Closely Coupled Forms of Nothing in Particular
The mirrors reflect a stranger wearing a suit of an elegance that has nothing to do with him. The tailor, taciturn and somehow goblin-like, crouches at his feet with his mouth full of pins, marking the cuffs of his trousers with chalk. Kern lifts an arm, half in jest, to see if his image will do the same; the sleeve of the jacket droops over his wrist, making him a child as well as an impostor.
Hiro sprawls in an overstuffed leather chair, practically sitting on his spine, drinking amber liquor from a heavy crystal tumbler. On the walls are paintings of horses in dreary landscapes, some with riders in red coats and black hats, like the doormen at that hotel in San Francisco. He hopes he won’t be getting one of the riders’ outfits, and he doesn’t see what horses have to do with tailoring, but it seems to be part of the shop’s look.
“You know, I appreciate this, but I don’t really need it,” he says as the tailor grunts and starts pinning cloth.
From a glazed calm Hiro says, “You’d prefer the double-breasted?”
Kern doesn’t know what that is, which is probably the point of the joke. He says, “I just mean it doesn’t look like me.”
“Clothes are the soul,” Hiro says. “They’ll change how you think about yourself, which is fitting, as you have a new place in the world.” Switching to Spanish, presumably so that the Chinese tailor can’t follow, Hiro says, “I have plenty of human assets I scraped off the street, and they look it. You’re different. You’re my new weapon, and a good one you’ll be, but you need an aura, to pass in certain circles, and this is a step on the way.” He downs his drink, reaches for the faceted decanter with a self-consciously steady hand. “Besides, how many people get to wear a Mr. Li suit? All too few even know that they should want to. I know because my late employer came here twice a year, rain or shine. Mostly rain, here. I might add that just what you’ve got on your back is, beyond question, worth more than everything else you’ve ever owned.”
Kern looks back at the mirror, tries to accept what he sees as his own reflection. He might look good, he decides, if the sleeves fit, and they let him put shoes on, and if somehow he could manage to relax. He remembers a photo of a young Mike Tyson in a tailor’s shop, dapper and self-satisfied in a new suit, taken, as he recalls, around the time of the start of his decline.
Hiro shakes his head. “It’s like giving caviar to children.”
*
No windows, outside the shop—he hasn’t seen weather since they scuttled off the helipad atop the tower in downtown Hong Kong—just buzzing fluorescents over thin, torn carpeting with decades’ worth of accumulated stains. The shop had a specific feeling, something about club chairs and mirrors and cigars—Hiro had called it “a bastion of vaguely traditional male privilege”—but out here it’s different, and somehow draining, less like a place than a somewhere-in-between, and he remembers looking down through the jet’s window at the city’s aqueous light glowing through the churning clouds, how he’d had to will himself into passivity as the plane fell into the grey and the glow became the glittering lights of towers.
“You look like you stole your suit,” says Hiro as they walk toward the elevator bank. “You should walk tall, like you’re used to this, like the wretched peones must jump to do your bidding. Such an attitude will be of value when you need to sneak up on rich people and shoot them in the head. Or, hell, beat them to death with your elbows, if you have to do everything the hard way, though I beg you to consider of the cost of the dry cleaning.”
Ten elevators in a row, their bronze doors embossed with stylized clouds and dragons. Hiro hunts for the button for floor 214, where their suites are.
“Take this,” Hiro says, handing him a wad of colorfully foreign money as an elevator chimes and its bronze doors open. “I have to talk with the big boss. Why don’t you go off to the mall, take the suit for a spin, try dipping a toe in the consumer economy. Anyway, the New Tian Shang Ta is remarkable, really something to see.”
*
Heaven is, he supposes, desirable, but it has no form, or at least none he’s heard of, and he wonders if its form is this, as he stands there on the lowest floor of the New Tian Shang Ta’s atrium, staring up into eighty stories of perfectly empty space. It’s full of quiet echoes, like the muted distillation of a thousand conversations. The ascending succession of the mall’s balconies lends scale to this image of the gleaming infinite that would otherwise be ungraspable, and across from the balconies is the seamless vertical pane of the tower’s outer shell, and beyond it the grey of storm. The rain hits the glass in a million tiny concussions, the channels of water branching and merging and branching again, but neither wind nor rain make the slightest sound, and at first he thinks they’re a recording.
There are elevators, but to take them would separate him from the essence of the place. There are stairs, which are better, but his legs would be spent by the time he got to the top, so he settles for the escalators which make diagonals between the balconies.
Off the balconies are floors full of shops selling more things than he’d known existed. The first two floors are dedicated entirely to watches, and he wanders among the brightly lit storefronts dazzled by the massed evidence of time passing and the prices for minor variations on the same essential thing.
Even with the escalators he’s tiring by the twentieth floor, but he’s made it his business to explore, because the mall is a condensation and summary of the world, or at least the world of the buyable, so he moves swiftly past the countless racks of magazines in alphabets he’s never seen, and it’s a little like coming home when he finds the floor with media in English.