Nino and Me

by Bryan A. Garner

  Back inside, I reported, “I think he must have gone to the restroom, Nino.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He should have done that before arriving.”

  I looked around the large foyer, and far off in a corner, near the entrance to the Elements mall, I saw a disheveled man talking to himself while typing something into his handheld device. He was a man of perhaps 60 with gray thinning hair. His tinted glasses mostly hid his eyes. He carried a backpack and wore dingy, frayed jeans, a flannel shirt, and a bright-red windbreaker. I walked over to him, some 30 steps. “Are you Basil Middlemiss?”

  “Why yes! You must be Mr. Garner!”

  “Yes. We’ve been waiting for you at the door, just there, for about 15 minutes. Didn’t you think to look for us?”

  “Ah, well, I knew you’d find me. Right! Let’s get going. We have a full walking tour ahead of us—the peripatetic delights of Hong Kong, as I like to call them.”

  I took him over to meet the rest of our disgruntled group. He launched into a spiel, sounding almost like a lower-middle-class Monty Python character. “Today, lady and gents, we shall have a walking tour of Central, the primary business district of Hong Kong, located on the north shore of the island, across Victoria Harbor from Tsim Sha Tsui, which is the southernmost—”

  I broke in, given that we were still just standing in the front foyer of our own hotel: “Basil, let’s get going.”

  “I just wanted to explain—”

  “Please explain in the van. It’s 9:20, and we need to get a move on!”

  “That’s right!” said Justice Scalia, marching toward the exit. Then he whispered to me, “What was his explanation for being late?”

  “He had none, Nino. He said he was sure we’d find him.”

  “He’s an oaf.”

  Even though I had introduced Justice Scalia to Basil as “Justice Scalia,” Basil asked for his first name. He was using first names. “Just call him Justice,” I said. “His first name is ‘Justice.’ ”

  Basil seemed to have no idea about his audience. In his mind, he was leading four Americans on a tour. Just a routine thing.

  As Justice Scalia was getting into the van, I stood right at his door as usual. “Stop babying me! Get in on your own side!”

  “Not until the 60% rule is satisfied. Please get in with at least 60% of your buttocks on the seat. Remember Providence?”

  Tom and Karolyne chuckled. “Oh, all right,” said Justice Scalia with resignation. He got in.

  As I walked behind the van, I took Basil aside and said, “This walking tour won’t be strenuous, will it? Not too much walking?”

  “Not at all, Bryan.”

  “You have Justice Scalia on this tour. Do you know who he is?”

  “He’s a judge, I think you told me. I had a judge recently from New Zealand, and I must say he—”

  “Basil, please focus. Your primary mission is to satisfy him.”

  Justice Scalia shouted from inside the van: “Get in, Bryan! No more delays!”

  “Remember, Basil,” I said, “this is a light walking tour.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  I went around to my side and got in. Justice Scalia said, irritably, “What on earth are you doing?! Let’s get this show on the road!”

  “This guy’s going to be a challenge, Nino,” I said just before Basil got in.

  “Right!” announced Basil. “As I was saying, the Central District of Hong Kong, which is where we will be walking today, is bordered on the westernmost side by Sheung Wan, marked by Aberdeen Street (which is known to locals as Wing Kut Street). It is bordered on the east by Admiralty, on the south by Midlevels, and on the north by Causeway Bay, which . . .”

  He continued droning on in this way, only barely audible to any of us. “I miss Polly already,” muttered Justice Scalia.

  We started out in Statue Square, near the Court of Final Appeal. As Basil kept up his voluble commentary, we were standing, standing, and then standing some more. Basil was giving what was patently his standard shtick, and he was delivering it in a way that we didn’t find endearing, with a fair number of lame puns and standard jokes. “Hey, Justice,” he said loudly as Justice Scalia and I started drifting away, Karolyne and Tom being too polite to do so—“Hey, Judge, there are lots like you who sit right there in this building,” he said, pointing at the Court of Final Appeal. “It’s the court of last resort in Hong Kong, although I’m told by visitors that the place isn’t at all like a resort. Ha! Ha! Now laugh at that, guys! Have a sense of humor!”

  “How did we end up with this joker?” said Justice Scalia.

  “I have no idea. I’m sorry, Nino. You want me to cancel this right now?”

  “No. Let’s give him a chance. I think he’s trying.”

  I went over to Basil and said, “Please try to keep us on the move and not standing for too long at a time. I hurt my knee this morning, and standing makes it worse.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “I know we have to stop for us all to hear you, but please make your remarks more succinct. Just the highlights, please.”

  “All right, Bryan.” Then in a loud voice: “Right! If I may have everybody’s attention: we’re going to cross the street to the HSBC Bank Building, where you will see the historic shorelines of the ocean. Most interesting.”

  “Shouldn’t that be historical,” said Justice Scalia to me, “not historic?” Of course, Basil couldn’t hear us.

  “Yes,” I said, “unless the shorelines were important to history. Maybe it’s arguable, but I think you’re right.”

  The group followed Basil across the street, where he introduced us to Stephen and Stitt, the two famous HSBC bronze lions cast in Shanghai in 1837. Stephen is roaring; Stitt is calm. Stephen is racked with shrapnel holes acquired from the Japanese forces during World War II. Karolyne and Justice Scalia posed for a couple of photographs in front of Stephen—in both of which they pretended to roar mightily. Basil hadn’t dampened their spirits much: Karolyne and Justice Scalia were almost childlike in their playfulness.

  Soon we crossed Queen’s Road, where Basil said we’d be ascending the steps to the original building of the Court of Final Appeal and what’s called the Olympic Amphitheatre (even though the city has never hosted the Olympic Games).

  “We’re going up all those steps?” asked Justice Scalia.

  “It’s not that far!” insisted Basil. “Just up there.” He started climbing the steps.

  “Is your knee going to be all right, Bryan?” asked Justice Scalia.

  “I’ll be fine. It’s hurting some, but I’ll be okay.”

  “Then come on,” he said, “let’s get going.”

  I stayed just behind Justice Scalia on the way up, to ensure that he wouldn’t fall. He was perfectly steady, but after the first part he was huffing and puffing. He stopped at a landing halfway up—after 52 steps—to catch his breath. He was leaning against a concrete orb on the capital of the balustrade.

  “Are you okay, Nino?” I asked. Tom and I were right with him now.

  “I didn’t know we were going to be doing all this climbing!” He had become annoyed. We waited 30 seconds or so, while he caught his breath, both hands on the concrete ball atop the wall. He turned, looking over Queen’s Road, and shouted, “Glow in the dark!” He had us laughing. I whipped out my camera to film him saying that twice more. He was joking, of course, about the phosphorescent stone ball I’d bought three days before.

  “Seriously, Nino, are you okay? Do you need to stop?”

  “I’m fine. Just needed a second wind.”

  We embarked on the remainder of the climb. Karolyne had stayed with Basil, who was no doubt blathering on, and they were already at the top. But we soon realized that after 52 steps up, we were barely halfway. We had many more steps to reach the top.

  Justice Scalia was seriously irked when we finally reached the top.

  “This is supposed to be a walking tour, not a climbing tour!” said Justice
Scalia. “Basil, nobody said anything about lots of climbing.”

  “I always come this way. Most people enjoy a bit of exercise. Right! This”—he pointed to an orange-brick building behind him—“is the original Court of Final Appeal, but before that it was the Mission Étrangères, built in 1917.”

  An upward slope took us to the front of the building. Farther on, to the right, was a yellow cathedral that caught Justice Scalia’s eye. He and I went straight over there, leaving Karolyne and Tom to listen to Basil. When we reached the entrance to the cathedral, we learned that it was St. John’s—the oldest Anglican cathedral in Hong Kong, with a beautiful, multicolored stained-glass window behind the reredos.

  Justice Scalia crossed himself as we entered. A funeral was underway, the pews half full. A large photo of the deceased stood on an easel beside the altar. A full choir was behind the altar, singing. We watched from the back for a minute or so. Justice Scalia crossed himself again, turned, and saw an offertory box. He pulled out a Hong Kong banknote of $100 (equivalent to $12 U.S.) and put it in. I made an offering as well.

  Across the lane was St. Michael’s Chapel, where Justice Scalia pointed out to me that the charity shop was called “Castaways.” “What a funny use of that word,” he said to me. “Do you think it’s a pun?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I think it’s referring to the discarded items donated to the church. Anglicans don’t pun much in church-related matters. I’d wager that it’s a very literal and old use of a word that we think of as invariably metaphorical. The literal sense of castaway is dead in American English.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” he said.

  He seemed to have caught his breath. Perhaps, I thought, it was simply that the unexpected exertion with the first half of those steps had caught him unprepared. We soon reached Basil, Karolyne, and Tom, who had moved on down the lane.

  “And now,” announced Basil, “we’re going to walk up there to the Peak Tram Entrance”—the place where we’d been dropped off two days before when we took the tram up to Victoria Peak. “Then across to the park.”

  I said: “More uphill walking, Basil?! This isn’t easy for all of us.” Of course I was concerned mostly about Justice Scalia, but my knee was aching from the ill-advised leg extensions that morning.

  “I don’t like all this climbing, Basil!” said Justice Scalia.

  “It’s really not that hard,” said Basil. “Right! Let’s just step across the street here.” He really did seem like a bungler to me—a character that might have been played by Michael Palin of the Monty Python troupe.

  “I want Polly back,” Justice Scalia said to me as he trudged across the road, and I limped.

  “Me, too!” I said.

  Basil hadn’t prepared us for the climbs still ahead: 47 stairs up to Hong Kong Park, and an additional 86 stairs up to the base of the Vantage Point Observatory. I stayed with Justice Scalia the whole way, as Karolyne and Tom, who stayed well ahead with Basil, glanced back at us with some frequency. Although my knee was in constant pain, I tried to conceal it. Justice Scalia’s difficulties seemed to have subsided. He was just unhappy about the arduousness of this “walking tour.”

  When we reached the base of the observatory, Basil announced that we could ascend its steps to have the second-finest view in all Hong Kong.

  “What’s the finest?” asked Justice Scalia.

  “Why, Victoria Peak, of course!” answered Basil.

  “We saw that yesterday,” said Justice Scalia. “How many steps up that tower?” he asked.

  “Precisely 123, if memory serves, Your Honor!” said Basil.

  “Do I look as if I want to climb another 123 steps for the second-finest view, when I’ve already seen the finest?”

  “I would say that you do not, sir. Perhaps you could sit on that bench while the others might join me in taking in the splendid panorama atop the tower. Any takers?”

  Holding my knee, I said, “You’re telling me that we just climbed all those steps—there were 86 of them—to get to the base of a tower that nobody in our group wants to go up?”

  “I’m sorry if you don’t,” said Basil. “The good news is that it’s all downhill from here.”

  Justice Scalia muttered to me, “It’s been all downhill since we found this guy.”

  “Right!” said Basil—in the British way, responding to nothing. “From here we get to see both the aviary and the park. Let’s continue.” He marched forward as if everything was going just as he’d planned.

  We had to descend 90 steps to the Olympic Amphitheatre, which was being disassembled for renovations, and another 12 down to Hong Kong Lake. The descending steps were harder on my knee than the ascending ones. Justice Scalia, meanwhile, seemed fine.

  “Hope your knee’s okay!” he said. “You really should work out more often.”

  “You’re one to talk, Nino. How could you say such a thing to your trainer?”

  “My trainer needs to be more fit,” he said. “That’s not my fault. Hey, look at that naked man!”

  “Basil,” I said, “this is the second naked-man sculpture we’ve seen on this trip. They seem identical.”

  “This, American friends, is one of 31 fiberglass-and-iron statues placed all around the city. Look at that rooftop there,”—he pointed—“and over there.” Several naked-man sculptures were in sight. “This is part of a city-wide art installation by Antony Gormley, a British artist. It’s entitled Event Horizon, and apparently some people like it. Each statue is a life-size body cast of the artist.”

  “Do you like it, Tom?” Justice Scalia asked.

  “I really do,” he said facetiously. To everyone’s amusement, Tom walked up to the park statue, took it by the hand, and posed for photos with the look of a simpleton.

  “Nino,” I said, “go hold its hand for a photo.”

  “I’m not doing that . . . Well, it is kind of funny . . . No, I can’t pose for that picture. Let’s move on!”

  “You’re very lucky to see Antony Gormley’s work,” said Basil. “This art installation was delayed for more than a year after it was first put up and then removed. An investment banker leapt to his death—a suicide. Then people thought that all these naked men were actual people on the verge of suicide, and alarms were raised all over the city. So the installation had to be taken down. Now, though, it’s back up. The artist has realized his dream of having replicas of his naked self placed all over the city—an unusual exhibition.”

  “Or exhibitionism,” Justice Scalia said. I grinned at him.

  We looked at the Asian carp in Hong Kong Lake, which is really more of a pond, and then Basil announced, “I’m happy to say our descent will be quite easy, since there are escalators all the way down.”

  “And up, too, presumably?” asked Justice Scalia.

  “Yes, but it’s less scenic.”

  “You mean we could have taken escalators up and walked down the steps?” Justice Scalia persisted.

  “I suppose, yes, but I never do it in that order.”

  We followed Basil to the top of the first escalator. Justice Scalia was incensed all the way down. “This is an outrage!” He was fairly snarling. “He made us climb those steps unnecessarily!” “You could have hurt your knee even worse!” “And he promised a ‘light’ walking tour!” “Dammit. He’s a fool. A damn fool.”

  Tom and I muttered various things in agreement. Karolyne, well ahead with Basil, doubtless thought she could help most by keeping Basil away from Justice Scalia, and she did so as Basil babbled on.

  “And now, American friends,” he said at long last, “it will soon be time for me to leave you as you enjoy your midday meal at Mott 32. But I will escort you to the entrance of this fine establishment.”

  We were standing in front of the Standard Chartered Bank Building, which has an unusual architectural feature: you have to walk up 38 stairs to get to the main floor. Then, to reach the basement where the restaurant is, you must go down a long escalator.

&
nbsp; “I’m not climbing one more stair!” said Justice Scalia. “In fact, I’m not taking one more step! I’m not moving from this spot.” He was scowling at the staircase as we stood on the sidewalk of a major street, Des Voeux Road, cars and buses noisily passing.

  “It’s just a few more stairs for lunch,” said Karolyne. “Just think: jellyfish is right inside there, and roast suckling pig.”

  “Well . . . okay. Dammit.”

  “We’ll get a cab afterward, Nino,” I said. “We won’t walk any more than necessary.”

  “This is truly unfathomable!” said Justice Scalia as we ascended the granite steps. “I just can’t believe we’re having to go up to go down!”

  I said: “It’s a miniature reenactment of our whole morning: steps up, escalator down. Escalators all the way down. Kind of like turtles all the way down.”

  “Ha! Is your knee okay?” he asked.

  “I’ll be fine. Are you okay?”

  “Sure. I’m in better shape than you, with your gimpy leg!”

  “That’s just because you made me do the leg extensions this morning. I told you I wasn’t supposed to do it.”

  “You just didn’t do it right!” he declared. He had an impish frown on his face.

  When we got to the entrance of the Mott 32 restaurant, Basil said, “Right! And now, American friends, I bid you all adieu. May the rest of your stay in Hong Kong be excellent. It’s been a pleasure to be your guide.”

  We all said thank you to Basil. As he walked off, Justice Scalia said to me, “You know, he’s not such a bad guy. Basil Middlemiss was growing on me there at the end. But I’m glad we’ll have Polly again tomorrow.”

  After lunch and a brief rest, we met with Chief Justice Ma for a tour of the Court of Final Appeal. The main courtroom has finely carved brown-wood paneling that isn’t so different from that in Justice Scalia’s own chambers. Once in the courtroom, Justice Scalia took the lectern for a moment, as if he were an advocate. I said, “Nino, declaim for us! I want a photo.” And he posed by pretending to pound the lectern, as if delivering an old-fashioned forensic oration. Unfailingly gracious, Chief Justice Ma was generous with his time that afternoon.