We are like neighbours in the same room, only our positions are not quite the same.
Perhaps one of us is upstairs and the other downstairs.
The room upstairs is large, as large as the sitting room. Downstairs there are always other rooms. The dated decor looks like a high-school canteen. The person downstairs lives at the outermost edge, right beside the door.
You knock on the door, walk upstairs, and ask what kind of people live here.
A few people upstairs and downstairs, and the story begins:
Every day I think what other people think, imagine what other people imagine. Walking through a crowd, I pull my mind out of the screen. Most people on the street are looking at their phones too. Their eyes grow more and more accustomed to focusing on one small screen. Now and then they put the phone down to cross the road, look up, and remember they possess panoramic vision.
I always think the sky covers only a small patch. People keep emerging on the street; now and then I remember one or two. There are even more around me, walking and stopping. You see every kind of person in the city centre. On the street I always pretend to be in a hurry, wondering whether I have forgotten something. Yet looking at them leaves me frustrated. I do not know what they are thinking.
I write a few sentences and discover that my grammar is becoming more and more Westernised. Sometimes I even think in English. It frightens me.
The Sikhs on the street may think in Punjabi, thinking of their families in Punjab. I remember that Punjab comes from Persian: panj is five and āb is water, so Punjab ought to be translated as Five Rivers. The cognate Greek root penta also means five. Pentakill. I miss League of Legends, but it stopped being popular long ago. None of my friends will play it with me.
The possibilities of what they might be thinking are often forgotten before I can guess them. The habit of thinking makes me tired, yet I cannot control it. Every time our eyes meet, I cannot help attaching myself to someone else. I want so badly to become every pair of eyes. Blurred or exhausted, each contains countless viewpoints and possibilities.
I am not an AI. Taking in too much has not made me any cleverer. When I am other people and other things, I remain curious and compassionate.
In the inferno of the living, Italo Calvino says, find the people and things that are not inferno; learn to recognise and record them, Calvino goes on. And I can become them.
So many people perform for you, singing and dancing for you. On your phone, you really are an emperor. The people below all look identical: the same makeup, the same skin, the same shapes of face. Some are a little taller, some a little shorter, allowing people with different tastes to find a better match for their fantasies. Worse are the ones with distinctive traits of their own. There are too many of them. They put too much pressure on people.
I do not want to meet anyone, yet I want to know what the people behind the camera think and how they live.
There are rats on the street and cockroaches in the yard. Squat, fat slugs and earthworms are summoned by moisture all year round and cling to the tiles. An earthworm is thin as a dried lily twisting on the wall. Turn on the shower and it rises and falls in resonance with the droplets hitting the floor. Its body is a gradient, pointed at both ends and orange-yellow in the middle. I want to become an insect and understand the world through negligible senses. I want to know how many metres from food I must be before I notice it. I want to know the logical relation between the birth of the urge to hunt and the hunt itself.
I also want to know what the person upstairs thinks about every day.
A possibility for the person upstairs: He does not have to leave the room to communicate with people.
Nor does he have to undress and expose his old long johns and feet. Only when he sees them does he remember to cut his nails, brush his teeth, and rinse his mouth. There is no hurry. He does not have to do any of it. No one can see him. He watches unseen.
The master of porn moves from one image to the next and, in the end, still prefers what is real. What is most real wounds most deeply.
If you were secretly filmed in some budget hotel ten years ago—imagine someone now, smiling beyond the screen, enjoying the pleasure of watching a person who has no idea. It sounds a little like a reader of Franz Kafka. No, that is not an apt description. A Kafka reader grieves alongside the protagonist.
When you were small, you built the warmest shelter from six pillows and two quilts. In winter you tucked the corners of the quilt into pockets, yet still felt unsafe. A little mouse, showing only its two little eyes, was watching too.
The master of porn lives in a world where even babies feel that someone else has something on them. Death and taxes make children resemble, from birth, the unsuspecting stars of hidden-camera porn. There is always a young man who loves to masturbate watching hungrily from behind, a satisfied smile at the corner of his mouth. When he is done, he laughs at you.
Sex is a bad habit the master of porn abandoned long ago. He only watches, using other people’s situations to experience grief.
Before having sex, they can pour out the first half of their lives or describe an entire encyclopedia in words. In the end they return to sameness, making the same movements while dreaming separate dreams in the same bed, staging another cycle of the hunt. Men treat women as prey and unowned property. Some women may be briefly possessed and then return to the wild. Men like seeing that most of all.
Voyeurism has a desexualised beauty. Appetite is restrained; every movement remains repressed and even-paced.
They dress women in work uniforms, put helmets on them, add the hats of ancient officials, design bikini armour, as if decorating a cake. Men see women at work and think: her cosplay is pretty good. She has made herself look delicious.
The morally upright have also lamented that this person will be—or is about to be, or has already been—possessed by somebody else. It leaves behind a regret, a suspicious trace they claim on the surface not to care about.
Eating, digestion, and excretion are all plot points, like making contact or picking someone up.
Orange-red meat and the brown colour of caramelised sugar are tiresome. The thought of swallowing already exhausts me. Food slides down the oesophagus on a long journey, immediately followed by an even longer process, compact and sticky. It is the process through which thoughts arise, but I do not possess them.
When a man is in a good mood, he forgets her, though only for a little while. Also when he smokes.
His mood is best when he is about to possess a woman. At that moment they try not to think of her, but of other people. Think carefully.
He thinks everyone who at this very moment is about to be possessed by someone else, or is being possessed already, is stupid and losing out. If they never meet him, they lose out. But the truth is that you cannot make everyone love you. He is a little deflated and suddenly feels that the person he is about to possess is not much after all.
The watcher restrains his appetite. Some people walk with their knees thrust forward, their legs springing. Someone lifts a foot, moves it quickly and level, then sets it down without a sound… Robert Bresson. A housemate practises rap downstairs. A strange country. The people around them speak other languages.
If you could see the lift surveillance from a budget hotel—a man who has checked in and put down his bag goes downstairs to buy cigarettes, or a lighter. He already has cigarettes.
The room smells of rancid oil. He has everything. On his way to possess someone, he merely wants to show off, to show off to the air. At this moment everything outside the room is his enemy, a possible threat waiting to steal his lover.
He is like a retired county magistrate returning home in brocade, smoking in the lift with perfect assurance.
Perhaps the master of porn can see this too: the man has returned to the room, but the person he wants to possess has not arrived. Perhaps they are friends; perhaps they have never met; perhaps it is a paid arrangement. None of that matters. What matters are these few dozen minutes. Now and then he stands up. Sometimes he sits down and opens every group chat. When he talks to friends, he deliberately sends voice messages, enunciating heavily to bring out his hometown accent. By accident he opens WeChat Channels and starts scrolling. Random freaks take control of him for ages. His mind goes blank, and finally he laughs in exasperation.
A knock at the door. Always making it so mysterious.
He puts down his phone and lights a cigarette, taking several fierce drags so that it looks as if he lit it thirty seconds before she arrived. As if he were the strategist Zhuge Liang waiting for her inside. He looks like a man who is always smoking. The smoke hides his wrinkles and makes his face less ugly. When the other person enters, it is like K. entering the village for the first time.
At this point the master of porn closes the webpage. Or perhaps this is only when the master of porn begins watching. He must also accept a certain fact—someone is watching him, wearing an expression as serious as his own.
There are six holes in the yard. Little mice run in and out, showing a pair of small eyes.
Another possibility upstairs: It was mentioned earlier that the room upstairs is large, as large as the sitting room. This gives people many choices. The bed can face any direction. You can ask ChatGPT about feng shui or ask someone else. All four walls are empty. Every flat object and decoration that exists in the world would fit. The same is true of the floor. He can lay down a Persian carpet, an Indian carpet, a Chinese carpet, or the hide of an entire animal.
Being able to do whatever you like is irritating. The blank walls seem to issue a summons, telling the tenant to buy useless decorations that cannot be taken away. After looking at colour for long enough, he can no longer bear white walls. Whenever he discovers a new film that can represent some fragment of himself, he wants to put up a new poster.
Every minute of every day, the phone pushes art from some corner of the world. Seeing does not mean possessing. I know we will not remember the PowerPoint slides we photographed in class. When you are about to lose something, it keeps stressing its own presence through hints, but you have already missed it.
The person living there is only an insignificant carrier for the upstairs room. The room is free because the room has nothing. By continuing to have nothing, one possesses the freedom not to cooperate, the freedom not to endorse, the ability not to hate those one does not wish to hate. Living in a room does not only mean that he possesses the room. He also possesses the right to look outside from this angle. It is an inexpensive hobby. Better to leave the walls empty.
Upstairs there is no shortage of angles from which to look. He discovers that day and night do not merely turn over mechanically. Phones and computers let people know time down to the last detail, yet never let them control it. They cannot know what kind of experience the next video will be. Virtual sunlight shines on you and you begin to secrete melatonin. Only a few seconds. Is that enough? Probably not.
Across the four seasons, day and night are not clearly divided. From six in the evening it already counts as nearly night, and the mood of the people on the street lasts until nine. Then another group appears. Until dawn they mingle with people who have just woken, sharing the cold air, whether it will mark the beginning of a day or its end. It leaves the heart hollow, as if there were nothing to look forward to. Falling asleep and waking beneath black-grey skies mean passing the sun’s most dazzling hours either in the confusion of stupor or the torment of endurance. During those hours people do not want to look outside. There is nothing new. It is always like this: cars joined into a sheet of silver light, swimming along the road.
Visitors have light footsteps or heavy ones. The staircase objectively reports the difference in sound. The person upstairs is prepared, ready to meet them calmly. The house is rented, so within the contract a free person possesses certain rights. He does not have to worry that his parents have come home. No one will enter his room without knocking. He has grown up. This place is his. Whoever has arrived is probably not here for the room, yet he still puts his head out of the window—outside, it is now a beautiful time, a time with no features from which you can tell what part of the day it is; the time you imagine you ought to be in when someone who has forgotten to look up suddenly remembers the scenery before their eyes, yet feels it no longer belongs to the world around them. This is also the kind of time in which you think, I should spend more time with my parents, keep them company. The picture in your head resembles a crayon drawing: weeds on the ground, the sun wearing a huge smile, little flowers as large as the house, smiling too. Three people stand in the middle of the picture. You do not need to give those around you personalities or rehearse what they will say when they open their mouths. If you keep thinking, they will most likely begin educating you.
Surrounded by beauty, you probably want to light a cigarette. While reaching for the lighter, you habitually flip your phone through a hundred and eighty degrees until it is upright, the first joint of your little finger lodged against the charging port, and enter the passcode without thinking. With a swipe, the whole world reconnects with you. The people you least want to contact are the ones who were standing in the picture just now.
Crooked white wired earphones have vanished from the streets. People walk while talking into Bluetooth headsets. Someone passing by thinks they are being called. Nervous or excited? A woman walks past a man talking to himself. Each notices the other and thinks the other is flirting, or that this might be a random attack, but none of it matters. We can always pretend nothing happened, as when we see the corpse of a little mouse and feel secretly pleased because at last it will no longer carry bacteria into the kitchen. Go online on your phone and there is always someone who ought to be dead but is not, someone who was alive but accidentally died. Somebody is secretly pleased. If the dead person is the same sex, there is one less rival for sexual resources. If the dead person is the other sex, it can at least prove there is one less competitor for a job. I carry this feeling like a castle.
“It seemed to K. then that all contact with him had been severed, that he was freer now than ever before and could wait as long as he liked in this place usually forbidden to him; that he had fought for this freedom as hardly anyone else could; that no one could touch him or drive him away, hardly even speak to him. Yet at the same time—and this conviction was at least as strong—nothing in the world could be more senseless, more desperate, than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability.”
K. was always making up for the consequences of impulsive acts born of lust, dignity, a sense of order, or merely the need for a presentable answer. Like the people of the whole world in the 1960s, his successes were always local. People believed they had won rights and freedom, then fell into a state of stagnant unease. The more obvious trait is that we are both the commodity and the salesperson. We package ourselves and wait to be chosen, forever possessing nothing through one cycle after another.
Prostitutes and porn stars were probably the first to wake up and discover that they possessed the freedom of modernity. Everyone else keeps arguing: the ability to say no is freedom; the ability to choose is freedom; the ability not to choose is freedom. The person upstairs may not think so, but someone, or some little mouse, is always watching him from a hole. He truly is free.
We can go and verify it. Enter the door. Climb the creaking stairs.
You knock. The room is empty. He moved away long ago.
Sometimes a little mouse comes in and stops in the corner, careful not to catch its feet in the gaps between the floorboards, but it does not live here.
What a surprise.
A possibility for the kitchen: The big rat From the backyard into the laundry and then the kitchen, a little mouse follows the same route as a person. Every room gives off a different smell. The air in the laundry is heavy, filled with mite corpses and lint; the dryer keeps it warm. Go farther in and it changes again. The kitchen smells of cold cooking oil. The moment you enter the sitting room, there is no smell at all.
Every night the little mouse leaps about on the cup rack in the kitchen like a Disney musical. It is fat, so it is also a big rat, living like Donald Duck’s rich uncle.
There are six holes in the yard, two leading to the neighbours. One extends beneath the toilet. In winter it is cold, so the mouse presses itself against the hot-water pipe. Another leads to the kitchen sink. The remaining two have been blocked with bricks. The little mouse does not know people are afraid of it. People cannot be sure whether the mouse is afraid of them, or whether it is too stupid even to know fear.
Stools stand in a circle in the yard, beside an ashtray nearly full. When people sit there, their eyes rarely leave their phones. Hearing something by the sink, they think, perhaps it is a big rat. The next second they insist on telling themselves it was only a rustle in the grass. The big rat beside them is fake. Only what is on the screen is real. As long as the strange music and clamorous slogans keep playing, the big rat will never exist.
In winter there are people in smooth fur, looking like otters, gleaming vividly in the easterly wind mixed with grit. When the weather warms, men begin giving off smells and women expose their legs. Walking down the street, looking at these moving bare limbs, I pretend to be busy. When I do not know where to look, I look at my phone. I am afraid an imaginary person will see me. Before they can react, my mind has already invented an entire logic for how that person comes to despise me. Even in imagination, nobody likes me.
The mouse moves beneath the drain cover, scraping against weeds and kicking small stones. The person still does not look up. He has already denied the little mouse’s existence. The little mouse is watching. He does not believe this fact.
The little mouse pays no rent. It appears on every street and keeps a tacit understanding with the houses. A certain higher ethic, in Laozi’s Daodejing: “The sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words. The work is done without dwelling on it; because there is no dwelling, it does not pass away.”
The little mouse does not sing. It eats until its body grows big and round. In an old house close to collapse, every step makes the ceiling tremble. It says not a word, only leaves scraps of food—there is a hole in your kitchen.
Negligent workers left a large gap beside the drain. Then there were the drunks who punched and kicked holes in the wall. Far too many drunk people have visited over the past hundred years. Human beings shout and frighten the little mouse half to death. Hiding in a corner, it does not know that humans are afraid of it.
An invisible crossing. A noisy rummaging. Both make people afraid.
If a little mouse enters your home, there can be no conflict of interest between you. On the contrary, it is your by-product. It depends on you for its existence.
When people sit in the backyard, they never believe there are rats. Perhaps the world in the phone is too exciting—you can watch porn, acquire knowledge, find countless opinions and pieces of information, as extreme as you please. The little mouse is curious too. It appears in every kitchen on this street. Stamens summon bees to pollinate them; shoals summon dolphins to hunt them. The little mouse likes you. It knows you are afraid of it. It also knows that when driven to desperation you stop being afraid. Finally, it knows that you cannot bear to kill it.
No one believed in the little mouse until surveillance cameras were installed in the yard. First it came out from under a pipe and slipped into the neighbour’s house. A while later it returned, stepped over the fallen leaves, entered the kitchen beside the sink, and jumped around. It walked as noisily as Mickey Mouse in enormous leather shoes.
The tenant still did not dare kill it. He uploaded the video.
Other people watched. Some remained curious and began inventing stories about the little mouse’s life. They imagined that this mouse liked to clean itself up, apply nude makeup, add a beauty filter. Very cute. It had been raining for months. On the days when the rain was too heavy, the mouse did not come. I kept worrying that something had happened to it. I also wanted it dead.
Finally, outside the door:
In the back street I saw a rat flattened by a car, lying quietly dead. The next day it was flatter. On the third day it rained and it did not change much. It rained for a week, and every day the rat became flatter. On Tuesday the rain stopped. Someone took it away. A rectangular mark remained on the asphalt, darker than the ground around it.
Every day I saw the remains several times. The rain had washed them holy. The rat was as flat as a picture. I stared for a long time.
At night, the little mouse still jumped on the cup rack. Life always has its accidents. Today was not its turn.