Thin-soled leather shoes do not strike the ground as loudly as thick-soled ones.
If you let your heel land first, then, as you hear that deep yet gentle footfall, lightly sweep the ball of your foot into the ground and hold it close against the surface, you will hear the beautiful sound of rubber and leather stretching out, like someone working a zip back and forth without end.
Thin-soled leather shoes let you make peace with the earth. Thick-soled leather shoes increase the likelihood of caffeine addiction.
Wooden soles, heels at least three and a half centimetres high, pointed or square—it makes no difference. Even after a protective sole has been added, each time the heel touches the ground you can clearly feel a kind of resistance.
Asphalt despises people like us. With every step, you know that you are walking: idle in leather shoes, pretending to be busy.
With every step, wooden-soled shoes destroy the future of walking. They are busy rebounding from the ground. Every step, every sound is different. You can never know what the final one will be like.
That was how he walked. His steps grew heavier and heavier, yet his body felt light.
He chewed his gum hard, as though his head were light. Concentrating all his energy on the gum gave him the power to feel contempt. Thick-soled leather shoes were nothing to worry about. The more he chewed, the lighter his body felt; his heels rebounded from the ground without end. A chill ran through him and his skin rose in gooseflesh.
This was how he was. As he walked, he thought his leather shoes felt expensive. Expensive leather shoes were difficult to wear too. Rich people did not walk. They were never idle; they only created more troubles for themselves.
“Do I look good?” He looked down at his expensive trousers and shoes and asked her.
Sometimes he wore the same skinny flared jeans as everyone else and pretended he had never seen a photograph of a Hedi Slimane boy. Wide-legged suit trousers were different.
She did not look. She said, Don’t you wear this sort of thing every day?
Wind slipped in through the trouser hems. At each step the wide-legged trousers bunched together like Caesar collapsing, then spread open again and drew in the wind. Standing still, he looked square, as though he had walked out of Minecraft.
Sometimes the trouser legs twisted together as if they were inside a washing machine. Now the two of them were walking, the same as everyone else, his mind in chaos, thinking of everything, far too much. These people disgusted him, yet he was also afraid of being alone.
He always wanted to walk by himself, especially when they passed other people. He secretly shook free of the hand holding his, lowered his head and pretended he had something to do. Once, holding hands had counted as having something to do. Now it did not. He would rather do nothing. It was much the same.
He had become highly skilled at secretly letting go. A grip lightly pinching a few fingers, a lover’s interlocked hand, or someone hooking an arm through his while he wore a trench coat with his hands in his pockets, both of them posing as though they were going somewhere—from any of these he could slide away without emotion.
He could be anyone. With their fingers interlocked, he became someone whose palms sweated easily. His fingers twisted left and right; his palm rubbed itchily against the other palm, implying impatience. But he would never use any aggressive means to end any relationship, including the holding of hands.
He would choose the right moment and draw his hand out naturally, raise it before his face for a glance, then press it to his left cheek and pretend it was soaked in sweat. He would wipe his face with his sleeve, taking care not to catch his facial piercings. Then he would draw the hand in a single line from his waist; when it reached the pocket, he would slide it straight inside and leave it there. His hand fidgeted around in the pocket. His lighter scraped against his phone’s tempered-glass screen protector, leaving a few white marks.
When he was being led by the hand—and here that means the particular kind in which the person doing the leading walks in front and uses a few fingers to grasp most of the back of the other person’s hand—he still had a way out. Usually he would yank his hand free. In that split second, before the other person’s resentment had fully risen, he would seize the hand again, release it, seize it several more times, pretending to be playing with them while deliberately using too much force. After a few grabs, he would slip his hand into his pocket as though to say, I’ve had enough of this game.
The trench-coat arrangement, with the other person linking arms, was genuinely difficult to break. First, it did not conflict with pretending to have something to do.
Second, Western films and culture had packaged the gesture with great poise, making it look as though you were doing something.
Third, the two of them looked rather pleasing.
Fourth, they looked like a couple.
But he had long since grown tired of it. Whenever a picture was taken, he photographed only himself, always in portrait orientation. Plenty of people liked the pictures. Then he opened their WeChat Moments and looked at them. They were all beautiful, but there were far too many people like that.
“Stop looking. Can’t you stop letting them like your pictures?” she said.
“They’re free to like my pictures.”
“What? You’re always talking about freedom, freedom. Where is my freedom?”
“You’re free to break up with me.”
“What use is that? My life will change, I will change, society and technology will change, but where is freedom?”
“You’re free to go for a walk.”
“There’s nothing here. Our author racked his brains to make up all this dialogue, but there’s nothing in his head. He hasn’t written so much as a setting.
“What?”
“I said there’s nothing here.”
“Huh?”
“But there’s nothing here. Someone can still see us, though, can’t they?”
“There’s nothing here. They’ll soon forget every one of these sentences.”