Vertical Motion

by Can Xue

“Who? Who else could it be?!” He said impatiently, “Of course it was I.”

  “Nishu—Shu said you aren’t that tall.” I stuttered.

  “Damn! Can’t I stand on a stool? Ah?” He glared as if he wanted to eat me.

  “At work, I’ve heard a lot of rumors from my colleagues. I thought, if you really haven’t gone out, how can others know what’s going on here?”

  “No wall can keep secrets inside.”

  He closed his eyes in exasperation, intending to ignore me.

  =

  I remember that in our childhood we always joked about Father behind his back. Laughing and joking, we made cynical remarks, as though none of us took him seriously.

  One day, Father took me for a walk. He walked slowly with his hands behind his back, as if deep in thought. Back then, there weren’t many cars, but only a few rickshaws. A thick layer of ash had accumulated on the blacktop road, and Father’s old-fashioned leather shoes left footprints in the ash.

  “Papa, why do you always wear these leather shoes? You don’t even take them off at home. Didn’t you ever wear any other shoes?”

  Father’s feet stopped in the ash, and he looked at me with a feeling of grief. I was frightened by my own joke. At a loss, I tugged at his clothes. He stopped for a long time—until someone came up from the opposite side of the street. Perhaps it was the person he’d been waiting for. It was a man of average height. His clothes were much like those that most drivers wore. His rough face was expressionless. He came over and shook hands with Father and referred to a promise the two of them had made earlier. Father replied, “I’m sorry! Sorry!” Disappointed, the other man walked away, swinging his arms. When he turned around, he glanced at me ominously. I shivered.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “He came to collect the debt that I owe him.” With that, Father resumed walking in his old-fashioned shoes.

  Following behind, I observed his footprints. Because he walked so gingerly, his footprints were always even. Not like mine—one footstep heavy, the next light: mine weren’t at all uniform.

  When we got home that day, a lot of guests were there. They were all Father’s old friends who had come in a group to see him. Father was heavy-hearted as he entered the room. He waved at everyone and said, “The debt is due now.”

  The guests seemed uneasy about him. With one voice, they said: “Isn’t there any room for delay?”

  “Unfortunately no.”

  Dispirited, Father lowered his head. His expression was anguished. The guests gestured to one another and quietly left.

  After they left, Father raised his head and looked at me in a swivet and said, “Rushu, in fact, the debt doesn’t have to be paid now. I can keep putting it off. You can repay it for me in the future, okay?”

  Afraid, I retreated to the door. I didn’t know if I was afraid of really assuming the debt or if I was afraid that I didn’t grasp what he meant. Actually, I didn’t understand what he’d said at all, and I was all the more afraid because I didn’t understand. I held on to the door, preparing to run off.

  “I was kidding you. Don’t you want to help Papa at all?”

  “No,” I blurted out.

  “Okay. That’s good. I feel reassured.” He looked as if he’d suddenly seen the light.

  =

  Father died in the harsh winter. His large body was bent into a curved bow. One hand turned into a firm fist placed on his chest. I stood at the head of his bed, my inner curiosity rising little by little: What was he holding in his hand? The people from the funeral home hadn’t arrived yet, and the other family members were outside preparing for the service. Taking advantage of their absence, I hurriedly knelt in front of the bed and seized Father’s cold fist and tried my best to open it. I tried for a long time, but it wouldn’t open. I felt Father moving. I sat down on the floor and trembled. From behind, I heard someone say coldly: “Truly diabolical.”

  I looked around: my brother was standing at the door.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “You, of course! You scared him to death! And even now you won’t let go of him! Ah, I saw through your plan a long time ago. Why didn’t I stop you? It’s only because of my selfishness! Sometimes, I’m weak, but I’ve never hurt anyone. Ah, Father! Father! This was all her scheme . . .” Choked with sobs, he was having hysterical spasms.

  All the family members assembled, and my brother was carried out. Nishu quietly squatted down with me.

  “That night, I shouldn’t have gone to your room and talked about Father.” She said, “I was always estranged from him—not like the relationship between the two of you, with so many personal feelings. It was because I was having insomnia and the rain was really irritating that I wanted to talk with you. So I just made up an excuse to see you. Actually, I hadn’t seen anything and even if I had, I wouldn’t have gossiped . . .”

  “Get out!!” I roared.

  She stood up at once and left.

  Had Father really moved? Of course not. It was just my imagination. His body seemed coiled up even tighter.

  Outside, firecrackers sounded, along with shouts and the sound of talking. Father’s friends from long ago had arrived. They had responded very quickly, just like flies that smelled spoiled meat. I hadn’t run into them on the street for years; they were mysterious guys. Ordinarily, they were nowhere to be seen, but in a crisis they all rushed out together. All of a sudden, I felt really afraid. I looked out the window and saw my brother leading them into the courtyard. I wanted to find a place to hide. Why did I alone have to take on Father’s debt? During his lifetime, he had never briefed me about these debts. After all, I can always walk away. I can leave and go to the unpeopled borderland.

  AN

  AFFECTIONATE

  COMPANION’S

  JOTTINGS

  =

  It’s the 28th today, and my owner has run out of patience. Ever since breakfast he’s been looking out the window. I can hear all his pores growling, and his eyes are flashing a fluorescent green. He’s a cultured man, a bachelor with time on his hands. A person like him doesn’t usually show his brutality unless he’s really provoked. At breakfast, he kicked me on the forehead and I fainted at once. What led to this? Milk. That’s right—milk. Naturally, he knows how much I love milk: previously, he had always split a bottle of milk with me. But this morning, because of the black person, everything went wrong. Without paying any attention to me, my owner had poured the whole bottle of milk into his bowl. I’d lost no time in tugging at his pant-leg, and had also called him softly, but he had ignored me. It seemed he was going to drink it all, so in my anxiety, I nipped his leg—not a real bite, just a reminder. Who’d have guessed that he would explode? Later, I figured this had given him an excuse to do what he’d been wanting to do anyway. Definitely! If a person was nursing grudges, then he’d stop at nothing. When I came to not long afterward, I realized that I’d better reassess my relationship with him. Delving into it more deeply, I concluded there was nothing superficial about it. Maybe the word “ownership” not only connoted dependency and obedience, but also, at some point, conflict and manipulation. After all, I knew the secret relationship between him and the black man, didn’t I?

  In fact, my owner had no reason to lose his patience, for I knew that sooner or later, the black man would pay another visit to this small high-rise apartment. It was three o’clock in the morning a year ago when my owner got out of bed and went to the kitchen in search of something to eat. I noticed he was barefoot, not even wearing slippers. When he walked, he held his arms out in front of him, and his face was blank. I knew he was walking in his sleep. Since he’d done this several times without ever having a problem, I didn’t tag along. He opened the refrigerator, took out a beer and some cold cuts, and sat at the tea table to enjoy them. Smacking his lips, he ate with great relish, but I knew he wasn’t awake. Perhaps food tasted even better in dreams than in reality. I was itching to go over and mooch some. But I didn’t. I coul
dn’t wake him up at such a time; that would have been harmful to his health.

  Just then, someone rapped on the door three times. Who could it be in the dead of night? My sleepwalking owner heard it at once and got up and opened the door. I thought, if it’s a thief, he’s a goner for sure: with one blow, a thief would make sure he’d never wake up again. Luckily, it wasn’t a thief, but a man with lacquer-black skin. He was wearing a shiny gold chaplet around his neck, and two skull-shaped silver rings on his fingers. My owner nodded at him and said, “It’s you.” The fellow answered laconically, “Yes.” I could see that my owner wasn’t awake yet—he was moving stiffly. After the fellow sat down, my owner brought him some food from the refrigerator, and soon the tea table was loaded down with all kinds of cold cuts, sausages, and thousand-year-old eggs. The black man sat up straight and clenched his teeth, unwilling to loosen up at all. He didn’t touch the snacks, but denounced my owner with his eyes. My owner didn’t notice; perhaps he was “seeing without seeing”—as sleepwalkers generally do.

  “Won’t you have a little beer?” my owner asked.

  “My chest hurts.” As he talked, the black man tore his shirt open with a single motion. “I was burned in the forest fire . . .”

  There wasn’t a hair on his bare black chest. You could see the distinct throbbing on the lower left side of his chest: Was something wrong with his heart?

  My owner didn’t look up at him. He was muttering to himself, “Why won’t he even drink beer?”

  The black man was grinding his teeth—to me, this sounded like a duck quacking—and rubbing his feet surreptitiously on the floor. In order to relieve the tension, I sprang to his lap and deployed some feminine charms. The black man petted me with his beringed hand, but it wasn’t ordinary petting, for his fingers were gripping my throat harder and harder. I began struggling, clawing the air aimlessly. When I was just on the edge of losing consciousness, he pushed me down to the floor. I was afraid he would hurt me again, so I played dead. At the time, my owner seemed unaware of what was going on. I saw him pacing restlessly back and forth in the room, maybe waiting for the black man to start something. As for me, since I’d already been the target of the black man’s malice, I was afraid he would do something even worse.

  As the black man stood up to leave, my owner humbly begged him to stay a while longer.

  “My chest hurts. Your room is suffocating,” he said as he flung the door open.

  He left. My owner—his sleepwalker’s arms held out in front of him—seemed about to follow him, but instead, he just walked absently around the room, repeating over and over again, “Why couldn’t I get him to stay? Why couldn’t I get . . .”

  =

  My owner was a serious stuffed-shirt of a man. He had a job at a newspaper office, but as a rule he worked at home. I had settled down here quite by accident. At the time, my former owner had taken his anger out on me and thrown me out. With nowhere to go, I’d been loafing around on the stairs when, all of a sudden, I saw a door open a crack. A thread of light came out. In the wee hours of the pitch-black night, the thread of light stared at me and cheerily beckoned me inside. The room was clean, with everything in its place. My present owner was sitting on the sofa, deep in thought, one hairy arm propped up on the armrest, his huge head in his hands. He saw me at once and jumped up and said, “Ha! An old cat!” From then on, my name was “Old Cat.”

  I quickly realized I was more comfortable here than with my former owner. My starchy new owner was not the least bit stiff with me: trusting me to discipline myself, he never set limits for me. After thoroughly inspecting his domicile, I, a cat of some breeding, chose the rug beneath the tea table as my bedroom.

  Every day, I dined with my owner. Since he believed in equal rights, we each had our own bowls and saucers. I ate whatever he ate, except that I didn’t drink beer, nor did I like fruit.

  My owner was efficient in his work. As a rule, he worked for two hours in the middle of the night, and then sat around the whole day, as if afflicted by a certain kind of depression. I sympathized with him: I supposed he was unhappy with his life or frustrated in his work. I also thought that he was essentially a strong person, and that after getting over the present difficulty, he’d be fine. But I’d been here a long time now, and not only had he not improved, but his depression was even worse than before. Had he been unhappy all along? After some consideration, I rejected this view. One day, a wretched-looking person came over. He meekly called my owner “editor-in-chief,” thus making it clear that he was a colleague from the newspaper office: from this, I concluded that everything was going well at work. I also discovered that, for no reason, my owner looked for trouble. Except for the two hours that he shut himself up in his bedroom and worked—I had no way of knowing what he was like then—most of the rest of the time he was an unhappy man.

  One day, he asked someone to hang an iron pothook from the living room ceiling, and from it he hung a hemp rope. When I came back from a stroll, the door was open, and as soon as I went in, I saw him dangling, unmoving, from that hemp rope. I screamed in terror, and he began swaying. He stood on tiptoe on the table, loosened the noose, and jumped down. The rope left two purple marks on his neck. After freeing himself from the noose, he looked much more relaxed and was actually in high spirits as he went to the kitchen and fried an ocean fish for me. But it was hard for him to get into such a good mood. As I ate, I was watching him in terror and thought to myself, is this a valedictory dinner? Of course it wasn’t, because after a bath, he strode briskly into his bedroom to work. The next day, his old trouble recurred: now, besides being depressed, he was also in agony. His intermittent roaring was oppressive.

  In order to help him, I jumped up and nipped his hand. This little trick worked: he calmed down as if just waking from a dream, and he urged me to bite him a little harder, until I drew blood. My owner must have been possessed by a demon, making it impossible for him to focus his energy on anything at all the whole day long. He couldn’t find any way, either, to vent his unhappiness. Or perhaps he had too high an opinion of himself to try any of the ordinary ways of venting. Sometimes, self-abuse could temporarily postpone the ultimate destruction, but it couldn’t solve the root problem. Each time, it took more intense stimulation. Just when all of his remedies were almost exhausted, the weird black man had appeared, thus instantly changing his entire attitude toward life.

  =

  That night, after the black man left, my owner slept for a long time. He didn’t wake up until the third morning, forgetting even his work responsibilities. After he woke up, he pulled out of his depression and rushed to the balcony, where he lifted weights over and over. Then he began sweeping the apartment. He cleaned the place until it was spotless, and even went so far as to buy a flower to brighten the living room. He washed the heavy drapes and let the sunshine splash the living room: the whole room overflowed with the atmosphere of spring. I really didn’t like his turning everything upside down in the apartment: the dust he stirred up made it impossible for me to breathe, and the rose made me sneeze uncontrollably. My owner wasn’t young. How could he be so hyperactive? He was acting almost like a teenager. The only thing I could do to get away from his cleaning was to go out and stand on the stairs.

  He kept this up for a long time. His face reddened and his eyes flashed. But every morning, and again at dusk, he looked bewildered, expectant. At such times, he strolled to the balcony and fixed his eyes on the distant sky. I knew who he was waiting for, but I couldn’t help him. Despite my anxiety, I was unable to do anything.

  The black man was savage and cruel. I’d already experienced his strong grip, and I didn’t know why he had eventually left me with my life. My owner was good to me, but as soon as this black man arrived, he simply didn’t give me another thought. He was indifferent to the black man’s brutal treatment of me. I felt vaguely hurt. My owner thought constantly about the one rogue whom he’d encountered while dreaming, even to the point of making him the cente
r of his life. This made me quite angry. Wasn’t I the one who kept him company day and night? Wasn’t I his only companion during his lonely days? When he was in the depths of despair, when all the fun had gone out of his life, who jumped on his lap and comforted him? But then, thinking about it more dispassionately, perhaps my affection had always been unrequited. My owner was an extraordinary man—unfathomable and mulling everything over at length. Even a particularly sensitive cat like me couldn’t catch anything but the surface of his ideas. Now, since he was looking forward to the black man coming, he must have had his own reasons. I’d better not impose my views on him. In a few minutes that night, my sleepwalking owner must have communicated at the speed of lightning with the black man. This kind of communication was far beyond my comprehension.

  With a charcoal pencil, my owner drew a pair of eyes and hung them on the living room wall. At a glance, I knew whose eyes they were. That man’s penetrating stare had left a deep impression on me. When my owner finished his work in the middle of the night and emerged from his inner sanctum, he looked exhausted and he would sometimes stand beneath that drawing and mumble something for a while. I thought, my owner was waiting for his idol: all he could do was console himself with false hopes and meet with him that way. The black man’s mysterious comings and goings were hard on him. Judging from his behavior that night, the black man also felt unbearable agony. It made him sort of unearthly. What I mean is: his suffering had gone beyond this world. This was different from my owner’s suffering. I felt that, although my owner was unconventional, his anguish stemmed from everything he did. Although I was a cat, able to observe dispassionately, I really didn’t know whether this black man had anything to do with this world. When he gripped my throat with both hands, he did so unconsciously. That’s to say, he didn’t know that it was my throat he had gripped. Why did my owner feel so attracted to this sort of fellow?

  After the first rush passed, my owner was no longer so overstimulated: he entered into a period of calm. Every day, he hid out in his inner sanctum and worked for two hours. Then he frittered away the rest of the time. Aside from making purchases and occasionally going to the newspaper office, he didn’t go out. During this period, a clerk from the office came by once. He was an old man with a thin, sallow face, who had come to bring drafts. He left a bad impression on me, probably because of the thumbtack in the sole of his shoe. After he came in, he scuffed the gleaming floor, leaving a lot of metallic marks on it. This man wasn’t clean, either; he smelled sour, and he spat wherever he pleased. My ever-starchy owner, however, didn’t seem to mind any of this: he led the clerk warmly over to the sofa, seated him, and poured a beer for him. They evidently had a special relationship.