Don't cry Tai lake

“Internal Security might come to search my room at any time. I want you to keep the folder for me. If you have an opportunity, publish the information. Not for me, but for the people who’ve been suffering as a result of the pollution.”

“Nothing will happen to you, Shanshan.”

“It might not be easy, even for someone like you, but I’m still asking you to do it.”

“I will do whatever is possible to get it published. I give you my word.”

“You’re the only one I trust,” she said, looking into his eyes.

“I promise,” he repeated and gripped the folder in her hand.

And he then grabbed her hand too.

She leaned toward him unexpectedly, her hand in his, her head touching his shoulder. He became aware of her breath, warm on his face.

They were standing close to each other, by the window. Behind her, the lake water appeared calm and beautiful under the fair moonlight. In the deep blue evening sky, the night clouds grew insubstantial.

She tilted her face up to him, her eyes glistening. He tightened his grasp of her hand, which was soft, slightly sweaty. She raised her other hand, her long fingers moving to smooth his face, lightly, as a breeze from the lake.

Several lines came back to him, as if riding on the water: Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!.. / Ah, love, let us be true / To one another …

Another poet, long ago, far away in another land, looking out the window at night, standing in the company of one so near and dear to him, thinking of the reason why they should love each other:… for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain …

It was a melancholy love poem, presenting love as the only momentary escape-from a faithless world, hopeless with “human misery, and the eternal note of sadness.” But at this moment, this world of theirs by the lake was even worse-an utterly polluted one. There was no certitude even in the air, in the water, or in the food. They were here … on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Still, they could be true to one another.

He had had some vague anticipation since her arrival, but they had been so busy talking about the murder, conspiracy, and politics around them. Now, in the sudden silence, the significance of the night fell upon them.

A moment ago, she had looked preoccupied, but now she was intensely present. The moonlight seemed to focus on her face in a stilled glare. He put the folder on the windowsill and touched her lips, and she murmured his name against his hand.

“Well,” he said.

“Haven’t we talked enough about other people and things?” She tugged his hand, turning.

Turning to their right, he saw the door of the bedroom standing open, inviting, the lambent light shedding like water.

SEVENTEEN

He awoke at midnight.

She was sleeping beside him, her head nestling against his shoulder, her legs entangled with his. Through the curtain, slightly pulled aside, a shaft of moonlight peeped in. Her naked body presented a porcelain glow, a small pool of sweat beginning to dry in the hollow between her breasts barely covered by a rumpled blanket.

Through the window, he glimpsed a faint light flickering in the distance, then vanishing across the nocturnal water. The stars appeared high, bright, as if whispering down to him through the lost dream. A ship sailed by in silence. The tick of the electric clock was measuring the invisible seconds.

So it had happened. He still found it hard to believe. It seemed as though he had been another man earlier, and now he was reviewing in amazement what had happened to somebody else. He looked at her again, her black hair spilled over the white pillow, her pale face peaceful yet passion-worn, after the consummating moment of the cloud coming, and the rain falling.

In the second century BC, Song Yu, a celebrated poet of the Chu state, composed a rhapsody about the liaison of King Chu Xiang and the Wu Mountain goddess. At parting, the goddess promised she would come again to him in clouds and rain. A breathtaking metaphor, which had become a sort of euphemism for sexual love in classical Chinese literature.

The memory of the night surged back in the dark, intensely, illuminating Chen in fragmented details. The intensity of their passion had been accentuated by a touch of desperation that affected them both. There was no telling what would happen-to her, to him, to the world. There was nothing for them to grasp except the moment of being, losing, and finding themselves again in each other.

With her above, she turned into a dazzling white cloud, languid, rolling, soft yet solid, sweeping, almost insubstantial, clinging, pressing, and shuddering when she came, into a sudden rain, incredibly warm yet cool, splashing, her long hair cascading over his face like a torrent, washing up sensations he had never known before. Then she undulated under him like the lake, ever-flowing, rising and falling in the dark, arching up, her hot wetness engulfing him, rippling, pulling him down to the depth of the night, and bearing him up to the surface again, her legs tightening around him in waves of prolonged convulsion.

Afterward, they lay quietly in each other’s arms, languorous, in correspondence to the lake water lapping against the shore, lapping in the quietness of the night.

“We’re having the lake to ourselves.”

She whispered a throaty agreement before falling asleep in his arms. “Yes, we’re the lake.”

A night bird hooted, close, yet sounding eerily distant. Chen hoped it wasn’t an owl, which were supposedly unlucky at this hour. An inexplicable sense of foreboding brought him back to the present.

Again, he turned to her curled up beside him, the serene radiance of her clear features vivid in a flood of moonlight. He was awash in gratitude.

All this was perhaps too much for him to think about now. But he had to, he told himself. At least, to think of a plan to protect her, and then, if possible, a plan for their future.

Eight or nine times out of ten, however, things in this world don’t work out in accordance to one’s plan, as an ancient sage once said.

In his college years, Chen had planned to be anything but a cop, but he failed.

Then he tried to be a good cop. Was he failing at that too?

That he wasn’t ready to admit. Not yet. Nothing could be judged out of context. That was something he’d learned-by being a cop.

For him, being a good cop came down, invariably, to the conscientious conclusion of a case. The present case now came with an obligation to make sure that nothing would happen to her.

Would he be able to do that? What was involved in this case, in the final analysis, was politics, which kept turning like colored balls in a magician’s hand, unfortunately not in his hand. So all he could do was to play a cop’s hand. It wouldn’t be easy. The approach taken by Internal Security might be political, but they at least had witnesses and evidence. Politics aside, he had practically no trumps in his hand. Not to mention, for the first time in his career, a possible conflict of interest.

Now, there was something in what she had told him earlier tonight, something concerning one statement crucial to the investigation …

She stirred, turning, her shapely leg sprawling out. He couldn’t help reaching out and tracing his fingers along her bare back, which rippled smooth under his touch, like the waves that begin, and cease, and then again begin, / with tremulous cadence slow.

Once again, he found himself too distracted to concentrate on the case. So he got up, found the laptop in the living room, and brought it back to bed. Propped up by a couple of pillows stacked against the headboard, he placed the laptop on his drawn-up knees, overlooking her moon-blanched face.

He didn’t start all at once. He was sitting still, thinking, unaware of the time flowing away like waves in the