Can Xue - Vertical Motion

“Are you observing our city, Uncle Lou?”

“No, I’m waiting for someone.”

That was weird. He’d known I was coming. Perhaps, sitting at the window, he’d seen me enter this residential area. If I wasn’t the one he was waiting for, who was it? It was no secret that he’d been trying to stay away from others for a long time. For example, he was the one who had taken the initiative more than ten years earlier to hold me at arm’s length. And yet now, he was waiting for someone! It really wasn’t the right time for me to have come. Should I leave?

“Uncle Lou, I’m leaving. I’ll come back another time.”

“No, Hedgehog, why not wait with me? The sun is so nice.”

I was shocked, because Hedgehog was my deceased younger brother. I had stood here so long, and he hadn’t looked at me even once. Following Uncle Lou’s line of vision, I looked out and saw a water tower in the distance, as well as the post office, the tax office, various other large buildings, and the mirage-obscured suburban quarry. I blinked, and it suddenly changed into a vast expanse of whiteness. I looked hard again, but it was still the vast expanse of whiteness. And thus, the anxiety I had experienced this morning rose again from the bottom of my heart.

“Uncle Lou, I’m not Hedgehog. I’m Puppy. I’m Puppy — the one who used to go fishing in the creek with you. Sure, I’ve degenerated a lot over the years. ” I was starting to babble.

“Puppy? Aren’t Puppy and Hedgehog the same person?”

Uncle Lou still hadn’t looked at me even once. What was he looking at? I was distressed because I couldn’t see anything. Feeling as if my knee had been gnawed by a little animal, I sat down on a chair. At last, Uncle Lou faced me, and only then did I get a good look at his face. His brown face not only wasn’t getting any older, it looked even younger than in the past. The wrinkles that had previously lined his forehead had fled. But one thing bothered me: his gaze was flickering. In the past, his gaze had always been focused.

“He’s arrived,” Uncle Lou said, and with that, he appeared to be really satisfied.

“Who is he?”

Uncle Lou didn’t reply, but only listened attentively. I did, too, and heard footsteps that sounded odd: the sound neither came closer nor did it recede. That is to say, he was neither coming up the stairs nor going down. He went up and down between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth floors. I listened for a while, and then the sound stopped. I wanted to get up and look out the door, but the stabbing sensation in my knee hurt so much that I broke into a cold sweat. Uncle Lou asked:

“Have you remembered?”

I didn’t know what he meant. I couldn’t speak. I was sweating all over.

All of a sudden, Uncle Lou clambered up to the windowsill and sat there with one leg swinging back and forth in midair.

“If you clench your teeth hard, you’ll feel no pain. In the past, a lot of crocodiles bit my legs in the lake. When I clenched my teeth, they swam away. This room of mine is linked with the lake. Have you remembered?”

Sure enough, when I clenched my teeth, the pain eased. In this “lake,” this loft from which you looked out and saw nothing clearly, what did I recall? I recalled the playing cards I had lost as a child. It was a deck of expensive waxed playing cards that I cared about very much. Four people had been in the room that afternoon. Who had stolen the cards? This was a frightening question. And what’s more, a storm that afternoon caused a flood that ruined our floor boards. For a short time, the city was a vast expanse of whiteness. Was it rainwater or lake water?

“I think you’ve remembered a little something, haven’t you?”

Uncle Lou jumped down happily from the windowsill. He was as agile as a thirty-year-old. I replied that I had remembered one incident, but that I didn’t understand the point of his question. It was even hotter in the room, probably because the sun was higher. Uncle Lou walked quietly to the door and looked out. Then he walked back and said to me, “That person has gone down.” He also said that he was anxious every day, because he waited for him every day. He sometimes came and sometimes didn’t; he was absolutely inconsistent. “He’s my nephew from the countryside.”

I was looking at the large window on the south side. I saw the sun, which was like a circle made of metal flakes — a white circle without dazzling rays, a solitary circle hanging in the boundless sky. Then, could it be that the dry heat in this room wasn’t coming from the sun? I wiped the sweat from my face with my sleeve. I wanted to stand up, but my feet couldn’t manage it. I looked at Uncle Lou again. He said he passed his life feeling “anxious,” but he didn’t feel at all hot in this sauna. He wasn’t sweating; he looked fresh and energetic.

“Uncle Lou, why didn’t this relative of yours come inside?”

“He can’t. He’s too ugly.”

“What? I never heard of such a thing!”

Uncle Lou sat down on the windowsill again. This time, both legs were swinging in midair. This frightened me a little, but he was relaxed, as though there were lake water outside the window and he could swim across it.

I could still hear footsteps on the stairs, so I thought the ugly relative hadn’t left yet. Why did Uncle Lou wait every day for this relative who was so ugly that he couldn’t associate with others? And since he was too ugly to be with others, then why did Uncle Lou insist that I wait with him in the room? Alas, Uncle Lou: in the more than ten years since I’d seen him, he’d become an enigma of an old man.

After wiping my face with the washcloth he handed me, I became a little more clear-headed. Clenching my teeth hard, I stood up and, enduring the violent pain, I walked to the door and held onto its frame with both hands. Ah, the stairs had disappeared! The twenty-fourth floor was suspended in midair with nothing below! The elevator cage was still across from us, but could an elevator still be in it? The wind carried the sound of Uncle Lou talking.

“Don’t look everywhere indiscriminately. It will blur your vision. There are too many things in this building. You should sit down in the room and listen more.”

Limping, I returned to the room and sat down. A sentimental feeling gushed from my heart. I don’t remember how many years I had wanted to leave home and go to the temple at West Mountain to study martial arts and live an impoverished, meaningful life. Year after year passed, and I could never fulfill my long-cherished wish (because the mountain was far away, because I had no self-control, and because of feelings for my family). From the time I was a child, I had admired the knights errant who could leap onto rooftops and vault over walls and had looked forward to the day when I could also be as skilled. Later on, I learned that this skill was called “martial arts,” and thus I lived for the day when someone would teach me martial arts. But to study martial arts, one had to go to West Mountain — as far away as the ends of the earth. The train ride took four days and four nights. It was also a rocky mountain with no vegetation. Only by taking a concealed path could one reach the temple on the mountaintop. One of my cousins wanted to study the martial arts, too: he went to West Mountain and then returned, saying he had strolled around for a week in the foothills without ever locating the path up the mountain. He saw someone appear in the middle of the mountain and also saw someone emerge from the mountain, but he was unable to find the path. Later, he abandoned the idea of studying martial arts. I also abandoned the idea several years ago because my legs began aching for no reason; it wasn’t arthritis, nor was it rheumatism. My legs just started hurting, and as time went on, the pain grew worse and worse.