Now the crowds of nations and memories overthrew his joy; wasn't there a place where they ran sugarcanes between two motorized cylinders to squeeze the pale green juice? The two cylinders were weariness and despair; and they extracted the freshest liquid from his thoughts, leaving him the husks while the abyss drank everything else, catching each green drop on its coal-black twitching tongue. He had a fever headache, and drops of sweat exploded on his forehead like grains from a shotgun, dense, heavy and painful. The black tongue drank those, too. — So many souls and countries weighting down his atlas — eternally everywhere everybody! — He remembered all the women he'd loved and waited for, all the friends and hopes like fruits in the compartments of an upslanted tray, brown ocher terraces, mottled walls covered with Arabic writing, remembered the happiness, blessings that had come and passed away; and he remembered ants in an anthill. He remembered a late night plane to Australia when he sat in dull amazement observing a woman's struggle down the aisle, a massive gilded vase in her arms; then a man dragged a bulging garment bag which swiped at everyone's faces — useless things people serve and pray to in their useless lives! He remembered ants crawling by the hundreds across his hands in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. He remembered ants in Mae Hong Song. He remembered Bangkok. Behind the grand oval windows of the massage parlor, ladies with numbers, ladies as numerous as ants sat on stairs of pink carpet, each woman a memory for many men whom she mostly did not remember (although the men remembered her, discussed her with one another and made claims, just as each anthropologist argues for the superiority of his own natives); and the women's hands were clasped upon crossed knees, and no doubt they were sitting there still, even as the "Hudson Bay" clacked farther up the track; the ants were waiting to become memories like the Somali women in flower-robes and stripe-robes and check-robes who sold mangoes inside the corrugated metal boxes under pale yellow-leaved toothbrush trees of Mogadishu. That was it. You waited to sell or you waited to buy, but in any event you waited, your consciousness essentially contingent as Hegel had said somewhere; so the Somali women waited and three Thai girls in tight blue ankle-length dresses ran giggling to the elevator. They were through for the day. — But a girl in street clothes entered like wintertide, passing through the hot velvet darkness where viewers and buyers fed upon each other (one girl lay on the sofa there, and another in a bathing suit trod her back quite lovingly). The new girl folded back the drape that hid a long hall of mildew which stretched to the dressing room where girls sat tweezing themselves before the mirror, and she went in and the drape closed and so she vanished. Behind the oval windows, her colleagues sat very still beside their purses, occasionally running a hand through their long hair. A tall German came in, and they froze into winning statues.
Just a massage, or a real Thai massage? said the German. Fifty dollars with sex?
Yes, said the obliging necktied boy, who'd just smashed a journalist's camera.
For the girl in, uh, red? said the German.
OK, sir.
Soon the girl in red was bending her knee in a kind of curtsey and gesturing the German into the elevator.
Next three Thais came in and drummed ballpoint pens on the glass very thoughtfully while the barman swivelled his stool and tapped a pen on another stool. The three Thais lowered their heads and tucked in their shirts.
Body massage? said the necktied one.
