I wish I could tell you exactly what he was supposed to do with the chicken, but whatever it was he never got around to it: a minute into the chicken part of the performance, as we all faced the right-hand stage, I felt an explosive wave of heat hit my back. The king of hell installation had gone up in flames, apparently of its own accord, earlier than expected. (People were saying afterwards, after the chaos was over, that this year’s king of hell installation had been particularly lively and impatient: it had been letting out little snorts of smoke throughout the opening ceremonies. Nobody had actually gone and lit it on fire; apparently it had just combusted of its own accord, that’s how ling, powerful, it was this year.) Everybody started yelling and running for cover, except the foreigners, who ran around taking pictures and getting themselves hot and sooty. Yushou ran into the little space between the right-hand stage and the edge of the cliff and grabbed a thin wooden slab that was lying there for some reason among the other debris and garbage from the day’s ceremony. He held it over his head to protect himself from the flying soot and sparks and still-burning pieces of paper and, as he put it, “was instantly surrounded by women huddling close to me! Now I know the route to popularity!” The courtyard with the king of hell installation was more or less deserted while it was burning, except for the foreigners at the fringes and the people actually running the ceremony, who jumped up onto the god-bleachers behind the installation and started taking the figures one by one and tossing them into the fire.


the king of hell goes up in flames