“Ah, yes. Tiantang. That is ‘heaven’ in Mandarin,” she echoed.
The wilted card on the pale-yellow wall read:
This is a legitimate establishment. Do not ask the attendant to perform any act of a sexual nature.
If you do, it will be denied and you will not have access to these premises.
Thank you for your understanding and your cooperation.
—The Management
Then, why the dimmer, that plastic knob in the wall, which, with a flip from the finger, could regulate the luminosity of an incandescent bulb, turning it into a thousand suns or instill the darkness of interstellar space where the apotheosis would be consummated?
A Chinese screen flashed a Buddha with androgynous lips gleaming with the lure of a promised nirvana. His pale hand was holding a flowering bush of droopy, trumpetlike white flowers.
I took off my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, and donned a sandalwood-scented kimono. It was a pastel-green robe with embroidered cranes engaged in a mating dance.
I stretched my body on the massage table.
On a wall, I noticed a print of a painting of Hokusai’s Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. In this canvas, a reclining geisha is being orally assaulted by an octopus. I was transfixed by the woman ravished by a mollusk, the ravenous beak of the crustacean digging into her fleshy corolla. The image was intriguing for a legitimate massage establishment.
The door gyrated, and a shadow filtered in. She looked thirty, but I knew her face sealed a secret of the mystery of aging. Asian women weather artfully the ravages of time. Their ivory faces and nubile alabaster skin are impervious to the erosion of aging. There is a timelessness about their physique and an eternity about their physiognomy. An elegance of lines, an eggshell skin coloring graced her ovoid face. Utamaro would have committed seppuku to have her as a model in his depiction of the women of The Floating World.
She removed my kimono. I pointed with my fingers at my bronchi where the disease was lodged. An enchanting melody from Madame Butterfly filled the room.
Examining the contours of her well-penciled eyes, I traveled in time. I recalled photographs of movie actresses from the fifties—Garbo, Stanwick, Blyth, etc.—whose dreamy gazes turned inward. Everything about those women spelled the sublime.
Light dimmed to its ultimate blackness.
I was blind like a one-celled organism in the primordial sea, tethered to the world by her precarious touch, connected to the living by a cutaneous anchor. I complied, surrendering my body to her inquisitive hands, capitulating to her lubricating touch.
Ointments basted my body. Oiled hands kneaded dormant muscles in silence.
Time streamed beyond consciousness or reason.
Voices chanting a Buddhist sutra rose rapidly to a crescendo. I was inside a monastery with monks intoning sacred words in Pali. The incantation magnified my inward emptiness. Filled with the void, I witnessed the annihilation of my self. Memory evaporated in the vacant universe.
I got dressed, sluggishly. The air I was inhaling was ethereal. Objects had lost their angularity.
I left money on the massage table. I don’t know how much.
“I am Gabriel, and you?” I muttered as I limped toward the door.
“Mantuo Luo.”
I ventured into the street feeling diaphanous and vaporous like an inebriated monarch butterfly in the beginning of its migration to Mexico. The day poured out, and with it departed the man I used to be. That unforgettable afternoon, I had received my stigmata.
Words of Annihilation
To acquaint myself with writing a diary, I studied literary examples: The Confessions of Saint Augustine, The Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of Jean-Jacque Rousseau. Many autobiographies are confessions. I read also Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Nabokov’s Lolita, Confession of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir, Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. I explored erotic confessions: I read Casanova’s autobiography and Catherine Millet’s memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., The Surrender by Toni Bentley.
A Return to Hades
Three days later, I visited her again. The chest congestion had subsided during the following week. The shards of glass that perforated my alveoli had lost their keenness.
The holidays were upon us. My wife and I became swept in the orgy of shopping that marks the weeks that preceded Christmas, yet in spite of the running around, I didn’t cough.
The holiday anxiety was taking its toll on my wife. The visit of her family, the arrival of her father complicated the stress. The travel logistics of all the members were an ordeal I endured this time around without duress. My wife was an Episcopalian, and the holidays were an opportunity to summon all the usual family suspects from all the corners of the empire for a series of lavish dinners, which she executed out of duty instead of adherence to a faith she had abandoned years ago.
Images of Mantuo Luo illuminated me from the inside. Knowing I would visit her soon made the stressful season more tolerable. It was her gaze—aloof, remote, fully detached, yet engaging—that had pierced me. I had been stunned, subjugated, disarmed by the stare. In that last encounter, her cool, imperious gaze had seeded my memory. It had germinated sprouting branches in the soil of the self.
Echoes of Distant Bells
A diary! It’s the motivation of memorialists to expose themselves and seek absolution. They don’t know what they should be redeemed from. They can’t escape a perpetual malaise at the core of their being. After Freud, journal writers became engaged in self-analysis emboldened by a new arsenal. They excavated the strata of the self in quest of repressed trauma.
In this present autobiography of the last three years of my life, I won’t ignore distasteful details or enshrine triumphs. I’ll flagrantly divulge my sins. Confessions lead to torture chambers. Every journal writer is a mini Freud; every diary keeper, a lay analyst. Freud practiced self-analysis throughout his life, self-examining his emotions, unconscious thoughts, latent desires. My discovery of this mentalist was a hand grenade thrown at the fortress of my self. I delved into his writings with the sacred curiosity and saintly eagerness of a pilgrim on the road to Damascus.
*****
My wife was appreciating my good spirit which had replaced my intermittent cynicism. This anonymous Asian woman I had visited a few times was altering my mood by soothing my pulmonary discomfort and alleviating my innate discontent.
An inner revolution had started. This Oriental agent provocateur threw a Molotov cocktail on my ramparts. She helped me overthrow myself.
*****
My wife traveled to Washington, DC, to help decorate her sister’s apartment.
I drove to the city. The air on Fifth Avenue reeked of car exhaust fumes and women’s perfume.
The elevator groaned as it struggled to the ninth floor. The elderly Chinese lady ushered me in. She took my hand and squeezed it.
I undressed and lay down in the massage table.
Her moist fingers unleashed a torrent cascading down my chest, loosening gnarled muscles, pulverizing recalcitrant nerves, unearthing obstructing rocks, uprooting petrified roots. The stream of effervescent feelings turned into a river rushing toward a waterfall. My body, now liquefied, fell into the abyss of the white rapids. A sudden serenity permeated every molecule of my epidermis. I was nudged by a gentle current like a sailboat caressed by temperate winds. The benevolent tide escorted me to a large estuary, and the drift deposited me on a protruding coral bank covered with soft