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  On the surface, it looked as if his neck and stomach were giving him trouble, while in fact it was his job that was causing problems for his neck and stomach. He had mistreated his stomach for too long. During his school days, night-time reading kept him from eating breakfast, and that had not changed once he started working, because night shifts – therapy time – made sleeping in more attractive than breakfast. Time for lunch wasn’t his call either; it was up to the client, and he couldn’t up and leave in order to eat, could he? If he was having lunch and a client came in, what should he do? To finish eating, speed was the answer, and speed became his style of eating. Most of the time Sha didn’t really eat his food, he drank it. Stirring rice and vegetables together, he added soup, turning the dry rice into porridge so he didn’t have to chew. All he had to do was slurp everything, and, with a few perfunctory movements of the lips, it was done. He’d sent everything down to his stomach. But speed is no big deal for tuina therapists – they are all fast eaters. The key is speed and quantity. He had to eat enough to make up for the missed breakfast and for the dinner that surely would not come at a normal time, if it happened at all. Lunch, therefore, became the only meal he could count on, so he drank diligently and conscientiously. But drinking enough to be full also caused problems. Clients never asked for tuina therapy after lunch, a time when they preferred foot massages, so that they could take a catnap while the therapist pressed, kneaded, dug and rubbed their feet. Giving a foot massage required the therapist to sit, in Sha’s case, with a full stomach, so full he felt like throwing up and had to straighten up and stretch out his neck just to belch. A full stomach gave him trouble; an empty stomach was worse. When he thought back, he saw that he’d suffered more from an empty stomach than a full one. He usually ran out of steam after one o’clock in the morning. When young people are exhausted, they commonly develop a voracious appetite, and when that appetite goes unsatisfied, the stomach turns hysterical and vicious, as if it has grown five fingers to pull, tug, push, rub and knead, as skilful as Sha’s tuina movements.

  And that was how Sha Fuming slowly ruined his stomach. When it began to ache, he shunned all medicines. Zheng Zhihua’s lyrics say it best:

  He said in the wind and the rain,

  The pain was nothing

  Wipe away your tears and do not ask

  – Why

  Also disabled, the Taiwanese singer employed his upbeat, carefree lyrics to be inspirational, imbuing the song with tenderness as well as a sonorous yet fearless quality. Sha Fuming was convinced that this song was written specially for him. Indeed, the pain was nothing. Wipe away your tears and do not ask – Why. In fact, Fuming had no tears to wipe away. Shedding tears was beneath him.

  The ache stopped and was replaced by pain. How are those different? In terms of language, they aren’t, but to his mind there was a difference. An ache occurs over an area; it can grow and spread, but dully, like the knead and rub in tuina. A pain, on the other hand, is concentrated in a single point, and acutely; it can go deeper, and sharper, like pressure in tuina. Later his pain underwent a minor change, it became a tearing sensation. How did it tear? Where had the two hands in his stomach come from?

  Chapter Three

  Xiao Ma

  SO WANG DAIFU moved into the men’s dorm, which, like most such accommodations, consisted of remodelled apartments with three or four bunk beds in the former master bedroom, the living room and the study to accommodate from six to eight men.

  As a newcomer, Wang Daifu could not expect to have a choice and, sure enough, he was assigned an upper bunk, to his disappointment. People in love instinctively desire lower bunks for convenience; but, of course, he did not complain. Grabbing the railing of the upper bunk, he gave it a hard tug; the bed didn’t budge, a sign that it was firmly attached to the wall by expansion screws. For some reason, that little detail pleased him enormously. Sha Fuming was all right. That was the advantage of having a blind man as a boss, someone who paid attention to insignificant details often overlooked by the sighted. More importantly, a blind boss knew just where he needed to display his considerate side.

  The lower bunk was occupied by Xiao Ma, or Little Horse, a man who, based on his experience, Wang Daifu treated with special courtesy. In a dorm like this, interactions between the bunkmates are usually quite delicate; while outwardly friendly, they can find it hard to get along. Trouble brews if they are not careful, though it seldom escalates into a major problem and is not something one easily brings up, and that can lead to awkwardness. Wang Daifu preferred to avoid awkward situations. Since he was just trying to make a living, not establish control, why get involved in personal intrigues? Peace can be a source of wealth, as they say. So he was cordial to Xiao Ma. But he soon realised that his civility was pointless, for Xiao Ma was an enigma. He reacted the same whether you treated him well or badly, and he treated everyone with indifference, neither good nor bad.

  Xiao Ma was young, early twenties. If not for a traffic accident at the age of nine, what would he be doing and what would he be like now? These hypothetical questions may have been pointless, utterly useless, and yet suppositions lingered. In idle moments, he liked to probe the hypotheses, and before long he would be so mired in them he would lose himself in a dreamlike state. On the surface, the accident had left few marks on him – his limbs were intact and he had no horrific scars. It had simply destroyed his optic nerves, leaving him totally blind, bereft of even the basic sense of light.

  And yet his eyes looked perfectly fine, no different from those of a sighted person. To be sure, if you tried hard enough you could see a difference – his eyeballs seemed livelier. When he was deep in thought, or angry, his eyeballs habitually moved, shifting from left to right, back and forth. That went unnoticed by most people, which caused him trouble that other blind people did not experience. Take riding the bus, for instance. The blind – Xiao Ma included – can ride for free, but not a single bus driver ever believed he was blind, which often led to embarrassing situations. Once, after boarding a bus, the driver announced repeatedly over the loudspeaker: ‘Attention, passengers, please voluntarily pay the fare.’ Xiao Ma knew at once that ‘voluntarily’ had a specific target: him. He stood in the aisle, holding tightly to the handrail, not saying a word. No blind person will ever advertise, ‘I’m blind.’ That is unthinkable. So he kept quiet and stayed put. The driver, a stubborn sort, picked up his mug and began to sip tea, waiting as if he had all the time in the world. The engine idled, also waiting patiently, until the silence inside the bus seemed unnatural, actually humiliating. Xiao Ma was the first to blink, after about a minute: he could not pay the fare and could not stand the idea of losing face; better to get off the bus. So he did. With a roar of the engine, the bus blasted his feet with warm exhaust, like invisible consolation or unseen mockery. He was outraged by the public humiliation. But he was smiling. That smile seemed embroidered onto his face, stitched there by needle and thread to hold the skin together. I can’t even be a blind man, the public won’t let me. He managed to smile, but never again stepped onto a bus. He had learned the art of rejection. He shunned – feared, actually – anything connected with ‘the public’. There was nothing wrong with staying inside; he had no intention of solemnly announcing to the world, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I am blind. I am really blind.’

  But Xiao Ma was handsome. Anyone who saw him shared the view that he was the personification of good looks. At first he reacted with anger, refusing to believe them, convinced that they were being sarcastic. Only after he’d heard the comment from enough people did he finally calm down and accept what they were saying. He had a handsome face. Having lost his sight at the age of nine, he could not recall what his face was like back then. It was like a dream, an impossibly distant dream. In fact, he’d put his face out of his mind. What a shame. But things were fine now, for he knew he was handsome. Hand-some – two unrelated words put together with unbroken intricacy and crispness to form a description that was pleasing to the ear.r />
  But handsome Xiao Ma had a not-so-handsome imperfection – it was on his neck. A surprisingly large scar, not a memento from the accident, but of his own doing. Soon after the accident, he recovered and began to walk, but the light in front of him had gone out. He panicked, so his father promised him that it was not serious and that everything would be fine soon. So he was plunged into waiting, or more precisely, a long, seemingly endless process of treatment. His father took him all over the country, journeying to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi’an, Harbin, Chengdu, even as far as Lhasa. Shuttling between cities and between hospitals, the young Xiao Ma was on the road all the time, but he never reached his destination. He arrived only at disappointment. But his father remained in high spirits, brimming with undying enthusiasm, promising his beloved son over and over. Don’t worry. You’ll be better. Daddy will make you see again. Taking his father’s words as a cue, Xiao Ma raised his hopes again and again, but deep down he was worried. He wanted to see, he needed to see, yet his damned eyes refused to open. But, of course, they were open. He began using his hands, tearing at the void before his eyes. But no matter how hard he tried, his hands were useless in shredding the darkness. Flying into a rage, he grabbed his father and bit down on his hand, not letting go. That happened in Lhasa. Then his father got wonderful news: in Nanjing, the starting point of their long journey, an ophthalmologist who had recently returned from Germany was practising at Nanjing’s First People’s Hospital. Xiao Ma had heard of Germany, which was a lot farther than the other places. Scooping him up in his arms, his father shouted, ‘Son, we’re going back to Nanjing, and this time it will work. I promise you, you will get your sight back.’

  No longer in a distant place, the doctor from Germany reached out to touch Xiao Ma’s face, inducing in the nine-year-old boy a sense of foreboding. He believed in distance, and had no faith in anyone or anything nearby. Since the hand that had returned from Germany could touch his face, it was no longer distant. Subsequent developments proved him right when a shocking incident took place – his father pinned down the doctor on the floor and used his fists on him. It happened at the far end of the hallway, away from Xiao Ma, who should have been out of earshot but wasn’t. By some unthinkable miracle, his ears allowed him to hear everything. His father and the doctor had been engaged in secretive whispering before Xiao Ma’s father got down on his knees, but still failed to sway the doctor; so he pounced and pinned the doctor to the floor, demanding a promise that his son would regain his sight in a year. The doctor refused. Xiao Ma heard the doctor clearly say, ‘That’s impossible.’ So his father used his fists.

  That was when nine-year-old Xiao Ma exploded, though it was altogether different from other kinds of explosions, for his was marked by an astonishing calm; no one could believe that a nine-year-old was capable of that sort of intensity. As he lay in bed, his ears shifted their focus and he heard people eating in the adjoining ward. Someone was using a spoon, someone was using a bowl; he heard the crisp sound of a spoon scraping against a bowl. It was a pleasant sound, so resonant.

  Groping his way along the wall, Xiao Ma walked over; holding on to the door frame, he asked with a smile, ‘Auntie, could I have some?’ Then turning to face her, he added in a soft voice, ‘But please don’t feed me. I want to eat on my own.’

  The woman placed the bowl in his right hand and the spoon in his left. But instead of eating, he smashed the bowl against the doorjamb, leaving only a broken shard in his hand, which he then jabbed into his neck and ripped it across. Who could conceive of a nine-year-old carrying out such a horrifying act? Stunned, the woman tried to scream, but managed only to stretch her mouth wide without making a sound. His blood spattered, like shrapnel, all over the place. This successful explosion elated him, as he felt the hot blood flying around. But Xiao Ma was, after all, a nine-year-old boy, and forgot that he was not out on the street or in a park, but at a hospital, where they quickly came to his aid. He was left with a horrific scar that grew with him; as he got taller, it turned longer and wider.

  The scar was not easy to miss, and many of the non-regular clients noticed it the moment they lay down. Curious, they knew they had to ask about it in a roundabout way. Normally taciturn, he rarely talked to his clients, but at moments like this he was direct, knowing that even more would have to be said if he beat around the bush.

  ‘You want to know about my scar,’ he’d say.

  ‘Yes.’ Curiosity trumped shame.

  ‘Well, I lost my eyesight. I got desperate when I couldn’t see,’ he’d answer in a singsong voice, ‘and all that desperation made me lose the will to live. I did it to myself.’

  ‘Oh – how about now?’ the worried client would ask.

  ‘Now? I’m no longer desperate. What good would that do me?’ He’d finish with a smile, in a calm, tranquil voice. Then he’d stop talking to the client altogether.

  Wang Daifu tried to avoid speaking with his bunkmate at the tuina centre, owing to Xiao Ma’s aversion to conversation, but he had to maintain the appearance of civility in the dorm. So, before going to bed, he’d speak with Xiao Ma, but usually only in brief sentences or a few exchanged words. And he always spoke first. Not to be taken lightly, those few words were essential to a harmonious relationship between the upper and lower bunks. By rights there was no need for him to do that, since he was so much older than Xiao Ma, but he insisted upon a cordial dialogue, and he had his reasons. Both men were blind, but Wang had been born that way, while Xiao Ma had been sighted for a few years. That made a difference, a vast difference. Anyone who took no heed of that would not survive in their world.

  Take silence for example. The blind are normally silent in public, but there are different kinds of silences. Those who are born blind are naturally quiet, but not those who lose their sight later in life; they experience two worlds that meet at a special place called purgatory. Not all of them manage to pass through it. At the entrance, they undergo the torment of internal chaos and turmoil, a manic process marked by fierce temper, so cruelly overwhelming that only ruins are left. In the deepest crevice of memory, each of them has not lost his world, only his connection with the world, but without which the world has suddenly become deep, hard and distant. Most importantly, it has turned mysterious and unfathomable, and probably impossible to defend against. In order to deal with the change, he must do one thing – commit a homicide. He must kill himself, not with a knife or a gun, but with fire. His body must roil in an engulfing flame until he smells the stench of burning flesh. What does a phoenix rising from the ashes mean? It means you must first immolate yourself.

  But it is not enough merely to immolate yourself, for there remains an even greater test – to remould the self, and that requires steely determination and rock-solid patience. He needs time, for he is a sculptor, not a master artist, progressing chaotically, chipping here and hacking there. Facing an unfamiliar sculpture, few know who they will be when the rebirth begins. Often, the completed sculpture turns out to be radically different from what he had wished for. He does not love himself. He turns taciturn.

  The silence of these people is authentic, seemingly devoid of content, but in fact it overflows with bitter laments and anguish, a surfeit of stressful struggle. Hence his silence often goes overboard, as do his quietude and his calmness. Yet he must go overboard to such a degree that silence is transformed into a sort of faith, under whose guidance the present ‘I’ becomes God while the old ‘me’ can only be the devil. The devil is still inside him, and he must be forever vigilant and alert. The older me is the karmic evil of three thousand years before, a smiling, self-satisfied snake. A snake is such a vivid, alluring creature, one brimming with enchanting power, that if you’re not careful it will doom you to a state beyond redemption. Wavering between the two selves, he turns irascible. He must control his irascibility.

  Seen from this perspective, one who loses his sight after birth undergoes none of life’s stages – childhood, pre-teen, teens, middle age, or old ag
e. After rising from the ashes, he is immediately thrust into the complexities of life. Beneath his childlike expression are the vicissitudes of life, the secrets of being alive. With the ability to see through everything in life, he displays an unfounded sophistication. His body lacks eyes but is itself a pitch-black eye that reflects everyone except himself. This eye can appear hostile at times, tender and loving at others; it knows how to be an indifferent onlooker, keeping a detached, suspicious attitude. A deity three feet above the ground.

  Xiao Ma’s silence embraced the solemnity of a sculpture; it was not nature or instinct, but a skill he had honed to perfection. Under normal circumstances, he could maintain that solemnity for hours, weeks, months, even years. To him, life was a process of control and a continuation of repetitiveness.

  But life cannot be endlessly repetitive, since it is not an assembly line. No one can turn life into a moulding press for soap or slippers, and produce days with equal sides, quality and weight. Life has its own rhythm of addition and subtraction, allotting more to today, less to tomorrow, and more to the day after. As the real facet of life, this process of addition and subtraction is what makes life interesting, enjoyable and unpredictable, all at the same time.

  Addition now appeared in Xiao Ma’s life, which had been going along just fine until Wang Daifu and Xiao Kong were added.

  It was past one o’clock in the morning when Xiao Kong first showed up in Xiao Ma’s dorm room.