A few days after the Spring Festival of 2019 — around the time when the year felt like it was truly about to begin — I was in Hebi, Henan, when I seemed to crash into a wall "infinitely high above, infinitely deep below, infinitely far to the left, infinitely far to the right." After the tremendous crash came an even more tremendous silence, and in that silence I peeled away from the car and the down jacket, falling into a dream on the roadside — intact and whole.
That day I'd been drinking heavily on the Leyou Plateau, the void for my cup, the void for my wine. When I set out I was dazed, and I'd dozed off several times along the way. By the time I neared Hebi it was already evening, and the sky was that eternal blue again, before darkening like a sudden tempest. During the darkening it began to snow. At first I was surprised that the snowflakes were all flying toward me, but then it dawned on me — I was the one rushing toward them, plunging into them, shards of light in a dark tunnel.
The snow fell heavier and heavier. The road grew congested. Cars ahead began flashing their hazard lights, slowing down — blood red and snow white, quite terrifying. I had a stubborn force knotted inside me, and like a mule I pushed through the congestion, back to the speed where snowflakes struck my windshield like a school of fish.
At the time I had two e-cigarettes with me (2019 was the miracle year for e-cigarettes; later they became impossible to buy) — one blue, original flavor, and one yellow, lemon. Not that I was deliberately implying anything, but the yellow one inevitably made me think of Tarcy Su: "And so I suspect / my senses / everything I see / is only an illusion" — an illusion. The e-cigarette tasted sweet and fragrant but lacked the scorching heat of real smoke; puffing on it felt spectral, as if it had been burned as an offering from another world to this one.
It was while I was smoking the yellow lemon e-cigarette that I dimly perceived that wall — infinitely high above, infinitely deep below, infinitely far to the left, infinitely far to the right. It was a van, square as a loaf of bread, stopped dead in the middle of the lane. Without thinking, I turned the wheel, and the car glided onto a patch of ice smooth enough for dancing. Sliding across it felt like a child with an unsteady center of gravity trying to grasp an absolutely slippery fish with both hands — my mind went blank, and then I heard a tremendous crash, or rather, I saw the crash sprout like a seed. Before the crash arrived, my consciousness had already entered a nondescript brightness.
After the crash and the brightness subsided, I slowly forced myself free from the car and the down jacket, escaping beyond the guardrail. Years later, in 2021, I took Lipi in for surgery. When she came out of anesthesia, her whiskers strained to stand but couldn't; she seemed to doubt her own mouth, and her four legs attempted to stand, forming various parallelograms. That's what I was like then.
The snow on the roadside was soft; stepping on it felt like stepping on nothing at all. I listened to the crash after crash ringing out like firecrackers, and felt a strange sense of celebrating the New Year — as though 2019 and all the years to come were meant to end here and now, rather than there and then. At the same time, I had an intense feeling of not being this person. I felt I was not this person, nor was I one of those people who wake up every day startled to find they are not this person.
I tried to summon some surreal powers, as I usually did. In the cold this was somewhat difficult — one had to pay closer attention to the curvature of the body and maintain absolute concentration. Eventually I shrank, slowly returning to my original shape and markings. The space and clothes that had once held a human form now felt like a desolate palace. The phone in the pocket still flickered faintly — perhaps a contact lighting up on WeChat. I didn't bother. I walked out, wobbling.
On the roadside I saw the second brothers lying in a row on their sides, their limbs and tails fully extended, their heads resting completely on a blue planet. I lay down like them — neatly, in a row. It's not hard to lie like this on a snowy winter day; before long the heavy snow would cover you, and you'd sink into sweet oblivion. Before me, someone had lain down like that. After me, someone would lie down like that. We got off at different stops, merging into this infinite queue.
Some years later — not too many, not too few — I scrolled through my Moments feed and saw a post from February 9, 2019: "So many cats by the highway, all lying on their sides, intact and whole — you'd think they were just in a dream."