Can Xue - The Last Lover

When Kim picked up the book, Joe saw him snicker, his long hair shaking. He’d changed into a sleeping gown printed with a strange pattern. As he straightened up from the waist, Joe saw a black cat stretch out from inside his pajamas.

“Only this cat understands my state of mind,” Kim said. “I’ve met the protagonist of your book before.”

“Is there really such a person?”

“It’s because what is written is the author’s own life. She rested in my house for a night, then on the second day she went to the summit. That was where she lost her leg. Her appearance when she dragged her injured leg, howling, down the mountain I still see before my eyes today. You won’t dare finish reading a book like this. If you read to the end, you’ll be dragged in and never come back out. That is a true ice cave, much deeper than on the mountaintop.”

The kimono disappeared before Joe’s eyes, changing into a patch of vast whiteness. He thought of discussing the novel with Kim, but he felt he had nothing to say: the book had nearly no plot, and no imagery. Even so Kim bore out that Hailin was a real person in the world. “How was her leg cut off?” Joe sank back into a reverie without borders. He heard Kim’s voice as if it were coming from inside the walls. The voice was ambiguous, and Joe didn’t know what it was saying.

The room quickly grew dark. The cats were nowhere to be seen, and Kim also wasn’t to be seen. The curtains shut of their own accord. Beyond the window a woman was crying. Joe groped his way to the bed, and in the dimness he quickly climbed the palace stairs and entered an uncultivated garden. On reaching it he realized that the garden wasn’t in fact uncultivated. Many different kinds of animals made a racket inside, and the people were not few either. They all stood silently underneath a large tree. Their expressions were difficult to fathom, as if they were not of this world. Joe thought that perhaps they were ancients who’d lived several centuries ago. There was one youth standing under a cedar tree who appeared extremely troubled. Joe asked him where he was from. He said he’d come from home. His accent was strange, he was a foreigner. Joe asked him again where his home was, and he said the East.

“But this place isn’t the East?” Joe assessed the mud-red palace walls and spoke in a loud voice.

The young man turned an expressionless face toward him and didn’t respond to his question. Then Joe finally noticed that the youth was wearing prison clothes and, surprisingly, had shackles on his feet. Looking next at a few of the others, he saw that they, too, appeared to be wearing prison clothes. Joe suddenly, without reason, felt incredibly ashamed. A squirrel scurried between his legs. The squirrel belonged in this garden. Joe didn’t belong here.

“My wife, Maria, planted many rosebushes at home,” Joe said, as though debating.

The young fellow’s face promptly showed a seemingly curious expression. But he still didn’t open his mouth, only making an occasional sound with his shackles and turning his ear toward where Joe was speaking. What was it he actually heard? Joe felt unsure on this point. Then there was a sound near Joe’s ear — it was the sound of Kim’s voice.

“The entire garden is inside my house. A book is buried under the palace wall on the western side.”

Joe deduced the location of the western side from the sun’s bearing. The western part of the palace wall was burning as if with fire. Joe watched until his eyes stung. He thought that since the garden was inside Kim’s building, there was no need to walk around futilely. He sat down on the grass. To his right under the cedar tree the young man held a book close to his chest. Joe thought the red cover looked familiar. He stood back up and walked over to him.

“This is your book. Inside is a cruel murder story, but I’ve already decided not to finish reading it. Who can finish a book like this?”

As he spoke he made a string of noises with his shackles.

“My book is about a young girl named Hailin. If I recall, she wasn’t ugly, her parents did business, were never at home. .” Joe said.

“Ah, you only read the beginning? That was a false semblance. The real story is afterward. This kind of story doesn’t have a protagonist. Take your book and leave.”

He handed the book over to Joe. Joe felt the book light and buoyant in his hand. Flipping it open he saw that it was, as a matter of fact, only an envelope. On the front cover the young girl Hailin had an unsightly open-mouthed smile.

Joe followed along the palace wall. In his ears Kim’s voice grew louder and clearer. This led him to realize that he was merely circling Kim’s building. Afterward, the voice grew quiet, and the wailing, desolate howls of the cats shook Joe’s head into a daze. “Maria, Maria, forgive me, forgive me, what have I come to?” Joe spoke to himself incoherently. The grass lawn and the cedars disappeared and the palace walls were intermittent in the duskiness. Even so, up ahead he saw from behind Japanese women wearing cumbersome kimonos. There appeared to be three of them.

“You’ve been turning about in this room for a whole day. You actually can walk and read a book at the same time. This is a masterful skill.”

When he spoke Kim’s face again displayed that cruel smile. Joe tried as best as he could not to look at his face.

“I always keep a respectful distance from horror novels,” Kim said.

Joe took the book in his hand and turned to the middle. Stepping in front of the window, he read a paragraph. It still told Hailin’s story. The middle-aged Hailin sat in her sewing room embroidering a red spider. Upstairs the fretful sound of her parents’ footsteps rang out. Her parents were now two old people who had lost their memories. On the third day after they returned from that distant place, Hailin with no irresoluteness at all had imprisoned them inside one of the building’s large rooms. “No irresoluteness at all,” these four words were underlined with a mark of emphasis. Joe read this sentence again and again, in order to comprehend its meaning from many angles.

“Joe, once you return home, will you or will you not commit yourself to growing roses?” Kim asked him.

As he drew nearer, Joe saw more clearly the design on his dark-colored pajamas. It was the savage faces of traditional theater masks, without any gleeful faces at all. Some of their mouths had long sharp teeth, with blood on them. Joe also heard the wail of an infant.

Because Joe didn’t answer, Kim again examined him closely:

“If you read them repeatedly, can you make the stories become reality?”

When Kim leaned in close, exposing strange, long teeth such as Joe had never seen before and stretching his right hand toward Joe’s face, Joe finally let out a shout. Then all went black before his eyes.

After a spell, Joe slowly recovered consciousness. He recalled that all along he’d been reading that horror novel, all along sitting at the windowsill. In the exact center of the house, Kim and the cook were in the middle of watching a seed inside a large flower bowl. A seed as large as a fava bean lay in the cook’s fat palm. It wasn’t clear what kind of flower it was. She raised her palm toward the light from the window. Joe saw clearly now that the plump brown seed had a termite-like insect popping its head out from inside. Kim laughed, hei hei , and showed Joe two other seeds he’d dug out from the flowerpot. Inside these were two similar insects.

“They are cultivated in our greenhouse. These small things don’t affect the blooming of the flowers, and who’s to say, the flowers may even benefit from them! Those roses at your house in reality open inside our dreams. You see them in full bloom, but that’s only a false semblance. It’s written clearly in the novel you’re reading.”