捉蟲入屎忽 | Catching Worms
Short Story #2 - A Second Ode to My Second Home
See him through camellia, white orchid. See the eyes on this one: amber, elliptical, enrapturing, moonlit. See him as you or me, surviving but not thriving. Evening redness brings indigo tidings and ultraviolet linings. Now Xihe tucks herself in, welcoming night, and Carlisle Li says hello to mercury vapour lights and bent arms, to twenty-foot tall floaters shuffling, to dragons and lions with khaki legs and navy blue Under Armour sleeves circling against predatory lights. Here comes the plodding march of Spring, tanggu rhythm underneath the cobbled streets. Here is the Bone White Pearl, too spit-shined for the chaff, only ever for the wheat.
He puts his chrome Samsung away at the call’s end, then peels off from the taxi-honk throngs of Queen’s Road East, ashened hands burrowing through a weathered tweed coat. The search for breathing room is a lost cause as Mong Kok takes him in all her poisonous luster and urban intoxication. The people don’t escape, they come by in droves, a faintly religious procession, skinwalkers beckoned from reality’s apocalypse. This is Hong Kong, the long and unencumbered dark where we do not sleep but instead run on and on until the night runs out of rope and the day breaks our backs.
Past the vendors selling fried fish balls, sugared egg waffles, soy sauce siomai so strong you can’t turn up your nose, past the stilled vendors with their 3D-printed banners, his fleet feet tell of particular spryness, a man quick to the cut and on deck. Looking on into an alley crowded with carts and cats, he remembers an article correlating shop-owners' lessening usage of neon with the city’s dwindling passion. It spoke of the glow this place used to have, the subconscious fever dream Wong and Tsui and Hui made their bones on.
There’s no neon anymore.
Diving into an aluminum-plated corner, a wire mesh door awaits like a jilted lover by the payphone. He pushes and it rings out with a slow creak, a magic entrance to a darkling realm. Inside waits a round table with two hind legs, enamelled and glossed, an overhead chandelier of warm orange light lancing off in zebra-striped rotations, circling, circling, circling. On a shelf all the way back, a tiny terracotta Buddha is stuck on a lacquered plinth, palm raised for nirvana or whatever, eyes closed, afraid to see.
“Seven o’clock?” asks the voice, her local dialect sounding angry but really isn't if you’re tuned in. Cantopop sounds in the background as she walks up like porcelain on two skinny legs, ringed fingers bundled together in a fleshy wreath under the amber light. Incense and candle wax waft from the end. “Name?”
“Carlisle,” he says, employing the gweilo name, for the whities and their little whitelings, baritone deep and seedy, debonair smile like a scoundrel prince culled from an older, undignified age, unfit for wuxia.
“I’d be closed normally, but you strike me as a mystery I’d like to unravel.”
“I’m all yours.” He can see her now as he follows, coming out of the blackness--plate smooth, tanned, elvish, purplish nightgown cosplaying as a well-to-do dress. He reaches into his coat for a pack of Lucky Strikes. “Can I smoke?”
“Yeah,” she chuckles, taking out a deck from her back pocket to begin what they’re here for. “Is this your first reading? Do you need an explanation?”
“No. But I like the sound of your voice, so go on then,” breathe in, out.
She feigns stolid but the turned-down stare doesn’t lie. “You talk to all Taoists that way?”
“Only the pretty ones.”
She stares at him, halfway gobsmacked and impressed, as he places folded red-tinted 紅衫魚, chief executives and ministers imprinted on demonic denominations. Taking it, she counts with care before stowing it, then begins, springing red-packet cards onto green baize. She tells him to seek out three, and he does, choosing them at random between slow seconds dragged across a chronal curb. Another shuffle, double then one-handed. In the dusky veil amidst antiques and calligraphy and dynastic echoes, their faces are barely distinguishable. His tongue burns with the taste of a habit so bad he ought to have kicked it by now.
She flips the first one over, sphinx sat on the wheel with wings at each corner, first, second, third, fourth, embossed in gold, drawn with unnamed energy, with things and spells best listened and not spoken to. “Wheel of Fortune. Cycle, up and down, round-and-round the merry go round, never staying in one place, never content to lie down to watch the grass till. You enjoy it. Moving, the tantric shake. But do you ever slow? Do you ever breathe in, breathe deep? Our people plowed and plowed until their lungs gave out. We were farmers who knew patience. What about you, Carlisle? When do you stop?”
The words take him back, back--
--back against the wall, fabergé in one hand. Stick to the plan, light them up roman candle-like and watch them scramble as eggs crack against the pan. And into the fire he goes.
Marbled corridors judder and belly-burst with Triad violence, violet starlight and bloodletting, bullets breaking up wooden panelling, bright tiling. Dinner-jacketed guards yelp as little schoolgirls do under their covers. He dashes out, turns a sharp corner, thick-soled boots trudging on carpeted maroon.
An alcove to a window taller than trees. He runs, runs, runs--before barging through glass into brute Kowloon air, pieces scattering, catching the light of the moon in fragments and shards, moments in time sprinkled over the corpse of his lifetime.
Kcab--
Rewind, return.
“Maybe now. Maybe never.” He takes a puff, long and drawn out. “If I get a job, I have the responsibility to see it through. Nothing more to be said.”
“You’re a betting man?”
“On myself. World spins, things change, but I like my luck.”
“And when you don’t?”
He doesn’t say anything, instead taking another prolonged drag, all the while she smirks and moves onto the second, kaleidoscopic arrangement paving the way for the next: black knight on a pale horse waving a cross-boned flag, bleached white, speaking of gothic musings, pulled from a state that wreaks havoc on the affairs of men.
She says, “the old order remains. The ties that bind. Fate and wisdom are estranged. You have a cord you want cut, a string you want shewn. What might that be? What are you harvesting? What keeps a handsome man like you from your date with diyu?”
What keeps him here?
He fingers his blackened duffel bag and scrounges through, finding a Murakami novel from bā bā, blue-checkered tangzhuang from Emily, Smiths record from Lucian, bronze locket where Isabella planted a kiss before making him promise, Carlisle, you better honor it and stay and call me, and nothing will stop you, nothing will stop us, not even when all our stars meet cosmic annihilation. Strange relics from forgotten birthdays.
“You can leave, 小狼,” goes mom, ghoulish and wrinkled in the door jamb. “You’ve always taken whatever you have wanted. Western therapy has poisoned you. No need to stop now.”
Pause, one too long for any sort of comfort. He gropes for a response but it falls flat and cold on his tongue like a snowman with stick hands, destined to melt once summer comes. Looking upwards, the bag straps tightening around his shoulders, he sees it. Dead ahead in the long dark--a generous space with unequal promise--the Mid-Levels penthouse sits blue, a sea of swarming sky-scraped lights behind the canopy. Above in heaven, zodiac symbols go to war with English dragons. No one is winning.
Thunder crackles overhead, vicious and kindling. She stands still under the rain, builder of bedlam, burner of bridges, and for a beat he’s fifteen again and she’s feeding him, pinched chopsticks, reading a whole life from his palm, spelling it out for him in alphabet of rigor and corporate and uni and slow punishment, and we were farmers, she once said, we toiled and toiled and so we must toil now, I will, you will, that’s the way it goes.
“I,” he tries again. Gray matter swirls, kicking up dust and things better left half-remembered. For a moment, he is convinced by them. But only for a moment.
And so he walks off into the Lantau green, silence reigning, away from the storm.
“Too many things, truth be told,” he says, flicking the cap of his silver lighter back-and-forth, “life’s too short not to drink from its cup, if you ask me. Too many songs to listen to, too many shows to see, too many parties to throw, too many things to read. Set of books, pair of lips.”
He leans in and instinctively she does the same, jaws that could cut glass glistening amidst the candelabra.
“Maybe I’ll find time for us both to read then.” She’s deviant, playful, sultry soprano sibilance. She reaches out for the third card then and turns it over. It is the skeleton embrace, fleshless lips interlocked, jointed arms chain-linked underneath a dusky hood.
“The Lovers. A pair in tandem. Complementary forces, yin and yang in a most perfect Tao-dance. The choice to commit and stay committed, through thick and thin, through sweat and sin, through bad and bedlam. What kind of pair might that be then, Mr. Li?” Before she says more, she squints, then makes an ‘ah’ sound. “I see the card’s reversed. Doesn’t exactly spell well for you, does it?”
“Oh, you know. Life like mine makes it easier to mix in bouts of business, bouts of pleasure. Never a full commitment. Better to not be tied down.”
“Pleasure?”
“Pleasure.”
Neither realize how close they’ve gotten physically until now. He closes his eyes for a single contracted moment, a window of endless expansion, of time and love and loss and pain and the things that make it all worth it. There are few words exchanged as they stand up, twin cosmoses closing in stationary orbit approaching each other at a light-year pace. In moments he’s up against her, she’s up against him, her breath like a smoker’s, heartbeats before planular destruction. He comes in close, sees her tongue sprout slowly, before he stops just short, places his chin against her shoulder and brings her hips against his.
“I’m afraid it’s not our time,” he whispers softly, placing a gentle kiss on her neck, “I know about the backdoor, 美林 .”
“Wha--how--” she stammers, pushing back in a mad rush, irises widening with the fear of anyone who knows they’ve been made.
“I’m a thief, lady, same as anyone, until the day the worms have me. And you have something I want.”
She reels back, the orange lights turning harsh and cruel as Carlisle fires the cigarette from his mouth like a silver bullet from a loaded gun. Tossing her aside, his fingers scour the wall for a divot, a nook or a cranny, before eventually he finds it, a secret dip in the red woodwork that prays tell about a dirty, gnashing little secret. With a tiger shove comes a dim room where there wasn’t before, smeared in greens and yellows of old film. Then jangling behind him. Clinking. Unsheathing.
It takes a second. He throws her off her center of gravity, uranages her through the table, sawdust and wood balayage out in hairline fractures, and aims the Walther spear-like, his posture a legionnaire’s on fields of old war, heart sated, fears finished.
“You bastard,” she says, struggling. “What was this? Another job? Another score?”
“Don’t act all high and mighty. You’ve been doing this for as long as I have. Only difference is I knocked on your front door and asked.” He comes in close, tauntingly so. “Was on a strict timer, it’s running out now. Dialled nine-nine-nine before I came. Can you divine miracles from prison concrete?”
Turning back, he checks the dingy room. It’s all there, huddled in the corner amidst rusted hooks and furniture left by gone ghosts--in a transparent case, all thousand green notes of her. It takes a few minutes for him to stuff her into a duffel bag, like trying to stuff back unspooled intestines. He walks past the fallen peddler, past the debris of her put-upon home, and out through those swinging doors where the sun is rising once more on a new August twenty-ninth, packed with misery, steaming stories, walled city dreams.
“I believe you, Carlisle. We’re not different.” she is frog-croaking. Then she starts to laugh like a revved-up buzzsaw. “Lovers reversed. My cards don’t lie. There is disharmony about you. Imbalance. Antimatter and matter collide and the universe snaps into two too many, so you’re split down the middle with your guts on the floor. Let’s face it--you wouldn’t know love if it kissed you.”
Parched moments, silent and deadly as the rattle before the snake.
“I know her in other ways.”
Carlisle closes his eyes and sees lightning again, bye-bye mama, father hooked to the I.V., effervescent, eyes ghost sheet-white. He sees promises left ungathered, spoiled under the sun of expectation, so many broken, so many sorry’s, so many many’s. Phantom-fleet sirens clatter across the winding Wan Chai roads, down black rustic gutters. He sighs deep, quiet agonies kneading in, bunched up, thinking mighty thoughts--for he is who he is, we are who we are, cultivators of a proud, gentle race. All doubt must be sown, and all dreams must be privatised, scapegoating for scapegoats and all their silent little lambs.
Hands shaking like leaves in a hurricane, he puts his shades on again, lenses bearing the brunt of the dark world before him. Zodiac creatures lie dead on the clouds; such a heavenly way to die, Morrisey laughter bouncing around these walls of time. Then he wishes God the best of luck before walking off, silence reigning, away from the storm.