Can Xue - The Last Lover

The stormy wind and the icy hail outside the room only intensified the seething desire in Joe’s body. Amid the groaning sounds of the black cats copulating, Joe thought of a sexual partner who wasn’t Maria and also wasn’t the Kim in this house. It was apparently a person of indeterminate gender, covered in long black hair from head to foot. Joe felt dread at this unfamiliar and intense desire. He thought that perhaps the black cats were inducing these latent sexual fantasies. Midway, he climbed out from underneath the quilt and stood in the center of the room. The black cats followed him down onto the floor. One of them bit his calf, and when this fresh sense of pain again provoked his desire, Joe felt he would soon go mad. Concentrated hailstones struck the tin roof deafeningly loud, and the building looked ready to collapse. A knocking on the door sounded again and again in the pauses between the hailstones. He saw the peacock-embroidered quilt he’d slept in bulging up high. Was it possible there was still a cat inside, and that the cat had rapidly grown this large? He walked over and pulled off the quilt; inside was nothing. Joe lay down again. The black cats hid in the corners of the room and even more lascivious groans sprang up from their direction. Kim shouted from outside the door:

“Open the door! It’s Kim. Years ago, I was in your hometown. Did you forget all about it?”

He yelled again and again until Joe finally lost patience, got up, and opened the door. However, it was the fat cook standing outside. The cook’s garlic-bud eyes weren’t focused on Joe. She was looking amiably at a small mouse at her bosom. The white mouse was one breath away from death. Joe didn’t know whether she understood his words, so he used hand signs to gesture, saying to her:

“Kim. . Kim, Kim!”

The woman immediately looked apprehensive. She tossed the mouse down on the floor, and left.

Kim finally appeared in the morning when the sun shone brightly. Joe saw that his face was a waxy yellow, and every movement of his hands and feet was unsure. He had changed into yet another embroidered sleeping robe, one printed with gold ingots. This get-up made him look unctuous.

“Did you realize your desires during the night?” He stroked his extremely glossy black hair.

Joe thought back to his high-surging passion throughout the odd night, and didn’t know how to answer.

“The contract is already signed, but you still haven’t made up your mind!” Kim said.

He called his wolfhound in from outside, and lightly stroked the dog, which was about as tall as himself. He told Joe that the dog’s mother had died the year before last, died on the mountaintop. “I sealed her up inside an ice cave. When I turned to look out into the distance, do you know what I saw?”

“What?”

“The East! I saw it clearly, that place where the sun rises. Everything is there!”

“But a man like me cannot see that far,” Joe said in disappointment.

“Ah, no! You’re completely wrong. Yesterday for example, you went there, you were like an emperor. .”

“I never went to the place you’re talking about. I was inside the building the whole time, suffering from the attacks of those black cats.”

“You’re not pleased with the cats?”

When Kim spoke he again displayed his bloody gums, very displeasing to Joe. He felt that the man’s body had the characteristics of a predator, one that seemed like it could break loose at any moment. Kim leisurely lit his pipe. After he’d smoked a few puffs, a thin flush spread over his face, and his black eyes shifted like a thief’s behind his lenses. Joe drummed up his courage and asked whether Kim would be able to take him to the summit for a look around.

“I can’t,” Kim said outright. “All the roads are impassable. Japanese people came to this mountain before. The women changed into kimonos and geta sandals, then they disappeared into the snow-fields.”

Joe drank coffee, thinking to himself how lonesome Kim’s life must be. Aside from that hometown floating among the clouds, his life was spent nearly cut off from the world. Kim read Joe’s thoughts and responded, saying, no, he wasn’t a bit lonesome, because everyone in the whole world could potentially pass through his residence. His house was like an entrance for getting into heaven. Joe, for example, whom he hadn’t met before. Hadn’t he hurried from so far away to be his guest? Although he hadn’t known Joe before this, there was, in fact, a common communication of information between them.

“I don’t at all. .” Joe wanted to defend himself.

“Oh, no, no, no!” Kim waved his hands. “It’s your doing. You send out messages, but you don’t know it. Instead, I know you. Right when you set off I heard the sound of your footsteps.”

Kim made Joe feel awkward, so he could only be silent. He saw a basket hanging down from the living-room ceiling. The hanging basket was piled up with wasps, and wasps were overflowing its edges. A few had dropped to the floor. Joe once again felt the house’s perilous situation. In comparison to these wasps, which were as large as jujubes, last night’s black cats really didn’t count for anything. Kim’s addictions were horrifying, but why on reaching here were his own desires so tempestuous? There had been one stretch of time when Joe had believed he was almost a hopeless case. Fortunately, afterward, reading had enchanted him. It was those fabricated stories that had saved him, that had brought changes to the look of his life. But stories were only a part of Joe’s life, the sole part possessing meaning. Joe had not thought that in the world there could be a man like Kim, who lived altogether inside of fabrication. Clasping Kim’s hand Joe realized his surpassing vigor. A wasp crawled onto the side of Joe’s foot, so he hastily switched his seat. He saw a thread of mocking light at the edges of Kim’s glasses.

“Your cook speaks very little.”

“She is able to speak, she just doesn’t want to is all. When she was young, her family turned her out for speaking out of turn. A few years ago she settled down at my place here.”

Kim invited Joe to the greenhouse behind the building to see the “rare flowers” he cultivated.

“It is worth your making mental preparation. You need to have confidence,” he said.

The so-called greenhouse was a large empty room. The room’s windows were small, so that the rays of light inside were dim. After Joe stood for a while in the center of the room, he could make out the earthen bowls arrayed on the ground. There were no flowers, but rather a single type of coarse sand in the bowls. Kim squatted down and dug up a brown seed the size of an almond from a sand bowl. He placed it in the light to inspect it.

“Look, it’s already burst open, but the shoots inside can’t get out. All the seeds here are in the same condition. The flowers open inside of dreams. Surely you understand what I’m talking about? It’s been more than ten years, and the seeds still keep this shape, neither sprouting nor decaying. Think about how surprising that is.”

Kim continuously dug up all kinds of seeds for Joe to inspect. His voice sent out echoes into the empty room. Joe had the feeling of entering an enormous open grave; it was both curious and unfamiliar. A question repeatedly occurred to him: Were there any passages here leading to the mountaintop? The shadow of a person swayed in front of the windowpane. It was the cook, who was observing their movements from outside. It appeared that she was keeping watch over Joe at every moment, but why? Joe knit his eyebrows. Kim watched from the corners of his eyes.

“These flowers don’t like the light. They are from my homeland. The buildings of our homeland have no windows, but every family still grows these kinds of flowers. Flowers raised in dark places have a slightly evil odor. Does your family grow flowers?”