Massage

by Bi Feiyu

  A very tall high school student with an athletic build was seated in a corner to their left. The centre for the No. 14 High School basketball team, he had a young girl in flashy clothes in his arms, a sight that Sha obviously could not have witnessed. Four days earlier, Xiang Tianzong had been the girl in those arms, but that spot was now taken by a ‘shameless girl’. Refusing to admit defeat, even as her heart bled, she had decided to act when she ran into Sha. She had taken him by the hand and dragged him to the bar, determined to have another boy in tow to show the basketball centre.

  As she listened to Sha Fuming her eyes were fixed on the spot ahead, watching that dog and his bitch the whole time. The basketball centre looked out the window, while Xiang and the flashy girl waged a staring contest, trying to provoke a reaction. Yet it was an adorable kind of provocation, for their eyes were devoid of aggression; rather, they were filled with contentment and tenderness. They were in competition and this was their Olympics to see who had the gentler, softer, more alluring gaze. In other words, they were vying to see which one of them was happier and merrier. As the victor, that girl had a more graceful charm, something akin to a line of poetry: ‘Mist blankets the cold water and the moon looms over the sand.’ Knowing she could not lose the match, Xiang looked away from the little fox to focus on Sha, with eyes that turned increasingly glazed until she appeared to be totally contented, with overwhelming devotion to and infatuation with Sha Fuming. Don’t even think about outfoxing me. You’re still wet behind the ears. Get out of here! You think your eyes sparkle, but that’s because of your contacts. Don’t think you can pull that on me.

  Just because Sha Fuming was blind did not mean he was unaware of people’s emotions. He knew; the only thing he didn’t know was what was going on to his left. To him, happiness had come out of the blue.

  ‘Was it nice cutting class today?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  He moved his lips, but was unable to find the right words; it was not easy for a sixteen-year-old to describe his feelings of the moment. A jumble of thoughts flooded his head, but his mind was clear enough to recall a line of Tang poetry: ‘This feeling creates an eternal memory.’ He breathed deeply, fully satisfied with his answer.

  Xiang fell into his arms. ‘I want to sit like this forever.’

  Sha put an ice cube into his mouth, which began to melt while the ice burned hot.

  He had no idea where the love had come from or where it went, but the romance in the bar did not last forever. His pitiful ‘little love’ died out in less than three hours, and after that, nothing, nothing at all. Less than three hours, so brief, yet long enough to be called a stretch of time. It would not be till much later that he would finally understand how two or three hours could be considered a period of his life. In any case, his love was gone, vanished without a trace. It had indeed become an eternal memory, but only that: a memory, a dream. In his dreamlike memory, there were only two things – hands and ice. The hands clung to him with an audible murmur, soft and slender, like flowers from the heavens. Then without warning they turned to ice and floated into Sha Fuming’s memory, where they remained, refusing to melt for years, despite the temperature in his dream. He could never get over how the ice retained the shape of hands, all five fingers together, no interlocking spaces between them, so no matter how hard he tried, it was no longer possible to hold hands. Floating hands covered the surface of the water, frigid, hard, vast and mighty.

  The ‘little love’ that had lasted less than three hours had an enormous effect on him; he longed for a pair of eyes, eyes that would sparkle and that forced him to make strict demands on love and marriage: his love must come with a pair of eyes, for only with eyes could he become a member of mainstream society.

  And that was how he had remained single for all those years. He was sealed up by two terms, eyes and mainstream society. More than demands of love and marriage, they became a matter of faith. That’s how people are – once they have faith in something, they gain a determination and a resolve to waste time.

  Blind people commonly prefer to fall in love with someone who sees better than they do; it is a matter of practicality and vanity. This is even more pronounced with girls, who are by nature competitive; finding a sighted person is a glorious cause for further celebration.

  But not Sha Fuming. He adhered only to his faith. Without eyes he would rather never fall in love, never marry. But his belief was powerless in the face of beauty. Faith can be a chimera, and there are times when its collapse results from a single internal activity.

  But more than internal activity, there will be corresponding external behaviour.

  One day during the downtime after lunch, he went to the lounge and knocked on the door, ‘Du Hong.’ Du Hong stood up. ‘Come with me, would you?’ he said, very businesslike.

  Instead of telling her why he wanted her to come with him, he just sat on one of the therapy tables and made no move to do anything. What was she supposed to do? She stood there and, like him, remained motionless. She was on edge. The boss had been in a bad mood recently, and she wondered if that had anything to do with her. She was not yet a regular employee of the Sha Zongqi tuina centre. After going over what she’d said and done over the past few days, she was relieved to find nothing that could be considered a problem. ‘What can I do to relax you, Boss?’

  Sha did not respond to her question. She could not know that he had raised his arms into the air. They were poised to stroke her face. Their goal was to verify and gain some understanding of that thing called beauty. They wavered in their determination. They lacked the courage. In the end, he took her hand. It was icy cold. But it wasn’t ice. It lacked the hardness. It was soft. Like a remembered sentiment. Du Hong’s hand felt like a hand. Five fingers. Sha stroked each of them, one at a time, and from those touches he made a stimulating discovery: there were indeed four spaces between Du Hong’s fingers, and without thinking, he inserted his fingers into them. The fit was a perfect seal, and at this point he realised that the icy cold hand wasn’t hers, it was his. The ice melted. His hand began to melt, drip by drip, about to become a flow and then surge.

  In a moment of rashness, Sha tugged on Du Hong’s hand, wanting to do something he’d longed to do for a long time before the melting was complete. He laid it against his own cheek. She dared not move. His head turned slightly, causing her to stroke him. Du Hong felt so warm to him.

  ‘This is no good, Boss.’

  What a long dream it was, passing through such humiliating times.

  ‘I’d like you to stay,’ he said. ‘Du Hong, I want you here always.’ She took back her hand, which was coated with sweat. ‘Boss Sha,’ she said, ‘doesn’t this make it some sort of transaction?’

  Chapter Eight

  Xiao Ma

  SAO-ZI ABRUPTLY STOPPED coming over to the men’s dorm. She hadn’t visited in quite some time.

  Xiao Ma sensed that she was making a point of avoiding him, both at the dorm and in the therapy centre.

  He was in a funk almost from the moment he realised that she was avoiding him. Why was she doing that? A smile flickered over his sad face, faint and fleeting. He could see what lay behind her behaviour, and he felt a stirring down below.

  He recalled her smell. The smell of her hair. A moist smell. She had everything she ought to have and nothing she shouldn’t.

  Xiao Ma turned reticent, as reticent as Sao-zi’s smell. No one saw anything different in him, for he was usually silent. But he knew he was different. Whereas he had always been silent, he was now silent within silence.

  What exactly is silence? And how does it become silence within silence? Xiao Ma knew.

  When he was silent, he normally sat quietly, and in others’ eyes, he was simply not making any noise. But that was just a front. In fact, he was playing with his toy, a toy unknown to everyone else. That toy was time itself.

  Xiao Ma did not wear a watch or rely upon clocks. When a client came for him,
he walked serenely into one of the rooms, where, an hour later, he would say to the client that he was finished, before serenely leaving the room. Not a minute more, not a second less. That was Xiao Ma’s special talent, an astonishingly accurate sense of time. To him, time had its own materiality; it was concrete and tangible, with its own circumference and area, its own texture and weight. He was nine years old when he first learned about time, but that was too soon for it to become his toy. During those toyless days, his brows were forever heaving up, constantly arching. He wanted to open his eyes. He held the hope of luck in his heart, wishing for a miracle. Day and night, all he looked forward to was a morning like this when he would wake up, his eyesight shooting out from the sockets like nails, piercing his eyelids and filling the sockets with blood. His longing was accompanied by violence incomprehensible to the average person; it was akin to death.

  Four years later, at the age of thirteen, his unsurpassed wisdom saved him. The violence came to an end. He gained peace of mind and turned time into a toy.

  He had never forgotten the old-style desk clock at his parents’ house. It was round, with hands for hours, minutes and seconds. The tip of the second hand was adorned with a small red triangle. At nine, he’d thought that time was a prisoner behind a piece of round glass. At that age, he had also mistaken time as a red signal, ticking away a tiny fraction every second. For more than a year, he had cradled the clock in his arms the day long, his permanent time-marking companion. Holding the ticking clock in his hands, he invented a game. First a tick, then a tock. But whether it went with a tick or returned with a tock, no matter how intricate and complex the ticking was, it had a rhythm all its own, and that was critical. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Neither too fast nor too slow, it never varied in its speed, the space between ticks constant. Everlasting, patient and interminable.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

  Time was ticking away; it was not time, but tick-tocks. It was not tick-tocks, but time. Delighted by the ticks, he fell in love with time.

  Actually, he discarded the old desk clock a year after that. He had no more need of it, as he had learned how to tick within himself. With a body that now possessed the rhythm of ticking, it was never wrong. Time ticked away inside him. Without exerting mental energy or redirecting his attention, he could employ his ticking prowess under any circumstance. He was a new-style desk clock, only livelier, for he could eat, sleep and breathe, and he knew what cold and pain were. He was pleased with this. When he ate, he ticked away the rice kernels; he ticked the air in and out when he breathed. When it was cold, he still could tell how long the tick-tocks lasted; the same was true for pain. Sleep provided the only exception. But his body immediately began to tick on its own as soon as he was awake. He was ticking, ticking away.

  It was not enough for him just to tick. This lack of fulfilment brought him new joy. He realised that he was not just part of time, but was capable of playing with it. There were many ways to do that, the simplest of which was assembly.

  Each tick was one second. One second could be measured in length or width. That being the case, a tick could be a geometric shape, like a square mosaic tile. So he began to assemble the mosaic tiles, one tick, two ticks, and they came together, an endless, inexhaustible supply of ticks. Two weeks later, Xiao Ma looked up and made the surprising discovery of a profound truth: that crisscrossing ticks, neat and tidy, devoid of a single blade of grass or tree, blanketed the vast earth. No buildings. No utility poles. Even if a blind man were to ride a blind horse, the animal’s hooves would gallop as freely as floating snowflakes. Xiao Ma did not move, and yet his ears imagined the sound of whistling wind. His hair flowed behind him.

  As time passed, however, he grew tired of the monotony of assembly, the tedium of construction. Since everything was built by men, it required men to take it all apart. An insane thought occurred to him; he sought destruction, the desire to take things apart. But before then, he formed a hypothesis. There are five hours in an average afternoon, which made it easy. He divided his afternoon into five one-hour sections. Dividing each hour into sixty segments gave him sixty minutes, which were then further divided to form the tiniest fractions, the seconds. A tick removed one second; another tick removed another second. After removing the very last tick, an inexhaustible afternoon magically disappeared. A vacant smile appeared on his face. A magnificent afternoon. Where had it gone? Who had taken it apart? Where had it been placed and by whom? This was a secret. A puzzle.

  He could play with time by approaching it from different angles or using other methods. He tried to move along with time. Since clocks are round, he knew he must move in a circular pattern, and he did, over and over again, on the outer edge of the circle. After three months had passed that way, he asked himself why time must move in circles. Time could be a triangle. Every hour could be a triangle. Each side would represent twenty minutes, each of which could in turn be a triangle, twenty seconds to each side. That new discovery helped him pass more time before a bolder, even crazier thought emerged. Why must the two ends of time be connected? They didn’t have to be. Could he open up time? Who said he couldn’t? He tried a new experiment, imagining time as a vertical line. With each tick, he climbed up one fragment, and so on. So the climb began, and facts quickly showed that there was nothing to stop him. Two hours passed, two whole hours, and Xiao Ma had no intention of turning back. Yet he suddenly sensed, with crystal clarity, that he had reached the apex. He was in the clouds. Cold sweat was his physical reaction to the shocking discovery; he was excited yet frightened, mainly because heights terrified him. But Xiao Ma was smart and had a cool head. He clenched his fists to ensure that he would not fall from such a height. Suspended in the air, he was drifting, all by himself. Wow. Wow. Wow! He was up in the sky. This was breathtaking, exhilarating. At such a moment, even a fleeting thought would cause him to disintegrate.

  Saved by his cool head and composure, Xiao Ma made an unerringly accurate decision – he would get down the same way he went up. Taking a deep breath, he began his descent, one tick at a time, patiently, tick, tick, tick. After seven hundred and twenty ticks, a mere seven hundred and twenty, a miracle occurred – he landed, triumphantly, on the chair beneath him. It had been an intrepid adventure and an arduous feat to save himself. Drenched in cold sweat, he gripped the chair’s arms for support as he stood up. He’d done it, he’d actually done it! Filled with elation and excitement, he experienced a wild abandonment he’d never known, prompting him to shout in the otherwise unoccupied living room, ‘I’ve made a discovery! I’ve discovered that time is not round. Nor is it a triangle. It’s not sealed up.’

  Time was not sealed up, so his ticks could not be imprisoned; they never had been. They had endless possibilities. Through an adventure filled with hardship and exploration, Xiao Ma discovered time’s most basic truth, one that had been obstructed by his eyes: seeing was not believing. If he had been born blind, or if he had never seen that damned old desk clock, he would never have considered time to be round. The ticks had not been imprisoned, not ever.

  Not being able to see is a limitation; so is being able to see. A superior smile appeared on his face.

  Time can be hard or soft; time can exist outside an object or within it. There might be a dubious space between the tick and the tock; there might be nothing at all. Time can have a shape; it can be formless. Now he began to see the magical side of time; it was unfathomable. The only way to see it clearly was to penetrate it, from one end to the other.

  Humans lie. They believe in their own importance. They put time in a box, thinking they can control it, that they can see it, that they make it tick and tock. Everyone is blind in the presence of time. The only way to see time’s true colours is to detach yourself from it.

  From that moment on Xiao Ma understood the real meaning of time; to be together with time you had to give up your body, give up people, give u
p your self. And that can only be accomplished by a blind person. The sighted, controlled by their eyes, can never be on intimate terms with time.

  Being together with time and with the tick-tocks marked Xiao Ma’s silence.

  But silence within silence was different, for it was no longer silence. Abandoned by time, Xiao Ma taught himself to be more observant. He began to pay close attention to Sao-zi, following her every move, even when she turned around. The air stirred when she turned, a slight, nearly imperceptible tremor that could only be detected by him. The lounge ceased to be a lounge, as scenes from his youth appeared in the space before him: there were mountains, and water, and grass, and trees, a blue sky, white clouds, even golden sunshine. Sao-zi was a butterfly, silently flitting in the air. So many butterflies, filling the sky in colourful swarms, and yet she stood out among them. As the only jade butterfly, she would have differed from the others no matter how great their numbers; she was eye-catching, her wings resplendent with gorgeous patterns that gave off fuzzy rays of light. She danced; she fluttered noiselessly, up and down, finally leaving the swarm to land quietly on a long, slender leaf. She appeared as a pair of giant jade wings, parallel, perfectly symmetrical and splendidly lithe.

  ‘Why are you following me, Xiao Ma?’ she said. ‘You’re bad. You’re horrible.’

  He mustered the courage to land on the same leaf beside her. She was weightless, so was he, but the leaf trembled just enough for her to quickly take flight. This time it was different, though, as she fluttered up into a vast, cloudless blue sky so clear it seemed washed. Only two objects existed in that clear blue sky: Sao-zi and Xiao Ma. He was in a breezy, light-hearted mood as he followed her; there was nothing in the world but two pairs of carefree wings.

  She landed again, this time by the water, so he circled her, cautiously, before coming to rest. It was a glorious landing– he alighted on top of her. A breeze jolted them into the air, where they lurched in the turbulence and tumbled in the ripples; though exciting, it left room for an easy conscience. Turning his head, Xiao Ma spotted their reflection in the water, which made it appear as if she were resting on top of him. Her reflection was utterly gorgeous, but what about his? It was of a black butterfly, looking clumsy. Nothing less than a clumsy moth. Ashamed of what he’d seen, he felt his eyes darken as he slid off her body and, irretrievably, fell into the water.