The Beauty of Humanity Movement (75 page)

When it comes to her father’s story, she has exhausted her imagination. She wants the justice of facts, some hard evidence.

H
ng wakes late this morning, battling a storm of a headache. What a relief it would be to lay his head in Lan’s lap as he had once done, the
velvet pads of her forefingers massaging his temples in hypnotic circles. He had been working his hardest in those days, his earliest days as a roaming ph
seller, seeking customers on empty streets in the mornings, making his broth and pondweed vermicelli in the afternoons, and spending his nights fashioning dung cakes and foraging for reeds for his fire and repairing the cart he had built out of random scraps.

They were sitting together in front of his shack after a late supper— Lan weaving a basket, H
ng whittling bamboo chopsticks—when he described the pounding in his head being like that of a blacksmith forging a horseshoe on an anvil.

“Come,” she said, placing the partially finished basket by her side and patting her thighs. “Lay your head here.”

H
ng hesitated. Whatever touch had passed between them before had been accidental, or inadvertent.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I used to do this for my brother when his head hurt from too much studying.”

H
ng eased himself down onto his back and inched his way up so that his head finally rested in her lap.

“Relax your weight,” she said. “You won’t break me.”

Oh, but how wrong you are, he thought to himself. He could feel his head becoming liquid, melting into her thighs as she drew those sensuous circles around his temples and pressed her fingertips between his eyebrows and on either side of the bridge of his nose.

“Close your eyes,” she instructed him.

He hadn’t realized they were still open.

“Tell me a story,” he whispered.

“But I’m not the storyteller,” she said with a quiet laugh.

“Then you are the healer,” he said, feeling himself drifting off to a place too sublime to be earthly.

That memory alone is enough to part the dark clouds in his head this morning. A ray of light, however fleeting, propels him to gather his things, load up his cart and set off into the day.

On Miss Maggie’s agenda today are two more ateliers. As they set off down the street, T
prays that the dandy peacock was just an aberration and that some decency prevails in the world of contemporary art.

They are once again confronted by twenty lanes of traffic between them and the lake. “The quiet inside,” Miss Maggie says of her own accord, closing her eyes for a second before stepping off the curb.

Unusually, T
cannot find his own quiet this morning. He is worried about the old man. H
ng doesn’t appear to be limping anymore, but his movements have really slowed down since his accident, and something was missing from the ph
this morning: it had tasted only ninety per cent complete. T
had also spied two neatly folded grey blankets stacked underneath the old man’s cart at breakfast, leading him to wonder if H
ng might actually be sleeping at the factory, having lost the energy to travel back and forth.

With Ph
ng being so moody and the old man out of sorts, T
begins to wonder if the problem isn’t astrological. There’s not much one can do to negotiate with the planets other than breathe deeply, still the mind with some Zen practice and wait until they orbit back into alignment.