One day he went exploring further and discovered a freshwater lake. Later, the peasant who found his body said he had drowned with a smile on his face.
Blade of Grass, drink water before wine, even if the finest wine is open and ready waiting for you. The foundations of a joyful life are laid by Heaven and our enhancements are not enhancements.
Blade of Grass, discovering the world in which you live is the chief part of your education. As the Emperor of Xuan said, ‘He who has to ask questions looks like a fool for a minute; he who does not ask questions remains a fool forever.’
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.
‘Come on, boy. Come on. This way. Good boy.’ Joyce kept wanting to pat him and say ‘Good dog,’ because that was the sort of thing one said to large, lumbering pets. ‘Good elephant,’ didn’t trip nearly as naturally off the tongue. But she kept up the flow of encouraging murmurs, stroked the top of his trunk and gently pulled his lead—and he kept moving forward, so that seemed to be the right thing to do. ‘Come on. Good boy. Come on. Joyce will buy you a little treat if you keep moving forward. Come on.’ She wondered if elephants liked the same sort of treats as cats and dogs—biscuits and stuff. In cartoons, they always ate bananas. Why was one never carrying a banana when one needed one? As a proselytising vegetarian, she decided she ought to always have one about her person.
What astonished her most was his eyes. Huge, intelligent, pinky-brown orbs in a nest of pale grey wrinkles, they shone with kindness—and a great deal else, too. Joyce believed she could see a stunning range of things in there—wisdom and suffering and knowledge of things that will be forever unknown to human beings. Overall, the most striking thing about the creature’s eyes—or actually, eye, because one could only see one eye at a time—was its obvious humanity, or what we arrogantly define as humanity, anyway. She mused that it was when one glimpsed this that one instantly reached enlightenment about the fundamental brotherhood of sentient beings. Children were often aware of this, as were vegetarians of all ages, but the majority of other adults had little notion of it—except on occasional visits to the zoo, when they were startled to catch the eye of an orang-utan or a gorilla and see just how ‘human’ they were.
From childhood, Joyce had had the ability to do a ‘soul stare’ with monkeys. You could see the subtlest emotions in a chimpanzee’s face. Then, in her early teens, she had worked really hard at developing the ability to connect with other species. These days, especially since she had become a vegetarian, she could tell—or imagined she could tell—exactly what was going on in the minds of many small creatures. Her friend’s hamster looked mildly bilious most of the time but could occasionally pull a deadpan glare that cracked her up. A white-eye in a cage she’d seen at the Hong Kong bird market looked surprisingly philosophical and had a ribald sense of humour. The neighbour’s dog looked manic-depressive most of the day but had a devil-may-care smirk at night. She had even spent time staring at animal faces to learn how they smiled—her sister’s cat, for example, did it the opposite way to human beings: she turned the edges of her lips down.
But you didn’t need to have a spiritual connection with animals to realise that this elephant was not smiling. It felt seriously ill. There was a dizziness in its brow. Its movements— slow and halting—suggested that it was in pain, and its trunk was not swinging and probing as she expected it to be; it hung loosely, like a dead limb. Joyce’s eyes filled with tears as she became aware of the deep unhappiness of this beautiful, innocent creature, which had probably been mistreated all its life and now had been turned into an instrument of death.
The elephant stopped moving and turned to stare at her.
‘What do you want, boy? Can I get you something? You want water?’
They had escaped to a sort of underground car park. She noticed a drinks machine nearby and found enough change in a secret pocket inside her jacket to buy a plastic bottle of mineral water.
The beast turned its hurt eyes to the bottle and then reached out with its trunk to touch it. Although she felt him try to grip it with a sort of webbed finger thingy at the end of his trunk, she didn’t let go, realising that it would do the creature no good to swallow a plastic container.
‘I’ll feed you. Let me do it.’
She unscrewed the cap and showed him how she could splash it out of the bottle. Then she moved close to him and put the bottle to its cracked, pinky-grey lips.
‘There you go, boy, there you go.’ It opened its lips and she emptied the entire bottle into his mouth. The creature’s mouth was bizarre: the bottom half was like two giant lips pressed together, making a groove that pointed straight ahead. There was something very labia-like about the elephant’s mouth. It was like pouring water into a fleshy, pink conduit. It seemed to enjoy the drink, and then closed its mouth and made a smacking noise.
There was a steep ramp leading out of the car park, and they were drawn to it by the flood of natural light coming from it. The ceiling was low—2.1 metres, a sign said, but the beast lowered its head, apparently used to walking through human-sized spaces.
As they emerged into the light, the elephant turned its head to Joyce and swung its trunk at her. It seemed to indicate its back. Again, it pointed to her and then pointed up at the valley where its back joined its head.
‘You want me to go up there? Is that where your minder used to sit? Okay, I guess I could try.’
She steered the beast towards a concrete parapet and used it as a stand to get herself halfway up. And then she gripped the elephant’s rough skin and pulled herself to the top. It was surprisingly comfortable up there—albeit rather smelly. The skin at the neck was softer than the skin on the sides, and she found that her legs fitted snugly around its upper back. Here, the Special Relationship kicked in. Just as daughters have a special relationship with fathers, and sons with mothers, so young women have a special relationship with large, muscular animals such as ponies and horses. Okay, so this particular beast was not part of the familae equinus, but Joyce felt a similar instant bonding with the powerful beast between her legs. Freud, had he been alive and watching, would have applauded.
Joyce knew how to ride a horse and was curious as to whether the same techniques would work on an elephant. She shifted her hips around, squeezed with her knees and patted its head. ‘Come on, boy. Let’s move. Let’s go. Come on, let’s go. Good boy.’ She jerked her hips back and forth. The creature started to lumber forward. It worked. Now where was CF? Unhappy about approaching a building crawling with armed men, he had said he would wait outside for them.
Wong’s narrow eyes had never been bigger. He looked. Then he shook his head. Then he looked again. It couldn’t be true—but apparently it was. Yet it couldn’t possibly be. There were things that could be and there were things that could not. And this definitely fell into the category of something which could not. There was only one possible explanation. He had actually gone insane. Temporarily, he hoped. The gas that the mad Venusians had pumped into the room must have had some sort of hallucinogenic drug in it. He was having what Westerners called ‘a trip’. Or maybe it was the trauma of watching all that violence. Whatever, his brain was seriously malfunctioning. That was the only satisfying explanation for the vision that his deranged mind was projecting in front of his goggle-eyes: Joyce McQuinnie, lumbering up from the car park ramp of the Shanghai Grand Theatre on the back of a white elephant, like a junior maharani from 1880s India.
But what really shook him was the realisation that this was not just a random hallucinogenic vision. It was a vision with a message. He recalled the uncomfortable episode yesterday morning when he had seen a picture of a white elephant and felt that it was a significant omen. Up to now he had stupidly thought that the extraordinary near-death events of the past twenty or so hours were the incidents that had been foretold. But now it was evident that this interpretation was wrong. An actual meeting with an actual white elephant—that was the really impor
tant thing that Heaven had decreed would happen this week.
The vision moved closer. It looked incredibly real. He felt he could reach out and touch the animal’s grey, wrinkled, leathery side. He could hear Joyce saying: ‘Come on, boy. Good boy. That’s it. Keep going. Good boy. Good boy.’
He reached out a finger and—gingerly, tentatively—poked it. Solid. Unyielding. Rough to the touch. Fibrous, almost wooden-feeling.
‘Come on, CF. We have to get this elephant away. Good boy. Good boy.’
He looked up at her, in a daze. The white elephant was solid. So was she. Somehow, this was actually happening. ‘What do you mean? You are stealing this elephant? Who belong to it?’
‘There’s a bomb in it. That’s where the bomb was hidden. Every inch of the place was searched. Every human goes through a plastic explosives detector. The only place that Vega knew they wouldn’t look is inside the animals. We’ve got to get it away. Are you listening to me? CF?’ She started to repeat her story. ‘Vega? The mad guy? He put a bomb inside…’
Wong’s mind reeled. He dimly heard Joyce going through an exhaustive explanation of why he should help her get the giant beast away from the theatre where the opening event of the summit would be held, but none of it made sense to him. How could an elephant be a bomb?
‘I don’t understand.’
She spoke slowly, John Cleese talking to a foreigner: ‘There’s. A. Bomb. In. This. Elephant.’
Wong blinked.
Joyce continued: ‘Vega did some surgery on it. Cut it open and stuck a bomb in it. That’s why it’s looking so sick. That’s why it’s walking so slowly. It’s going to blow up soon. We need to do something with it.’
Wong started to come out of his daze. This was the bomb? Vega had put a bomb in the Shanghai Grand Theatre—and Joyce and her friend had somehow discovered that it was inside the elephant? This was ludicrously far-fetched. This was definitely a hallucination.
A spark ignited in another part of his slowed-down brain. Bomb?
Bomb = danger.
Danger = possible damage to his person.
Only possible reaction to possible damage to his person = rapidly remove person from scene.
Can bombs exploding in hallucinations do actual harm in the real world? Who knows? He had never had a vision as vivid as this one before. But it would be crazy to risk it. ‘If there is a bomb inside this elephant, we should put him down. We should leave him here. We should go far, far away. Right now. Come. Get off. Let’s go.’ Animation returned to his body as fear set in. He grabbed her arm and tried to pull her down.
She shook her arm free and then used her hips to urge the beast to walk. ‘No way. I’m not leaving it. They’ll shoot it. It’s not fair. What has he done to deserve to be shot? Nothing. It’s not right. I’m a veggie. A true veggie. I will not be associated with any animal deaths. Besides, even if they do shoot it, what about the bomb inside? That woman said it was a big one, and it’ll go off at six eighteen. Loads of people will die if we leave him here. We have to move him to somewhere safe. Come on. Come on.’
This was madness. Wong, losing his temper, wanted to shout abuse at her, but his mind had started working at high speed on various other tracks. He was not a generous man, and news that a bomb would soon go off left him thinking only about his own safety. Yet one grim fact stuck out of the lake of fog in his mind like the mast of a sunken ship: he could not allow the white elephant to die. What a terrible stroke of bad fortune that would be. It would be equivalent to him losing his own life. No—it would be worse than dying, because what would happen would be that he would remain alive but have the worst luck in the world every day for the rest of his days. This would be an unimaginable horror for a feng shui master. Death would be a far better option.
As for the crowds in central Shanghai—he wasn’t particularly bothered about failing to halt the death of dozens or hundreds of Shanghainese citizens, pestilent and smelly over-tall people with stupid clothes, ma da sao men and frilly princess women. No, it was the death of the elephant which would cause the eruption of a mountain of bad karma of incalculable proportions. In karma, size mattered. Killing a bacterium was nothing. Killing a bird or medium-sized animal, unless it was for food, was not so good. Killing a horse was seriously bad luck. Killing an elephant—this would be terrible. And a white elephant! Symbol of longevity. Symbol of perfection. Symbol of royalty. Killing a white elephant after having the forewarning he had had the previous morning—it was not to be contemplated.
As Joyce lumbered away, he begrudgingly admitted to himself that the killing of innocent passers-by might actually be a factor to be considered in an indirect way, too—it would be messy and make the situation horribly complicated. The authorities would have to be involved. And in China, as he had learned to his cost many times, one did not want the powers involved in any way if it could be at all avoided. Somehow, Joyce was right: they had to solve the problem, not run away from it. The bomb had to be moved away from the city centre. It had to be placed somewhere where it could go off and do no harm.
The elephant was moving slowly and Wong caught up with Joyce in a few strides. ‘We must move the elephant somewhere with no people before it booms. Where shall we put it?’
‘Somewhere deserted. Let’s get onto the main road and see what we can see.’
They turned out of the western approach to the theatre, looked out at Huangpi Bei Lu and stared. There were tens of thousands of people filling the road—the anti-American demonstration had reached as near as it would be allowed to get to the Shanghai Government Building, which was adjacent to the east side of the Grand Theatre. Bodies and banners filled the street for as far as they could see. Although the police had attempted to limit the demonstrators to Huangpi Bei Lu, many had spilled onto Nanjing Xi Lu, getting in the way of the cars, which stood nose to tail in a jam. It looked as if the entire pedestrian and vehicular population of the world had decided to descend upon the gates of the Shanghai Grand Theatre at this precise moment.
Both of them had the same thought at the same time.
‘What time is it?’ the feng shui master asked.
Joyce looked down at her watch: five twenty. ‘Gridlock time,’ she said.
Right on cue, half a dozen trapped cars started honking.
Panic creeps. As the mental precursor of frenzied action, panic should hit like a thunderbolt. It is usually connected to danger, and should therefore engender a rapid reaction. But more often than not, it meets an almost impenetrable wall, which is the human dislike of losing control. So instead, panic creeps silently around our synapses, head down, tiptoeing along. But as it goes, it grows, and we need to change our metaphor. It becomes a huge, expanding amoeba with many pseudopodia, and then grows into a full-scale stream of the stuff. It floods into an increasing number of sections of our subconscious, like an underground river breaking into new chambers. There are no visible ripples on the ground above, but nevertheless the firmament has become dangerously unstable.
This refusal to countenance panic is important, for panic may sweep through our cranial passages as liquid, but it is not water. It is a type of plasma which works like liquid nitrogen on the brain: it freezes the system, turns it cold and hard and unmoving: messages can no longer travel from synapse to synapse. The thought processes which should organise our escape stop working. So perhaps the correct thing to do in the face of extreme danger turns out to be to ignore it, and focus solely on solving the problem. Joyce, who tended to freeze when scared, was halfway there.
Wong sat down, his body facing away from the elephant, and started to think about what to do. This was a job for the intellect. Hard, cold logic, the computation of many facts at high speed, was what was needed. Some things one could do by instinct, but moving loaded elephants out of crowded city centres was not among them. This needed every one of the 800 000 million brain cells in his cranial cavity working independently and in correct sequence.
Space. Peace. Absence of people. That�
��s what was needed. If he could not save the elephant, it would at least have to die in a peaceful situation, willingly sacrificing itself so that others might live. He imagined the elephant exploding in a quiet, deserted field, with himself and other onlookers watching through binoculars from a safe distance—and preferably with a local mystic such as Shang Dan doing something to mitigate the negative forces unleashed by the beast’s demise. This is what must happen. He must enable this to happen. Find an open green area. He looked at his watch. ‘The bomb will boom in forty-seven minutes. We need to find a quiet place quickly. Park, something like that.’
By this time people from the demonstration had spotted them and many had surged onto the pavement to have a close look at the beast—elephants were not a common sight on the streets of Shanghai. The first to reach it were children, and their families soon caught up with them. At the start, there were a dozen people, then fifty, then a hundred, and then they were surrounded by a sea of bodies growing larger and denser by the second.
‘Sorry,’ shouted Joyce. ‘We need to move this beast. Excuse us. Can you keep away, please?’
No one paid any attention. From her vantage point on top of the grey mountain she shouted: ‘Please keep away! This elephant is explosive!’ Still no response. She realised she needed to switch to Mandarin, but this was not a subject covered anywhere in the first eight chapters of Conversational Mandarin Book One. ‘Bomb. Bomb inside elephant. Big bomb,’ she shrieked.
Several people looked up, baffled, at the young woman on top of the elephant. ‘Big bomb,’ she told them.
‘Bum?’ a young man stroking the elephant asked. He pointed to his bottom. ‘Big bum?’
‘No, bomb. Big bomb.’
She leaned over to Wong. ‘How do you say bomb in Mandarin?’
‘Baang.
’ ‘What? Bomb in Chinese is bang?’
‘Not bang. Baang. High falling tone.’
‘Weird. How do I say “This elephant may explode”?’
The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Page 18