Can Xue - The Last Lover

Joe became aware of a group of people surrounding the work shed, slinking about in the dark and talking in excited low whispers.

“Someone’s here,” Joe said.

“It’s always like that in places like this, thieves everywhere.”

Vincent blew out the oil lamp. He wanted Joe to talk about his happy adventures over these past days. Joe said there hadn’t been anything worth remembering. He was simply roaming. Because Vincent wanted to hear more, Joe made up a story about planting opium poppies on the plateau. Joe thought his narrative prosaic and dull. In the middle of telling it he heard the people outside closing in and beginning to knock on the windows. He believed he saw a knife blade gleaming in the moonlight. But Vincent pressed him to keep talking. He didn’t want Joe to stop.

“I wanted to smoke opium, but no one would let me. I’m an outsider here,” Joe said, feeling slighted.

“You were an outsider to start with, you come from the West. That’s what’s interesting. Look at Lisa, she had an obsession. She threw all her strength into it.”

Joe couldn’t speak because two dark figures had slipped into the room. Unsettled with fear, he calculated how much money remained in his wallet. He saw the two shadowy figures take seats at the table. In this way, the four of them each occupied one side of it. Vincent still talked about Lisa as if nothing had happened. He spoke about his wife’s pursuit over a long course of time. But Joe had stopped listening because the person on his right was stamping on his foot so hard he shouted in pain. He thought his bones might be broken. Should he give this man money? He was unable to determine whether the fellow wanted his money or his life, perhaps both. The man on his left lit a cigarette. In the spurt of flame from his lighter Joe saw the face of an outlaw.

Vincent was also smoking, and speaking unhurriedly. It looked as if he’d long since put life and death out of his thoughts.

“The gangs of thieves are as common in the plateau region as home-cooked meals. Many of the thieves live inside the Five Dragon Tower. Actually, some of them are also local, people who aren’t willing to do honest work, or who are lonely. But the thieves didn’t plot to murder Lisa. She wanted to take risks, she was obsessed. She’d been like this ever since she was young, and it’s hard to change your nature. I regret not going with her. I was too slow, always a step back. Joe, these two guys aren’t out for your life. If you want to go, you can go.”

Joe tried to stand up. He tried to leave the shed. And they didn’t prevent him. He saw the yellow dog standing at the work site waiting for him. Several spectral workers were carrying stones. Joe hadn’t gone very far when he stopped and thought of going back again. A face appeared under the work-site lamps. It was Xima Meilian, the indigenous woman he’d met on the first stop of his journey. Joe thought of going to meet her, but the yellow dog bit into his pants with a death grip. Joe became aware of something. He stopped struggling and stood in place, dumbly watching the woman.

There was a black shadow behind the woman’s body. Half of her beautiful face was blocked by the shadow, so Joe could only see one of her eyes. Her narrow eye still burned with the desire he’d seen in it before. She raised a hand, as if to welcome Joe over. The black shadow slowly enveloped her. Joe couldn’t see her. He wanted to call her name, but he didn’t know how to pronounce it. Looking once more, he saw the shadow already absorbed by the darkness of its surroundings. The work site’s sole lamp shone quietly. Joe sadly recalled that river.

Inside the work shed Vincent struck the bones on the table with a wooden stick. He’d gathered them inside of the Five Dragon Tower, the bones of wolves and dogs. He didn’t know why he’d wanted to say they were from Lisa’s skeleton, perhaps in order to give himself something to feed on. To search out Lisa’s tracks he had gone to many places across thousands of kilometers. The farther he went the more his heart lacked assurance. The Long March was only a long march, Vincent had learned this point profoundly. After she went missing Lisa never reappeared. One time, in a temple, Vincent saw a woman who looked like Lisa. But when he went over to her, he discovered it was a woman of a different race altogether. Although he couldn’t find Lisa, Vincent had never felt so close to her. Yes, he felt that he had already become Lisa. A longing sprang up in his heart to trek from one place to another. His soul melted into the landscape, strange to his eyes, of the Eastern world.

Lisa had disappeared from his side in a crowd of people. They were coming out of the largest department store in the city, and Lisa had told him to wait for her a moment because she saw a girl from her hometown. She squeezed through the spaces between people and soon disappeared. Vincent waited, but she didn’t come back. At last the black woman named Joyner came. Joyner told him she’d seen Lisa at the train station. She was rushing to catch a train. The night before, Lisa had told him she wanted to make an inspection in the field, to get a clear idea of the makeup of the troops who constituted the long march army. Vincent asked her whether she would journey to countries in the East. Equivocally, she made no answer.

Vincent didn’t start his journey until the second day. He understood that Lisa was using her action to point out a direction for him — to go to a place where he’d never been, a place of which he had no perception. So his first intention wasn’t even to search for Lisa, which was almost impossible anyway because there were no clues. His first intention was to throw off everything he had now and go, as Lisa had hinted to him, to try another kind of life. Of course he didn’t plan to abandon his clothing company. He only meant to let this long journey make him lose his way and become a different man, then afterward he would return. He thought it was probably the same with Lisa. When he passed the high-rise building in the car, the Eastern woman was standing at the doorway. The infinite emptiness of the expression on her face left him once again deeply shaken.

The first conveyance he chose for himself was an airplane, not a train. He thought that at high altitude he would recall Lisa’s appearance from their early years together. Before, he thought, he had not paid enough attention to many critical facts. These facts had revealed themselves to him many times in the early years. But on reaching high altitude, he discovered that his plan had come to nothing. People cannot return to the past through recollection. Not only did he fail to recall all sorts of details about their life; he couldn’t even call up the image of Lisa in those early years, as if when he met her she was already a woman of a certain age. He grew dejected and stopped trying to remember. Later he went many places, and Lisa’s face grew vaguer in his mind. And not only her face from earlier days. Little by little he forgot even her more recent appearance. On this point he was both anxious and upset.

One day he slept in a large courtyard belonging to a family of farmers. He slept until midnight, when he was startled awake by the repeated crowing of a rooster. He walked to the threshing floor and saw shadows in the landscape of the paddies where the water and sky met as one color. At the time the moon was bright, and a busy scene, very much like the Eastern markets he had seen many times in the previous days, appeared in the sky. But it was only an image, there was no sound. After careful discrimination, he made out that those shadows were all attempting to enter a structure resembling a casino, but a ferocious tiger stood on each side of the door. On top of the dome of the structure, an enormous hawk looked majestically over the shadows underneath. All the shadowlike people were blocked at the doorways by the tigers. Vincent wanted to look closer, but the old farmer, named Xiao (some people called him this), came out from the house. Xiao was smoking a pipe, his creased old eyes alive with vigor. He spoke a foreign language Vincent didn’t understand, and he seemed agitated. He talked and talked, making all sorts of gestures with his hands. Suddenly, Vincent’s mind opened, because when he stared at the old man’s face, he unexpectedly grasped the import of what Xiao was saying. The gist of the old man’s speech was: do not watch the scene in midair. It is extremely frightening. It kills people daily. Xiao painted a large circle with his hand, to show that there were human corpses buried in all the paddies in front of them. As he spoke the illusion in midair disappeared and became a ghostly atmosphere. Xiao abruptly shouted at Vincent. Vincent heard him say, “What did you really come here to do?”