Last night, I had dinner with a woman named Zhao. Tall and willowy, with skin the color of ivory. She worked as a calligrapher at one of those tiny shops along Tomas Mapua Street, where they make headstones and banners for Chinese funeral marches. She smells faintly of incense.
After dinner, we walked along Claro M. Recto Avenue, dodging people blindly hurrying off to somewhere else, and impatient trucks sending up sprays of muddy water from their relentless wheels. She walked quickly, on the balls of her feet, like a ballet dancer forced to walk on base earth. I, on the other hand, plodded along behind her. As she drew farther away, she cast a look at me over her shoulder, with her hair in her eyes and a half smile flirting across her lips. The next thing I knew, she vanished.
I broke into a half-hearted run, instantly regretting that I had started smoking again. When I got to where she disappeared, I looked around and noticed a narrow doorway that opened onto a steep flight of stairs dimly illuminated by a bare bulb. With my heart pounding in my chest, I climbed up the rickety stairs. I wondered which step would give way. Luckily, none did.
At the top of the stairs, I found a long dark corridor, lit only by an open window at the very end. I moved forward, unsure of where else to go. It was then that I noticed that one of the doors on my left stood slightly ajar. I slipped in, trying not to open it much more. For some reason, it felt appropriate in this dark, secretive place, to move as furtively as a thief would.
Once inside, I saw her again, standing by the window. The neon sign outside hummed incessantly, and the blue light reflected off the coating of sweat that lay on the bare skin of her chest. I had not noticed the heat until then, only the slight metallic taste in the air. But seeing her, naked to her waist, I suddenly felt the full weight of it pressing in around me.
All I could do was watch.
With a languidness of movement that made her seem like she was underwater, she made her way to a large drafting table, lit by a single lamp, and began arranging her brushes and inkwells. “Come,” she said. Obediently, I crossed the room and stood next to her. The hair on my arms stood on end, reaching out to her it seemed, as though every last bit of me craved the feel of her skin.
But all I could do was watch.
With graceful fingers, she picked up a brush, hesitating only for a moment, as though testing the heft of it, before plunging it into the inkwell close by. I counted two heartbeats before she drew it out and deliberately laid it on the sheet of virgin white taped to the table. Her first stroke powerfully traversed the length of the paper and stole my breath.
Still, all I could do was watch.
I had no idea what she was writing, only that her hand moved fluidly across the surface of the paper. I watched enthralled as rivers of black ink cascaded and flowed from the tip of her brush; ink-stained fingers making minute adjustments in the way they held the bamboo stem, sometimes gripping like claws and other times looking like they were barely even touching the brush.
I could hear her breathing, and when I looked, I saw her mouth half-open, lips moist and quivering. A bead of sweat, or maybe it was a tear, rolled down the side of her face down to the angle of her jaw. Suddenly, it was all I could look at, wondering, as it crept down to her chin whether it would fall and stain the paper.
It didn’t. Following some unknown law of attraction, it resisted gravity and held on to her skin.
“You people are foolish,” she said softly, startling me with the suddenness of it. She leaned back from the table and I saw that she was done.
They say that in dreams you cannot read. But I stared at her work and tried to fathom the swirls of black and wondered if I should not be trying to read the white. In the distance, I heard the sound of sirens, like firetrucks. As I fought to understand what she had written, a movement from out of the corner of my eye distracted me. I saw her rise and slowly sway her hips from side to side, slipping her skirt down past her thighs, the neon lights from outside the window once again glimmering off the sweat that slicked her skin. As I turned to face her, the cipher on her table forgotten, the sirens grew louder and louder until I had to shut my eyes because I could not shut my ears.
“You see? Foolish.”
I opened my eyes and in the unforgiving glare of the morning sun, I understood what she meant.