“Yes, well maybe he was a little more verbal than you know,” and of course now, unwittingly, Tapshaw has revealed he’s not really so sure about Wang’s complicity after all. Both men realize this as
tell it was obviously him, I can see it so obviously in a way I couldn’t then
soon as Tapshaw says it but Wang lets it go because it’s a little beside the point, and also because part of him has always suspected the same about the boatman—not that he was part of any plot, which is absurd, but that maybe he wasn’t exactly the idiot savant of the lake he pretended to be. “Are you going to tell me he wasn’t broadcasting those messages?” Tapshaw says.
“I’m telling you,” Wang answers evenly, “they were meaningless,” which to Tapshaw, Wang understands, is the most dangerous prospect of all, the most subversive of all possibilities, the possibility that polemicists and ideologues, political spokesmen and militarists alike reject down to their core, not to mention rationalists: yes, Wang ruefully reminds himself, let’s not forget rationalists. “I’ll tell you what,” he says to the other man. Tapshaw glares up at him from the floor. “I’ll let you go,” Wang nods, “if you can answer one question.”
“I’m not playing your games.”
“Tribulation II, or III?”
“What?”
“Tribulation II or III. That shouldn’t be so hard. Haven’t you been keeping track? Haven’t you been able to tell when one ends and one begins, and then when the next ends and the one after that begins? You answer that and I’ll unlock those cuffs right now.”
Unconsciously Tapshaw begins chewing his lip. Wang can practically see the gears turning in his head.
because I didn’t really know him then, now I can see it’s Kirk with flashes of
“Come on, III or IV? Or, wait a minute, I said II or III didn’t I?” Wang taps the gun on the table next to him. “Well, we’ll throw in IV too. Give you more choices, more chances to get it right.”
Tapshaw exhales. “III.”
“Wrong.”
The other man’s shoulders sink in defeat. A moment of silence passes before Tapshaw finally thinks to ask, “How do you know?”
“Actually,” Wang says, “I don’t. But apparently, neither do you.”
“Then it was a trick question,” Tapshaw says.
“You’re really not getting the gist of this, are you.”
“What do you care about that kid anyway?”
Another trick question, Wang thinks, because he doesn’t know the answer, just as he doesn’t actually know for a fact what the young boatman was involved with or wasn’t, it’s just intuition—a little late in my life for intuition, Wang muses. A little late for instinct. That’s what bondage queens are for, instinct. There’s no mathematics for intuition, even for someone who was a student of mathematics once, but then mathematics isn’t always necessarily the language of reason and sense; you can stick numbers after anything, including a tribulation or two or three, and pretend everything adds up. He doesn’t really know for a fact, moreover, that what he’s told Tapshaw is true, that what the boy was broadcasting those nights from out on Hamblin Island was truly meaningless. The broadcasts didn’t mean anything to Tapshaw or Wang, or maybe even the boy, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t
Bronte in him maybe, as if she was the shadow of his resurrection, or maybe
mean something to someone, or that they didn’t have a meaning no one knows.
And at that point, of course, well then what’s rational and what isn’t? At that point there’s no saying anymore what chaos is, there’s no saying anymore what “meaning” means. At that point. The broadcasts were meaningless, Wang said to Tapshaw, as though that was the rational explanation—which only means sometimes randomness is rational and meaning isn’t. Then you’re lost in the dark heart of god or the void, whichever you’ve decided you believe in: when there are no accidents, is chaos chaos anymore? And if everything is an accident, is order an accident as well? One man stands before a line of tanks. Another crashes an airliner into a building. One ends an Age of Reckoning, the Age of the Sky; the other begins the Age of Chaos, in which the sky melts to earth and becomes a lake. On one or the other or both, those who record the times and those who interpret or use the lessons of what’s recorded—and especially those who love power first and last and only, and use such interpretations to their own ends—will impose a rationale. But ultimately and interiorly, the reasons belong not to those who watch and record and interpret and use, but those who do.
Which isn’t to say that, because the man standing before the tanks and the man crashing the airliner each does so for his own secret reason, they’re the same. It’s not to say there’s no difference between them, or that good and evil aren’t real. To the contrary—thinking about this now, although he doesn’t know it Wang crosses a point of inexorability, on his journey to the center of his life’s enigma—it’s men’s secret reasons that best testify to good and evil, which are as real as love and hate, which in turn are the world’s only incontrovertible things,
he was the manifestation of hers, and I woke then or rather was awakened in a
empirically incalculable as they may be. In his self-loathing there’s part of this proposition even Wang won’t accept yet, even as he now, yes, intuits it: he won’t accept that because he may not have stood before a line of tanks solely for whatever reason the world believes, the act was no less noble, no less heroic. Sometimes an act means something unto itself. Sometimes it has a heroism unto its own. That boy who rowed him in the boat back and forth to the Chateau, well, Wang didn’t even know him; and he’s going to live only long enough to begin to intuit the way a child—above and beyond any other creature or thing—explodes all notions of meaning and rationale, chaos and god, because it’s one’s child who makes such things matter beyond one’s own self. And if Wang can’t really answer the question of why the boy in the boat matters to him, or even if boy matters to him, what does matter is that she had a boy, not my boy no; no not mine, not ours, but one perhaps who could have used a father anyway, if there had been a man around big enough to overcome his pain and pride: so this, Wang thinks, this is for lost sons, and Tapshaw will never understand that.
A sudden dusk descends.
In China they would have found me by now, he thinks to himself sitting at the table; and then, turning to the increasingly frayed ribbon of blue in the sky through his window, rationale fractures to its fundament—and he catches his breath, thunderstruck.
She never got the letters.
His jaw actually drops a bit. A hot wave of his own absurdity washes over him; a moan only he can hear rises from the pit of him. Never having remotely crossed his mind before, this sudden
wave of nausea by the bubble of him breaking the surface of my dream and
realization out of the, well, gray if not blue, now has a stunning clarity: she never got the letters (labial jewel, riverine rapture …); and suddenly he sees the last fourteen years for their grand error, the greatest hubris of which has been not simply how reactively and immediately he concluded she had spurned him, without even considering the possibility that chaos might have intervened to thwart his attempts to reach her, but that he then called this conclusion “rational.” The rational processes of mathematics aside, one chooses what it is he wishes to consider rational about his life; and now if Wang could simply find a way to begin breathing again, if he could simply find a way to loosen himself from the revelation that grips his chest at this moment, he might ask himself not only how it is that rationality minus chaos equals not rationality but chaos, but also why he chose to believe in her rejection of him rather than in the intercession of chance. He might ask himself how it is he could have not taken into account a lake that appeared in the center of a city, and that cast into such pandemonium the age before him and all its correspondences.
Then he might ask himself who he is. The Emperor of Elevators, he whispers. What? asks the man handcuffed on the other sid
e of the room; but Wang takes no notice. He raises his hand to the sky as though, viewed through the prism of his palm, its rare blue might be located. Wang? the other voice says again from the floor a few feet away, what’s wrong with you? but holding his hand up to his eye, staring through, Wang is transfixed, and finds himself back fourteen, fifteen years ago in this same house, sitting in this same place at a table much like this one, pen and stationery spread out where, just a moment ago, there was a gun, the waters of the lake not yet having risen as high up the banks outside the window. Oh this is one of those spells, he tells himself very lucidly, one of those “lapses” that have been reported around the city lately,
reclaiming his place in my womb, and it wasn’t ong after that I came back to
that he’s dismissed out of hand as outbreaks of mass psychosis even as he himself experienced such a thing one night a year ago, after returning from the Chateau for what proved to be his final visit there. Possessing both “present” and “past” consciousness, now he’s back in the days of ’4, back before the crusades and his days as a dockhand at Port Justine, hurled back to this time by force of either trauma or triggered recollection, to this memory on which a life turned—several lives, as he’s about to learn. He feels it all again, his rage at her silence then and, beyond that, at her old infidelity that produced the son that was not his, and at the forsaken years between them, and at his simultaneous imprisonment by and exile from the polar events of great moment through which he lived without her so anonymously: and once again, as he was fourteen years ago, he’s paralyzed by, what? … my love for her? or my fear of it … and then a man who has from time to time meditated on the laws of impulse only to reject them does the second profoundly impulsive thing of his life, and the first since he was nineteen years old.
Having been cast by his Lapse back into this memory, now he breaks free of its destiny. He turns from his window to gaze at the small empty house around him, stares at the pen and stationery on the table, and takes in his one good hand the umpteenth furious unfinished letter that another Kristin would receive by accident if he ever sent it … and instead crumples it up; then he takes leave of his senses. He walks quickly from the house and breaks into a run, hurrying to a boat moored on the banks, gets in the boat and, binding his bad hand to one of the oars with his belt, begins to row, undaunted by the four or five miles he has to cross.
Other than the smattering of lights coming on in the Silverlake casinos to the northeast, he takes little note of the slightly altered
the city where he had been conceived, and if once I was convinced that no
not yet submerged scenery around him. The ghost of history, he feels himself grow more corporeal by the moment. He glides through the watery sky of the lake an hour and a half without break until the weak arm of the bad hand throbs with pain. In this moment on the lake, everything about Wang’s absurd life comes to a halt; he’s riveted by a calm still secret to him. He’s riveted, as when he was nineteen years old in the Square, by a resolution beyond rationality, by a wisdom forgotten as soon as he’s seen it. In this moment he has more than passing acquaintance with his own strange courage. After a while he turns to look over his shoulder for where he’s heading; he sees her hotel, not far from the Hamblin where he and Tapshaw, following the sound of a song, once sailed out thirteen years from now. He grows closer to her hotel as twilight grows darker and, just as though his life was exactly timed for such a thing, his final approach coincides with the cry of a child from the waves around him.
He hears her wail for her drowning son from a hotel window. He hears again the boy’s desperate call and turns the boat to the sound; just as though his life is exactly timed for such a thing, he unties his hand from the oar and reaches into the water—nd small fingers reach up and grabs his throbbing arm. With his other good hand, Wang pulls the boy up from out of the lake into the boat. In the boat, holding close to him the nine-year-old soaked and terrified but, as of this new moment, alive, Wang thinks to himself, Someone try telling me this isn’t my son.
The next morning Wang, the woman he called K in his letters, and her son Kim leave the sinking hotel and move to shore. A day later, Wang buys a used car that needs new tires. On their way up Highway 1, Kim rides in the front seat with Wang as the woman sleeps in back; they stop at a shop in San Luis Obispo and get the
matter where I went a lake would have followed me there, now I don’t know, I
boy some new animé posters to replace the ones left behind in L.A. His room is the first they decorate when they rent the new flat in San Francisco that rests at a fork in the fog and overlooks the bay. On their first night in the apartment, staring out the large windows at the blue bay, Wang doesn’t think of Lake Zed but only this, his most fulfilled moment; the next morning, when he makes a quick run to the market for chocolate milk—Kim’s favorite—and his used car that needed new tires suddenly spins out of control on Van Ness and crashes into the oncoming bus, in those final moments before his neck snaps Wang wonders how it is that he, of all people, personally bore witness to both the very moment the Twentieth Century died and the very moment the Twenty-First was born, separated by the twelve shadowyears between them. He’s a little surprised in those final seconds that it should be the young girl with the long gold hair he remembers, who he saw only a few times and whose name he never knew. In those final seconds he would like to believe he’s been redeemed somehow, something about which he would give more thought if he had the time, but in the few seconds he has, the only thing he can be sure of is that the view of the San Francisco Bay from the new apartment the night before was worth everything.
Orphanhood is the bond, then, when Kim meets Saki more than fifteen years later. By the time he’s twenty-five years old Kim is an orphan three times over, having lost first the father who was there only long enough to make a son, then Wang, then his mother to ovarian cancer three years ago in Toronto, where the two of them fled before the Bay Area’s occupation in ’9. Returning to liberated San Francisco in ’18 following the siege of Monterey, Kim sees Saki for the first time when she mysteriously emerges from a condemned hotel at Chinatown’s Dragon Gate looking coolly and fully capable of casting a spell on every man before her.
don’t know, even as I feel like there are so many things now that I do know,
Part Japanese, Saki was orphaned by her mother, a former stripper from Las Vegas who vanished early in the girl’s life—into a religious cult, unconfirmed and dubious rumor has it—and by her American father she’s seen only in her dreams, a strange man who once charted a huge blue calendar that completely reordered history according to the chronology and logic of apocalypse, and from whom the daughter got her electric blue eyes. Kim can’t believe his luck to have a woman so beautiful. He and Saki move in together. When he receives a position at the university as a professor of musicology, Saki goes to work for a map maker, walls around her floating with brightly colored places of indefinite borders, oceans of uncertain shores; although it would make more sense for the couple to live in Berkeley where they work and the rents are cheaper, Kim can’t bring himself to leave a single-room flat not far from where he grew up near Van Ness. If he leans from the upstairs window as far as possible and turns his head sharply north, he can see a blue sliver of the view of the bay that the adopted father of one week who saved Kim’s life saw on the last night of his own life.
Kim marries Saki two months after she becomes pregnant. Angie is named after her grandmother even if it wasn’t the grandmother’s real name but the one she took from an old rock and roll ballad she loved while dancing underage in a Vegas strip joint back in the 1970s. So it is that two generations later Kim and Saki’s daughter has more music in her genes than she knows. When Angie is eight years old, long before he’s entitled to a midlife crisis her father has a ludicrous and cataclysmic affair with a student not nearly as beautiful as Saki; far from only a passing distraction, even after it comes to light the affair becomes an ever more disastr
ous obsession. It’s as clear to Kim as to everyone else that he’s taken leave of his senses. One afternoon Saki marches Angie to a hotel
even as now I know not only that Kirk’s father is dead but that my own mother
room and bursts in on the rendezvous at a particularly debauched moment, a scene that profoundly traumatizes Angie more than whatever indignant satisfaction on Saki’s part can compensate; in the years to come, she’ll hate the mother for it more than the father. Two years later, the relationship between daughter and father is finally reduced to Kim—now without job or family or lover, and in defiance of a restraining order—suddenly appearing one morning before Angie and her mother on the sidewalk outside the little girl’s elementary school, in rags and pleading for a single embrace, sobbing the little girl’s name as Saki curses him.
Angie never sees him again. He disappears, either to enlist in some distant crusade of some undetermined roman numeral or to fulfill a family tradition of disappearing fathers and mothers. Given this, on some level it doesn’t really make sense Angie would go to the same university as her father and, like her father, study musicology—or it makes complete sense. Perhaps it makes sense for all the reasons it doesn’t. The rational processes of mathematics aside, one chooses what it is she wishes to consider rational about her life; and in fact Angie is not one to set rational processes aside even if, Wang not being her true grandfather, technically his blood doesn’t run in her veins. She works hard in school to the exclusion of everything else. Except for one extremely perfunctory dating relationship that lasts five months with a young computer programmer, her life is consumed bycombinations of music and math (since all music is mathematic), and her theory that as there’s a basis for physical matter so there isfor psychic matter, that within a deconstructed and reassembledmelody there’s to be located the helix of freedom and desire, transcendence and oblivion, even—if she believed in either—god and chaos. She spends her life searching for this helix. By the late ’40s and early ’50s, called a genius by some and a crackpot by
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