Can Xue - Vertical Motion

But, gradually, it became apparent that I was worrying too much. My injury hadn’t made my owner any more abnormal. Quite the opposite: he perked up a little. He had a lot more to do and was no longer as idle as he used to be. If people were a little particular about their daily lives, fixing three meals a day and cleaning the apartment could take up a lot of time. When I was first hurt, my owner was still not enamored of doing these things, because he’d long been accustomed to a simple life. At that time, everything in the refrigerator was prepared food, but now he had to buy fresh food and he had to cook especially for me. So sometimes he was almost scurrying about. Since he was very capable, he quickly had the housework under control. Recently, he even seems quite enthusiastic about doing the housework, for he whistles as he works! As it is now, he doesn’t have much time for woolgathering — except after he gets up in the morning, when he can’t help but sink into daydreams for a short time. Then, as if he’s heard an alarm, he springs up and “plunges into the flood of daily work” (this is the sentence I use to describe him).

Something occurred that surprised me a lot. One day, when I returned from a stroll, I saw the black man standing at our door. He seemed irresolute, but then he went in. Five seconds later, he came out again. He looked the same: teeth clenched, eyes menacing. Like a thick black shadow, he dodged into the elevator and quietly descended. When I went inside, my owner was wearing an apron and busying himself with cooking fish soup. What had transpired in those five seconds? Had they had a brief talk, or had my owner not even seen this uninvited guest for whom he lived day and night? After looking into it, I decided the latter was the most likely. Could it be that the idol in his heart was collapsing?

The next day, I looked at him even more carefully. I stared at him early in the morning when he was daydreaming on the balcony. My observation told me that what he hoped for from the bottom of his heart hadn’t faded at all, but was even more intense because of the telescoped time. Gripping the railing convulsively, he was looking at the horizon: I was afraid he would jump from this high building. After a while, tears of regret filled his eyes. What did he regret? Had he been unaware of the black man’s presence and then learned of it later from traces that had been left behind? Then why had he grown so numb that he even missed the arrival of the person whom he yearned for day and night? As I saw it, although the black man moved as if floating on water, he couldn’t be completely soundless. I could only conclude that everyday life had numbed my owner’s senses. By the time I thought of this, he had already calmed down. He rinsed his feverish face with cold water. Then, without looking back, he picked up his shopping basket and went to the market. He had a lot more self-control now.

He must have been working much more efficiently. Sometimes I saw him go into his inner sanctum and re-emerge within the hour. And in his work he seemed even more flushed with success. He still wasn’t close to anyone: he was sticking to his lonely bachelor’s existence. It was from the old clerk’s mouth that I learned of my owner’s promotion: I heard the old man call him “big boss.” He also reproached him for living so simply, and said he should try to have some fun. At the time, I had a sudden thought — if the black man told him to give up everything and go with him to the ends of the earth, would he do it? What followed proved me absolutely wrong.

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As a rule, my owner went to the office only once every two weeks, because another big boss was in charge of the day-to-day work. My owner frequently discussed work with him on the phone. Sometimes someone from the office also telephoned, but not very often. Recently, all of this had changed a lot: now our phone rang all the time. From my observations, in general, these people weren’t calling him about work, but were complaining about some old scores that hadn’t been evened up. These people evidently belonged to all kinds of opposing factions. They were all attacking each other. My owner’s responses seemed very odd — he showered compliments on everyone who called, and parroted what they said, so on the phone everyone was happy. As a spectator, I heard a lot of conflicting words coming out of his mouth. Today he said this, the next day he said that: he was glib on the phone, but after hanging up, he kept sighing and was endlessly remorseful, absolutely fed up. Still, the next time the phone rang, he rushed to answer it again. Sometimes this meant he had to put off doing the housework. I was very much repulsed by those “gossips” from the newspaper office. I thought they were all vermin. At the same time, I was captivated: How could an aloof, idiosyncratic character like my owner care about his despicable underlings, even going so far as to mingle with them in the cesspool? To show my revulsion, I jumped on the tea table several times and pretended it was an accident when I knocked the phone off the hook so that there couldn’t be any incoming calls. But my owner had recently become especially vigilant. Every once in a while he checked to see whether the phone was back on the hook. It was as if he had eyes in the back of his head, so my little plot failed.

Things grew more and more serious. Phone calls weren’t enough for those people: I heard them pressuring my owner to deal with their disputes. It seemed that everyone who called asked my owner to “give evidence” on his behalf. I secretly felt things were going from bad to worse. I grumbled to myself that my owner was too unprincipled: he shouldn’t mingle with those people and intervene in their filthy mess. After each phone call he was terribly distressed, and didn’t get over it for a long time. After a few more days, these people began to press their demands even more forcefully, and there were even a few menacing implications. One of them mentioned the black man: he said the black man had presented himself at the newspaper office’s lobby and was waiting for my owner to meet him there. After my owner took this phone call, he paled and grew weak in the knees. In a daze, he tidied up a little and then rushed to the newspaper office. The rest of the day, I felt as if I had dropped into hell. I believed that his going there this time boded ill — that a collective plot to murder him was going to be actualized.

It was late at night before he returned. Not only had he not lost his life, but he was in such high spirits that he was singing in the bathroom. After a bath, he was full of energy as he went into his inner sanctum to work.

The next day, the phone was ringing off the hook again: my owner kept using vulgar language on the phone and telling dirty jokes. He seemed a changed man, but except for the phone calls, he was still treating me well. He found time for housework and seemed in good spirits. I thought I’d better get used to his new ways. I should make an effort to observe his train of thought and catch up with it. In the afternoon, the black man asked someone to phone and tell him to go to the office (I figured this out from my owner’s expression). When he heard this, he took off immediately, beside himself with agitation. After these two times, I finally got it: it was the black man’s idea that my owner should mingle with the others in the cesspool!

That evening, he brought two ugly guys back with him. Each one sat on the sofa, crossed his legs, chain-smoked, and spat on the floor. Before they’d been here even a minute, they began talking about the old clerk, hinting that he was a sycophant. I knew that my owner and the clerk were on very good terms, and that they agreed about everything in their work. I couldn’t understand why he was letting these people slander him. He sat there listening gravely and nodding his head slightly, indicating that he sided with them. Thus encouraged, the older one was emboldened to suggest that my owner tell the old clerk “to get another line of work” and give his position to someone else. As the old guy was talking, the door creaked and opened: the black man was standing there. In the light from the corridor, his face looked ashen and was etched with deep grief. Pea-sized beads of perspiration rolled down from his forehead. He was shaking badly. The old guy stopped talking, and everyone stared at the black man outside the door. Suddenly, it was as if the black man had been shot in the neck: all at once, his head drooped. An invisible force was dragging him back, all the way to the elevator door. As soon as the door opened, he tumbled into the elevator, and it slid swiftly down.