The high-speed train from Yunfu East to Guangzhou South takes just over forty minutes. For Zhao Xiaomao, aching to see her lover, those forty minutes stretched into eternity. She clutched her tiny cloth backpack tightly, her toes piercing through the floor to kick at the cold little stones on the ballastless track.
Standing in the aisle, watching absent-minded Xiaomao, I thought: the high-speed train is truly an ugly invention — at least as far as the interior seating arrangement goes, it is spectacularly ugly. An entire carriage with all the seats facing the same direction — is there no justice in this world? If Céline and Jesse had been riding a train like this, Linklater wouldn't have been able to make Before Sunrise with three heads and six arms.
My ticket was for Car 8. I stood at the carriage junction and sized up the passengers inside. Some were obviously fictional characters — for instance, the hot mom in Seat 6, speaking Cantonese to the man beside her, saying she lived in Shunde. Her breasts were as enormous as steamed buns made by a clumsy housewife. Her face looked twenty-two or twenty-three at most, yet the son on her lap appeared to be a good four feet tall. Unless she had given birth to a modern-day Nezha, she was certainly a character from some novelist's imagination. Then there was the man next to her — wearing smart casual trousers and Oxford shoes in the dead of summer, a flannel shirt tucked snugly into his waistband, every button fastened tight. And finally, the anxious-faced Zhao Xiaomao, her fingers flying across a large-screen phone, typing furiously, periodically tapping the paper airplane icon to the right of the input field — though there was, in fact, no signal here.
Amid the din, I recalled the twilight and the mountains I had seen while exiting Yunfu East station. News and winds from a distant place left me feeling utterly spent. I straightened up, closed my eyes, pressed my palms together, and stretched my arms with all my might. My palms slowly lengthened, passing through the window glass via the gentle refraction of light, and the wind outside blew from my palms into my heart.
Gently, I beat the train's absurdly small, ill-proportioned wings for it. A few millimeters above the tracks, the train floated up, imperceptibly.
When we reached Shunde, the hot mom in her tight T-shirt and the man in the flannel shirt passed through me and got off, dragging between them a son of Nezha-like enormity. I, meanwhile, had fallen deep into a grey sleep.
The train arrived at Guangzhou South ten minutes early. By then I had been beaten to a pulp by sleep, reduced to a puddle of sludge. Within that sludge, an old friend I hadn't seen in years assassinated his own wife, and I, as witness, was trapped in a classroom draped entirely in funeral white.
I walked alongside my mother. She walked lightly, free of her usual burden of years and memories. Besides complaining about my father, she spoke of other things too — complaining about my nephew's father, for instance. When I stopped to sigh, she also mentioned that brightness flowing like water, the gleaming bowls and chopsticks and tables, sunless.
I am nearly forty now. I am nearly forty, I thought, bewildered, standing in that brightness flowing like water.
When I was jolted awake by Xiaomao's bell bumping against my arm, the carriage was completely empty. Only then did I realize with a start that I was not this person.
I shouldered my backpack, pulled my suitcase, and walked out of the carriage. From the platform to the turnstile, from the turnstile through the long, long walk to the South Plaza. The South Plaza was as clean as a field after the autumn harvest — not a soul in sight.
Those tiny wings had created a stretch of time that did not exist, and now I was living inside this nonexistent time. Indeed, I thought, I am not this person. And yet, I fear, I am also not the person who realized he is not this person.
I fished my Yangcheng Tong transit card from among dozens of cards. "Beep" went the turnstile — 35.20 yuan. A cross-section of life in Guangzhou was inexplicably reconnected, just like that.
Sometime in June or July of 2013. Boarding at Chigang station, transferring to Line 3 at Kecun, riding all the way to Jiahewanggang, crossing to the opposite platform, exiting at Airport South. "Beep" — fate sliced down — 35.20 yuan.
Where should I go? Anywhere would do. There was nowhere I needed to be. The train rattled on for a long time. At Changgang station I transferred to Line 8. The program that years of living had burned into me was functioning well. At Chigang I got off, passed through the long corridor, and emerged above ground.
There I saw a figure from behind — a small cloth backpack on her back, skipping and bouncing along, weaving through the motorcycle-taxi brigade blocking the exit, carefully dodging the vendors spread across the crosswalk. A bit farther on, the overpass leveled out, and Guangzhou's panorama rushed in all at once. In the distance, the Pearl River stretched calm and wide. The skyline along the river was waiting for sunset. The Guangzhou Bridge and Liede Bridge rose and fell in gentle undulation, and one could imagine the surging mist and the sound of waves upon them.
I followed her. She turned left ahead into Chigang East Road, stopped at the next crosswalk, crossed, opened an iron gate, and entered — one of those typical Guangzhou residential compounds: humid, old, clean. In the courtyard sat listless people, speaking listless words in Cantonese — a language neither Xiaomao nor I understood.
Through the door, turn left, first building. Xiaomao swung her backpack to her chest, fished out a key, unhurriedly passed through the security door, then climbed the dark staircase. No stamping, no phone flashlight, no bouncing — neither heavy nor light, neither noisy nor entirely silent. Here it was as calm as life in its original form, as if these stolen ten-odd minutes could go on forever, belonging to no one. Xiaomao climbed slowly, savoring each step of the three flights of stairs.
- I forgot to unlock the door. Xiaomao pushed it gently open and went in. The fictional life lay quietly within this fifty-some-square-meter apartment. The entryway had only a small shoe cabinet. Xiaomao bent to change into cotton slippers, walked forward; on the side was a small door, opening inward — a tiny storage room. A purebred Chinese domestic cat shot out without warning. The calm life erupted at once, bubbling and gurgling. Xiaomao scooped the cat up and kissed its face with little smacking sounds. The cat, full of suspicion, sniffed vigorously, struggling to identify this madwoman who had barged in out of nowhere.
No one at all. The cat drooped its sorrowful tail, trying in vain to banish the image of this woman drifting through the living room. But it could remember nothing — the scent was not merely unfamiliar but composed of entirely unreal elements, something categorically different from anything smelled before. Clearly, there was nothing noteworthy in the living room. Nothing here bore any trace of Xiaomao, and no object made her feel at home.
She pushed open the bedroom door, diagonally opposite the entryway. A warm breath drifted gently out. A bed. One wall made entirely into a closet. Near the balcony, on a shelf about a person's height, sat a very battered glass storm lantern, radiating an aura of inner peace, beside a cup full of pencils. What was on the bed? An unmade quilt. No tangled men's and women's undergarments to lend this fiction any drama. No people either. At the foot of the bed stood a wardrobe — no one inside that either. The clothes that once held bodies hung limp within, motionless. The balcony door was open, facing the courtyard of this U-shaped building. A plant resembling a banana tree stretched its enormous leaves — she didn't know what it was, but Xiaomao only knew banana plants. Xiaomao walked onto the balcony, leaned against the cement railing that looked as if it had just finished drying. Guangzhou's night began to wash in, wave after wave — a scent both adrift and settled. The Pearl River New Town, Canton Tower, Guangzhou Bridge, and Liede Bridge — since they could not be seen, they had nothing to do with any of this.
Xiaomao leaned on the balcony, and I imagine she was thinking things no one else could know, things that even if spoken aloud would make no sense to anyone. Perhaps a night sky full of stars, perhaps an echo in some valley, perhaps a face seen only once, perhaps a green river. The cat crept up gently to the shelf with the storm lantern, carefully, in batches, batting the pencils out of the cup, then listening intently to the crisp sound of each pencil hitting the floor.
I took my absurdly large camera from my backpack, opened the aperture as wide as it would go. The green focus box in the viewfinder drifted furtively, then bounced once and landed on that figure. I pressed the shutter, solemn as launching a missile. A silhouette. Before her eyes, a background dissolving into haze. Behind her, nothing — only a pair of remembering eyes.
On the round table in the living room sat a 2011 MacBook, its screen shimmering with faint light. Little windows chirped and murmured information like clumsy, blunt-headed fish, their messages dissolving across the screen. Characters extended fuzzy edges into the white space — jagged fringes born of low pixel density — like a letter that had been splashed with water, growing meanings both tender and ambiguous. I stared at them as if into a mirror, and what slowly melted in that mirror was my consciousness.
This was my 2012 — visited by no one.