White gem? I know there are red, green, and blue gems . . . yes, even black gems, but have never heard of white ones. Are you kidding?
X paused as if annoyed by my interruption: Looks like you are not interested in the story. Fine, I won’t tell it.
Skeptical as I was about his story, I became even more interested, yes, even fascinated. What kind of story, really, is X’s story about the white gem? How will it end?
So I tossed X a cigarette and urged him: C’mon, go on with the story. I am very interested.
X smiled nonchalantly, lit the cigarette, and started to tell his white gem story—
Once upon a time there lived a boy, 8 years old, perhaps. One day he ran into a man in the street who, somehow, looked familiar, but at the moment he couldn’t recall the man’s name. Who was he? The boy racked his brains for three days. Anyway, the boy finally succeeded in recalling who the man was. It turned out he had been the boy’s neighbor and had moved away about two years ago. That was why the boy couldn’t recall his name for a while.
At this X stopped, the same nonchalant smile in his face. Then he took out his own pack of cigarettes, slipped one into his mouth, and tossed one to me.
I took out my lighter right away and lit X’s cigarette for him. Naturally I lit my own, too. However, my interest was not in the cigarette. I thought X wanted to take a drag on the cigarette so he could tell the story more vividly. Then, I thought, up to this point no white gem had appeared yet. We had not even gone beyond the prologue. And I thought, the real story was yet to come—I was dying to know what happened between the boy and the white gem. Or, what happened between the white gem and the boy’s neighbor?
I couldn’t wait for X to open his mouth again.
Yet X seemed not ready to do so anytime soon. With a rather content smile on his face, he dragged on the cigarette slowly, appreciatively, and even went so far as to blow me a big, perfect smoke ring.
I couldn’t take it anymore and urged X again: Buddy, why are you torturing me like this? Tell the rest of the story!
“Finished! I’ve finished the story.” X said, blowing me another big, perfect smoke ring.
Finished? The way I stared at him my eyeballs must have looked bigger than chicken eggs. How? How could you have finished the white gem story? What happened to the white gem? And where the heck is the white gem in the story anyway?
X, however, appeared to be unaffected by these questions. With the same content smile on his face, he said slowly, “The important thing is not whether there is a white gem in the story or not, not whether what I’ve just told you is a story at all, but that you’ve been a loyal, captive audience of mine despite the doubts you have about it all—yes, you didn’t believe the story, but fell into its trap with your eyes open anyway!”
“What? You’ve been fooling me?
“You can put it that way. But the real question should be: Why were you fooled? Why have so many people believed the stories being fed them despite their doubts?”
With these two big questions, my friend X gave me a long, meaningful look, and laughed.
(1997)