Creative disclaimer: this piece contains fictional elements. Certain events and details have been fictionalized and should not be taken as fact.

I. Effacement

The watercolor landscape dissolves and vanishes in the June rain,
a cry of sorrow beneath an umbrella,
the downpour dyes farewell red.
— スイサイ／アンブレラ／ロクガツ／ドライフラワ

Yang Shukai lay curled in the pellucid early-summer dusk rain, the water flooding his mind until it swelled and swayed, unmoored. Between consciousness and sensation a thin membrane had been laid; in the montage of memory, he extended his left hand to feel the fragrant, dizzying splendor of the world in bloom and the damp, clammy rot of the orchard mud, and his racing heart began to slow.

The sky before him turned murky. Pale light seeped through the gray window glass and spread across his face, which had taken on the blank expression of rotting wood. Thin threads of deathly stillness radiated faintly from his body. Raindrops struck him in provocations, treading him down with cruel weight. His numb neck struggled and writhed, but could not lift his head; the aching soreness in his shoulders and neck called back to him the memory of how, under the gaze of a vast crowd, his head had gradually lowered, until at last it hung limp against his torso, as if there were no life left in it. His hands convulsed. His breathing came in fragments. His eyes stared blankly at the scratches the sharp fruit-tree leaves had left across his arm. The mark, which had almost broken the skin, showed an odd rose-pink color, dimmed now by the running water. But just as that red was about to fade, a drop of deep crimson squeezed from the crease of skin, and the wound gave way, thin bright blood seeping out onto the surface. This blood mixed with the grassy smell of rain seemed the only thing in the surrounding world that still held a vivid color; the blood seemed to want to consume him. He felt it soaking into the school’s orchard soil, spreading across the asphalt, flowing up over the orange bricks beside the classroom. He felt something inside him draining away in an endless stream. He felt blood surging onto the sports ground, onto the podium, running through the black windows and into the empty bathrooms beyond.

The school building in early summer baked with heat. When class let out, boys swarmed into the bathrooms like ants. The bathroom lights were small and charming, their dim glow delicate as fireflies. The slippery floor sent three or four boys sliding forward out of control; one landed hard on the stone floor with a loud wail, flailing his chubby little fists. A few seconds later someone’s feet caught the fallen boy and stumbled over him, involuntarily letting loose a string of crude language, teeth bared at the boy on the ground, spraying spittle. The boy on the floor twisted to stand and shoved the standing boy hard in the shoulder; the standing boy toppled, his hands pressing the floor and coming away smeared with a brownish-black mixture of shoe mud and bathroom water. His face twisted into a knot of distress; he scrambled to a sink and cranked the tap wide open to rinse his palms, the glaring-white water spraying outward, forcing everyone within a meter to raise their elbows in defense. Curses drifted on and on, the reek of flatulence rose to the heavens, and together they formed a vast, pure, sensory sea of joy.

Footsteps boomed outside, boomed closer. The boys playing in the bathroom sensed that against the bright mirror of the window, a cluster of dark shapes now loomed over this territory of rank and rank smells. Several gray-green shadows drifted around the corner, pressed toward the bathroom entrance; suddenly a demonic wind rose, ghostly cries filled the air, footsteps inside scattered into disorder, and the one tap still not fully shut off stood there gaping, dripping its slow drips. The sounds of shuffling faded; overlapping breaths echoed off the stone tiles.

The shadow stepped without ceremony through the bathroom door, and the darkness dissolved instantly to reveal Yang Shukai’s bold face – stubbled despite being barely past ten – and the force in it. He stood for a moment, then spun sharply and brought his palm down hard against the tap handle. The tap’s throat caught with a shriek, and Yang Shukai cut off the running water. He moved his gaze slowly from the tap to the heads in the room; cold sweat broke out on a dozen foreheads at once. The shadows behind Yang Shukai stepped in too. Backlit, the group fixed their attention on a small boy with deep-set eyes and wheat-dark skin. The boy’s lips twitched; he stepped out from the crowd. His drawn brows pointed at Yang Shukai, bristling with fury, and he walked of his own accord to stand before him, stubble raised in defiance. The two locked eyes with burning intensity; the onlookers fell back further, clearing an arena in the center of the bathroom.

“Three, two, one!”

In the quiet of night, the insects called out in their loneliness, and he huddled beneath them, gazing up at the winding river of stars. Churning thoughts kept him tossing and turning, his body absorbing the uncanny smell of the earth’s countless deaths and rebirths. On the deep blue expanse of sky, brilliant stars plunged all at once in a sudden free fall, then paused before his wide-open eyes, and at last floated in midair. Yang Shukai imagined quietly the sorrow and transcendence of scooping up all those stars in one sweep, but his weary breathing gradually faded as his consciousness darkened. In this enormous, life-turning school campus, ten thousand scattered crystal tears shattered against his drenched clothes, shimmering with a blue-black silver light, tenderly and intensely soaking through this immense and infinitesimal figure, a person dying alive…

II. Interlude

Looking up at the storm already lost,
clouds too cruel now to weep for me,
the last of green youth.
— 迷彩

One dazzling morning in 2014, the sun drove its immovable rays of righteous light into every body in Shanghai. Another Monday of mixed feelings: the stream of cars in front of the school washed away the weekend’s inertia and began its circular flow again. Directly across from the school gate was the water park’s parking lot, a steady procession of sedans pulling in and pulling out, flowing into a picture of a prosperous, developed city. The yellow dust and exhaust fumes scattered by each set of screeching tires worked their way into the throats of the parent-volunteers hissing directions at the intersection; fresh-faced pupils bounced with energy, riding their morning vigor into this “prestigious school” familiar to every elementary parent, hopping lightly over rows of narrow, tightly packed bricks and making their way into the classrooms.

Sparse trees and shrubs ringed the school’s modest athletic field, their branches and leaves watching silently as row upon row of students filed out from the classrooms. Teachers wore stiff faces; students wore swaying smiles and occasionally made a shrill little noise, only to fall silent again at once. Standing on the field, they might have been weathered stone statues, motionless as curiosities. The idle clouds grew bored and moved on, and the fierce sunlight poured down. A layer of heat settled over the students as they waited for the revered old figure on the podium to finish his remarks.

Yang Shukai glanced at the stone statues around him and let out a lazy yawn.

He let his body go soft, feet tilted awkwardly in support. His head drooped; he watched the insects and leaves chasing each other across the green grass, a fragrant young leaf drifting past his cheek, and a little bug following it toward the vast free blue sky. The scene on the field made him feel, somehow, both the school campus’s definitive narrowness and a sorrowful awareness of how little he actually knew of it. He recalled his childhood spent cooped up at a wooden desk and chair, and a thin smile of contempt, melancholy, and resignation cut across the corner of his mouth. He looked toward where the homeroom teacher was standing: she paced with her hands swinging carelessly, glancing now and then with bared teeth at the peacefully expressionless stone forest, grinding her molars together. Yang Shukai thought of her morbid obsession with orderly, silent lines, thought of her flailing large palm and her blood-basin mouth that could swallow a person whole, and felt a chill run through him.

Yang Shukai thought of a joke that had happened in class. On the way to the library in a queue, two friends were whispering to each other. The teacher immediately spotted this “misconduct” and required them both to copy their own names a hundred times in the library. One had a name with many strokes; the other’s name had few. When they finished, the one with more strokes felt it was unfair, and a vague resentment toward his friend took root – one that had not dissolved to this day. Two good companions had parted ways from there.

At that thought, Yang Shukai felt a basin of cold water crash down on his chest.

The principal concluded his address, and the exhausted microphone let out a buzz and went to sleep. The stone statues began slowly to move. They bounced over the soft grass still reflecting the sunlight’s glow, they crossed the black asphalt, they stepped over the rows of narrow, tightly packed bricks, and returned to their classrooms.

III. Golden Embers

On the eve of revolution,
a lightning bolt lands in the explosion,
the paper-prop curtain reduced to splinters of wood.
— グラウンドゼロ

It was still the age of children saying whatever they pleased. People who had just entered the first decade of their lives gathered in the classroom to discuss flights of fantasy and endearingly silly jokes. When class let out, laughter rose and swirled and scattered through the not-too-large room, in vivid contrast to the stillness of lessons. The homeroom teacher’s office sat in one corner of the classroom – she witnessed the outlandish things this absurd pack of children got up to, her ears full of their clamor. A careless slip when marking homework made her feel that she too, like these minors, had gotten an answer wrong; her temper frayed, and her pen made a fierce slash across the page.

Nearby, some children, unable to exhaust the new-life energy careening through their bodies, stood up to stretch; others, worn out by the tedious in-class assignments, put down their pens and left their seats. Their clumsy movements gradually morphed into running and jumping; mischievous boys wove through the somewhat crowded gaps between desks and chairs. One troublemaker made a gun with his fingers, aimed for a second, and pulled the trigger hard at another boy tangled in the maze of desks and chairs. For an instant it seemed as though a spark flashed from his fingertip; the other boy grinned and, with a theatrical “Ah!”, collapsed sideways. Lost in the performance, his foot caught on a schoolbag that had appeared from nowhere; he jerked his left hand back and thrust out his right to brace himself against a chair seat, but still snapped like a fragile sapling, half his shoulder plunging into the lap of the girl sitting next to him – she had been frowning over an English in-class exercise that looked like hieroglyphics – both his legs kicking wildly out into the aisle.

The sudden weight and warmth on her legs startled the girl’s hand into a jerk; the pen in her hand wobbled, flipped, and fell like a bullet toward the floor. She quickly pressed her hands on the desk to lean out and rescue it before it hit the ground – but she hadn’t anticipated that her left hand would land on the exercise book, and the two of them slid together off the edge of the desk, while the boy’s weight on her legs let her torso extend only halfway. In the midst of all this commotion, the right hand she had planned to brace on the next desk over also missed the surface, her left hand flew off the desk like a rocket, and her center of gravity was overturned beyond recovery. The boy, not grasping the situation, struggled to get up; the girl’s legs were suddenly freed, and her feet were dragged off the floor by her own upper body as it came crashing down.

“Crash!”

The girl’s delicate lips burst into a sudden crumple, and her cream-white skin was drawn into painful fungus-thread wrinkles, twisted out of all recognition.

The gunsmoke from the as-yet-unconfirmed barrel curled gracefully, swaying into the air, while the classroom rang with laughter and song. The troublemaker who had fired the shot stood there, jaw dropping along with the girl’s body. At that instant, his hollow skull erupted with a thunderous explosion; shards flew through his mind, left and right, jabbing stars into his eyes. He still held his gun, standing alone on a battlefield piled with desks and chairs and schoolbags, invisible shadows closing mercilessly around him. He opened his mouth wide and opened his eyes wider in silence, arm convulsing violently, then going limp and slack, as though an invisible iron bullet had passed clean through his thin arm. The crimson ink bleeding from the fallen pen stained the dust-covered wooden floor black; the rolling cap drifted in the ink pool like a little flat-bottomed boat, glinting like a spent cartridge, and the oddly shaped nib pointed wordlessly, mockingly, at the girl’s face pressed against the floor.

Three days later, the troublemaker’s abandoned soul was found by a school auntie among the tangled, filthy thornbushes. She gave it a puzzled glance, flicked off the dust, and walked away.

IV. The Creation of Adam

Cold autumn, warm spring, blue-dark evenings, red-bright mornings –
good morning,
good night.
— 赤道を越えたら

“Let’s form an adventure squad!” said the bespectacled boy, who had spent the previous night journeying through the strange Undying Kingdom with Charlie Nine and Mo Duoduo and their companions.

The eyes around him converged on the bespectacled boy. He removed his glasses with practiced flair and hung them from his collar – this was the look he wore only for a certain particular girl. He gave his head a mental shake and swept thoughts of her aside for now. Then he stood up straight, slapped the desk, and asked, infused with the passion and fighting spirit that had been accumulating around him:

“Do you – would any of you – form an adventure squad with me, and find a time to go on an adventure together?”

His eyes radiated a clean, golden light. Beneath his quiet exterior boiled a fervent heat; the free-ranging imagination in his belly tightened and swelled in turns. The ghosts and goblins of remembered book pages stirred to life, wearing alluring, bewitching expressions, dancing in the bespectacled boy’s heart.

Silence fell when he finished speaking. The sound of shoe soles on the wooden floor and the wash of nearby classmates’ voices dropped suddenly to a thin murmur; the waveform went flat, the hum pinched off one by one.

The classroom air changed color. Eyes drifted without landing anywhere. A few people blinked at each other, as if wanting to say something, then said nothing. The air solidified.

“Me me me me, I want to join!!”

In the few seconds of blank staring that followed, Yang Shukai leapt from his seat, raised his right hand as high as it would go, and shattered the transparent block of solidified air. His smile bloomed across his face like a spring flower; his eyes widened to full moons, his nostrils exhaling thick white breath. He implored the bespectacled boy with intense joy and certainty to count him in as a member of this future-uncertain, not-yet-mature adventure squad. His young heart had imagined countless times the quest into the Forest of White Bones, the descent into the depths of Atlantis’s mysteries, the escape from this terrible and dreadful and yet utterly ordinary reality. He felt stifled. This school campus, the sea of knowledge inside it – both were dead and lifeless. But this daily life would never end; this Dead Sea was boundless. His fear rose from that block of air beside him. The air block pressed and played with him invisibly… he had to shatter it! Hearing the four loud, forceful words “adventure squad,” it seemed to him like an express flight toward the secret kingdom inside his heart, a golden key to unlock the gates of the imagined kingdom bound up in chains, and beyond that gate lay infinite unknowns ready to fill his infinite curiosity.

As Yang Shukai straightened his spine, under the pallid lights and the lazily and humbly turning fan, half his face was covered in a murky halo. Just then the evening sun glanced sideways and poured wild golden-red light directly onto Yang Shukai’s outstretched hand. The sky was cloudless; the light wrapped without concession around Yang Shukai’s arm, golden-bright as a sacred scepter.

In that corner of the classroom there was only stillness. People stared at Yang Shukai, his face lit so white it blazed, holding aloft his radiant right hand like a divine statue. Exquisite light danced on his hand. Yang Shukai seemed now to have become the sum of countless students’ burning hearts; his slight arm was in that moment endowed with boundless life and spiritual power. The pores on his arm opened with magnificent ease, radiating a distant yet clear song of youth. The drifting song moved through the small space of the classroom like Peter Pan, and everyone who heard it could not help but show an expression of wonder and longing. He reached toward the bespectacled boy with a hand composed of all-encompassing, vibrant fragments of light.

A moment later, the bespectacled boy reached out his hand with poise, touching the scepter with care, like a scene in slow motion.

The water cup on the desk fell to the floor, ringing out a clear, sharp sound like a snapped string. The song vanished instantly; the thick paper over the ears of everyone present was pierced by the clash of metal, and the whirring of the rusty fan, the fizzing flicker of the pale fluorescent lights, and the babble of idle conversation filled the classroom all at once. Five people – three girls, two boys – pressed their lips tight, watching the handover of radiance in grave silence: fierce waves of light rippling as the glow flowed from Yang Shukai’s arm across the bespectacled boy’s whole body. The two figures, as if in a church fresco, patted each other quietly on the shoulder. The five at their seats exchanged glances, and said nothing. Before Yang Shukai and the bespectacled boy had even turned around, someone in a seat burst out: “Count me in too!”

Then five hands, scrambling over each other, rose one after another amid the singing and humming and muttering noise of the classroom.

V. The Duel

My life, unhinged somewhere, is a tragedy too puerile and clumsy.
You must be laughing at me from the ceiling now – this human-shaped finale?
— 夢遊病者は此岸にて

“Three, two, one!”

The fight broke out in an instant: Yang Shukai and the deep-set-eyed, wheat-skinned boy tangled together in a flash. They threw punches and kicks, tearing at each other’s clothes. The crowd of male classmates standing nearby fell back a few steps, clearing a space in the center of the bathroom, then pumped their elbows and shouted to cheer on their respective comrades. Footsteps clattered in the not-spacious room without any pattern; rough breathing stretched tight. “Ma Chichi! Hit his back! Hit his back!” – “Yang Shukai, sweep his legs!” The onlookers had already started issuing reckless instructions; both Yang Shukai and Ma Chichi were locked in the heat of the fight and couldn’t help feeling flustered at the shouting, both of them speeding up their hands. The two shoved and grappled; clothes came undone, sweat appearing on their foreheads. Ma Chichi was pushed to the edge of the sink and splashed a face full of water at Yang Shukai; Yang Shukai seized the moment to unscrew the soap dispenser and retaliate, and within a short time the floor was awash with liquid. Some onlookers had already left the edge of the ring; others fell back further, nearly pressed against the walls. At that moment, Ma Chichi slipped and went down, his hands releasing Yang Shukai’s collar to brace the floor. His legs were covered in the filth of mixed soap, tap water, and the mud from classmates’ shoes. Seeing the look of incredulous disgust on Ma Chichi’s face, Yang Shukai burst out laughing; while Ma Chichi was still wobbling after just getting up, Yang Shukai slammed him against the bathroom stall door, then drove his shoulder hard from the other side. Ma Chichi, his balance still gone, grabbed for something to hold and caught the door latch by accident; intending to brace himself upright, he pulled the latch and instead accelerated the stall door’s closure.

“Bang!”

The stall door slammed shut with a crisp, clean crack. Ma Chichi panicked; he had been confined to this narrow stall, the toilet inconveniently positioned right in the middle, his feet inevitably straddling its rim. The liquid on the stall floor seemed to contain more ingredients than the original filth; the toilet bowl still held unflushed excrement. The nauseating stench and the stifling heat hit him all at once, dizzying him. He pinched his nose with one hand and pushed the door with the other – but his strength was no match for Yang Shukai’s entire body weight pressed against the door from outside. His breathing came faster; he was forced to move his hand from his nose, shouting and hammering at the door, wrestling with the latch. The door didn’t budge. The onlookers were stunned. The watching crowd thinned further, and those still watching fell silent. Ma Chichi pressed his body up against the door; Yang Shukai recognized the signal and leaned in harder, his other hand also pressed firm against the door. Separated by a single panel, both could hear each other’s panting. Yang Shukai seemed to see right through the door to Ma Chichi’s blood-red furious eyes, blazing with rage. Their energy was not infinite; their undeveloped muscles could not sustain this much longer. Both faces were contorted; Yang Shukai took a deep breath.

“Ha!” – one last fierce shove. He spent the last of what was in him.

“Crash!”

The sound exploded through the bathroom, carrying far. Ma Chichi felt light sweep into his eyes; he found he could see the incandescent bulb overhead again, its glow dim and grayish. He gave two dry laughs. Yang Shukai stepped back, hands bracing the sink. The tap not quite shut off dripped its steady drips. Neat footsteps came clapping, clapping. Drip, drip, clap, clap, drip, drip, clap, clap, drip, drip, clap, clap.

The teacher’s eyes were fixed on Yang Shukai and Ma Chichi. The teacher stood without moving. The small dark mass floating in the vast white of the teacher’s eyes was filled with a metaphysical bewilderment – not simply confusion or shock. In that moment, the star in the teacher’s eye collapsed, and a bottomless black hole appeared.

The bathroom stall door had been broken by the fight and fallen inward. Before the teacher arrived, every spectator had fled without a trace.

VI. Ordeal of Swallowing

…Bon appétit…
— 浴室

The air was warm but sharp and coarse; the bespectacled boy breathed and felt his throat being scraped by an animal’s claws. He cleared his throat – rather than improving, it accumulated a slick wad of phlegm.

Every school day, what third-graders (or all elementary students, for that matter) looked forward to most was, in ascending order: the end of class, lunch break, going home. Listening to the teacher read aloud in a blank expression the same obscure and flavorless words she had given last year’s cohort, the playful students dreamed, the bright students stayed awake, and only those caught in the middle – neither brazen enough to openly check out, nor able to transcend the prescribed pace and let their imaginations roam – sat in a fog, half-dreaming. They could follow most of the lesson but not fully; they sat upright and bewildered, half-awake. After class, at lunch break, after school, it was the wild imagination and passion for the world that scorched their small hearts and bodies – that was childhood.

An oil-pastel orange sun was ringed by impenetrably gray clouds. The clock ticked; the jelly-like clouds refused to leave. In the dead silence of problem-solving, the fourth-period bell exploded with its “ding-ling-ling, ding-ling-ling”; pens clattered onto desks, and students swiftly pulled out their place mats and made straight for the food line. The queue formed immediately, filled with the clanging of iron trays and the slurping of eating. One boy so hungry he could hardly stand wolfed down his food in a windstorm; the classmate next to him threw a look of contempt.

The bespectacled boy lifted the steaming, fogged-over lid that concealed the contents of his tray with trembling hands.

He didn’t notice how the red lines in his eyes stood out like red correction marks on a test paper. The food in the tray felt no fear; it looked back at him with a sinister gaze. The sun wailed and disappeared behind banks of gray cloud; black shadows shot out in all directions, forming row upon row of terrible chains. Outside the window, a toad croaked its murky, guttural croak. A wave of steam fogged up his lenses. He removed his glasses in a daze and took out his cloth to wipe them. He hadn’t yet identified what was on the tray, but the blurry distorted shapes before him seemed to be moving in the smallest possible increments; a layer of dread rose in the bespectacled boy, and the hand wiping his lenses trembled involuntarily. He lowered his head and watched the clear brightness of the steam, internally remarking with a sigh that beneath the pure vapor rising from the lid was a mass of dark shadow. He blinked and put his glasses back on – and at once, gastric acid surged back up toward his throat.

He had identified the repellent creature in the tray: pitch-black eel and eggplant. The worm-like eel, its body slick with a mucus like the phlegm in his throat, lay curled in the corner of the tray, its skin reflecting a dark glossy light. It seemed to be breathing in slow rises and falls in its sleep; from a distance it resembled a pile of fresh human excrement tangled and pressed together; up close, one could make out the extremely dense and numerous spots on its body, like countless gloomy eyes fixing on the bespectacled boy and refusing to let go. The bespectacled boy caught a wave of suffocating stench and felt his mind go hazy; he seemed to see the eel begin to move – the mucus made wet squelching sounds, and the flaunting eel began to sway its round head and writhe its sinuous body like some extraterrestrial creature. The bespectacled boy felt his throat seize; his chopsticks moved and stopped in the air, his mouth trembling, emitting small panicked sounds. He forced himself not to look directly at the eel and began scooping at the rice and other food elsewhere on the tray, but the once-fragrant smell of the rice had been contaminated beyond repair; on this olfactory wall all he could see were enormous spots corroding what should have been a smooth surface. The spots bared themselves at the bespectacled boy with a hissing, sputtering breath like a stuck-out tongue, the dense spots becoming dense eyes, and these eyes opened – but their pupils were murky and void like the red-bean paste filling of a glutinous rice ball. The eel began to writhe again into the shape of a snake. The bespectacled boy swallowed the remaining food; now only the eel and eggplant held their ground in the tray, staring him down. The eel dripped its connective saliva. The bespectacled boy was at a loss; his tongue moved in and out of its own accord, like that eel.

Everyone around him had already finished eating. The classroom was left with the bespectacled boy in a cold standoff with the eel. He looked skyward for help – the sky said nothing. The sky had grown a face like a demon ox; the face howled in uncontainable rage, blasting hot, multicolored breath, commanding the bespectacled boy to keep eating until the tray was clean as a mirror. Then she marched back to her office in the classroom corner and shut her ears.

The bespectacled boy lifted a fat-maggot eel on his chopsticks; the instant it touched his mouth he retched repeatedly. He squeezed his eyelids, tightened his cheeks, and forced the thing down toward his throat. The eel seemed to thrash its tail inside him, bouncing up and down, free and easy; his eyes went starry, he opened his mouth and coughed weakly, silently convulsed with weeping. Tears hung at the corners of his eyes; snot and saliva fell without dignity. The eel pressed further into the depths of his body; the lower half of his face went numb, his stomach clenched, and every place connected to his spinal cord felt about to suffocate. Gastric acid surged again, eroding the eel’s broken body. He narrowed his swimming eyes; his thoughts were wiped clean. Swallowing this utterly nauseating and degrading creature’s corpse had left his mind with nothing but a protective blankness; his tongue, suspended in the middle of his mouth, was rigid as death. He grieved his way back through memories of his warm home, his interesting classmates, the vivid and brilliant world; tears, snot, and saliva pattered down into the tray, running through the grooves to mix with the mucus on the eel’s surface, giving the eel a painful, complicated flavor.

The muscles at the corners of the bespectacled boy’s eyes and mouth trembled as he swallowed the third eel. His stomach writhed frantically in the dim, deep cage of his body, resisting the thick eel’s invasion of its interior.

He shifted his gaze to the heap of limp eggplant beside it, held his breath, and stuffed a fleshy, softly breathing-seeming slice of eggplant into his throat. His weakened esophagus lurched into violent motion; the muscles inside him raged in resistance against this stomach-turning horror. He felt as if his head had been hit hard by a fist; then, this unchewed pulp came flying from his throat along with a ghastly cough, landing with a splat on the messy iron tray, followed by a spray of colorful matter – carrots and corn from breakfast, an eel resting peacefully in the mire, orange-and-purple half-digested food chunks, and a small amount of residue trailing across his face. He looked utterly wretched; the table was a catastrophic mess. The homeroom teacher saw it from afar and said with disgust: “Take it to the cafeteria yourself!”

Burning with humiliation and shame, carrying the tray that had put him through so much suffering, his face decorated with remnants, the bespectacled boy passed Class 2, passed Class 3, walked down a long corridor, went out the door of the school building, walked six or seven minutes, and arrived at the cafeteria. The cafeteria workers saw him: some narrowed their eyes and turned up the corners of their mouths slightly; some widened their eyes and let their mouths fall open; some half-closed their eyes and pulled their mouth-corners down. The bespectacled boy, crestfallen, held out the tray with both hands to the worker in a gesture of formal offering. When the tray left his hands, his body felt as though it had dissolved.

For the four-odd years that followed, every day was the same.

VII. Blossoms

After both the lies and the dark of night fall asleep,
turn and go at once.
— 黄昏泣き

The beautiful bright sunset glow spread and fell like a woman’s hair; every tree and blade of grass on the field was draped in a layer of vivid golden light. Class 3(1) was in full swing: the moment a sliding-friction sound of “shhh” was heard from outside the window, several students stood up in preparation. “Heave-ho!” came the sound, and the auntie at the door let out a long breath, setting down several stacks of cardboard boxes with a thud. The teacher moved them over and opened them with a mysterious smile; by now the children below the podium had already spread out their table cloths (really handkerchiefs), drooling, eyes fixed on the teacher’s hands.

Yang Shukai swayed left and right trying to identify what was in the teacher’s hands. The object was thrown over by the classmate in front; it was a white, oval-shaped thing. It rolled round and round and rolled to the edge of the desk. Yang Shukai grabbed it, rubbed his hands, narrowed his eyes, tilted his head back, and peeled off the white cylinder’s wrapper with the delicate care of a person treading on thin ice. The packaging was plastic; Yang Shukai’s heart had already arrived at an exhilarating answer, but he still peered anxiously into the paper. As the paper was slowly peeled back, a small patch of orange-yellow showed from inside the white cylinder; Yang Shukai immediately beamed and shouted out: “A burger! A burger!! AHHHHHH!!” He ripped the wrapper open in one swipe, and the burger was exposed. In his great joy his hand trembled and he nearly dropped it on the floor. The steaming burger blasted its thick fragrance; Yang Shukai’s nose found it deeply pleasant. He sniffed it, so happy that tears circled in his eyes. Having grown accustomed to the school cafeteria’s rough and cold meals, he could not help wolfing down the burger in great swallows; a warm yellow flow moved through his heart, and the luster in it shone again. He tilted his head gnawing at the chocolate, closed his eyes tasting the ice cream, grinned wide tearing off the burger. Laughter and clamor, shouts of delight rang without end; the classroom was full of a merry air.

As they ate, the golden light on the horizon gradually faded, replaced by a darkness that symbolized the unknown, standing by for the Children’s Day gala to begin. The darkness was dense, the mist thin, drifting around the outdoor stage; the lights slanted through wisps of mist and illuminated this somewhat simple but soon-to-hold-hundreds-of-young-lives stage. Rows of small plastic chairs had been set out below, the grass swaying gently, and birdsong traced spirals in the night sky. The lights grew in number, grew brighter; at that moment the whole field suddenly burst with festive music, and the queued-up students flooded in, row after row. The variegated lights cast their round red faces in green, and the stage makeup on each face was like a casual child’s scrawl.

Yang Shukai took his seat. His face was patched green and white; his lips burned like flame; his eye shadow shimmered like gilded gold – as if the whole amusement park had been painted on him. He glanced at the people around him in his performance costume, a little embarrassed.

“One-two-one! One-two-one!” He heard the festive chanting around him and remembered the slogan from rehearsals. Back then, he never stood up straight to rehearse – sometimes he rolled around on the floor, sometimes he held up his prop and dueled with a boy classmate with great theatrical flair. Back then he had never taken this performance very seriously at heart; he felt this kind of tedious formalism was plundering his childhood time. And perhaps that wasn’t so wrong: many of the boys had been chatting and laughing with him throughout rehearsals, leaving the dance teacher beside him – not much makeup on – with a face patched green and white. Electronic devices were the topic they could never avoid; they discussed what fun games they’d been playing recently: Goat Simulator, Space Sheriff, Plants vs. Zombies. He felt that what made up his childhood was about thirty percent those games, twenty percent the battle of wits with his mother over control of the smartphone, and the remaining fifty percent school life. He hadn’t memorized many of the dance moves – in fact there weren’t any complicated moves; generally you just followed the others for positioning. As for performing in front of the whole school, it wasn’t so much that he lacked confidence as it was five parts of anxiety.

But the young MC dramatically called out his class, and Yang Shukai had no choice but to climb on stage with his class, his green-painted face and costume, in a flurry of nerves. He immediately averted his gaze, not daring to look directly at the crowd pressing in below. He lowered his head slightly, silently following the other students through their positions. A minute or two went by like this, and then for some reason an unnamed reluctance to be swallowed into anonymity stirred faintly at his throat. Other people’s hands rose and fell in front of him, dancing gracefully; the longer Yang Shukai watched, the dizzier he became. He staggered, almost colliding with the classmate next to him, and Yang Shukai suddenly snapped back to himself. He hadn’t noticed that a thin layer of sweat had broken out on him; he strained to recall the unfamiliar steps, strained to keep pace with the classmates around him.

The lights gave him no such chance. When he swayed to the very front of the stage, a cluster of spotlights fell on him without mercy. The blazing lights warmed his burning heart; a wave of heat rose to the top of Yang Shukai’s head. He felt a sudden openness, his nose cleared, his hands moved free and unrestrained. Standing at the very front of the stage, he broke the stiffness in his body and began to move with larger gestures. He himself didn’t know why. He saw the audience below watching him with full concentration. The dust under the lights floated like smoke, like mist; he waved his hand and shattered this blurred screen. He stretched his hand forward. And then – one layer of the heart’s wall, one layer of the classical rule-following, one layer of the deep-rooted awe of the shimmering crowd before him – it touched his fingertips, and collapsed.

The lights shifted color; Yang Shukai gradually melted back into the collective. Dimly he realized the dizziness from before had vanished without a trace, yet the classmates moving before him blurred into one mass, swaying in and out of shadow. Yang Shukai felt no pressure; the classmates drifted and paused, like beautiful silhouettes. After a performance soaked in sweat, as they exited the stage, Yang Shukai closed his eyes and licked the sweat from the corner of his mouth – a complex saltiness.

The buzzing in his head did not stop quickly; his thoughts scattered and flew. With them flew brilliant, abundant blossoms – once their class left the stage, the principal read out a few enthusiastic congratulatory words, and the fireworks show that belonged to these children began. These were real fireworks: dragging long comet-like trails, rising to the far-off night sky, bursting and scattering in splendor. The Milky Way flowed above their heads, and the fireworks were like flowers fallen into its current, scattered petal by petal by the water, the scattered petals filling the entire sky. The deep night sky grew bright.

Yang Shukai went numb all over. He stood there dumbfounded, and for the first time, brilliant starfire was lit in his eyes.

VIII. Kaleidoscope

Life is deliberation within distress. Everything, everything, is buried in water.
— リコレクションエンドロウル

On a rare foggy, haze-wrapped day in early autumn, the school atmosphere was far from carefree. A few faint figures appeared on the field; each step Yang Shukai took shattered the ripples he had stirred. The shallow water reminded him of the time in kindergarten when he and his friends had played in the water features in their compound. Back then they had feet in the silt, running and jumping over grass and fallen leaves around the pool, and sometimes even tumbling into it by accident, soaking their clothes and earning a scolding. None of that would happen now, Yang Shukai thought – he was at an age where he would never, under any circumstances, lose his senses and fall into the pool.

He turned a corner. When he caught sight of the bespectacled boy, his worries peeled away from his chest and dissolved into the surrounding mist. The bespectacled boy was wearing his signature handsome glasses as usual; he smiled in greeting as Yang Shukai approached. Yang Shukai noticed that a clump of the bespectacled boy’s hair had water droplets in it – crystal droplets catching the lamp glow, trembling on the verge of falling, beautiful and clear. He must have gotten caught in the rain on the way here, Yang Shukai thought. He didn’t dwell on it; he stepped forward to ask about the latest progress with the adventure squad. The bespectacled boy told him, with a slightly awkward look, that the squad members’ free time didn’t match up and the planned expedition to the underground garage had been quietly canceled; but then he changed course and said he’d recently found other interests, and would invite Yang Shukai to join. He introduced the stick-figure comics he’d been drawing and the song lyrics he’d been writing.

As lunch break neared, Yang Shukai noticed that the bespectacled boy still had that string of water-droplet ornaments on his hair. He grew puzzled: if he’d been caught in the rain on the way here, they should have dried long ago. The bespectacled boy came over with a small slip of paper to share the lyrics he’d adapted; Yang Shukai, who should have been enjoying them with interest, found his mind wandering. His eyes were nearly locked on the light on the water droplets. The light flickered on and off, playing its melody atop the bespectacled boy’s head; Yang Shukai no longer cared about the awkward lyrics on the paper, and listened with his whole heart to the music stored within the water droplets. He felt the oppression in his heart gradually clearing, his mood slowly brightening; a half-sweet, half-tart feeling fizzed with a sizzling sound in his chest. He licked his lips, and his hand, without his control, lightly touched that string of water droplets.

The droplet fell. The bespectacled boy blinked, and looked at Yang Shukai with a puzzled, slightly parted mouth. Yang Shukai made an awkward sound and asked quietly with narrowed eyes: “Why is your hair a little wet?” The bespectacled boy laughed and said he’d messed up his hair and was just fixing it.

The mist thinned. The sky took on a faint tint of pink; the clouds turned and curled over it like an oil painting. The foam in Yang Shukai’s heart burst abruptly, and a red-violet liquid swayed inside him. He walked quickly to the bathroom. The bathroom mirror reflected the light from the sky; the fragrance of hand soap and the relaxing sound of flowing water washed over him.

Yang Shukai’s face appeared in clear detail. He stared blankly at his reflection; his chest rose and fell, his breathing heavy and turbid. He slowly closed his eyes, took several deep breaths, and prepared, following the bespectacled boy’s example, to make small improvements to his own appearance. When he opened his eyes and lowered his head, he saw the ceaseless flowing water in the basin, his face reflected in it, rippling, rising and falling. The water was a cool light pink; Yang Shukai, as if glimpsing a kaleidoscope, entered someone’s ocean of thought – he couldn’t say whose – and the images in the ocean gradually sharpened; he watched in a daze, helpless before it all.

The pitiable family! Under the crushing weight of society and the soaking of tradition, still hoping its sons will succeed, the family is enveloped in anxiety and tedium. Family relationships, like a spider’s web, are stuck together and torn apart by an invisible hand, drifting helplessly along with the structure they cling to. The small spider wishing to jump outside the frame has lost its way in dust and debris; the large spiders that have already accepted they will spend their lives confined to it lie motionless on the web, sharp-eyed, troubled, beseeching – watching the small spider’s valiant climbing.

With a great crashing sound, the web was submerged in a fragrant, intoxicating rush of clear water!

The lamentable school! Solemn and merciless as a great gilded bell, weighing down all that is within it, motionless, looking blindly down at the small world’s diligent turning. The countless mechanisms inside may not produce one single note of wrongness – those that cry out are muffled, those that veer are straightened, those that are oddly shaped are whittled to regularity. When the bell is lifted, the mechanisms rush out in a noisy flood; the muffled, the straightened, the whittled escape; those that are still crying, still veering, still oddly shaped spin in endless circles and curves inside the bell – and getting out of the bell is not necessarily good: outside the bell is wrapped a cavity of shimmering acidic water, black and white mixed, impossible to separate; those who do get out are immediately swallowed back into it…

With a great crashing sound, the bell was shattered by a spray of water against the sink!

The regrettable society! This scattered, fragmented society is both in agony and in carnival! The school guards a wall of ancient knowledge that stands above the thoughts of children – but what its guardians have not anticipated is that the virtual order is gradually crumbling. Information has already seeped through the cracks of the rules, colliding violently with young, fiercely beating hearts. These hearts refuse nothing; they absorb the countless seeds that drift on the wind; watered by different fertilizers, different seeds take root in the heart and begin to grow. What use is this wall? To repair it, how many appalling prices have been paid? Under this high wall, under this wall’s dominance, when have people not lived bowed and narrow-shouldered? And what kind of life is that for? Can this wall really protect the people within it? Or will this wall improve people’s lives? Do the bricks of the high wall truly stand with a clear conscience, still firmly stacked? This wall was a farce from the start! Standing there with a false smile, its body swaying uncannily, as if it could topple at any moment and crush countless people into pulp – perhaps now its unsteady bricks are already falling one by one, landing cold on any number of people’s heads, causing any number of misfortunes. Look – out there in the outside world… outside there is no day and no night, no truth and no falsehood, no good deeds and no wicked ones… outside is endless carnival, brief alliance and disintegration, outside the world is changing like mad…

Washed away by the water!

The tears, unstoppable, ran down the contours of Yang Shukai’s face and dropped from his chin, falling into the water formed by thousands of droplets. Yang Shukai turned the tap on full, plunged his head under the waterfall, cooled his eyes, cleared his mind.

IX. The Letter That Breaks the Heart

Where is the real me right now?
Please, give me an X-ray and let me know.
— 熱愛発覚中

A joke made on a whim proved prophetic: the bespectacled boy had fallen for a girl.

Spring’s colors are romantic and soft. The spring breeze drifting past fluttered flower petals and gently tickled the bespectacled boy’s heart. Involuntarily, he began to yearn for all things beautiful. Dreams he had dreamed before were vague yet intense – in them was a vast white expanse – or perhaps pitch-black; he could no longer remember clearly – but the glittering teardrops sparkling on that barely-real ground, he would never forget for as long as he lived – would he? He didn’t know; he hadn’t thought about it. He was only ten, new to the world, with no choice but to chase the fleeting hem of the dream-girl’s skirt, that corner of gauze and glass damp with water. So for some reason – possibly because the sweetness of the spring breeze had clouded his judgment – he quietly confided to his desk neighbor that he had a secret crush on his year’s head student representative (still a candidate at this point).

He felt water sloshing inside his heart; the pulse accelerated further. The bespectacled boy came to know what it felt like to be moved. He didn’t realize this feeling had crept like a thief into his heart. Watching the head student representative dance into their class to campaign, he was still joking around with his desk neighbor and laughing carelessly.

About a week later, on the morning of a certain day, the bespectacled boy sat on the crowded school bus and looked out the window. The window was still the same window as yesterday – a bit dirty, a bit blurry – but he always felt something about the sky’s canopy was subtly different; it seemed like there was a pane of glass, a thin net he could sense but not see; no, not a net – like a tissue soaked in ink, like a filter set into the eye… The school bus braked hard; the bespectacled boy’s head knocked against the seat in front of him, and his drifting eyes snapped open again. He stared blankly at the colored clouds floating overhead and realized his pupils had contracted; a mood of melancholy welled up in him. He sniffled involuntarily.

“Look at the students in that other class! Look how outstanding!” The homeroom teacher was unstinting in her praise of students from other classes, then turned to smile with her triangular narrowed eyes at her own. In her smile was an entanglement of a little envy, a little contempt, a little tenderness, and a little anxious resentment. At the new leadership election assembly, under the bright spotlights, confident students mimicked politicians and delivered exaggerated performances.

The head student representative candidate lifted her skirt and stepped onto the stage – graceful and elegant, her voice clear and melodious. The bespectacled boy still intended to watch her poised figure as if it meant nothing to him, but found he could not quite manage it. Realizing this, he grew alarmed; he looked in puzzlement at that head student candidate’s confident delivery, bit down on his tongue, and had a moment of pain, a moment of pained breathing, looked in puzzlement at that head student candidate’s confident delivery, looked in puzzlement at himself, turned sharply – the audience sitting around him were laughing and applauding; he looked at the audience around him and found they were all himself. The lights in the ceiling gave off swaying light, the moving traces of light dragged back and forth, and gradually the entire ceiling glittered, the lights blinking and watching the people below, watching the bespectacled boy who was the bespectacled boy himself beside the bespectacled boy, watching that head student candidate’s confident delivery; the bespectacled boy’s neighbor the bespectacled boy watched the bespectacled boy…

The microphone let out another shriek, and the ceiling lights went dark.

The bespectacled boy suddenly realized the person speaking now was not that head student candidate; something was in his eyes – there was an emotion that wasn’t quite crying. The sound of the speech quietly faded; the assembly hall seemed to have become a Buddhist hall.

Like a parasite, the ache in his heart grew day by day; the bespectacled boy was forced to give it shape in a few lines of text. He drew on the letter in oil pastels, marked it with fluorescent pen here and there, then signed his name in a flowing stroke of ballpoint, and carefully sealed the envelope with pink and red stickers. Because of his shyness and the sense of distance between them, the bespectacled boy had no way to hand this letter to the one he admired in person. One day, a class squad leader found out about all of this and enthusiastically offered to help: she and the head student would be rehearsing a dance together, at which point she could pass along this letter for him. The bespectacled boy felt a quiet excitement rising; without stopping to think too much, he handed over the envelope.

The real tension only began after the letter was sent – the bespectacled boy could not help thinking about the letter and about the head student night and day. Sometimes he would dream, dreaming of a girl, though he couldn’t remember who the girl was – perhaps that head student. Waking, he was always confused and at a loss; sometimes he could see the dried stains left by tears on the blue-and-white pillowcase. School life receded… although he still came to school every day, still joked around with classmates every day, he felt school drifting further and further away on a murky, hazy river, growing harder and harder to see. School life no longer seemed like a whole thing; it seemed broken apart… The bespectacled boy still performed his unrequited love at high volume – collecting the head student’s promotional postcards after school, the classmates around him enthusiastically handing them over with grins and laughter. The bespectacled boy began thinking about how to look impressive: sometimes he dampened his hair a little, as if fixing his style; sometimes he pushed his glasses up to the top of his forehead, sometimes he took them off and hung them from his collar; he often walked with his hands in his pockets, his shirt tucked into his trousers.

On a yellow dusk when the creases from the school bus’s press against his shirt and trousers made him a little uncomfortable, the weather had turned unpleasant; the grayish sky was taken over by a monstrous blazing sun, orange and black spilling in all directions. The bus jostled; he looked at that blazing star with unease, watched the nimbus spread, watched the corona collapse, watched the radiance conceal itself. The clouds covered the sky again, and the sky turned entirely into a pool of murky water. The bespectacled boy got off the bus; his mother had come with an umbrella to meet him. The rain fell in a thin patter; the bespectacled boy walked in a gloom beside his mother. Possibly the rain had made his mood low; with a “crack,” he stepped squarely on a rotted branch, and it snapped. The rain came down hard; mud and dirty water clung to his shoes. At the entrance his mother clearly noticed, but said nothing.

The bespectacled boy went upstairs without a sound, his mother following at an unhurried pace behind him. He noticed that a few little plumbago plants by the tea table had dried out, the originally pale flower petals now showing rust-like brown spots and unnatural curling. He felt a mild distaste for flowers that had died so soon after being brought home. He returned to his room as usual and put down his schoolbag; the solitude made his heart grow hot again. He agonized over his look for the next day, and finally decided to sneak over and borrow his mother’s sunglasses. So one evening when his mother had gone out to buy groceries – the rain had already stopped – he quietly began to search for the sunglasses. The sun slid sideways from the sky; he sped up his search, hoping to test the sunglasses’ effectiveness while the light lasted. At last, standing on a chair, he found his mother’s sunglasses on the television stand that had been built like a fireplace – slightly pink-tinted lenses, the frames catching a glint of gold in the evening light. He put the sunglasses on with impatient excitement and looked out at the scene through the floor-to-ceiling window. The sun was down to a single bowstring arc; he looked through the lenses dyed scarlet by sunlight, staring at the dying sun as if to swallow it whole.

“Crack” – the sun’s bowstring broke, and the last of the sunlight was lost, and the world fell into darkness.

But… that didn’t seem like the sound of a bowstring snapping…

Through the now-black lenses the bespectacled boy stared at two crumpled slips of paper on the television stand; he felt he had seen these papers somewhere before. He still couldn’t make out what was on them… but a feeling, as though one of his intestines had been cut, made itself felt. He climbed down from the chair dizzily, staggered toward the papers below, and stretched out his hand to the corner of one sheet.

He went soft all over… he had no wish and no courage to pull the paper down…

Presently his mother came home, and saw her son standing there in her sunglasses, stupidly staring at two slips of paper. His mother swept through the living room, turned into the kitchen, put down the groceries, picked up the cleaver, and began, slowly: “The teacher gave them to me. Think about it yourself.”

In an instant, a thousand emotions surged from his stomach to his throat; he stammered and could not get out a single complete word; he could hear nothing. What reached his ears was the dull thud of the cleaver on the chopping board – thud, thud, thud, and lingered… He felt the cleaver as though it were coming down on his hands, on his throat, on his intestines… thud, thud, thud, echoing… He could see nothing; it was as if the black lenses were blocking his sight. He lowered his head and went back to his room; his heart bled the whole way, or perhaps it was some other part of his body.

Emotion welled in him over what love had done; the bespectacled boy was wordless, lost in a fog.

In a crying night, his mother stormed into the room with fury and yanked the postcards covered in the head student’s photos out from under his pillow, tearing them to shreds. The tearstains on the postcards had not yet dried; he watched the head student’s image come apart in pieces, and his head dropped lower; his choked sobbing came in broken intervals. His mother threw the few scraps of postcard into the bin and left. His sobs gradually quieted.

When his breathing had returned to something like a normal rhythm, he leaned against the balcony railing, and through the now-murky black lenses looked with contempt at the cold, desolate moon; two lines of tears froze on his face, pressed sore by the wind; he wore a faint, slight smile. He gripped the creases in his hands, which were not quite comfortable, and yet two or three postcard scraps were taken by the wind and scattered off, drifting one by one into the dark night.

The bespectacled boy’s lips trembled. He watched the scraps grow smaller and smaller in the distance, disappearing into the sky, and the focus of his gaze suddenly blurred.

X. Submersion

This karma repeating itself in cycles –
naturally one grows sick of it.
— 葬列

Twenty minutes had passed since Yang Shukai was found washing his head in the bathroom.

The teacher escorted him back to the classroom. The joint appearance of a dripping-headed student and a teacher abruptly silenced the room full of merriment; the air was filled with the sound of water dripping from his head and the sound of eyelids blinking. A gloomy shadow fell; thunder rolled distantly; Yang Shukai felt his legs go slightly numb. The teacher’s sharp gaze was like needles in his face, his legs. His classmates waited in silence for the teacher to speak. But the teacher said nothing; after a little while, the principal arrived. With a grave expression, the principal led Yang Shukai and the entire class out to the field. This was already the tail end of the last period; leaden clouds hung heavy, and rain had not yet begun to fall. On the field stood several dozen stone statues, every face solemn, every expression blanched. Five minutes passed. The end-of-school bell rang; the wrinkles on the principal’s face shifted. She raised the microphone with a trembling hand, knit her brows slightly, and forced out the words:

“The results of yesterday’s English oral examination have been tallied. The third-grade results are fairly good. I will now announce the rankings and the average scores for each class. Class 3(4), first place, average score 91.8; Class 3(6), second place, average score 90.2; Class 3(3), third place, average score 89.5; Class 3(2), fourth place, average score 88.6; Class 3(5), fifth place, average score 88.3; Class 3(1), sixth place, average score 87.4.”

Last place again… The students of Class 3(1), standing on the field and receiving the principal’s direct gaze, couldn’t help feeling mortified.

“Although the rankings are as stated, nearly every class has some students with very poor scores. These students fall considerably below the class average. I will now read their names. Class 3(6): Wo Xiuyuan. Class 3(3): Jiang Jiacheng. Class 3(3): Xu Jiahao. Class 3(2): Hu Qingcheng. Class 3(2): Lu Yuecheng. Class 3(5): Yang Shukai. Class 3(5): Sun Xiangyu. Class 3(1): Xu Chenghong. Class 3(1): Liu Fengkai. Class 3(1): Wang Hanrui. Class 3(1): Chen Guanxi. Class 3(1): Shan Yuyang. These students are asked to find their subject teacher and understand the situation, and to think about why they were unable to perform well!” The principal’s voice resounded.

Yang Shukai was not standing with his class; he was standing beside the homeroom teacher, beside the podium – facing the entire class. He saw some people had turned their eyes to him. He was stunned. The wind picked up.

The previous week, one afternoon after school, he had noticed the azaleas in the compound garden. They swept by like fire; their vivid color drew at his heart. He couldn’t help stretching out his hand to touch them, but the azaleas suddenly shifted, and the mournful, gorgeous shadow of an oleander appeared before his eyes. He was startled and quickly pulled his trembling hand back. The following evening, the flowers blooming in the garden were azaleas again; looking closer, the blooming oleander darkened at the edges. The third night, he saw azaleas mixed with oleander, oleander with an azalea growing among them… He genuinely could no longer tell whether those were oleander or azalea.

Water… the pool…

He remembered that noon when he had played beside the water feature in the compound. Coming home after a big exam, even the frighteningly small compound seemed wider now that it was empty. A gentle breeze came; the water’s surface was undisturbed. Occasional cars passed in the distance. The pool water was murky and fathomless; the deep green water gave him a sense of oppression, as if this still surface might swallow him at any moment. He looked away, leaped onto a small path through the trees nearby. Branches swayed slowly overhead; he stared at the sunlight through the gaps in the leaves, lost in thought. The late-spring sun carried little passion, but Yang Shukai’s impulse was growing – he wanted to grab a branch! He grabbed a branch and climbed up, straining to bend his arms, hooking his feet around the trunk. He extended his arm, his right hand touched a higher branch, and without a second thought he gripped it tightly. His feet released; he threw his left hand up too. The smell of earth slowly spread; no birds flew overhead. His hands started to itch; Yang Shukai frowned and released his right hand – still itching. Why this sudden itch? He wanted to scratch, but couldn’t release his left hand. He pressed his fingers against the branch; they grew somewhat swollen and painful, but his left hand started to itch too. Why the itch? Why? Yang Shukai demanded answers, looking up at the sun – still solemn, still high, still without passion, even lifeless, one might say. His circulation was being cut off; the unbearable itch intensified. He looked helplessly at the sun, as though the sun could offer him some assistance – it could not. The sun stuck out its wet, sticky tongue and licked Yang Shukai’s hands; a new burning sensation appeared on them. Why the itch? Why? He glared at the sun, glared at the tree; he couldn’t not let go; his feet were swinging, he needed to find somewhere to put them. He couldn’t find a foothold without the use of his hands! His hands hung from the tree like two dead pieces of wood, nearly out of strength. He closed his eyes. Yang Shukai fell from the tree to the ground; the smell of earth, of rotting wood, of dried leaves, of grass flooded his senses all at once. He lay splayed on the soft soil, breathing… itching! Yang Shukai’s eyes snapped open; he found his hands covered with ant corpses, thick with ant remains, ant fragments, ant particles, red ants that looked like black ants smeared with blood. Waaaah! Yang Shukai hurriedly brushed his hands away, but felt the itch at his chin – moving, moving slowly in the direction of his cheek – itch – Yang Shukai felt clearly the clumsy wriggling of several of the ant’s legs, their swaying back and forth. Yang Shukai was frantic! He could no longer tell if this was vital life or dying breath; the sun was completely blocked by shade; from the soil came an ancient, distant call; the stones around him seemed to pulse…

The principal’s address gradually ended, but she still stood on the podium, glaring at the students of Class 3(1). Beneath the gaze of the homeroom teacher and his classmates, needling him all over, the principal too turned her eyes on him. Under the gaze of the vast crowd, his head gradually lowered, until at last it hung limp against his torso, as if there were no life in it.

Though he was on the open field, Yang Shukai felt himself confined to a narrow cave. These people were like the bats hanging upside down from the cave ceiling! Their eyes were shifty, their heads retracted into their shoulders, needlessly guarding themselves with their wings, wrapped tight, so tight! Yang Shukai knew perfectly well that wings are for flying; he said nothing. He didn’t dare to say anything; he waited for the moment he could escape this murky, stifling cave. After some time, the principal slowly picked up the microphone and dismissed the students of Class 3(1), leaving Yang Shukai behind. The students filed out one by one; at the same time the other students let out of school were piling up at the gate waiting for parents to collect them. Yang Shukai had already missed the school bus; the homeroom teacher told him to stand by the podium for another ten or so minutes, then come find her so she could call his parents. Yang Shukai responded with a small, drooping sound.

On a day of late spring, whether azalea or oleander, both had wilted. The stems hung low; from the gaping wounds on the petals spilled an abundance of gray dreams.

Water… the pool…

The pool was stirred by wind into ripples. Adventure-loving Yang Shukai, even after the adventure squad went quiet, still wandered his compound on his own and practiced parkour. Little as he was, when he watched on the computer those people moving with swift, nimble grace, vaulting over obstacles most people couldn’t imagine through one after another skillful maneuver, he felt the infinite potential of human beings and was left speechless. This compound was pitifully small – its plaza several times smaller than his school field, the trees in its little grove fewer than the row of trees planted around the school field. Even so, a curve of black stone steps, a slope and high wall beside the garage, and a mere four pillars had each left him with indelible memories – and of course, that pool of murky water. Ironically, that murky, filthy water did make this otherwise shallow little pool look considerably deeper. In the middle of the pool was a low wall rising several tens of centimeters above the pool’s edge, connected to the bank but nearly a meter from the curved little footbridge over the pool. On one of the rare afternoons when he had time to play in the compound after school, Yang Shukai was practicing precision jumps and kong vaults on the black stone steps, back and forth forty or fifty times. Tired of the steps, he went to the pool and studied it; he jumped onto the low wall, jumped from the wall to the bridge, from the bridge to the stone bench, from one stone bench to another… and so he hopped and bounded through this prop-scarce little compound until he noticed that low wall. The wall was wrapped in a layer of brown silt; red-brown bricks were stacked at odd angles, a few blades of grass poking out from the cracks. Yang Shukai stood on the bridge watching the ripples strike the wall and shatter; he couldn’t help leaning forward, toes on the edge of the bridge, both hands on the wall, his body forming a twenty-degree angle with the ground like a human arch-bridge between bridge and wall.

Dust puffed from the wall; he could clearly see the eroded powder of the red bricks sticking to his palm. A cool breeze, an expansive sky; the branches of the willow tree swayed gently on the water’s surface, but the willow had no young green leaves left, only a deep-brown trunk from which countless pale-brown branches curved upward and drooped back down like dull, spent fireworks, tracing a parabola. When Yang Shukai saw this leaf-stripped tree, a sourness in his heart resonated in his nasal cavity; he wanted to go look at the willow, and at the precise appearance of the half-decomposed fish near it. He pushed his hands down, and his body arched backward – but then he leaned forward again, hands returning to the red bricks, whose sharp edges jabbed his palms painfully.

Well… this sort of thing wouldn’t happen now, Yang Shukai thought. He was already at an age where he would never, under any circumstances, lose his senses and fall into the pool. Yang Shukai pushed down again with both hands, and his body formed a fifty-degree angle with the ground. Not enough; he couldn’t stand upright. His hands returned to the red bricks; the sharp edges jabbed his palms painfully. He found his arm strength draining away; he clung to the red bricks with everything he had, his mind full of ideas for getting free – but his thoughts tangled like a ball of yarn, tighter and tighter, more and more tangled; he could think of nothing to break himself out of this awkward position.

No one nearby – only the sparrows flying past, their eyes carrying a contemptuous, disdainful smirk. Yang Shukai’s breathing lost its rhythm. He felt his arm strength flowing away; he felt his mind overloading, the temperature of his brain rising, about to ignite. His arms too were about to ignite; fragments of the wall crumbled into the pool and sank into its murky, dark water. His feet could no longer hold their position; his legs too were losing strength; his shoes scraped the ground. His feet slid back. His hands gave way.

On the empty field, Yang Shukai stood alone. The rain beat down on him without mercy; mixed with bathroom tap water, it ran down his face. He saw the laughter inside the school building; he saw the contempt woven into the laughter. He stood beside the podium; the school flag on the podium flew in the cold rain. How many glorious students had once stood on that low podium, and in the end he could only stand beside it? Yang Shukai thought, full of a helpless desolation.

A rain-drenched city. A rooftop terrace. Visible air-conditioning units outside. An invisible mist-blurred metropolis. Buildings uneven, people uneven. Trees planted incongruously into the cracks between them. Below, the living beings of this city. Yang Shukai stood at the balcony edge, gripping the railing and looking down – the thought of jumping from here… probably wouldn’t come, would it? He had imagined it, though – leaping, becoming a butterfly, a new birth: “falling head-downward through the air, in love, mingling with the growing noise of the night street rushing up to meet him.” That had always been a daydream.

Yang Shukai knew the teachers had abandoned him completely, that this school had abandoned him completely. His legs could barely find any strength. He stumbled through the rain toward the orchard. He saw the orchard – this was his first time ever seeing the orchard of his own school campus. The other students probably rarely got to see their own school’s orchard the way he could; they were in the classroom writing assignments, and the campus now should have only teachers left. So he thought. The flowers in the orchard bloomed bravely in the rain; he simply lay down in the orchard’s mud, receiving the baptism of the early-summer dusk rain. He extended his left hand to feel the fragrant, dizzying splendor of the world in bloom and the damp, clammy rot of the orchard mud. On the deep blue expanse of sky, brilliant stars plunged all at once in a sudden free fall, then paused before his wide-open eyes, and at last floated in midair. What a wonderful realm of fantasy space was – the stars spun in his eyes, this is the place people understand least of all! Yang Shukai let his tears come. His stinging tears, together with the crystal tears raining down from remote, distant heavens, shattered against his drenched clothes, shimmering with a blue-black silver light. He looked in pain at the school building: do you really know more about the stars and this vast universe than I do? Don’t you find it pitiable to have lost this precious capacity for fantasy? But the fire rising in Yang Shukai’s heart was put out by the rain. He entered a dream; he saw empty yet beautiful visions; he saw a gentle sea and a drenched sea wind; he saw sweet, sweet foam everywhere. The vision opened its arms to him, and then held him close, and whispered to him with a choked voice:

Let’s make a promise together,
let’s fly together past the Pelican Nebula,
and become a beam of light –
this is our secret.

His feet slid back. His hands gave way. Yang Shukai fell into the pool; the fivefold foul waters submerged all his senses.

Quotes

ツミキ《スイサイ／アンブレラ／ロクガツ／ドライフラワ》
椎名林檎《迷彩》
ツミキ《グラウンドゼロ》
椎名林檎《赤道を越えたら》
キタニタツヤ《夢遊病者は此岸にて》
椎名林檎《浴室》
東京事変《黄昏泣き》
ツミキ《リコレクションエンドロウル》
椎名林檎《熱愛発覚中》
椎名林檎《葬列》
キタニタツヤ《芥の部屋は錆色に沈む》
ツミキ《トウキョウダイバアフェイクショウ》
Cö shu Nie《ペリカン号でどこまでも》