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Section 1
## Prelude
Proofread by: Angie
Drifting, and touching ground. Sleep, and waking. Consciousness wheels between these two phases. This is a strange place. Cold, and dark, and filled with nothing but terror and grief. You cannot even tell whether you truly exist. And yet, somehow, it aches with a longing you cannot name. A sound comes. Like water boiling in a cauldron of hell. Like a demon’s groan, the throat rumbling as if it meant to drink the sea dry. The shriek of steel twisted, bent, and crushed until it breaks. Absolute silence, divided from this place by a single wall of darkness. Screams, weeping, roars. Countless lives slipping away in this very moment. And—the voice of a violin. Woven through the tones of two violins are the low voices of viola and cello. But what echoes at my ear is only the violin’s principal melody. A sound that seems to rise above those cries of terror, above life itself, even above time. It sounds like someone’s singing. No—someone is singing. Amid the wretched wailing, a faint song can be heard. I have never heard it, and still the song is so dear it makes me want to weep. When the calm, dignified performance ends, the man with the violin rises and says something to the three who remain. Three? Or two? I cannot see clearly. “ ” Drunkenness, and clarity. Leaping, and landing. Darkness without end. Everything begins again. Sound. Vortex. Darkness. A muddy torrent surges and rages, and slowly swallows…
## Act I The Hour for Calling on You Has Passed*1
Does anyone like the ads on the little screens set into the backs of bus seats? Does anyone, really? Am I the only one who thinks the things do nothing but backfire? “So yeah, I still feel it, same as ever: ‘I’m cut out for this work.’ I was on edge all the time at the start, but once I’d picked up the basics at school, the real job turned out to be pretty fun. You don’t get the feel of it until you actually do it—and it isn’t something just anybody can do!” The young man with the gap in his front teeth laughs out loud. In the fifteen minutes since I boarded at Louvre Station, the same video has played four times. Their so-called advertising strategy might as well be the systematic practice of every method guaranteed to make a consumer loathe an ad. Push it this far and it is practically prenatal conditioning. The letters “JW,” and a black dragon perched on a red sphere. The young man, his back to the company crest, talks on and on, armed with an empty smile. He can’t be much past fifteen. Just like me two years ago—me, fresh out of school. “I really can’t thank Jabberwock*2 enough. The company’s like my parents. Plenty of us are war orphans, kids who were trafficked—the company put us through school and gave us work.” The bus crosses a stone bridge. Through the bulletproof glass I look down; no water runs under the bridge anymore. The war half a century ago dried the sources, and this country’s “rivers” are nothing but marks on a map. On an abandoned sightseeing boat, capital letters in black spray paint. F·O·O·D—food. On the boat beside it, M·O·……
## Act II The One in the Dream*
*The title of this chapter is taken from Act I, Scene 9 of La Traviata, “Ah! fors'è lui che l'anima” Has anyone ever had their face sucked by a vacuum cleaner? If you have, I would very much like to shake your hand. I have been through it too. More than once. With the face at the center, every corner of the body is pulled. Static racing all over the skin. A draw strong enough to tear the eyes and the nose clean off. No idea at all of where you are—when—what place, what time. Only a few seconds, probably, but we have all felt it. Tolipulzero Foss, the one I am on my way to see, has felt it too. And at some point she had enough. —gèngqīnjìn. What is that? —gèngqīnjìn. —yǔzhǔgèngqīnjìn. I remember. It is a song. A hymn. The opening lines. But who is singing? No—did I really hear someone singing? In the whirl of static, just before my eyes and nose are sucked away, my vision opens wide. “Well, hey!” Awake. Body and mind feel properly joined again. The strange things that rose in my head on the way back must be forgotten, or they will get in the way of the work. In the shadow at my feet, the wallet the guide prepared beforehand, wrapped in rags, lies on the ground. For now, it is what I have to live on. But before that— I reach toward the wooden rack behind me. “Calling a fine lady ‘that woman’—and I still have to find a suitable lodging for a man like this!” “Yes.” I have no faith. ……
## Act III From Flower to Flower*
*The title of this chapter is taken from the Japanese rendering “Hana kara hana e” (花から花へ) of Act I, Scene 11 of La Traviata, “Sempre libera degg'io.” In Chinese it is usually rendered “seize the day,” or “forever free.” The ninth me did not become a thief. I became a detective. The first thing I did was go and buy things. I ran to a secondhand clothing shop and bought several coats that, seen from a distance, even “I” would not recognize as mine, and a fashionable cane. Disguise is a thief’s basic accomplishment. Then I spent three weeks growing a beard, and changed my speech and my manner from head to foot. In the language of this age, I was a typical “lion”—a fashionable gentleman who kept hard on the mode. After that I rented a convenient apartment on Rue d’Antin. I was sick of watching which rooms would be let, and when. Fully prepared, I began to inquire around the Lady of the Camellias. I dug from memory the names of the men who came and went from her rooms, and sought a lead from each in turn. I found them in the gambling houses or at the masked balls, greeted them as if it were nothing, stood them drinks, and when they were in high spirits I probed without showing my hand: do you know about that ornamented egg? The jeweled egg—they say the Lady of the Camellias left it with someone for a time. Every answer was: I don’t know. Never heard of the thing, never seen it; though I feel as if I might have heard something—say, could you lend me a little money?—it almost always came to that. They were men who paid tribute to a woman who drew gold like that; of course it did. At first I would lend them a little, but when I thought it over carefully, Foss…
## Finale The Drinking Song*
*The title of this chapter is taken from Act I, Scene 3 of La Traviata, “Libiamo ne' lieti calici” My consciousness floats somewhere far away. As if I had been pushed out of a cave, high and distant, into a cavern of darkness. A weightless drifting, and a faint ache in the head. When I wake I smell disinfectant. White walls, and a white ceiling. And then, the scent of spring. Apples. I hear a steady shh, shh, shh—the sound of peel being pared away. In the chair facing the bed sits a girl, a plate on her knees, deftly peeling an apple with a small knife. The moist peel, joined in one long spiral, descends little by little. I stare, blank, and the apple is peeled to the end; the long ribbon drops lightly into the plate. I look up. When my gaze falls on her face, the girl smiles faintly. “Hello, Daburuzero. I’m Tolipulzero. Yesterday I saw your consciousness level rise, and I thought you might be about to wake.” Startled, as if a doll had suddenly spoken to me, I look around in a fluster. I am lying in the bed of an empty room that seems to be a private hospital ward, in white pajamas. In the mirror of the washstand before the bed, my face is reflected. Brown hair. Brown eyes with a hint of gray. “Daburuzero…?” “It’s your name. Do you remember anything?” “………………” My bed rattles and shakes. She presses a switch, and it grows still. To keep off bedsores…