Mira got up from her seat and approached Yang.
And Yang knew that now, finally, it was time to let the tears fall.
There was an ambulance parked in front of the house. A pallid stillness lay over the whole scene, nothing moved, and the air was like a warm, transparent wall. A regular ticking sound pierced the silence of 33 degrees Celsius—as indicated by the wavering gradations of the rooftop thermometer. The lazy beat of a mechanical heart. Or else, was it the metronomic footsteps of someone running down a corridor in rubber-soled shoes, or the ticking of an unusually large wristwatch hanging from my ear? Perhaps the person living on the ground floor had turned on the washing machine, or maybe the sound was coming from a broken electrocardiograph. A man was being brought out on a stretcher to the ambulance. His shoes stuck out from under the blanket. Water was dripping from them. The house was a wrecked ship. I know that old man, with the huge green oxygen mask jutting from his head like a green dragon on a ship’s prow, or I think I know him. I try to approach him but the nurses hold me back, their speech incomprehensible. When I turn the page of the picture book a toad and a red orchid are melting to a pulp in a flowerpot. The ruins of a castle appear as I keep walking, and a narrow stony road that rises at a steep gradient. There is the scent of hot grass and dry sunlight. Just then, soaked in sweat, I look back over my shoulder and see a large damp reptile soundlessly following me. I can’t recall its physical form. This is all a scene from a dream. I could only sense the warmth of its long black tail, which it held erect; warmth like that from stone steps burning in the heat of the midday sun. Someone took my hand. And suddenly the scene changed.
The old bookshop, which had no ventilation system other than its windows and door, was full of cigarette smoke. I sat at a table with an espresso cup on it; a corner of the square was visible through the open door, and I could see people sitting around tables by the side of the road in spite of the hot weather. I got the feeling that I was being watched intently by the countless books that lined the walls from the floor to the high ceiling, and by the stories within them. Strangely overwhelmed, I overcame my shyness and got up from my seat, looking up at the higher shelves as I wandered among them. It was the second time we’d visited this bookshop. The first time we’d arrived too late, after the bookshop had already closed for the day, and so could only stand outside for a while and peer in at the display stands. We talked as I examined the books laid out in the window display, pointing at the titles I recognized, but also at those I didn’t. It was winter. The wind shook the awnings of the open-air cafes, and after midnight the snowflakes began to fly. But it was summer now, and we went inside the shop. They brought out small cups of an espresso that was thick as tar. A calm yet persistent scent eddied around us, made up of trees and stale dust, paper and the wooden floor, and cigarette smoke. You were talking with the owner about the difficulties facing small bookshops, about the pessimistic outlook; I finished walking among the shelves, and stepped outside the shop. The shop immediately next door was a florist’s, with a single chair outside. I sat down and put on my sunglasses. Happily, I’d been given a book from the shop as a present. The first story in the book was about five cities, and very short. The title, Invisible Cities. I began to read aloud from the beginning of the book. Time went by. Reptiles surrounded me, listening to the sound of my reading. They were curled up quietly, barely moving; only their raised black tails swayed slowly in the air, as a huge butterfly might, in that sunlight of late summer sliding into autumn. Heat radiated from their skin, which had been warmed in the sunlight and from the square’s asphalt. This afternoon subsiding by degrees like a swamp. Asleep, I heard the sound of sleeping breath. Of one sleeping breath fumbling for another. They must be tangled with you, my breathing, my sleep, and my dreams. And I wanted to keep dreaming. Tears and sweat were flowing from me, wetting my face and watch and pillow. Sleep drifted about over lukewarm waves, like an anesthetic leaching in through veins, seized by sleep’s phantoms . . . held within sleep, one eye makes a simultaneous record of what the other sees. Sleep, the soul’s gelatinous component, the made-visible half-form of that which is unseen. Dreams and the embrace of dreams, which always stir up such sluggish, stunned sensations. This thing that stimulates my sleep, the respiration and waves of dreams, waves of breath and waves of water, that chord and note. And a silent song-cum-selfless-aria spun out on the keyboard. I passed back into the dream, back into the bookshop.
But you’d left, they told me. You were alarmed to find I’d disappeared and hurried outside to look for me, they said. And that it had already been over half an hour since you’d left. He left? While they were speaking I suddenly became alien to the dream, quite at a loss. All the books turned away with cold, sad faces, all the writers clamped their mouths shut and went back to being dead. The cold espresso dregs stained the bottom of the cracked coffee cup. He really left? I repeated blankly, clutching the book that had been my present. As though there was nothing more I could do. Which was true, in fact. I had been sitting in front of the florist’s, reading aloud from the book. I didn’t see you come out of the bookshop. And you didn’t notice me either. I’d thought I was waiting for you. You believed I’d gone away. Like something that had always been spoken of, not knowing that it had not been true. In that moment when you failed to find me, I was reading Invisible Cities. I do not know where you live, and my house, though you know it, is too far away.
I liked to talk about dreams. For lovers, Freud was a gypsy of romance and sensual desire, part fortune-teller, part lute-carrying poet, and the manufacturer of a wonder drug. At some time or other, I told you about the beautiful yellow bird I held in my hand. The sense of a being delicate as a spider’s web, suggested by the heat from its fierce warm breast, its slender weak toes and the soft down on its skin. About the wingbeats that had seemed shockingly strong in spite of such delicacy, the feel of its muscles tense and tremble beneath the skin, the ruddy memory of its chest suddenly springing up at that smallish yet explosive wriggling. At that, you pronounced my dream both enjoyable and extremely well behaved. I didn’t know the reasons for your conclusion. I wasn’t a student of Freud like you. But I could guess that the reason you found it enjoyable wasn’t