"You are light and freedom to us in the bank."
Auden said, "I try."
"You are the spirit of the wind."
"Banks are important too."
"Not ours."
Auden said encouragingly, "Oh, yes. Commerce is important too." He gave her his Errol Flynn smile, "Not everyone can go haring about up impossible hills—"
Natasha said with a gasp, "Chasing impossible dreams . . ."
Auden said, "Climb every mountain!"
Natasha said, "Keep right on till the end of the road."
It was so nice to meet someone who wasn't a Communist. Auden said, "A man must dream." Once you got close to her you noticed she was a girl. You could tell by the way the front of her shirt rose and fell. You could smell it. It was perfume. It wafted. It rose from her five foot two about fourteen—well maybe twelve— inches upward and came in zephyrs and— Auden said abruptly, "Business before pleasure."
Natasha said with the tear still glistening, "The bank is a terrible place to work, Phillip." She asked, "May I call you Phillip?"
Auden said, "Sure." For a man of muscle and sinew the voice came out as fast-melting butter. Auden, clearing his throat, said, "Sure!"
"We have no happiness in our lives in the bank, only drudgery and the dust of shattered dreams. Shattered by Mr. Nyet." Natasha said, "He's away at the moment." She said with what looked like a sneer, "He knows better than to be around when great things are happening!" Natasha said, "I'm an athlete myself. The bank staff and I, we all planned to represent the bank this year in the Pan-Asia Bank Officers' Games in Bangkok, but Mr. Nyet—" She sniffed, "Mr. Nyet refused to sponsor us—"
Auden the Magnificent asked with interest, "What sport do you play?" Maybe he could give her a few tips.
There was a silence. She gazed up at him with almond eyes. How anyone could fail to see she was a girl was beyond him. Auden said, leaning down to catch her sweet and low voice, "Hmm?"
Natasha said, "Indoor games, Phillip."
Auden said in English in a whisper, "Oh, boy . . ."It sounded as if he was practicing his fast breathing for the next run. Auden, looking around, wondering where the hell Spencer had gone, said, "Oh." Auden said, "Ah." Auden said, "Well . . ."
". . . Phillip . . ."
". . . Natasha . . ."
"Thank you, Phillip, for showing us all that there is a way to rise above all of life's hard blows, that there is Hope." Natasha said, "And you do all this for the love of a friend, for poor P.C. Wang—"
Who? Auden said quickly, "I do."
"Phillip . . ."
Auden said in a tiny voice, "Natasha . . ." Auden said, "Natasha—"
Natasha said, "Yes?"
Auden said, "Um." He looked at his watch. It was working, going around: both hands, the big hand and the little hand. Auden said, touching her gently on the shoulder with his mighty mitt—like all powerful hulks gentle to a fault, "Just—just stand clear when I go." Auden said, "Just—just—" Auden said, "This time, I'm going to go full speed!"
"Oh!"
"Oh . . ."
She was a girl. He could tell. His legs, as she brushed against them to give him room to move, turned quiveringly, completely— to jelly.
"Twenty . . . eight!"
"Aw—SHUT UP!"
Enough was enough. He was, after all, the officer in charge.
He took charge.
"AW, SHUT UP, WHY DON'T YOU!?"
In the Detectives' Room, O'Yee, getting madder'n hell, slammed the window to the outside world with a bang.
They were forming. All up and down the street to the base of Sagarmatha Hill, people were forming. Natasha had gone back into the bank. Auden had stopped saying, "Oh . . ." They were forming to catch some of the money when either he or the Tibetan dropped it when they were shot. Auden said, "Hell!" Maybe he was hiding behind the trash skip. Auden, not turning around, his eyes glued to the waiting multitudes, said out of the corner of his mouth, "Bill?"
He was nowhere. He was gone.
All the multitudes were fit young men wearing singlets and shorts. Some of them looked like rickshaw pullers: they had muscles in their legs like oak.
He looked at their feet. They were all bare. They looked like Frisbees. Auden said, "Hell!"
He waited, calm, unruffled, by his demeanor and his grace the undisputed, the favorite, the Olympian. Auden said with a sneer on his face to the waiting hordes, "Huh!"
Auden, out of the corner of his mouth, so imperceptibly that it looked merely as if his lip muscles were doing warming-up exercises, said, "Bill! Bill! —Bill!"
He was never around when you needed him.
Auden, in his last final gasp before he crouched down on his starting blocks and waved across to the bank to where Natasha watched from a window, said for one last time, "—Bill!!"
He wondered.
In the library with a book in front of him opened to pictures and drawings of all the birds, he wondered.
By now, everyone would be finished at Yat's.
He wondered why, of all the buildings and cages and kiosks at Yat's, why only the Wishing Chair, why only that in the midst of all the terrible slaughter, had been smashed.
In the empty, silent library, Feiffer, touching his hand to his face, said softly, "Christ . . . !"
He wondered why any of it had been done.
It had been done with a machete. In the night, its edge, coming down, had glittered like lightning and then it had been gone.
"More pork, more pork, wide-awake, wide-awake!" They were the sounds of the birds in the books, sounds like bells, like music, calls, carillons, rolls, whiplashes, reprises over and over in the stillness.
In the library, there was only the stillness.
In the lightning, in the stillness, in the grayness and the pictures in the book in front of him, he wished he could hear the sounds of birds.
There were so sounds.
He wished he were someone else.
He wished, someone suddenly frightened in the big, empty room alone—
He wished—
He wished to God it had never, never happened.
6
Solipsism. It was a word. It was the last word left. It meant the belief that all things in the external world were only the imaginings of the last, the only mind, left on earth—that the earth itself was only the imaginings of the last, the only mind left on— left inside the cocoon of redness.
It was true. The word was the last word left in a world in which all the words had gone. Maybe it was no word—maybe it was only a sound, what things were, not a word at all, but only the awareness of the red. The redness was a veil, it was spinning, opening and closing in slits and buzzing without sound.
Solipsism. The street, through the slits, was yellow—there was a car, a mailbox—they appeared as objects in the redness, free-floating, passing by, entering the redness, sailing through it in colors and then, halting for a moment in the cupola of red, floating out again. The objects, the streets, Hong Kong came into the cupola disconnected, rootless—the car passed through a slit in the cocoon—it was black, a taxi, with the driver, openmouthed and shouting without sound—and then—then it was gone.
All the birds and animals had died. They had come into the cocoon like owls on silent wings, seemed suspended on wires and then, their heads coming loose and floating away, they had begun to spin, to fall out of control with dark liquids falling away from them like vapor trails; they had struck a part of the redness, the veil, the cocoon, and then had passed out, gone over, ceased to be. They had been wet. It had been raining. An umbrella, like an ectoplasm, had hovered there above the roof of the cupola. Beneath the umbrella and the cupola, the blood vapor trails had spun and turned and twisted and gouted in slow motion, splashing, passing through and out of the redness and there had been no sound at all.
Things had come halfway into the redness—the stomach and paws of a dog, the head of a crocodile, dreamthings: they had been pulped into blood and slashed to
entrails.
And then they had gone again.
The street passed in through the cocoon, not at its base, but at chest height as a long, unwinding yellow strip with black lines on it where the paving stones were, then, a moving image on a racing-driver computer game, it was swallowed up into nothing and was gone again.
The red cocoon was expanding, contracting, pulsing, shimmering, opening and closing without cause.
Something on the yellow street—part of the yellow street— something following the yellow street came in—something— objects—black and stark white and bright blue and black, and then they were gone again.
There was a buzzing starting, getting louder and louder.
The objects in the cocoon were dreamer's pictures, the pictures of the sleepless. Solipsism: it was the thought—the last thought, the only thought in the cocoon that all there was was the cocoon. The red cocoon covered, enveloped, was the person inside it. The person was reflected, was the reflection of itself, was only the image in a mirror with the form of the cocoon. The person's name was Jakob. It was a small, brown-faced old man.
The dreams, the objects came in and out of the red cocoon like pulsings of sleep, like the world seen in and out, sharp and blurred like spectacles taken quickly on and off.
There was a buzzing.
There was a sickness.
It was the sickness of the spectacles taken on and off, of the queasy loss of balance, of nausea, of trying, failing, to fix on a single object.
Through secret, different streets, like the birds traveling on different, invisible currents and along arcane, unknown, unknowable roads in the air, the person inside the cocoon traveled in another dimension, in another time, toward another destination.
Jakob. He was a small, brown-faced old man with a soft, almost whispering voice.
There was only the buzzing getting louder and louder.
It was not true. If there was any external reference to truth, to the world as it was, it was not true at all. It was a trick, a device, a secret.
. . . Jakob. He was a small, brown-faced old man with a soft, whispering voice.
It was camouflage.
It was a trick.
The machete, like lightning, had killed everything that had come into the cocoon and disemboweled it.
The person inside the cocoon, moving through secret streets to a secret place, like the birds of the night seen during the day, held up to the light, looked nothing like that at all.
He had cold, dead eyes, the small brown-faced man with the whispering voice.
His name was Jakob.
His last name did not matter in the least. No need for a last name.
He existed through the shimmering red cupola that only he— the last thought on earth—ever saw. He was God.
He killed things.
They came into the red, pulsing cupola and he killed them.
10:33 A.M. It was red light inside the cupola, the cocoon. Like a submarine, closed in and without windows, it passed through seas it never saw, never touched.
It was merely there, passing. The cocoon, like the hull of the submarine, was hard, enclosed, impermeable, without light other than the red light of depth and dark places.
It traveled invisibly, unseen in the places of the night.
10:33 A.M. In Icehouse Street, Hong Bay, Crown Colony of Hong Kong, as it passed by, like a memory, a thought, a secret held tight-lipped silent, no one knew it was there.
Jakob . . .
There was no Jakob.
What was inside the cocoon, hidden, invisible, hiding there, was merely a reflex, an amoeba. It was merely a mechanism that killed.
There was only the buzzing.
In Icehouse Street, only the person inside the cocoon, the person who was the cocoon, heard it.
Buzzing.
Jakob.
—it was very important that, methodically, in order, following a pattern, one by one at the right time and place, he, without mercy or thought, killed things.
There was no light in the dead, cold eyes as they walked. The dead, cold eyes saw only the redness.
7
That's a peregrine falcon." Dead, mounted on a stand made of a broken tree branch set in stones and grass to resemble some sort of natural perch, it was a beautiful, multicolored bird of prey that looked like a small eagle with a beak like a razor. In his little, unpainted workroom and living area on the second floor of Number 83 Generalissimo Chen Street, Chao, touching it reverently on the head with the gentlest of touches from his long delicate fingers, said, "It comes here to Hong Kong very rarely from the high, wild places in China. Tell me, what would you do if you saw it lying dead on the road?" Everywhere in the little room there were stuffed and mounted birds, eagles, hawks, owls, in the corner what looked like a small collection of Chinese pheasants, finches, a kestrel about to take wing on a papier-mache rock, even tiny bee eaters and hummingbirds. Chao Kai Sun, touching the wing of the falcon and stroking, asked, "Well, what would you do?"
"All these birds you have in here are on the list of endangered species."
"All these birds I have in here are dead." He was a small birdlike man himself. His eyes were bright and sparkling as if he lived some sort of intense inner life. It made his age hard to guess at. He could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five. Chao, waving away whatever thoughts about him Feiffer was having, asked, "Well?"
"I don't know much about birds—"
"You know enough to know that all these—the hawks, and the falcons and the owls are endangered." He seemed to hop across the room to a workbench and return before he had even gone. "So is this. This is a common sparrow at first sight. In fact, it's a particular subspecies of sparrow that—"
Feiffer said, "Do you know what bird this feather came from?" He had it in his hand. He had offered it to Chao twice, but the man had not touched it. He didn't need to touch it.
Chao said, "Yes, yes, I know." He said tightly, "You haven't answered my question."
"Are all these birds illegal?"
"Yes!" Chao, looking happy, said, "Yes, every one. They have all been killed by the most effective and wholesale killer of flying birds in the world—the car aerial." The door to the next room was ajar. From it, Feiffer could smell the smell of formalin and preserving fluids. Chao said, "And I killed not a one. Each one of them, at one time, lay dead on the road or in a field in the New Territories or in a dirty gutter waiting to be eaten by rats or carrion and I, personally, killed not a one." There was something he wanted. It could have been absolution. Chao, his voice going up, said, "If you arrest me and I argue my case in court, the letter of the law says that possession of endangered species is as much a crime as the possession of a deadly weapon—if I go to court I will go to jail."
"And what will happen to your birds?"
"There is no natural history museum here in Hong Kong so there are no dusty storerooms or drawers in which to store them for the mice, so they will all be destroyed." He touched the falcon. "This was found on a rubbish tip in Icehouse Street." He tapped at the glorious bird's sternum. "It was almost cut in half by an aerial after high winds had forced it into the city and then heavy rains had forced it to come down onto the roadway to hunt in the light of a streetlamp." Chao said, "What was I supposed to do? Let it rot?"
"What are you doing with it now?"
"It is an endangered species." Chao, pleading his case to someone, not Feiffer, said, "Each new area of agricultural land that is rezoned to industrial or residential use slaughters more birds in a moment with the destruction of trees and habitats than a dozen men could do with shotguns in a month!"
"All your birds are dead!"
"If they were alive there would be no need to protect them."
"You're not protecting them. What you are doing is making decorations for drawing rooms—"
Chao said, "You've read a book on taxidermy."
"Every museum curator says that private—"
"There is no museum
here in Hong Kong."
"You are not a museum."
"If a museum is ever formed in Hong Kong I will run it."
Feiffer said tightly, "Do you sell these birds you collect?"
"I do not." Chao said, "Once, the famous example, there were dodos in the world—large stupid birds like the mutton bird and now—"
"Like the passenger pigeon."
"Yes." He stopped. He seemed to soften. Chao said, "Look, listen: all the wild places where birds lived—where they bred and were free and high—all those places are going. They are being forced down to us, to civilization because all those places are gone—" Chao said suddenly as if in answer to a question that had not been asked, "I would never trap a bird! All the birds I have here died in the city and were brought to me by people who saw their beauty about to be turned into—"
"What people?"
"I never pay them. They know about me and they—"
"People like George Su?"
"This is his falcon." Chao, smiling, said, "And although you do not know me, you know George Su. You know what sort of man he is. You know that he—"
"I know that he's been in prison twice." It was no good. It was only the letter of the law. Feiffer, feeling like a policeman, asked, "What do you want from me?"
"I am committing a crime."
"Do you want me to issue you a license or something?"
"There is no license."
"Museums can get them."
"I am not a museum."
"Then as a recreational exhibit."
Chao said, "I show no one. The birds are not for show—they are dead! They are not birds anymore, but chemically preserved carcasses! They are nothing to see! They are no substitute for seeing the real thing or even seeing a photograph of the real thing in a book—they are not the real thing: they are dead corpses preserved like Egyptian mummies!"
"Then why the hell—"
"Because when all the real, free, living birds are gone— destroyed, shot, cut in half, turned out from their places, reduced to memories, this may be all we have left!" Chao, never a museum curator, said with vehemence, "Do you think a few jade baubles and amulets and scrolls hung on a wall reflect the true, the real glory of the ancient civilization of China—in a museum? Do you think they bear any resemblance to what was real and living then?—Do you? Do you think that these poor dead things resemble—at all—the flight of a bird in the sky or the feeling a man gets when he sees it?—Do you?" Chao said, "In the end, like the scrolls and the baubles and the amulets and the dust, this is all we may have left one day!" Chao said, "They lie dead on the road and they are picked up and brought to me. No one is paid for it and I do not sell them or give them back! The people who bring them would not want them while there is a single living bird left—what I do is store them up like some sort of survivalist against the day when everything is gone and all that is left is ashes."
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