Chapter 26: A man prepares for his seduction
A man, pale of skin and blue of eye, sat in Coffee Academics in the Causeway Bay suburb of Hong Kong, doppio espresso with a twist down to dregs, glass of water half full. He leaned back, stretched, rubbed his eyes, closed them for a second. His nostrils flared slightly as he concentrated for a moment on the scent of freshly roasted coffee emanating from the Probat roaster behind him, listened to the sound of the paddles slowly rotating through the beans under the chatter of other patrons.
His iPad was open to a physics text pertaining to electricity and electromagnetism. While he’d known the basics and more for decades, his father having been an engineer contracted to rebuild and modernize Quezon’s electrical grid after one of the many wars to end all wars, it had also been decades since he’d attended to the theory, and he had never, outside of classroom exercises, done anything concrete with his knowledge. Now, however, he was to play satyr to a goddess who inhaled electrons and spat out lightning. His ego, which most agreed was perhaps too healthy, was not of a league which made him think he was able to be the Red Sox to her Yankees, if that was the right sports metaphor, or the Spotswood sending boarding parties to her Blackbeard’s pirate ship, an analogy he was even less certain of.
No, the elementary elements of the flow of electrons, the nature of impedance and resistance — twin aspects of the same principle — , Ampere’s right-hand rule, of galvanic skin response and sparks from static in the air, these concepts needed grounding, needed to be fully meshed within his mind. And he needed to be able to influence them with his magic if the plan was to be successful, if he was going to be able to overcome Dian Mu’s resistance — or was it impedance? — strike sparks of lust from her, galvanize her flesh with desire.
Similarly, he’d spent hours on colour theory and Pantone swatches, thinking through permutations and combinations, colour bleeds and washes, and learning more about how the eye was constructed, with its overlapping analog receptors, a strong blue and then largely overlapping red and green, combining to provide humans with amazing ability to identify colours from photons passing through aqueous humour, supporting our differentiation of emus from ostriches.
Then back to the smell of coffee, or rather the science of olfactory appreciation and the psychology of memory, of treatises on elocution through scent and its sister taste. He’d been captured briefly by a short novel he hadn’t read before, of a man with a perfect sense of smell who became a serial murder as he attempted to distill the ultimate perfume from the remains of his victims, but inhaled it quickly enough that it didn’t divert him too badly from his schedule, while still leaving him with an idea or two.
Finally, he’d shifted from wavelengths of light and the chemical receptors of the nose to the middle ground, the perception of sound, which propagates much faster than scent but much slower than photons. He focused on tonality of certain musical words within an ancient variant of a key language, of ways in which certain semantic constructs could be made musical, melodious and intriguing to the ear.
His mental model of the human brain, its stem, its sister spheres, the cross bar of the corpus callosum, the regions which lit up with excitement under different sensory stimuli, was enriched, improved. Planning this seduction would leave a lasting mark upon his efforts in the future, making them more nuanced, richer, more resonant, much as the spun pheromones he’d gifted the apotek with had improved her potions for years, increasing her already broad reputation in Southeast Asia, improving her fortune. He regretted that unlike Joyla, she had no interest in extending her life and youth, regretted more her untimely death, the loss of her wild talent of lust. He shook off the melancholy that thoughts of her always brought to him, promised himself that he would return again once this was over, mourn again properly, tear his hair, gnash his teeth, rend his garments and try, hopefully succeed, at achieving catharsis, the solace and release of tears.
And so, his knowledge refreshed, his mind teeming with new pathways of desire, he started to formalize the stairway of seduction he was creating, working through the correct dosage of each pellet of intrigue, the correct arc and timing of the creation of lust. This bewitchment could not fail, did not have the minor downsides of his decades of playful beguilements, a night alone, an unexpected failure, a misstep leading to rejection, perhaps at worst some withering scorn.
He stretched, caught the eye of the barista with his elaborate signifiers of hipster tribal inclusion, signed for another doppio, opened a sketchpad on his iPad and began to draw and write, shade and tint. He worked steadily for an hour, then blinked, looked up, realized his espresso was sitting untouched and cold, caught the barista’s eye again, waved apology and a request for another.
He thought through what he had laid out, the seaways of desire it depended on, the sailors of lust crewing its modes of enchantment. He thought of castes and attendant special pleadings, required sidestepping of unpleasant implications, statements to avoid and statements to accentuate, excuses that must be understood but never spoken.
He was reminded of his time at Eton, his pursuit of women up and down the complex caste system of Britain, one he was both part of and separate from, in ways both obvious and nuanced. He remembered the woman who knew he was a Leo, betraying her particular place in the social hierarchy despite the plumminess of her vowels. The signifiers of class stand out, are hard to set aside, must be respected in the structuralism of the erotic.
This time the cup was empty, the lemon peel slightly dried out. He realized the significance of the memory of Eton. He didn’t have enough time to play the game he had designed. He sighed, signed for another coffee, started sketching a steeper stairway, a more rapid arc through time, with greater risk of failure, but more chance of success.