Ken Liu - Broken Stars

However, in the course of this week, Ah Chen seemed to have caught some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He rearranged all the furniture in his room, measuring each item’s location to the millimeter; he sorted his clothes by color and thickness; he stuck a label onto every drawer. Everything had to be perfectly ordered. A single stain or misplaced scrap of paper was enough to scrape his nerves raw.

That week, Ci was forced to sleep in the living room. She would make three meals a day and bring them to the bedroom. One day, as she tiptoed in, she decided she would clean the room. The moment she opened the wardrobe, Ah Chen flew into a rage and slapped her.

A month later, the Agency of Mysteries brought B’s ability. Ah Chen’s ears became peculiarly sensitive to sounds; they left indelible marks in his mind. When he heard wind, music, thunder, or even the barking of dogs, every syllable seemed imbued with new significance. Poems, essays, haikus, and colorful slang rose from the pages as if given life, linking their hands and dancing, endlessly dancing, passing before his eyes one after the other like little fairies.

He wrote one beautiful poem after the next, but the sublime melody of his verses gave him no peace, not when A’s powers of organization and structure howled at him from the darkness, “Order! Order!” while B’s power insisted that the beauty of language came from ineffable spontaneity and inspiration. The two masters’ mental states fought like storm and tempest, neither willing to bow to the other. Ah Chen felt as if his body had become a gladiatorial arena for his mind. He couldn’t sleep; he shivered despite himself.

C’s ability followed. What an abyss that was: a million faces, a million personalities, a million stories, a million different kinds of despair. Ah Chen finally understood the price C had paid to be able to write about those twisted souls and those unimaginable plots, the hell he had made of his own spirit. Ah Chen trembled, navigating through the blood, the tears, the white bones and black graves, as if he walked on thin ice; he very nearly fell. Without C’s psychological tenacity, Ah Chen approached the precipice of suicide multiple times. Only through hard liquor, which temporarily numbed his brain, could he seek the smallest scrap of solace.

Day after day, tears washed Ci’s face, and she soon fell ill. She couldn’t understand how the handsome, scholarly, gentle man she loved could turn into a different person in the space of a night. Truth be told, Ci understood from history that the majority of authors’ spouses led unhappy lives, enduring both material poverty and their partners’ sensitivity, moodiness, and even unfaithfulness. She had understood it even before she married him.

Unfortunately, for many like her, knowledge and reason had never stood a chance before love.

This was all irrelevant. Ci lay in bed, weakly gasping for air. Remembering the slap, she closed her eyes. A tear slowly wended its way into her hair.

One day at dusk, Ah Chen was awoken by a strange voice.

“You thief.”

Ah Chen’s eyes snapped open. A man’s face appeared in his mind, thin and long, its expression not quite a smile.

The face hadn’t materialized in front of his eyes, and it wasn’t projected onto anything. It had simply floated to the surface of his mind, clear and blurry at the same time. That’s hard to explain. It was as if he had one good eye and one injured eye, and was trying to look at the world with both at the same time.

“Steal my imagination? Who do they think they are?” The man laughed.

Ah Chen grabbed wildly in front of his eyes, but caught only air.

“All laws are one; all things are eternal.” The man looked at Ah Chen pityingly, slowly blurring into nothingness.

Ah Chen at last woke from his drunken stupor, and found that his vomit had already been cleared away by Ci, and that his blankets were aired and sweet-smelling. The setting sun shone into the room, and clarity seemed to flow into Ah Chen’s heart. That was E’s ability.

Humanity always reenacts the same bildungsroman. All the principles you learn through your struggles today had been written down by the ancients thousands of years ago.

There is nothing new under the sun.

“You went to such lengths to steal these things, and all for what?”

What have I done? Ah Chen watched countless motes of dust dance in the setting sun’s light.

He seemed to see the history of literature slowly distorting in those four parallel universes as the butterfly effect rippled through space-time. Countless chains of causality broke apart, then joined again; countless people’s fates altered with them.

He felt as if he was looking into each world: publishers’ contempt as A seemed to run out of talent; readers mocking B for his clumsy language; E’s wife yelling at him for his uselessness. C flogged himself in the dark of night, sobbing in agony.

He’d stolen each of their most precious possessions, and drowned in alcohol, he’d trampled them into the dirt.

At this point, Ah Chen noticed something strange. E’s wise, reasonable voice asked him, “Why do you feel no guilt? Why does your heart hold only regret, and not the pain brought on by your sense of responsibility? Why have you lost the ability to love another?”

Love? Ah Chen thought dazedly. What’s love?

Oh. He’d traded love away at the Agency of Mysteries.

“Love was the most important thing of them all,” E said tranquilly. “Technique and intelligence will let you see through the world, explain it, look down upon it, but they’ll never make you a true master of literature. You have to let go of yourself, join yourself to the world without resistance or hate; use love, admiration, and respect to observe all living things, including humanity. This is the true secret of literature.”

Ah Chen stood up and opened the door to the dining room. Ci sat at the table, watching over a pot of steaming Laba porridge.

Ah Chen sat down stiffly across from her, like a puppet.

“You should eat a little.” For the first time in many days, her eyes held the light and peace of knowledge.

Ah Chen took a mouthful. It was salty, not sweet. He raised his head, looking at Ci’s pale face.

“Ah Chen, I don’t know where you went the evening of Laba Festival. I don’t know why you changed so much. But you must have a good reason for what you did.

“I waited for you the entire night. The porridge from that day, like today’s, was salty.” Ci forced a smile.

I should say something , Ah Chen thought. In the end, he didn’t say anything.

“Ah Chen, I read your manuscripts yesterday, when you weren’t looking. They’re wonderful. I’m so happy.” Ci finally looked as if she were about to cry. Slowly, she took Ah Chen’s hand in hers.

“Promise me, you’ll keep writing.”

Ah Chen was silent for a long time. “For you, I’ll keep writing.”

Ci slowly smiled. Her eyes shone with the same sweetness as they’d held just after the wedding, but it couldn’t hide the grief at the corners of her eyes. The setting sun shone on her pale face, coloring it with a flush for the last time.

Her hand is so cold, Ah Chen thought.

“Ci… did she…” Mo’s heart sank.

Her father continued to operate the cooking box slowly.

“Yes, Ci died the next day. Perhaps she saw that the last spark of light in her life—Ah Chen’s love for her—was gone.