Can Xue - The Last Lover

Martin made an exaggerated gesture. Elaine stood to one side covering the smile on her face.

“I think,” she directed her words to Reagan. “I think Martin is like my sister. Someday he will swim into the sea wearing your clothes. . Mr. Reagan, have you noticed that everyone on the farm looks the same? Only people harboring the same thoughts come here.”

“There are two crows in the pockets of my hunting gear.” Martin shrugged, and began to whistle.

Reagan followed the young man with his eyes as he walked, bouncing, into the distance. He was overwhelmed with many thoughts and feelings. The sunlight seemed to press down on his body, thousands of jin heavy. He lowered his head and saw the bottom hem of his pajamas torn and bloodstains on his bare feet. Before dawn, he’d heard the sound of the earth rising and falling, a sha sha sha rustling, like the movements of an enormous python. He’d thought then that the land was traveling away from him, that the crows would not wheel over his head. But now he saw Martin wearing his hunting clothes, saw him embracing the younger sister of the girl who had drowned, and the land came back under his feet. Elaine was not ordinary, either. Sometimes she loafed in front of his house, her eyes staring straight ahead. If he stepped in front of her to say hello, she would jump away, guardedly, reproaching him in a loud voice: “Who are you?”

She had said, “My sister gave me her place, but I’m not grateful for it.”

A train’s steam whistle sounded in the distance, he heard it clearly. Perhaps Ida had returned long ago, and was hiding somewhere. The longing in Reagan’s heart was for the black-clad young man. That different impulse was hard to forget — could he be an incarnation of Ida? The discrepancy in sex didn’t amount to anything. There was a photograph of a young man clipped in Reagan’s sole photo album upstairs. His mother had said it was his older brother, but he had never met this black-clad man.

In a room in the tall high-rise Vincent imagined the Chinese woman telling him that he should visit the gambling city to figure out a few things about his wife, Lisa. The Chinese woman sat with her back to him. She hadn’t opened her mouth, but Vincent heard her thoughts. They came toward him as language, and so he formed this statement from her present thought.

Lisa had forgotten her birthplace entirely. She spoke incoherently of a grassy lawn. Retired grandmothers sit on the lawn in wicker chairs all in a row. Some read the papers, some nap. In the distance, a long snake slinks along in the deep grass. A silver-haired woman catches sight of the snake. She doesn’t get up. Instead she covers her face with the paper and lies down in her chair.

“But you haven’t spoken of the gambling city’s most important feature,” Vincent interrupted.

“The slot machines?” Lisa’s eyebrows drew together in a line, betraying her ferocity. “I’ve seen many of them in that valley of death. If you go there, you’ll see the blood-red sunsets. I cannot go with you because if I go to that place I won’t be able to return. Poor Vincent, I’m uneasy about letting you go there.”

But Vincent had his mind on the horse-racing tracks. He didn’t take Lisa’s prophecy to heart. Hadn’t she come from that place? And hadn’t she lived outside it for decades? Vincent had always envied his wife’s origins. He thought of them as a legend that was true. He had never told her this, and if she heard him say as much she would be furious. Vincent had only passed by the gambling city once on a train, and had never stayed there. Every night he saw its rose-colored sky in his dreams. The domes of the gambling city appeared so dubious under this sky, so untrue. On a nearby mountainside, the bells of a cathedral tolled. There were no people in his dreams. He felt that the activity in the casinos had nothing to do with people. When he’d first known Lisa, her body’s active, inexhaustible desire astonished him. He’d had so much happiness from it. For many years he’d wanted to explore the source of her vitality, but she kept her mouth closed like a stoppered bottle.

“I only remember that grass lawn. It was a home for the elderly,” Lisa said, unbending. “The other things were like floating clouds, they weren’t important. The selectivity of my memory is very strong.”

“So you also think the casinos are empty?”

“Yes. Although they are full of people, in reality they are empty.”

Vincent and Lisa’s talk led to nothing. In fact, this situation was predictable. Vincent’s company was expanding as before. His luck was so good it was hard to believe. He brought in several aides to develop two subsidiary companies. He asked Lisa whether he should retire. Lisa said people like him couldn’t retire, so he should work up to the end. He thought about what she said and felt it to be correct. She was always right, as if she were his road sign. When she said, “Although they are full of people, in reality they are empty,” Vincent felt as though he wanted to cry.

Recently, Lisa had undergone a transformation. She drifted around in dirty clothes, as if she had lost her awareness of the people surrounding her. But at night she didn’t go outside any more. She slept heavily. One night at midnight, Vincent came home from a bar out on the street and walked into the bedroom. In the dark he felt the air in the room buzzing, weng weng , hurried and nervous, like an air-raid siren. He sat on the bed, collected himself, and clasped one of Lisa’s hands as she slept. The situation didn’t change. He said to himself, “Lisa, Lisa, you are capable of so much.” In the dark Lisa suddenly spoke to him distinctly, “Vincent, after this don’t cross over that little bridge. You have fallen from the bridge into the stream. The river water is shallow, shallow. Your head rests on a rock sticking out of the water, only your clothes are wet.” Vincent turned on the light and discovered that Lisa was still dreaming. She no longer needed to move her body to seek those remote stories. Now she lived inside them, day and night. But he, as before, rose during the night and searched wildly until he wore himself out. Woman, woman, what kind of miracle was she? Had her birth in the gambling city determined everything about her? Sometimes Vincent saw the relationship between them as a race between competitors. This way of thinking even influenced his heart. Recently a stifling sensation grew more evident. But he already understood that no matter how hard he ran, he couldn’t catch up to his wife asleep at home. He was no more than a shadow in the light of a streetlamp; she was a rock within history. Yet she was reluctant to part from him! What for? She didn’t ask about the Rose Clothing Company’s affairs, but Vincent had always felt that the business’s prosperity bore a direct relation to her undertaking in the earth’s deep core. Vincent wanted to comprehend how her desire was brought into being at that core, but his effort was futile.

“Vincent, are you still excavating that gully? There are more and more little fish, little shrimp.”

Once she woke Lisa said this to Vincent, her face filled with the fatigue of her nighttime life. He could see that her rest was painful. He understood that the most active part of her life was now separated from him.

“This unforeseen gain from the stream gives me temporary satisfaction. Darling, I love you.”

“I love you, too, Vincent. But I can’t search on the earth’s surface with you. There are problems emerging in my life. Now I’m on a drilling crew. Don’t you think so?” Her expression was contented. “Have you heard the story of Maria’s long march? She is also on a long march. How strange!”