SIX
SIX T hen, venom, to thy work. But Mai Trừng was no longer the object of these words. Now I had become the object. It’s true I had intended to poison her. A buttonsized poison pill, wrapped in a layer of nylon, always nestled in my pants pocket. But those who live by the sword die by the sword. With someone like Mai Trừng, such a saying wasn’t a cliché, but was absolutely true. It was an immediate reality. I would die from poison. I might even die from my very own little pill. I had chosen my own death and didn’t even know it. Just like Cốc, Bóp, and Phũ. They’d all chosen their own deaths for themselves. I went into the hotel’s karaoke room. A group of men and some hostesses were cuddling up to each other, taking turns holding the microphone and screaming out, “If I die tomorrow, will you be sad?” The mournful line came out sounding cheerful. Even I almost smiled at it. What a stupid line. Go off and die; your own true love, your other half, will head straight off to sing karaoke with another own true love. Stupidity. Karaoke is just an entertaining trick made for people that want the instant gratification of transcendence; only real singers have the right to hold the microphone and sing. Our voice always sounds good to our own ears, but for others, it’s a cruel torture of their eardrums. The great, idiotic invention of the Japanese. Kawabata’s dead, Akira Kurosawa seems dead, Kitarō seems dead, and the remnants of their cultural inheritance have devolved into diversions like this karaoke, a house of culture whose foundation is crumbling and sinking because it was accidentally built on a marsh. Electronics , computers, commerce and trade, a boggy culture, and an educational system that catered to the ignorant vulgarities of the nouveau riche all combined to create this rape of the musical arts. H o A n h T h a i 79 But I’m also dying. Dying people and decomposing cultural paradigms understand each other easily. I took a microphone and sang along with the group of people: “Keep on loving, love like never before, / Love like a fool, love like the hour’s late / . . . / The world is just the two of us, the scent of perfume, the clouds in the great sky, the distant heavens.” A kind of entertainment that skillfully seduces with its constant exuberance. Yet that’s what a dying person needs. Exactly what the dying need. Sick of it already, I dropped the microphone and left the room without looking at anyone. A shadow followed after me. I shivered with a touch of fear. I stopped in my tracks, but heard the steps keep coming. One step, two, three. Using a martial arts move, I stepped smoothly to the side and then spun around. I was face to face with the head engineer. That year, when his ship had been caught in a sudden storm, his whole crew, knowing his wife had been unfaithful to him, had cursed him as a Jonah.1 In fact, he really had been so distracted by the situation that he had left a flashlight next to the compass , causing it to indicate the wrong direction. We came together and embraced. He slapped me on the back, and then stepped backward. “Wait here, we’ll meet again in around an hour.” He winked like a sailor. “I’ve already paid my money,” he said, “and I’ve already got an appointment with a young lady in the karaoke room and I already rented a room. One shouldn’t break one’s word to women, right? Or do you want to come along?” I told him to rest at ease; I would wait for him in the Captain’s Studio on the second floor. I also let him know that he didn’t have to come back in exactly one hour; he should feel free to draw out the work—both its stages and its frequency—if he so desired.2 I walked up to the Captain’s Studio. Ki was curled under the altar next to Cốc’s urn. I was moved by that display of loyalty. The dead are dead. Pain and suffering are only for the survivors. I led the dog into the elevator and out onto the top floor. It was dusk. The purple...
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