“What is it now, Vince?”
“…Am I fired?”
“Whatever for? The person you sold out is aware of your treachery and takes no issue with it. As for me, I consider you an essential member of my crew. I would prefer you to keep working at Ranasinghe Jewelry, should that be feasible for you, even if it is after Richard leaves Hong Kong. Is that something you would want?”
Vincent didn’t see the point in answering Saul’s question. Considering Saul knew of Vincent’s secret conversation with Jeffrey, he probably knew Vincent’s plans to leave Hong Kong, too. He forced himself to look unbothered, like he had never heard the question at all, and changed the topic. “Where is he anyway? Richard, I mean.”
“I wouldn’t know. The shop is closed for the afternoon. He mentioned going for a walk, and considering it is the Dragon Boat Festival, I’m sure we can all imagine where he might have gone.”
Vincent didn’t reply.
“Do give our conversation some thought. Your life is yours to do with as you like—as is everyone’s, I suppose. Nevertheless, you only ever have one chance at it. Much like a sports match, there are no do-overs. Now, I will take my leave.”
Saul vanished, although to where, Vincent didn’t know. Hong Kong was teeming with people. This Pearl of the Orient had once been likened to a labyrinth. Now, for the first time in his whole life, Vincent felt completely lost within it.
The main roads near Victoria Harbor were, in charitable terms, hideously congested. That Vincent found a spot so close to the water without having a boat of his own was nothing short of a miracle. It was funny—every time he, his father, and Marian went out to watch the races, they could never stake out such a good spot. Only today, when he was in half a mind to give up and go home, was it like something had led him straight down to the ocean. The irony made Vincent grin.
Fishing and ferry boats festooned in colorful flags, each a resplendent mansion for fisherfolk, turned the harbor into an explosion of color. Yellow, pink, and red triangular flags fluttered in the breeze. There were the succulent smells of food stalls, the crowds, snatches of chatter (“I bet the firemen team’s gonna win this year!”), kids crying, laughter, English announcements blaring from loudspeakers…
Vincent drifted on the tide. The world felt like a mirage—until a bang split the sky and the crowd erupted with cheers. The race had begun.
A line of four boats burst into passionate motion. Each craft was thin, lancelike, with dragon heads mounted at its prow. They raced in a mad dash toward the center of the bay. These were the best of the best that had risen through the preliminary matches. The twenty-person teams sliced through the water, moving as if in time to the beat of their drums. The oars flew along, sending up waves of spray. Every stroke was of uniform height and angle, so much so that they seemed almost mechanical. Such precision was necessary, because even a nanosecond’s variation in the strokes would have produced unwanted resistance. It was a picture scroll of a perfectly synchronized dance.
The dragons raced as if man and boat were one entity. The rowers rowed and the boats flew forward. There was no self-interest or compromise on the part of any of the players. Constant forward movement, throwing up spray in their wake—that was all. Just going and going, always forward.
A roar of wild cheering told Vincent the race was over. Everything was blurry and warped like some kind of illusion, which explained why the sight of the man in the boat didn’t feel real at all. The man stood on the deck of a white ferry, no doubt some rich person’s plaything. His face was impossibly beautiful. His blond hair swayed in the wind and the spray off the sea; his eyes were clearer and paler than a bright blue sky.
Richard.
It almost looked like this suit-clad man was watching Vincent, not the race, from his distant vantage point. In that ephemeral figure, Vincent glimpsed an infinite sadness. It did not ask why. Nor did it blame Vincent. It merely watched him. The look in his eyes—the eyes of this foreigner watching him from far, far away—told Vincent that the two would never be part of the same world.
By the time Vincent came to his senses and found his voice, the beautiful phantom-like figure was long gone.
Too often of late, Vincent suffered dreams where he wandered the inky blackness of darkest night. That night, he had his first unique dream in many days, racing through rainbow-colored stars alongside creatures of myth. Some part of him recognized that even he, after all he’d done, was still permitted to have dreams like this. At the same time, another part of him knew it could never be more than just a dream.
紛緫緫其離合兮，斑陸離其上下。吾令帝閽開關兮，倚閶闔而望予。
Now sundered, now complete, now joined and ruptured once more, undulating in capricious, beautiful fits—I arrive at the gates of Heaven and bid its keeper grant me entrance; he does naught but recline against it and cast his eye over me.
Such went a passage from the Chu Ci, a work by ancient Chinese statesman Qu Yuan. It was from the “Li Sao,” his poetic magnum opus, and the very same passage Richard recited at the behest of his client. Considered the most prominent classical Chinese poetry anthology after the Confucian Five Classics’ Shijing, the Chu Ci was also mentioned in the Wen Xuan, a favorite work of the master poet Du Fu. In terms of subject matter, the “Li Sao” touched upon the profound mysteries of the emotive world.
The poem was so popular that any person growing up in the Chinese cultural sphere was guaranteed to have read it as a child, whether they wanted to or not. It was therefore only natural that the recitation prompted Vincent’s imagination to take flight and deliver him fantasies of soaring through the skies in a vessel propelled by dragons, phoenixes, and winged tigers. His was a journey through the cosmos, rising and falling through the night sky, endlessly converging with and drifting from his dream companions.
Why, there was nothing to be frightened of, he realized. No, not in the slightest. And just as he really began to believe it, the indigo curtains and charcoal clouds parted, and he beheld glittering gates of gold. The gates of Heaven shone so bright he believed any and every dream of his would come true if they opened outward and let him cross their threshold. Imposing and majestic, they put Vincent in mind of the splendid thrones of dynasties thousands of years past.
And there he was.