Can Xue - Vertical Motion

Just then, someone rapped on the door three times. Who could it be in the dead of night? My sleepwalking owner heard it at once and got up and opened the door. I thought, if it’s a thief, he’s a goner for sure: with one blow, a thief would make sure he’d never wake up again. Luckily, it wasn’t a thief, but a man with lacquer-black skin. He was wearing a shiny gold chaplet around his neck, and two skull-shaped silver rings on his fingers. My owner nodded at him and said, “It’s you.” The fellow answered laconically, “Yes.” I could see that my owner wasn’t awake yet — he was moving stiffly. After the fellow sat down, my owner brought him some food from the refrigerator, and soon the tea table was loaded down with all kinds of cold cuts, sausages, and thousand-year-old eggs. The black man sat up straight and clenched his teeth, unwilling to loosen up at all. He didn’t touch the snacks, but denounced my owner with his eyes. My owner didn’t notice; perhaps he was “seeing without seeing”—as sleepwalkers generally do.

“Won’t you have a little beer?” my owner asked.

“My chest hurts.” As he talked, the black man tore his shirt open with a single motion. “I was burned in the forest fire. ”

There wasn’t a hair on his bare black chest. You could see the distinct throbbing on the lower left side of his chest: Was something wrong with his heart?

My owner didn’t look up at him. He was muttering to himself, “Why won’t he even drink beer?”

The black man was grinding his teeth — to me, this sounded like a duck quacking — and rubbing his feet surreptitiously on the floor. In order to relieve the tension, I sprang to his lap and deployed some feminine charms. The black man petted me with his beringed hand, but it wasn’t ordinary petting, for his fingers were gripping my throat harder and harder. I began struggling, clawing the air aimlessly. When I was just on the edge of losing consciousness, he pushed me down to the floor. I was afraid he would hurt me again, so I played dead. At the time, my owner seemed unaware of what was going on. I saw him pacing restlessly back and forth in the room, maybe waiting for the black man to start something. As for me, since I’d already been the target of the black man’s malice, I was afraid he would do something even worse.

As the black man stood up to leave, my owner humbly begged him to stay a while longer.

“My chest hurts. Your room is suffocating,” he said as he flung the door open.

He left. My owner — his sleepwalker’s arms held out in front of him — seemed about to follow him, but instead, he just walked absently around the room, repeating over and over again, “Why couldn’t I get him to stay? Why couldn’t I get. ”

=

My owner was a serious stuffed-shirt of a man. He had a job at a newspaper office, but as a rule he worked at home. I had settled down here quite by accident. At the time, my former owner had taken his anger out on me and thrown me out. With nowhere to go, I’d been loafing around on the stairs when, all of a sudden, I saw a door open a crack. A thread of light came out. In the wee hours of the pitch-black night, the thread of light stared at me and cheerily beckoned me inside. The room was clean, with everything in its place. My present owner was sitting on the sofa, deep in thought, one hairy arm propped up on the armrest, his huge head in his hands. He saw me at once and jumped up and said, “Ha! An old cat!” From then on, my name was “Old Cat.”

I quickly realized I was more comfortable here than with my former owner. My starchy new owner was not the least bit stiff with me: trusting me to discipline myself, he never set limits for me. After thoroughly inspecting his domicile, I, a cat of some breeding, chose the rug beneath the tea table as my bedroom.

Every day, I dined with my owner. Since he believed in equal rights, we each had our own bowls and saucers. I ate whatever he ate, except that I didn’t drink beer, nor did I like fruit.

My owner was efficient in his work. As a rule, he worked for two hours in the middle of the night, and then sat around the whole day, as if afflicted by a certain kind of depression. I sympathized with him: I supposed he was unhappy with his life or frustrated in his work. I also thought that he was essentially a strong person, and that after getting over the present difficulty, he’d be fine. But I’d been here a long time now, and not only had he not improved, but his depression was even worse than before. Had he been unhappy all along? After some consideration, I rejected this view. One day, a wretched-looking person came over. He meekly called my owner “editor-in-chief,” thus making it clear that he was a colleague from the newspaper office: from this, I concluded that everything was going well at work. I also discovered that, for no reason, my owner looked for trouble. Except for the two hours that he shut himself up in his bedroom and worked — I had no way of knowing what he was like then — most of the rest of the time he was an unhappy man.

One day, he asked someone to hang an iron pothook from the living room ceiling, and from it he hung a hemp rope. When I came back from a stroll, the door was open, and as soon as I went in, I saw him dangling, unmoving, from that hemp rope. I screamed in terror, and he began swaying. He stood on tiptoe on the table, loosened the noose, and jumped down. The rope left two purple marks on his neck. After freeing himself from the noose, he looked much more relaxed and was actually in high spirits as he went to the kitchen and fried an ocean fish for me. But it was hard for him to get into such a good mood. As I ate, I was watching him in terror and thought to myself, is this a valedictory dinner? Of course it wasn’t, because after a bath, he strode briskly into his bedroom to work. The next day, his old trouble recurred: now, besides being depressed, he was also in agony. His intermittent roaring was oppressive.

In order to help him, I jumped up and nipped his hand. This little trick worked: he calmed down as if just waking from a dream, and he urged me to bite him a little harder, until I drew blood. My owner must have been possessed by a demon, making it impossible for him to focus his energy on anything at all the whole day long. He couldn’t find any way, either, to vent his unhappiness. Or perhaps he had too high an opinion of himself to try any of the ordinary ways of venting. Sometimes, self-abuse could temporarily postpone the ultimate destruction, but it couldn’t solve the root problem. Each time, it took more intense stimulation. Just when all of his remedies were almost exhausted, the weird black man had appeared, thus instantly changing his entire attitude toward life.

=

That night, after the black man left, my owner slept for a long time. He didn’t wake up until the third morning, forgetting even his work responsibilities. After he woke up, he pulled out of his depression and rushed to the balcony, where he lifted weights over and over. Then he began sweeping the apartment. He cleaned the place until it was spotless, and even went so far as to buy a flower to brighten the living room. He washed the heavy drapes and let the sunshine splash the living room: the whole room overflowed with the atmosphere of spring. I really didn’t like his turning everything upside down in the apartment: the dust he stirred up made it impossible for me to breathe, and the rose made me sneeze uncontrollably. My owner wasn’t young. How could he be so hyperactive? He was acting almost like a teenager. The only thing I could do to get away from his cleaning was to go out and stand on the stairs.

He kept this up for a long time. His face reddened and his eyes flashed. But every morning, and again at dusk, he looked bewildered, expectant. At such times, he strolled to the balcony and fixed his eyes on the distant sky. I knew who he was waiting for, but I couldn’t help him. Despite my anxiety, I was unable to do anything.