Can Xue - The Last Lover

The couple floated in the air, walking as they talked, then fluttered into the large house. The door quietly shut behind them, then quietly opened again. The cook, a woman, put her head out. Joe stood up, clapping the dust from his clothes, and walked toward the cook. He wasn’t sure what he could do to appear natural.

“I remember the cook they hired before was a man. If his employer lay drunk on the ground, the cook would carry him inside.” Once he opened his mouth, this is what Joe said.

The cook didn’t say a word. She looked at him briefly, then let him enter the building.

He had just sat down on the sofa in the spacious hall when husband and wife came to greet him.

Although they welcomed him warmly, Joe sensed that their thoughts weren’t inside the house. He could tell this from their drifting expressions.

“Joe has come to settle accounts with us,” Vincent joked.

Joe heard this with surprise. He thought, Was a foundational change coming to the Rose Clothing Company? The empty hall gave him an eerie feeling. Where had the original furniture gone? Vincent didn’t ask why Joe was there, but thought it natural that he was. Later on Vincent invited Joe to go for a drink at a restaurant down the street. Joe said that if he drank before the sky was even dark, fear would fill his heart. Vincent laughed aloud, a skin-crawling laugh. Then he pulled Joe into the street by main force. Joe was a moderate man and not willing to oppose his boss. So although he hated the way Vincent went about it, he was compelled to go along.

In the car, Vincent told Joe his trip had left him uptight and he wanted to get drunk. At home if he drank too much Lisa would interfere, so he pretended to take Joe out for a drink. He really just wanted Joe to accompany him. He didn’t have to drink. When Vincent said this, his voice became loud and piercing, like a parrot’s, like an old parrot’s. His brow twisted, revealing his ferocity.

Because it was afternoon there was no one in the restaurant, but the door was open and a single bottle sat on a single table. Vincent uncorked it and drank a few large gulps straight from its mouth. He then turned and told Joe that he wanted to go below. Joe asked him below where, and he replied that he meant the underground rooms.

“You’re coming, too?” Joe agreed.

The underground room was full of wine bottles. People lay on the ground every which way, and appeared to be asleep. Joe saw a small door beside the liquor cabinet and couldn’t help reaching out a hand to push it open.

“You will get free if you leave this place.” Vincent seemed to smile. “You will make up your mind eventually.”

Before Joe’s eyes appeared the back garden of his own home. A ghostly woman wearing a kimono stood in the garden.

“Maria!” he shouted.

A strange man walked out of the building. Glancing back, Joe saw that the door to the basement was already shut. Joe scanned the walls for signs of rain, but there were none. Whose house was so like his own?

The woman said to the man, “I’m going to the square.”

She finished this sentence and the sky grew dark. The man and the woman, one after the other, left the garden.

Joe finally emerged from the intricate crisscrossing alleys. He told Maria that he had been in a heavy-headed state, but light-footed. He remembered only that he saw parrots everywhere — on the balcony, on the walls, on the trashcans. Everywhere, and moreover, the birds weren’t afraid of people. When they saw Joe, they approached and spoke to him. The birds’ voices scared him, sounding too much like Vincent’s voice. Even the import of what they said was similar.

“Joe, have you made up your mind?” the old parrot swayed side to side toward him.

Joe looked up at a sky covered in haze, and answered dejectedly, “I want to find an exit.”

The bird stood its ground, dissatisfied. But wild laughter erupted behind Joe from another bird.

Maria heard him attentively to the end, and at last responded: “Vincent truly is your kindred spirit. When you pushed that small door open, didn’t you hesitate, even a little? It sounds so strange.”

“I thought of it too late.” He felt his will sinking.

The next day Joe took off from work. He began reading a book with only one page. The book was clothbound, with a drawing of a tall pine tree on the cover. Inside there was a single thick sheet of paper. This sheet could be unfolded to the length of the desk. The picture on the cover appeared to be of an anthill. The periphery of the anthill was densely written over with a miniature text, visible only under a magnifying glass. And once Joe looked with the glass, he discovered that he didn’t recognize a single word. This book had sat on the lowest shelf of the last rack in a small bookshop on a noisy street in the city. When Joe went to pay for it, the elderly bookstore owner came over and told him the book was not for sale.

“It was on the shelf, but it’s not for sale?” Joe was furious. He grasped the book tightly, almost afraid the shopkeeper would take it back by force.

“Fine, take it away, take it away! But don’t regret it!” He walked away resentfully.

The book’s price was unusually high, but Joe paid without hesitation.

Now he attempted to locate his own square in this anthill. Accompanying the slow movements of the magnifying glass in his hand, the floor under his feet began to rise and fall.

“Father, what are you doing in there?” Daniel shouted from outside the study.

“Be a good boy. Don’t come in, it’s a mess in here. .”

Daniel evidently didn’t dare enter. Joe sighed in relief and continued to wrestle with the book, which was flying around madly. At one point, he flopped down to the ground, his ear to the floor, and heard Maria’s voice underneath the floorboards. She sounded irritable. Joe didn’t care to listen to more, so he stood up, leaning against the wall. But he hadn’t been on his feet two minutes before he fell down onto the sofa. He looked around from the sofa and saw that the anthill had disappeared from that remarkable book and turned into a blank white space. He felt as if the sofa were a small boat on the rippling water. Daniel pushed the door slightly open and stuck his head in. His neck and face looked fresh and healthy.

“The study is finally mad, too,” Daniel said, looking pleased.

“Daniel, son, what are you planning to do?”

“Me? Don’t blame me, this is because of you, you bought that book. And there’s Mother. .”

He closed the door, apparently to go downstairs. Joe was astounded: “Does Daniel really know everything?”

In the chaos of the study, Joe started to think calmly. A dove was cooing. There was an actual dove inside the heap of books on the floor. Had it flown in through the window or had Maria put it there? Many of the books were damaged, their pages strewn all over. Joe leaned against the wall and slowly moved out onto the balcony. Before his eyes a familiar scene reappeared.

Maria and Daniel sat among the bushes drinking tea. The two cats walked, stately, back and forth. The balcony was directly in the line of sight of mother and son. Joe waved to them, but they did not respond. Did they even see him? The room shook again with violent tremors. Joe feared he would fall from the balcony, and quickly went inside, crawling aboard the sofa, holding on with a death grip. “And so there are things as strange as this,” he said to himself irritably.

Afterward the earthquake gradually subsided, although there were still aftershocks. The aftershocks continued until Maria called him to come downstairs and eat, when they finally disappeared. He went downstairs, disoriented, and sat at the dining table. Daniel wasn’t there.