by Paul Kane
“Now,” Johnnie said, reaching into darkness and drawing out a wooden box, laying that on the barrelhead, opening its lid. “I had this out of a condemned whaling junk in Kowloon. The binnacle I sold to a copper millionaire, to make a bar for his apartment; but I took this out under his eye, and he didn’t know what he was looking at.”
No more did I, except the obvious. It came from a binnacle, it had a needle under glass, above a card. “It’s a compass,” I said.
“Sailor. It’s a right compass. This would find you your way through Hell.”
One thing for sure, it would be small use to anyone at sea. The master of that whaling junk must have kept another needle to find his way from point to point, from port to port, to know his course across the wasteful ocean. A right whaler knows his fish from their spout, from how they blow; he can tell a sperm from a minke from a bowhead, a right whale from a rorqual.
Any sailor knows one thing about a compass. Never mind what the card says, in whatever language; what matters is the way the needle points.
This compass, this right compass of Johnnie’s, it wasn’t pointing north.
I lifted the box in my hands, felt the solid weight of brass and wood—dark and old and salt-worn, but not rotten—and saw how that needle shifted not one second from its line, however I turned or tilted it. It knew where it meant me to go, or what it was trying to tell me. The ignorance here was my own.
Held closer to the light, it was still reluctant to enlighten me. The card beneath the needle was no printed rose; it had been handwritten, and long ago.
And in Chinese, which would have been no trouble in a regular compass. Besides, I can read Mandarin a little. Enough to tell my northings from my eastings, bei from dong, that at least.
The thing about Chinese characters, though: they don’t work like an alphabet, where you can spell out an unfamiliar word and have an idea at least of what it sounds like, what other words it might have come from, the general drift of its meaning. You know a character or you don’t, and if you don’t you cannot work it out.
Whatever this needle was inspired to point toward, I couldn’t understand it. Johnnie might, but I couldn’t quite understand Johnnie either, not tonight.
He said, “I owe you money,” which was no way to start a negotiation. Direct is one thing, open surrender is something else.
“You do, Johnnie.” A gold tooth’s worth of money: more than the value of the tooth, in honesty—the mortgage was a token, an insistence, a gesture of honor—but not as much as this compass was worth, in its brassbound box with all the heft of its age and mystery and scientific question. Not by a distance.
Still, he said, “Take this, keep it, use it; we’re all square.”
“I don’t know how . . .”
“Be smart, sailor. You will need it.”
Any other night, Johnnie would have found me a bed; or more likely given me his own, upstairs among the aromatic shadows of his stock, the smells of joss and camphor wood and dust from a thousand holds and homes and marketplaces, a thousand separate journeys from there to here. He’d sleep in the shop, or else shift himself to some back-alley doss-house for a night or a weekor however long I stayed, stranded between one voyage and the next.
Tonight, though, he was boarding up the storefront and moving out himself, heading for higher ground. And so I came from Johnnie’s back to this: a room that I could almost call a suite, thanks to the way it bent around the hotel’s corner to give me two walls of glass and two distinct spaces, one for bed and bathroom and one for sofa, TV, desk. Properly meant for business, no doubt, but I had done all mine: I could use it simply for typhoon-watching, until the storm passed through and I could away to sea again.
I set the compass on the desk, still in its box. It could wait, and so could the typhoon. I wanted to sleep first, in a broad deep bed that didn’t rock me, before I woke to wind and wuthering.
Before that a shower, hot and hard. Then I meant to call down for food, to sit at my high windows here and watch the lights of the city and the dark of the sea until I was thoroughly ready for bed; but I was still drying my hair when there was a knock on the door and a voice called, “Room service!”
I pulled on a robe and opened the door, although I hadn’t ordered yet. I’m like that. Besides, I knew where I was.
There was a boy, a young man, in the corridor with a tiffin box in his hand, a stack of stainless steel containers that glistened with condensed steam.
“Hullo,” he said. “I’m called Shen.”
I quirked an eyebrow, and asked the obvious question. “Did Johnnie send you?”
“Of course.” A swing of narrow hips and he slid past me as though he was oiled. Went to set his burden on the desk, found it occupied already by the compass in its box; pursed his lips, drew out a coffee table and spread mats to protect its gleaming surface before he disengaged the various containers from their handle. Lids were marked with scribbled characters; lifted off, inverted, they turned into bowls. Chopsticks were supplied. As he laid out my dinner, Shen glanced from me to the room’s minibar and back, so emphatically that I was almost apologizing as I went to fetch beer. Beers.
Generous to a fault, Johnnie is, once business is put out of the way. To several faults, and some of them my own. Shen was hospitality, no more: a gift, that competitive generosity that encompasses, seems sometimes to define a relationship in the east.
To Johnnie, that is, Shen would be an expression of hospitality. Also a message: Stay where you like, I can always find you, always trouble you with gifts.
To me, Shen was very obviously trouble: that kind I leap to welcome, to embrace. A man should seek his sorrow where he can, seize it when the chance arises.
He was one of those slender, short Chinese men who look almost too young, although they are not; almost too pretty, though not that either. He looked seventeen, so he was probably twentyfive. He looked as smooth as a girl, as though he barely troubled shaving; that was probably true.
His smile was as solemn, as self-possessed as his hands were neat and swift among the dishes: the lustrous gleam of oyster omelettes, the powerful aniseed smell of chicken in basil. And rice, of course, and yard-long beans coiled in a sesame sauce, and thousand-year eggs with their gray yolks and translucent black albumen, that could only be there to frighten the foreigner. Except that he would never be so crude or so ill-informed, and I would not be frightened. So they were there for my pleasure, as it all was.
As he was himself, of course. Well dressed, well briefed, well ready.
He ate a little—half an egg, some of the beans, rice—to keep me company, and sipped at a beer for the same reason. Likely he was that kind of person who has an uneasy relationship with alcohol, except that nothing in his life would be uneasy; if he could not drink in comfort, he would not drink at all except like this, for manners.
His chopsticks were busier on my behalf than his, selecting choice pieces of chicken, a stray oyster, a slice of tofu, and laying them encouragingly in my bowl. To oblige him, I ate more than I might have done, though not—never!—as much as there was to eat. That would have been a mortal insult, to him first and so to Johnnie.
Questions are impolite, so he asked none. We talked lightly, inconsequentially, of the sea and the city, nothing personal. Time passed, food disappeared, the sky darkened and the wind built. I fetched another beer for myself but not for him, who did not want it. While I was still picking, filling up the corners, he drifted across the room in search of music; and found the compass instead. Opened the lid and looked, touched curiously, glanced at me, his face alive with questions.
There was one question I could legitimately ask him, a privilege I could lay before his feet: “Can you read the characters?”
“Of course.” And was delighted, his sudden smile declared, to do it; delighted that I had asked.
He held his hand out, and I went to him.
His grip was soft, enticing; his voice the same. Between them, they held me entirely. “This here,
at south, this is the character for sorrow, for lamentation.”
Oh, my prophetic soul: I had called him, privately, my sorrow. I could kiss him now. I did kiss him now. He tasted of tea and smoke, and no surprise.
“This at the west, this is pleasure. At east it is pain, or extremity. At the north, though”—where the needle pointed, because I had set the box that way: straight out of the window, across the bay, southwesterly and directly toward the coming typhoon—“this is a character I do not know. I do not think it is a true character,” though it famously took a lifetime to learn them all. “See, it has the radical from sorrow, and from pleasure, and from pain: it is a construction, a configuration of all three. I do not think that there is such a word.”
He didn’t say it like a confessional, I cannot read this after all, in shame at breaking a promise. Rather it was an excitement, as though the very strangeness of it were something achieved.
We talked about it a little more, we searched a Mandarin dictionary on the Internet until the connection went down, we disassembled the compass to see if there was anything written on the back of the card. There was not. I magnificently failed to explain how I had come by it, he magnificently failed to ask; we were both, I think, rather pleased with ourselves.
At last I took his hand in my turn and drew him from the table, from the box; drew his distracted gaze from the window, the line of the needle’s pointing, the dark of the building storm; led him around the glassy corner to the bed.
Now he did surprise me. He stood quite still and allowed me to undress him. Not from shyness, never that. Not from shame either, though another man might have thought it, when he saw what lay beneath the fresh black shirt and jeans.
Shen stood in the shaded light of a single lamp on the nightstand, and that only made his scars stand out the heavier, as the sun’s angle shows the moon’s craters more clearly at the half than at the full.
The smooth, supple body I had been feeling for was . . . disfigured, disrupted by a regular pattern of deep scarring, a checkerboard effect all up his arms and across his chest, down his thighs and calves, wherever he could see and reach. If those scars weren’t self-inflicted, they were surely administered by consent. It might have been a mark of passage, a ritual achievement, if he had belonged to another kind of people. As it was—no. I thought he had done this himself.
Here are the characters for pleasure, and pain, and sorrow. Here is another character, the roots of all three intermingled.
I thought perhaps that compass should be pointed directly at him; it seemed to encompass him. That must be why his eyes had gleamed above it, why he had seemed to yearn, or else to sigh in satisfaction; it had spoken to him, sung to him, far louder than it did to me. I was intrigued by the thing; Shen, I thought, was hungry for it.
Even now his eyes were moving in that direction, even while he stood with his body, his privacies exposed to my eyes, to my fingers, to my questions . . .
It’s not polite to ask questions. I took him to bed, and never mind what strange artifice his yearning called him to; with me he would find cleaner, simpler pleasures. At least, I had hopes that they would please him. For certain, he did me.
One thing about being so high above the city: you might feel disconnected, but you don’t have to draw the blinds.
One thing about that night, that kind of night: neither of us was in any hurry. There was no rush to sleep, no rush to wake or fuck or be away. My time was my own, and so was his; the room was paid for, and so was he.
Through the darkness, then, there were times when we were only lying in bed, talking idly, playing idly, and listening to the storm in its own hurry. There was a physical sense of rushing, of increasing solidity and urgency to the air, even before the rain struck, and the lightning.
Smoke and fire and hush in here, in the glass by my bed, in the Lagavulin that I sipped; smoke and fire and noise out there, beyond the windows, in the storm, like a battle fought at sea. God’s man-ofwar, the typhoon.
I may have said that aloud.
That, and other things equally foolish. The night was long, and short on sleep; he was interestingly delightful, even besides his unmentionable markings, and the storm brought an unexpected focus into the room and the moment. Every one of the moments, as though every single needlepoint jab of a tattoo mattered equally. Or, I suppose, every slice of a razor.
I said, “I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”
He said, “Don’t be sorry.”
I said, “Roll over, then.”
Dawn must have come in some higher place above the clouds, sunlight trapped in the ridges of the whirl, sucked into the funnel of the eye. Even below, it did grow lighter.
Shen got out of bed, went to the bathroom; claimed to be surprised, a little, that we still had electricity. Half the city had gone dark, district by district, as the storm turned the lights out.
Then he went to stand naked by the window-wall, gazing out at the typhoon where it still thundered and rushed, young transient flesh and ancient eternal weather separated only by a fixity of purpose, glass as statement, Here I stand and there you are, and this is the gulf between us.
Lightning made the patterns of his scarring stand out, stark and brutal.
Then I thought I saw another figure, stood beyond the glass.
In midair, that would be, on the solidity of wind, twenty-three stories above the city streets.
It was naked, too, that shadow-shape; and of course it was only a reflection, window turned to mirror, so that Shen was looking at himself and so was I.
Except that the storm must have distorted the reflection somehow, because the figure it held was none so straight as Shen and none so clean, it seemed twisted somehow and its scars were differently organized; I thought they cut a diagonal cross into its chest, from shoulder to hip both ways, as though it might unfold like origami. And then it moved; it lifted its hand to the glass, seeming as though it stood on the other side of a doorway, someplace still and bewildering, hints of a labyrinth behind, where a man might need another kind of compass to navigate . . .
And then I put the lights on, one bedside switch to brighten the whole room. I wanted to see quite clearly how wrong this all was, what a nonsense, no figure at all out there once the light fell onto it.
And there was the figure in full light, and there was Shen staring at him, lifting his own hand in the irony of a slavish reflection, and I saw that he had the compass between his feet there, box and all.
And then the window blew in.
Blew out.
Blew away.
Was gone, all that glass in a sudden shatter, all noise. Like a blast without wind, or a wind without direction.
The glass was gone, that separation was gone between one state and another, and Shen was gone, too. Just—gone. He had been standing in arm’s reach of the window when it ruptured, and now that place was empty.
I hadn’t been looking, not properly. I’d been flinching in anticipation of flying glass that never came, that never reached me. Even so, I had two contrary impressions in my head: one, that he’d been snatched away, that the figure outside had reached in and taken him; the other, that he had reached out. Stepped forward. Gone willingly.
Both were nonsense, of course. There had been no figure, stationary in a typhoon, two hundred feet above the city. There was no such Hell, to be glimpsed in storm and reached in extremis. Only a reflection distorted and a mundane tragedy, a window imploding under pressure and a young man seized by dreadful wind, carried off to a dreadful death.
That same wind was in the room with me now, something living, appalling. It pulled the duvet from the bed and dragged it out into the sky; it took what furniture was closest, the TV on its stand and never mind the weight of it, that lifted too before I saw it fall. The standard lamp was seized and thrown, hurled across the room to break a mirror in the other wall.
For a little moment, perhaps my body wanted to hurtle over to that missing window, in a desperate lunge aft
er the vanished Shen. I know my voice snatched after him, I know my arm flew up in echo, instinct over intellect. And met that wall of wind, felt it against my fingers, and—well, no.
If a sailor knows one thing, it would be the wind. If he knows another, too, it would be a lost cause, when not to reach for what is gone already. I have seen men washed overboard, lovers walk away. The trick is to survive them, not to chase.
I didn’t shift a willing foot toward the window.
North Sea gale or Gulf hurricane or roar down in the Forties, your first massive wind will blow all pride, all shame out of you. I crawled from the bed to the door, crawled naked on my belly except to snatch my money belt from the nightstand as I passed. I dug my hands deep into the thick, heavy carpet and dragged myself along, didn’t try to stand, even at the door. I reached up from the floor to work the handle, hauled it open and slithered through, let it slam behind me and felt my ears pop at the change of pressure.
Stood up cautiously into no wind at all, the still air of a hotel corridor and the faint distant buzz of voices, someone having a room party, entirely safe behind their window-walls; and made it only halfway to the lift before a member of staff appeared, calm and utterly unsurprised. Perhaps she had seen me on the CCTV and come to intercept; perhaps it was purely routine to discover naked men astray outside their rooms, in times of storm or otherwise.
She took me into a linen cupboard, found me a robe while I was telling her about the window gone, my friend gone with it. Her shock was swift and professional, impersonal, efficient; my own was climbing me like a monkey in the rigging, I could feel the tremor of it in my fingers, knew what it was, could do nothing about it.
Then there were police, the hotel doctor, a large whiskey and a little pill, another bed in a room without a window. I had tried to say, I had said—time and again, I think I said it—that I was used to this, I had seen men die this way; but to the hotel of course it was terrible and they were determined that it should be terrible to me, too.