1 Wants to go to Europe. Searches the map, calls a car, chooses the special-fare option—cheaper. Before long he is here: the Mediterranean coast. Two walls enclose a narrow lane, bricks covered in latex paint.
The Middle Ages. Production was limited then; every brick had to be moulded by hand, so the flaws were considerable. Look at these useless bastards—ignorant, without desire, accustomed to doing a half-arsed job—serfs auctioned back and forth, with no love whatsoever for the science of brickmaking. Perhaps his mother was a maid in the manor. One night thirty years earlier, a cavalry company had camped nearby and the landlord had warmly invited the officers to call (along with a few common soldiers, the logistics captain’s cousin and nephew). The ceiling on this young labourer’s destiny was not low. He called himself the captain’s son; a lieutenant’s family would have been respectable too. He never associated with the other lower orders, never added them on WeChat—or if he did, never gave them a contact name. He simply liked being difficult. At night he never lay down in the stable with his companions. The bricks he made had the same terrible sense of humour as the tax farmer’s face. That achievement earned him a privilege: the master allowed the young labourer to sleep on a brick mould, braced against the warehouse door—every night, his body pressed against a face not yet formed.
But history never writes only one version. Or perhaps the craftsman woke and discovered he had been born in some self-governing city near Genoa. The sea wind of capitalism’s dawn was gathering strength, preparing to ruin poor bastards across Asia, Africa and Latin America—in space and time, physically and psychologically—and awaken the servility in their hearts. In any case, he came to his senses. “So I’m a free man, for fuck’s sake.” He immediately went off and poured down several drinks, then woke again a century later. The sea wind was still blowing. The ancestral brick mould leaned crookedly beside the door. His grandfather had spent half a lifetime rising from peasant to craftsman, then bestowed upon himself the surname Ferraro. At the same moment, Britons were giving themselves the name Smith. The mould was so battered and old the craftsman felt annoyed each time he saw it. Ferraro let nature take its course as he mixed the concrete, leaving honeycombed hollows in the new brick like a heart webbed with blood vessels.
Times changed. Life grew richer. People tired of pursuing perfection. The fashion now is to reproduce imperfection perfectly. Some progress, at least. Audiences can no longer endure soldiers in armour glittering like stage costumes, faces spotless, hair neither greasy nor matted; nor Eastern Han peasants with strings of dried maize hanging in their homes (maize did not reach China until the late Ming). They have begun checking whether the medals on a uniform conform to regulations, whether the details of a weapon have been faithfully restored.
A notice is pasted to the latex paint. It says: Know shame, then take courage. Hengda Film City has listened extensively to public opinion and audience feedback, and will strive to restore the filth of history, its flying dust, its starved yellow faces, and the Little Ice Age.
While scouting locations the director had wondered: “Can a film studio use technology and ideas from the shoulders of giants to present imperfection with even greater perfection? When an imperfect presentation presents imperfection, is it also laying another brick in perfection?”
Some would rather pursue imperfection and preserve every last fraction of it, excavating symbols of damage in the wilderness, taking souvenirs of original sin, prejudice, self-aggrandisement and after-the-fact excuses as their sacred rule, passing on the spirit of imperfection—printed on paper, uploaded to the cloud, preferably stored on a portable hard drive. Others treat life as banishment from death. Neuromedicine, cytology, brain science. The two ends of the axis are perfection and imperfection: from seeking the mystery of death to anaesthetising yourself with future possibilities, where are you? Somewhere in the middle, perhaps. Social media and video-site comment sections are forever at sword point, forcing everyone to choose a side. Every person and every act deserves abuse.
This was not the atmosphere the director wanted. The script was not yet settled, but passion already surged through his mind. Heroes arriving from every direction did not contradict one another: “throughout all ages; ancient and modern combined; Confucian outside, Legalist within; China and the West joined; Chinese learning as substance, Western learning for application.” These phrases tempted him more than a litter of kittens at play. Istanbul, where Eastern and Western civilisations meet, has many cats. Balance, yin and yang, the Daodejing, Laozi… The instant he unconsciously named his protagonist “K” (Wang Er would have been better), another timeless scroll entered the world. The simple philosophy inside his head believed there must be a necessary connection running from the doctrine of the mean to synthesis, to the connection of all things, to communion with the universe, to the Gaia consciousness of the Earth, to all things embracing the One, to the many returning to one, to nihilism.
“Fuck me, I knew all this shit was connected. The wisdom of our ancestors! The past is the future, the future is the past, four dimensions, five dimensions, Murphy’s law, the law of attraction, sexual repression, psychoanalysis, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.”
Non-professional actors, long takes, modern poetry, dialect—use perfection’s imperfect darlings to create perfection, because perfection is imperfection and imperfection is perfection, one is two, the Two Forms give birth to the Four Images. “I admit I do this to conceal my mediocrity. Mediocrity is the doctrine of the mean, the doctrine of the mean is synthesis and also the connection of all things and also communion with the universe and also the Gaia consciousness of the Earth and also all things embracing the One and also the many returning to one and also nihilism.” The director silently encouraged himself. Since childhood he had suffered from the terrifying disease of logic. Once exposed, you quarantined at home. No choice: watching the washing machine churn water became your only entertainment. The north wind formed a vortex between the densely packed towers of a resettlement housing estate and sent leaves spinning.
2 EXT. 1 — MEDITERRANEAN-STYLE TOWN. Thick white walls, blue domes, small windows, narrow lanes, wooden shutters. Day. Overcast. No excrement in the street. A curator awkwardly performs an action unbecoming of his position.
The camera wears a grey-blue filter. From three metres away, a medium shot presents him to the audience from the belt up. K is a curator. As for the definition of a curator and how one might prove or falsify it, the screenwriter can only offer inspiration. Find another path: explain it through documentary narration in the voice of Zhao Zhongxiang; reflect it indirectly, with sophistication; establish the background through costume and styling; or make the protagonist say it himself. All of that demands greater care from the director. We are writing a novel. Two words are enough: a curator. Anything a novel can explain in a few words is bound to become a symbol; reader and writer alike expect motives and meanings behind it. Only now do I realise I have fallen into my own trap, and the novel’s—not that I pursue symbols, symbols of life symbols of death symbols of will. They pursue me. A storyteller need not care whether grains of sand rise unevenly from the thick white wall, or worry whether the shutters pull upward or downward. He drew in the collar of his trench coat and suddenly felt a little cold.
But creators are now forced to shoulder the responsibility of turning everything into a symbol, converting what lies beyond words into images and inserting them properly into the work. Deliberately avoiding imagery does no good. You try to refuse the thought; at that moment it has already become a symbol of some kind. When you refuse to give the shutters meaning, do the possibilities call up a memory? Sunlight may enter the room at any angle. Perhaps the slanting light painting zebra stripes across the floor represents regret… A non-metaphorical symbol can only represent resistance to metaphor; refusing metaphor symbolises refusal. Perhaps I cannot escape these associations. I am simply less and less certain which of them serves which.
When I describe the curator in such a state of disarray, do I begin from a prejudice, taking it for granted that the protagonist is meant to be a civilised and respectable man? My curator does not actively create value. He drifts within an organisational framework, the entire Leviathan at his back, protected from disease, hunger and upheaval. The character ought to look down from on high. His speciality is abstracting symbols into symbols, passing them from left hand to right. Failing that, he can isolate the concept of “art,” set “artist” beside occupations such as “carpenter,” “cook” and “sanitation worker,” then mock artists for harming society. Or he can split hairs, defining some matter from a predetermined position. Perhaps this alone is enough to make the reader fear him.
While I am over here resolving the curator’s existential crisis, he is over there looking around—the ground lies beneath a skin of seawater, making people lift their legs unconsciously as they walk. It looks slippery. The holiday-resort filter makes the place resemble a Second World War position. The protagonist wears a grey rainproof trench coat, 130 centimetres long (the Albert Camus kind), black wool trousers with a centre crease, and a Republican-era student cap to set off his East Asian face and average height, prompting bullet comments of “spy drama” and “Yu Zecheng”—a spy-drama hero. Seawater surges from every corner and turns ninety degrees along the walls. Cold air from Siberia: you feel its chill only when you tilt your ear to listen. It drains all strength; after thinking for a moment, you have to stop. Wood in air that does not circulate. In films the air is often fake. The audience beyond the screen does not care, but the protagonist suffers badly from it. Every open set is a block of tofu. The world moves with the person, never changing, and leaves him unable to breathe.
SCENE 2. Day. A pitch-black doorway.
The curator walks in. More than a dozen crews shoot here every month. The place began as an inn built for a period boys’-love production. Tiles cover the roof; the only stone object is a horse trough. In the main hall stand eight pairs of fir tables and chairs. An attendant in a coarse linen undershirt keeps tossing a copper coin. The staircase faces the entrance. Upstairs are guest rooms, boxed lunches and contracts. This time the room has been dressed as a dim tavern filled with long tables. Two oak saloon doors will be added in post-production. The customers have changed from down-and-out swordsmen and followers of the demonic path into ninth-rank officials in second-hand mink and liberals. Replace the crowd with a GIF and save some money. Look carefully: the people around him move in three-second loops—the hands about to clap never meet, the mouthfuls of meat are never fully chewed.
He takes an empty seat. Someone naturally edges up beside him holding a glass of beer. He is the only real background actor here, paid 120 yuan a day. The extra had been leaning against a post in a brown coat and tight trousers, his head withdrawn into his collar. A layer of mouldy-orange air hangs in the bar, stinging the eyes. He and the timber watch the curator enter, then abruptly separate, as if the wooden pillar has given birth to a son.
The extra sits too, wriggling for ages until his crowded testicles are properly pressed beneath his crotch. One hand rummages inside his coat as though stealing his own belongings. At last he digs a wad of money from the inner pocket and—smack—flings it onto the table. The money is not slapped down and not thrown down. The rear half meets the table first, then the front describes an arc shaped like the birth rate and—smack—lands as well.
New notes, straight from an ATM. Unfortunately, they have sat too long and the banknotes’ dim, seductive sheen has already slipped away. The curator raises a hand without thinking, wanting to turn one over and see whether the serial numbers run in sequence. He looks around. No one cares about them. His fingers have just touched the money when the man opposite wriggles again, as though adjusting the angle of his underwear. The curator jumps and snatches back his hand.
The extra leans forward. His opening words are: “Mountain against river, Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan… Chongqing against Chang’an.”
The money is a fresh peach covered in fine, translucent white fuzz. After touching it, the curator feels an itch inside his fingers. Banknotes stacked together are extremely sharp, easily cutting several invisible slits into the pads of his fingers. The peach fuzz drifts into them. The itch becomes unbearable. He puts his hand in his mouth and sucks several times, hoping to ease the touch of money as if drawing out a wooden splinter.
The director prompts his protagonist just in time through the Bluetooth earpiece: “Tell him: Wangfujing, Jiefang Road; reason or no reason, let us hear Judge Cui.” The curator repeats it faithfully.
The man says: “Dawn arrives in silence. Why are you still so at ease? Run, run, K, you child…”
K again. Anyone steeped for years in Franz Kafka’s novels instinctively names a character K. Kafka: that thunderous name immediately lays a framework over the work and directs its development. Naturally this scene is no ordinary scene. It has depth and substance, the spirit of Kafka and the substance of Kafka—that thing no one can describe.
“Tell him: Don’t trouble yourself.” The director issues his instruction at exactly the right moment.
K lowers his voice and asks, “Why doesn’t this one rhyme? Aren’t these countersigns?”
From the earpiece comes a half-formed mm, the dull plosive of words that reach the tip of the tongue and are pulled back. Then a hiss of breath, as though a cutscene has been triggered: some enormously complicated and time-consuming mission, a vast adventure, an epic conspiracy, is about to begin, and the director, as guide, will have to shoulder responsibility. Air leaks from his lungs through nose and mouth. A few dozen seconds of mental activity feel like two days spent carrying bricks.
This spirited young director could have, and indeed had, planned it this way—routine procedure, meaning that the producer would as usual deliver the repeated script and storyboards to the assistant through various media: sometimes white letters on black, sometimes an electronic copy by email, sometimes wrapped as a birthday present (hidden beneath a leather cover and disguised as an expensive notebook). Once, just as the assistant cut open the belly of a fish, guess what happened?
The assistant would then, rigorously and in complete accordance with process and workplace rules, convert the script into a lawful official format and present it to the director. The director was accustomed to reciting lines from the page to obedient actors. Now he regretted it. How the fuck did improvisation get in here? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have invited this son of a bitch to make a cameo. With no alternative, he drained his whole body of strength to address the curator in a drowsy voice, a voice like the whisper of the sea wind: “There is a principle… in principle, you are not allowed to ask questions…”
He does not say what he wants to say. It is all the author’s fault for being too stupid; everything can only be entrusted to dreams, to great sleep, to Jia Baoyu wandering through the Land of Illusion in Dream of the Red Chamber.
Our Land of Illusion looks roughly like this:
3 Last night, the curator’s dream lasted until noon. The director had said he wanted him in a cameo, and the curator had been excited all day. That night he dreamt of the director. His dreams are all quite ordinary: mysterious, with room left over for interpretation and metaphor. The dream staged a non-logical coherence and a coherent non-logic, half true, half false. Before he could gather himself, what he had encountered the night before was not a collection of fragmentary scenes, not certain moments stretched without limit, replayed, savoured without limit, laden with causes and consequences and possibilities—profound moments that make the waking person hold his piss desperately, press his brain into service, force it to remember the plot, while at the same time trying to shut it down by force and carry you back into the great rest—a lovely night, or regret beyond repair.
The dream stops here and extends at the same time. An actor’s dream has a beginning and an end. It stops in endless waiting, waiting for the next instruction. The heavy breathing at the other end of the earpiece gradually fades. There is no clock in the bar. Customers, bartender, kitchen staff: every human movement repeats at three-second intervals. The stone ceiling cuts off the course of sun and moon. Time contracts inside an endless instant. The curator has nothing to do. Might as well watch Bilibili.
A Utopia of Goats and Horses—a kitten appears and disappears among weeds taller than a person. So cute. A goat lowers its head to eat the grass and does not resist the carnivore beside it, allowing the kitten to jump onto its back. The long hair with a few scraps of leaf caught in it must be soft and warm. The kitten seems to remember its white mother, and a sudden melancholy fills its brain. Perhaps it does not understand the feeling. On the goat’s back, its paws extend and retract as it kneads. The fleece is thick enough that the cat cannot hurt it. At this moment the goat is immersed in rumination, eyes and mouth both turning. A horse drenched in sweat comes close, sprays the rising steam over the cat, strokes it with its chin, presses the broad side of its head towards it, wanting intimacy with this little thing. The mountain is made of stone. Grass grows in a thin layer of soil, its roots fighting the rock at every moment, spreading everywhere and finding no passage. It wants to live too. Photosynthesis alone will not do, especially when the sun inside the screen has no warmth. You guessed correctly again: it is a texture map. But the grass must live. Every blade, every goat and cat must live. Its body spreads helplessly. If it cannot go down it strains upwards; the air contains moisture too. “Have study and work been feeling stressful lately?” the director says. “Today I’m recommending an incredibly useful tool.” The curator is not under much pressure. The kitten seems to remember something—perhaps its white mother again. It looks alertly across its home, ears tipped slightly, attention caught by some fresh disturbance in the grass. In an instant it jumps to the ground and sniffs the earth with all its strength.
Click over here. Yes, the black thing—the kitten has discovered the hidden camera and is fascinated by the large, hard-edged object. Its tail hooks into a question mark; a purr is still rolling in its throat. It rubs both cheeks against the rim of the lens, leaving its scent.
“Cats like horses,” the narrator says slowly. The sentence comes from far away, drifting from very, very far away, from beyond the horizon, yet it belongs to you alone and can reach only your ears, every word intact. Labiodentals, affricates, a trace of a Beijing accent—he is professionally trained. His voice breaks the laws of nature and vibrates your temples. Every line of narration has the intimacy of soothing a pet. He knows how to fill the piece missing from a person—pets lack order; with us, it is precisely the opposite.
The curator loves animal documentaries. Their conscientious directors seek neither fame nor profit, wishing only to record an instant of life. This undoubtedly deserves respect. They knew from the beginning that pirated copies would travel the world, perhaps with the watermark of a gambling site stamped in the lower left and the QQ number of a nude-chat scam in the upper right, but they do not care. Nature, at least, is real.
“Much better than those films that make no fucking sense.” The curator wants to post to WeChat Moments. A rebellion without cause makes him want to complain. He writes the post, deletes it, then thinks of something catchier: “I prefer animals to exercise; ecology to ideology.” Less than three seconds after posting, he refreshes the screen several times and deletes it again. He is not afraid of embarrassment, only of being mistaken for someone who still cares about these things.
A pop-up. WeChat. His mate sends a location: Minle Mutton Soup, behind Xingnong Square. He writes something. They have arranged to eat and discuss an art exhibition the curator will soon organise in a two-storey garden villa in the French Concession. The venue’s name sits beneath his tongue, but for the moment he cannot remember it. Fortunately, everyone knows the nickname. At the words villa, fucking impressive, art, listener and speaker arrive at a shared understanding. “Oh, that place, on the same latitude as the Austro-Hungarian embassy.” Ambiguity is also a form of tacit agreement, used to mark the blurriest house on the map. If you describe a piece of real estate through “linear narrative,” it faces south with its back to the north; its central axis can extend through Heilongjiang, then Vladivostok, then farther north… And now we are writing symbols again. What does this house represent? What do you think it represents? Perhaps it represents nothing but the time of yours it has wasted, wasting your time through cheap little traps of thought made by playing with the Chinese pronouns for he, she and it. Reading this novel is a waste of time. Is your time worth wasting? The world is fast. People were already making psychoanalytic thrillers during the Second World War. Writing like this now is truly useless, no progress at all.
Apparently a company recently built some kind of facial electromyography sensor that can decode particular sounds in dreams and transmit dream language in both directions—words are sent through the device to sleeping subjects, who wake able to repeat them in full. Meaning that in future you may have to watch advertisements even in your dreams. Only members will be allowed to dream without ads.
Yesterday he made a cameo in his good mate’s film. Every event conformed to reason, so naturally the curator ought to retain correct knowledge and memory. He has not forgotten his identity, the plan, the organisation, technology making everything more convenient, communication through dreams… and the Bluetooth earpiece. “Send a voice message complaining: Ah, another commercial district. Nothing to eat but the same shitty things, expensive and disgusting.” The director speaks through the earpiece. “Your tone must be impatient.” After such a long silence, the curator had forgotten the director. The man belonged, after all, to last night’s dream, a sword from a fallen dynasty. The director too seems to wake from a dream. He hastens to make up for his absence and begins issuing exact instructions—tone and gaze, body language, all must meet the requirements. He calls himself a craftsman.
His mate says helplessly, “What’s wrong with a central kitchen, li? You should count yourself lucky there’s food at all. Most people pay a premium for pre-made dishes.” This gentleman came from the north and is something of a noted connoisseur. Everyone loves food these days; livestream eaters have already eaten the globe on our behalf. He, however, remains devoted, giving tireless love to his favourite mutton soup. Great cities gather migrants and mutton soups from every direction. The trinity of the writer’s faith is Shanxian mutton soup, Pingquan mutton soup and Cangzhou mutton soup; Hailar mutton soup is honoured as the Virgin Mary, while Ningxia mutton soup may receive an exalted title such as King Solomon. At this, the curator almost laughs. “Why do you sound like classical European literature?” Even the introduction of his friend has become stiff and formal, going so far as to call him “this gentleman.” “And that li. Who talks like you…”
Like me, he sits leaning against the sofa for a while. Time circulates through the bathroom exhaust fan. He does not know what to write.
Might as well watch Bilibili. The camera pulls back again, into depth. Like milk poured over coffee, the harmonious field of dark green, light green and faded grey-green is suddenly broken. On the flat top of a cylindrical rock mountain, we see a building growing abruptly, from a distance like the little house and balloon inside an eye-test machine. The high ground is a utopia too. Another group of kittens, goats and horses: enlightened, they disdain to join the herd of their own kind—those who pursue only the basic security of safety and a full stomach. They long ago discarded the nonhuman written form of the pronoun “they,” trading hard work for stability. Their house is extraordinarily complex in its construction, what the animals call anthro-mimetics, inspired by a camera gimbal.
The little house is built inside two nested metal frames, with a large gyroscopic apparatus at its core. The device consists of a high-speed rotor and a precision bearing system capable of sensing external changes in time. During an earthquake, the Coriolis force generated by the spinning gyroscope can counteract the seismic waves and automatically stabilise the house. The animals draw power from solar panels and windmills. Insulation, high-efficiency windows and intelligent lighting fill the home. There are also 360-degree panoramic windows and an unobstructed natural view. The kitten and his white mother both love the sun.
With such a fine natural display case, the director has struck valuable material. Who would still go to a zoo? The camera never leaves. But we must consider reality—the hooves of goats and horses did not evolve into shapes capable of using tools, and the fickle kitten cannot perform most precision work. This leaves faults in the gyroscope, which now and then rehearses an earthquake. The animals have therefore acquired the habits of sailors: aboard a deck in heavy seas, they shuffle their feet and stand at right angles to keep from falling, rather like the ritual gait known as the Yu Step. The same footwork appears in boat boxing, once widespread in the Wu–Yue region. One can only call it nature’s miraculous convergent evolution.
It does not end there. This gait flowered and spread through later generations. The curator knows plenty of people who make art or make work and walk this way. I know them too. Their work resembles the goats’ house, a battered mechanical sphere. Or resembles something. I thought for ages and could not say what. Perhaps power that exists only in order to exist, survives only in order to survive. The things they create have no aim except to keep themselves from falling out of the system.
4 A flying kick. One flying kick smashes open the building’s security door. Dusk rushes into the stairwell at once, mixed with leaves covered in white spots (probably a fungal disease; there is a smell of mould) and soil from car tyres, like the breathing of a million miners. The pink sky is about to turn blue. Cigarette butts and urine stains appear clean in its light, pieces of amber laid upon the ground, calming body and mind—at this moment the corner will never change, and so the curator has no fear.
At the other end of the earpiece, the director knows the way better than Yu Qian’s navigation voice, as if he were still inside the film city. The entire street, including the moving wind, is under his command: “Go north for one light. There are shared bikes by the road. Don’t scan a blue one, costs thirty cents more; scan a little yellow one.” “Return the bike up ahead, across the road—listen, that pile over there. Fuck me, what mannerless cunt kicked them all over, fuck your mother.” “Go into Furui Convenience Store and buy a bottle of water. Put it in your pocket.” The curator’s trench coat has large pockets, deep as a magical sack for trapping people, one on either side and two inside. They can hide six 750-millilitre bottles of beer. But he is walking quickly and the pockets hang low; with every step the mineral-water bottle strikes his crotch.
After walking for a while he can take no more. “What do I do?” The curator looks at the bottle and thinks: “If I do this, the work will be labelled, perhaps with labels I have never imagined.” There is truly no alternative. This element probably has no meaning beyond itself. Then what does having no meaning beyond itself represent? Objectivity? Who can truly be objective? Perhaps it represents acquiescence, or blind obedience…
With no other choice, the curator performs his secret technique. He performs it, mind you, not me. The truth is the curator knows a move for retracting his genitals into his abdomen. In Istanbul he learnt it from a Persian juggler with the face of a porcelain doll. As he remembers, the man was both old and young. Long lashes flashed black; his hair curled more sharply than his lashes, drawing the tourists’ gaze towards green irises. He was concentrating, staring at his curled Ottoman moustache—working the art. The little moustache rose at the same angle as the lashes. Its tips had been deliberately waxed into the shape of McDonald’s arches.
It is a long story. The curator listened for a long time too—listened to the Persian juggler speak of his Turkic ancestors. A great art such as retracting the genitals deserves preparation, time and practice. The secret technique came from the messengers of Khwarazm. Do not misunderstand: this is man and nature, not a shallow political metaphor. “As everyone knows, the king of that country liked only good news, and so established the world’s first system for monitoring public opinion. Inside Samarkand he was omniscient and omnipotent. No internet, no electricity; control through the most primitive method, fear. Every messenger bringing bad news would be castrated, yet they had no choice but to report the enemy’s latest movements—which khan had defected, who had been beheaded by the Mongols… At the moment of national survival, the messengers had no choice but to sacrifice themselves…” The juggler’s voice sank lower and lower, as if the matter were deeply shameful. “Things are better now. Now we have a republic and no longer need to read a tyrant’s face. You know, last time I voted for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The time before that I voted for Erdoğan too. The time before that, Erdoğan. Next time, ah, I’ll vote for Erdoğan again. You know, so many young people now understand nothing about economics or international relations, all they want is change, but who knows what it might change into…”
As the juggler talked, he wandered off the subject. The curator became anxious and hurriedly said, No, no, no, no, no politics. “Then… the messengers began rigorous practice of the art of retracting the genitals. When their news was bad, they retracted before seeing the king, sobbing in court that an enemy state had imprisoned and castrated them. Once the emperor saw that, he could hardly lose his temper. He waved a hand and dismissed them. From then on, the messengers pretending to be eunuchs enjoyed freedom of speech. Every day, like muttering ghosts, they brought news of land and people lost. In any case, the Mongols eventually destroyed Khwarazm, didn’t they? That was that. Some people fled west, all the way to what is now Turkey.” The curator later studied under him. He no longer remembers how he learnt it.
Of course, I could also write that the curator is a castrate, an impotent man, a eunuch. In the manner of Mo Yan, I could invent a coarse myth about sex: perhaps someone sat on his root and broke it; perhaps he thrust too hard from behind, rammed the other person’s coccyx and snapped it again. I could directly describe the curator’s sexual weakness and deliver a wild passage of bodily writing. But what use would that be? To show that I have severed myself from patriarchy? Would it truly help? The motives of writing always protest too much. Every woman draws men’s attention; some simply restrain themselves and impersonate human beings. When they cannot, they find excuses—I am too old; I have a family. Unless I say that I am K, the curator is K too, weak in body and likewise in spirit. Better not make him a eunuch. Since ancient times, castrated men have been the worst of all. Depriving eunuchs of sex only encourages aggression.
He looks into the black doorway. So many plastic signs, absorbing light: nail salon, cat café, guitar lessons, tattoos and facial piercings, murder-mystery games. Too many. Must not let them cheat you of money. Several layers of black plastic sheeting left behind after renovation cover the front of the building as a welcome carpet. The lobby is packed. Four lifts fight up and down but can never carry everyone: those rushing to spend and those rushing to earn are equally frantic. The curator squeezes in and asks someone to press twenty-seven. Two hours later, he arrives.
Why so long? The writer asks the same question. He did not delay on purpose. This is what happened: the lift stopped at every floor and new people entered and left each time. This was normal. Six rhyming safety rules were written on the wall. Four screens played advertisements, each one screaming a slogan hoarse. Two bars designed to block electric bikes made uncomfortable seats. The ads were deafening; the brain struggled to classify them as white noise. The curator was still holding his genitals inside. His mind grew hazy under the disturbance around him, as though he had entered a dream and found adverts there too.
The lift stops on every floor and keeps travelling down. There are quotas handed down from above. The people at the central control room are perfectly righteous about it: “We have performance quotas too.” In an economic downturn they send a whole lift of people to the shopping floor. Look at the time—when restaurants need customers, everyone is delivered to the food court. The doors open on fried sausage and skewers boiling in broth. Who could remain hungry?
The twenty-seventh floor has not been fitted out. The building is circular, a ring of doors and a ring of corridor. There are still plenty of people. The corridor has no windows. Voice sensors have been installed, but no lights. Cooking fumes and sizzling drift from some open doors; in exchange comes the mouldy smell of clothes newly collected from charities by the export shop next door. It has rained constantly of late. Smells and sounds circulate through the roulette-wheel corridor. A livestream seller promises quality; an e-commerce department promises a dispatch time; a debt collector promises a solicitor’s letter, promising to mobilise an army over three hundred yuan in arrears. If you listen carefully, every business can obtain the latest market intelligence and trade secrets in time.
Delivery riders find the place too stifling, so they smoke in the fire stairs and spit through the gaps between flights, competing for accuracy.
The curator searches by torchlight, but there are no numbers on the rooms and the signal inside the building is poor, cutting off the director’s instructions. He circles again and again and finds nothing. All this time, he notices someone nearby who keeps poking his head out. It is too dark to make out his face, and the curator is too embarrassed to shine the light directly at him. He sweeps the beam past as inoffensively as possible and sees a delivery uniform, a GoPro strapped to the man’s chest.
The curator opens his mouth and is filled at once by the rancid-oil smell. “Hey, hello, mate, sorry, do you know… ah… there’s a, what do you call it, mutton-soup place here, right… number 44. Which one is 44… what do you do, anyway… wearing a camera?” The question comes out in pieces. The bitter, greasy air sets off his pharyngitis; each time he opens his mouth he wants to dry-heave.
In a north-eastern accent, the man says he makes vlogs and livestreams and has come for the experience. “Number 44? That’s an open kitchen. More than a dozen delivery businesses in there! Mutton soup—you’ll have to look. See which one resembles it. I’m telling you, ah, they call it a kitchen. All that’s inside is a microwave.”
The curator realises he may have been played. This streamer does not resemble an ordinary experience vlogger. His movements are too practised, as if he knew from the beginning what to film. The lens on his chest is lit, mercilessly recording the curator’s humiliation—a curator about to vomit bile. Is this the director’s cinéma vérité? Fucking truthful enough. The curator’s dilated pupils accept every new smell in the airless corridor. The smell of burning protein drifts over: a hair salon is incinerating the clippings from its floor in one batch. A million mosquitoes struggle upon an electric swatter.
Beside him, the streamer is still chatting in fragments with the bullet comments. If you cannot even speak smoothly, do not be a streamer. What? My Mandarin is perfectly good. “Brothers, remember: the more ordinary, the safer. Treat a kid as a little shit and an old person as an old bastard. Do not be Socrates. You never want to know the feeling of exhausting your mind to cultivate a pack of idiots and treacherous disciples, while also understanding that betraying you is their right. And do not be Caligula either. People who know nothing and pretend they do, people who half understand you, will wave your name around to swindle others and use you to promote themselves.”
5 Last night, several helicopters may have been circling above the curator’s bedroom. Or perhaps they were mosquitoes. Half awake with fury, he began to imagine a fifty-square-metre electric swatter and a million mosquitoes rushing towards him. Mosquitoes do not travel in straight lines. In flight they must always stop abruptly or change altitude; another mosquito in the swarm does the same and immediately takes its place. The unpredictable cloud of mosquitoes coils around its own noise. Every one dies upon the electric swatter.
It was not only the mosquitoes that ruined his sleep. There were also two clocks. The curator owns two clocks—his phone alarm does not count. Like real clocks, like clocks from before, they go. They go mechanically, not as digits upon a screen. They do not merely go; they remind you with click click click that they are going. Time is an abstract understanding of worldly change created by human logic and perception, yet human beings cannot sense time and can rely only upon clocks that go and sound as they go. The clock regulates the time in this place. The curator has two clocks. Both go and both sound. In his room, one clock going is a clock going; two clocks going together become music. Yesterday one clock stopped. The curator slept badly and woke with the irritable mental drive of a body deprived of rest, as though he had downed several cans of Red Bull.
Lean over the window and look: a dense stream of people inches forward, no one wanting to brush a phone from somebody else’s hand. Less rain falls with each passing year. Passengers reject a perfectly judged sexual suggestion like a taxi cutting through a perfectly judged sheet of water, almost splashing the queue outside the milk-tea shop. Today he has to meet the curator and discuss business. Ah, he truly hates going out. People people people. Honestly, the thought alone annoys him. Those people… leave home as though receiving a great guest; employ the people as though assisting at a great sacrifice… Downstairs is a pedestrian shopping street, prime real estate. The barbecue restaurant is packed by noon and large green beer bottles cover the ground. Young people, a crowd at a gathering, all sorts mixed together: a few words here, loud calls there, one lifted hand spanning past and present, one open mouth producing ideology. They speak a great many words and suck at a great many cigarettes. Do not fear the drink-and-smoke rasp. Opinion is the only thing worth remembering in the floating cold air. I love my teacher, but I love truth more. The phrases repeat without limit: “Brother, don’t you think I know you?” “Brother, I’m done messing with you.”
The young men raise their glasses, every one dressed in black. The conversation dies. Men and women in T-shirts with different prints sink into the sofa, no one knowing what to think. They always feel there is no one worth talking to. People are too shallow; all they discuss is marriage, work, study and gossip. Talk to someone too profound and you expose yourself. The real objects inside their words are too heavy. So you need to find people to drink with: someone idle, someone loose, someone frustrated in desire, then someone lazy—too lazy to leave home, too lazy to speak, too lazy to contradict your laziness and lose their temper—to serve as an audience. Seize the chance to drain a glass, immediately insert one of your all-encompassing principles, a parable that can bring enlightenment through every spoken and unspoken word. Face on the outside and substance within.
You are so young—where did you learn this whole routine? Wasting time in speech, wearing life away through association, owning nothing yet believing you must at least count as worker, peasant, soldier and student; knowing deeply the principle of principles, the principle that cannot be spoken, the simple principle, the tacit principle that needs no words. Every sentence you speak must be concise but not simple, open to interpretation while inviting misunderstanding, coarse on the surface yet containing great wisdom. You are an opinion leader with personality, a rebellious and independent niche thinker, both conservative and open. Some speak like poetry. Some speak straight to the core. Some turn every laugh and curse into literature. Some are spiritually impotent and do not want to say a word. Some have watched too many Jiang Wen films; after enough of them, speech becomes impossible. Spiritual impotence is an entry ticket. It comes and goes. Fine when you are sober. Stiff enough when the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine fire great missiles at one another. If you had sex while watching a white foreign streamer react to Chinese TikTok, you could certainly fuck for hours. Competition within this group is fierce. There must be battles of letters, critiques of critiques and negations of negations, satires of later satire and original satire, taking matters in life that could have been judged on their facts and raising them, through projective thought, to brotherhood, principle, how to conduct oneself and the Way that can be spoken is not the constant Way. You are exhausted. Having studied too much, you become indolent and lost, immersed in an ocean of yourself.
A film is only a film. At least the people in films dare to earn their money standing up, because they all enter the game with a fundamental demand. Listen: the people downstairs seem to speak through the hollow pipe of a great cock after ejaculation:
Hey, brother, listen, I need to tell you something.
What?
Come here, brother, I’ll tell you.
Go on, then.
Do you think I know who you are?
What?
After all these years, you think the two of us… who is he?
Huh?
You think he’s your friend?
What the fuck?
Then me and him now are… existence?
Huh?
You know, there was this Ferrero factory…
What?
Right now, you think you yourself—why did you come here today?
What the hell are you trying to say?
When the factory was first established it was tiny. Every worker was related to the manager…
And then?
One worker stole chocolate every single day…
And then?
What kind of problem do you think this is?
Don’t give me that. Dock his wages, fine him.
No, no, no…
Then what?
It’s the principle… feelings… responsibility… trust. How do you not understand?
So what?
How do you still not understand?
Every fucking cocoa bean Ferrero uses for chocolate gets fucked by monkeys in Southeast Asia for stress relief before they send it over to Europe. They have Brahmin cocoa beans, Kshatriya cocoa beans and the like. The only ones they give you Germanic barbarians are the shittiest Dalit beans. It annoys me, seeing you eat them so happily.
They all seem to understand.
Last night I read the sky. Seven stars stood in conjunction; meteors scattered. Too dangerous. Let us assume the objects described by our story, and the cats, have died.
6 For the moment he does not need to exist. The wooden chair is too high, or the defective industrial table before it is too low. The computer cannot sit level with the eyes. How can anyone write like this? Just remain here. The Chinese input method is awkward too. The keyboard is too loud; at night I am afraid of disturbing others.
I ought to disturb more people, because even at abusing people I cannot compete with AI now, not without the skill of Guo Degang. I do not have it. The chair gives every person writing at this moment, unable to find the right character, a neck craning forward or occasionally leaning back. Countless Henry Miller-style descriptions of surroundings and living conditions are being produced. He has appeared using unruly language to ease sexual repression while still attempting to become Henry Miller. But he is not that kind of person. He is sensitive and cowardly. Everyone wants to be Franz Kafka; no one truly wants to become Kafka in life, while Kafka in life would avoid you like the plague. And if you say this, no one cares about his state of mind in life. They only think you are putting on airs, that you cannot possibly be trying sincerely to understand him. At first you finished one of his books (after the whole thing had been spoiled), read the first fifty pages three times, made up your mind on seven occasions, and once you reached the end never forgot it. You excitedly searched online for explanations and book videos. You saw someone post Kafka’s face, alert as a mole, and stared into the mole’s eyes, and in your mind said: “Holy shit?” Later you read The Village Schoolmaster (The Giant Mole) and again thought: “Holy shit?” Do you understand? If not, keep talking.
I have forgotten everything written above. Writer, horse, cat, curator, villa—what were they all supposed to correspond to? It resembles an online power-progression novel that changes maps after every level. I cannot remember whether I created their forms first or their referents. Should we write only meaningless reality, or meaningful stories?
Should we write only the story, or, before writing it, casually pick up a cigarette, look left and right for a lighter, feel a hidden swelling in the throat? Parts of several letters have worn from the keyboard. You try to distinguish them. Smoke makes the letters dance. You weep dry tears.
After delusionally trying to turn the story into reality, then using a complete, different system of signs—the signs thought up casually by that dull person trapped inside the room in which he is trapped, then forced into connection with one another. Speech means solitude. The sign is despair. I will write a song I sing every day, reminding myself how to approach despair by the most direct route. Beneath this blue sky, thinking each day of the direction a tree will fall, the broken houses, the rushing birds, the sand borne on the wind. No one can blame the people who grieve here. They forget to trim their nails.
I have only two Henry Millers left, two Fyodor Dostoevskys, one copy of Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. The checked-baggage limit is only twenty-three kilograms. Someone gave me this Hesse. It sat unopened for a long time. I knew little about her, but at least remembered her name. I seldom remember names. I love her. We spent only a few days together. She gave me a Hesse and Netochka Nezvanova. I think she meant that I was as useless as Netochka’s violinist father. Yes, she was more mature than me and had seen through me long ago. I would wear her to death, then wear myself to death. But I love her. I thought about her for years. Before I left she gave me a bunch of flowers and told me to return before they wilted. I never again opened the plastic bag tied in a dead knot. The flowers have long since turned brittle; shake it and fragments fall. I do not want to open it again. Nor do I want to open Narcissus and Goldmund. There is no eros now. Australian customs strictly forbid plants and animals from entering, though leather shoes may be worn in. I brought only two cartons of cigarettes.
I created so many stories, so many people, and forgot them. When I return to China and open the plastic bag, the pollen will probably choke my face. A kitten will approach and sniff curiously, sneeze, then run. The kitten is always remembering his white mother. More likely, my mother will simply throw the bag of rubbish away. I say no. She sends me an article: “Decluttering: Why Can’t You Bear to Throw Things Away?” I take great strides like a person with business to conduct. Someone full of worry yet knowing how to solve it walks with my stride. A monkey does not; they are all slightly hunched. A gorilla can walk this way. It also resembles the gait of a social-app user: they know a stranger is always waiting. I cannot see strangers, only living signs one after another. The few exceptions expired long ago with promises made in passing. I will never meet them again. There is no second chance.
Theory mixed with Henry Miller as I look out at lawn, wet deckchairs and trees fighting one another. I want to write poetry. Perhaps the curator needs a poet mate to lay a few bricks for his exhibition. Sometimes I envy poets. What can I write? Only manifestos. I can taste only manifestos in their poems, distil only symbols. If I am this stupid, I should not read poetry. Poets are far more popular than I am. They can answer the jeering below at any moment: “Give us one, give us one.”
Mira qué pobre amante,
Look at this poor lover!
incapaz de meterse en una fuente,
unable to leap into a fountain
para traerte un pescadito rojo
and bring you back a little red fish
bajo la rabia de gendarmes y niñeras.
beneath the fury of policemen and nannies.
These are lyrics by an Ecuadorian psychedelic-rock band. The album is called Poetry, Love, Freedom and Revolution. Put those words together and panic sets in. When did we begin to fear them? As though the slightest contact would demote us to ordinary people; as though mentioning any of them in any sentence were instantly banal, returning us from art wankers who have attained primitive simplicity to ordinary art wankers. It is terrifying.
Why do the police arrive the moment anyone writes poetry? Like a university protester. Officer, you have a pistol, an electric baton, a body camera. If it runs out of power, I have a power bank. I am only a loose construction of cheap books, pirated films, artworks glimpsed by chance and fragments of free music. Like a bowl of ground tobacco. Roll it. Once you finish rolling, I will attack your alveoli and bronchi. Pharyngitis. Make you sick. Why do poetry, love, freedom and revolution make you sick? Things turn into their opposites at the extreme? Everything makes me sick: meals, cigarettes, alcohol, flesh. Australia is warm and no one begrudges the display of flesh. Flesh full of trees and soil. Great trees, small trees, fallen trees, eucalypts, palms that resemble Hainan coconut trees, koalas. Bird tracks in the earth become trenches for ants. The novel is an ant, lifting the weight of the soul with the soul’s lightness, like the nail bed receding, or waking to discover a new black line on your thumb. Not enough to seek medical help immediately.
Vapes make you sick too. Disgust, however, is not a struggle. It is only acceptance, an experience that knows everything afterwards. The horse jumps. The movement of its calf muscles resembles trains passing one after another. The horse sits in an uncomfortable chair to type, careful of scoliosis. I remember Mo Yan saying the horse is mother. Let it be. I think he is right.
7 Zoom back, camera. When the camera pulls away you see the sound recordist, script supervisor, director, assistant director and make-up artist. When the shutter opens, the film displays tourists in a landscape, dynastic buildings or racing cars. All of this is the film’s own function. It is merely the film’s optical judgement that the world exists; the images upon it are only proof of that function.
This novel resembles a wet dream after missing a party of a hundred people: surging, unavoidable, and somehow still not over. How is anyone meant to endure it? I tired long ago of explaining, introducing or recommending anything to anyone. By now I no longer know what I look like. The people I should have known were probably missed long ago through my arrogance. Still powerless, able only to miss more.
Two lives ago, I masturbated beside the sea in Istanbul. The sultan discovered me and punished me by making me a neutered cat.
In the north-east, an animal that wants to become a spirit must seek a human conferral: rabbits, snow frogs, roe deer, hedgehogs, weasels and the like. If one day someone dressed entirely in yellow approaches, cosplaying Kill Bill and Bruce Lee, and asks, “Do I look human?”—say yes and he becomes one. Say no, you look like Nailoong, and it is over. He must go back and cultivate for another two hundred years. He will hate you for it.
Day after day in the street, I think what others think, consider what others consider. Not merely speech about livestream selling or online loans, things that will show their first shoots only centuries after the flood engulfs the world; there is no need to worry now and multiply vexation. There are also rumours of a more humanistic colour. A Greek doctor sent by some sultan to treat plague on some island is suspected of having been secretly murdered by a gang led by the younger brother of a prominent local sheikh. The investigation concluded only that the place was poor and its ignorant population had mistaken the doctor for the source of the plague. But other voices say the local pasha tolerated the activity in order to suppress Greek nationalism (why does that sound so familiar?). I come from Cyprus. As I listen, I do not forget to pluck the saz in my hands, brewing an Anatolian melody from the Mediterranean coast: nine-eight time, D, E, F major, G. The sultan will dance; Caesar will dance; never mind the ahongs and imams. Bang bang bang: a twenty-one-gun salute, an Ottoman military band inside my mouth.
In truth, the salute sounds only on the sultan’s birthday, the military band was inspected last month, and I have nothing. No saffron and no rose spice. How can I conceal my hatred, and my fear? My music insults the earth, the strait and the Way that follows nature. It mocks the shoving crowd. I despise myself and make some noise to cover my unreason. They say this makes me suited to writing novels. I do not want to write that crap. Orthodox Christians praise my proud integrity, my continued defence of Greek culture in the heart of the empire. Once they leave, I will return to the sheikh’s story. Animals are all liars. Only blood machines do not lie. You must understand that the roast peacock on the sultan’s banquet table, laid on romaine lettuce with an apple in its mouth, is a lie. The court, its treasury empty, has only a few recycled feathers, a beak and a skull. An innocent turkey is ground into mince and mixed with hummus to keep up appearances. The lives and deaths of these animals are lies. You have never been a neutered cat in Constantinople remembering his white mother, and so naturally believe all these stories were invented. The salute was never fired; the empire would not celebrate for an infidel; the military band was elsewhere that day. They are only that one patch on the empire’s briefly flowering peacock feather, dampened by the snow of Vienna. The empire broke itself here. Why did the speaking, human-hearted animals of fable not help the sultan, as their close relations once charged into battle for Chiyou?
Animals ought to be resurrected, but how to resurrect them is a serious question. Can animals be resurrected by human nature? Russians are the keenest on resurrection. Rodion Raskolnikov is resurrected under the guidance of Resurrection. Who will guide animals like us? When can we hope for an Ivan Karamazov to emerge among the weasels? When will someone come to remove the animals’ chains? We lack the courage to deny the sunk cost of centuries spent cultivating. We can only ask every traveller without rest to confer humanity upon us, telling them the story of the Khwarazm messengers again and again. This makes us look especially clever, deep in thought. I am the knife and chopping block, and between laughter and abuse become superior to the animals upon the dining table. We break the rules and follow Chairman Mao Zedong forward through great winds and waves.
A Persian cat: curled lashes, a doll’s face, a little Turkish moustache turned upwards. In his heart survives the final shoot of Zoroastrian dualism. I recommend that every mediocre person embrace dualism dualistically. Good is good; bad is bad; black and white stand clearly apart; Ahura Mazda is light. The animals playing in the little house and on the grass were never there at all. The animals on the table are only symbols. People need not care how they survive and need not care what they have eaten. They need only follow instinct and replenish their energy. None of the food you see exists.
The king of Khwarazm understood life. He chose never again to hear the truth and castrated every truthful messenger to prevent them from reproducing. Like Ahura Mazda, chief god of Zoroastrianism—the so-called fire-worshipping religion—he made dialectics emerge from dualism and created deconstruction and metaphor. The empty crotches of the messengers and the curator after they retracted their genitals are nonbeing; nonbeing names the beginning of heaven and earth. Show me the coating on your tongue. I bet it is empty too. The cat in the house, his white mother and the horse know that their harmonious companions below the mountain are an illusion. The utopia in the grass knows just as clearly that precise deconstructions and seismographs exist only on paper.
The world is too cruel. Merely because the symbol of the cat must be avoided, the cat and his white mother have to die. God is pitiable too: before he has decided whether he exists, Friedrich Nietzsche demands his death. If even God has fallen this far, the messengers of Khwarazm have no grounds for complaint. The king likes cats and wants even more to dream of them. Yesterday he dreamt of himself, the cat and the cat’s white mother in a body of water. The water was blue and had no colour. Each time he moved, broken ripples rose in succession as if peeling something from his body and carrying it away, widening and widening, no one knowing where they went. The space had no echo. He felt the pain of being separated from his own flesh and blood. He put the cat inside a plastic bag because cats fear water. The cat was remembering his white mother and bitterly resented the king for always touring his territory and seldom returning to visit. Khwarazm was too far away. Even a saint could not walk there to redeem them and enlighten their confusion. Greek saints wore no boots because they had no nails; barefoot, they could hardly cross the mountain ranges into Central Asia. Even if the king contracted leprosy, no saint would kiss him before he died.
He suffered greatly. Upon waking, he found himself surrounded by mocking symbols. The messengers under him also used kitsch mockery to conceal bewilderment and fear of the unknown. The business he conducted, filthy business, pickpocket business—whether stealing a country or stealing money—was carried out with a sense of superiority. A thoroughly bad man, with a filthy heart.
I look around: Mediterranean-style street, flagstones and buildings. The buildings are badly made, especially those broken bricks, covered in dense cracks like a cardiovascular system. They resemble the face of some pasha in charge of finance. No one knows which craftsman made them. This heart is a bad heart. Technology was undeveloped then, the age remote; people still believed human beings thought with the heart. It is the bad heart of a bad man who watches porn before deciding to apologise to his ex. The sea wind from the dawn of capitalism blows in.
When something terrible happens: animals, for example, are anthropomorphised and fitted with meanings beyond words.
Several centuries later, a young man in the same kind of trench coat as the curator will step forward and say: “Hello, everyone. My name is Albert Camus. My interests are literature and art. I would like to say that a life which looks only towards money is no different from death. Resurrection exists in silence.” This is the French resurrection. The Russian resurrection must be more earth-shaking. The curator’s resurrection is the Chinese resurrection. But he will not be resurrected. I no longer like him. Because he is false. I have even begun to doubt that he ever truly existed. Of course he did not.
False means writing. False means that much of the time I believed I was living. False means that while I think, you exist; you are real. Or perhaps it means that you have begun to think. The kitten remembers his white mother. His mother wakes quietly without disturbing anyone and is persuaded back into the dream. In the end, you will still reach the conclusion: we will not be resurrected.