Frontier

by Can Xue

  Qiming heard Nancy agree to go to work. The director said she would work far away so she didn’t have to come home every day. Once a week would be about right. The two of them left the pavilion arm in arm; Nancy was crying. He heard the last thing she said:

  “She’s a wisp of smoke I brought from my hometown.”

  Qiming thought, It’s awful if she thinks of her own daughter in this way. She must have been seeing her former self in her baby. Is she really going to completely change into another person? After tidying the garden, he headed over to work on the sewer in the backyard. The fallen leaves had stopped it up. As he made his way over there with his tools, Grace—looking like a ghost—came up carrying a paper bag. She shot furtive glances in all directions. When she reached Qiming, she pulled hard on him, wanting him to squat down with her in the shrubs. Qiming wasn’t pleased. She opened the paper bag and took out a small carton. She said that her dog was inside that carton, and she wanted to bury it in the garden. She asked him not to tell anyone from the institute.

  “If they find out, that’ll be the end of me,” she said as she dug a hole with a small iron spade.

  “Is it that serious? Then why did you tell me?”

  “Old Qi, who can keep a secret from you? You’re the eagle here.”

  She placed the small carton into the hole, cried softly for a short time, and then covered it with dirt. Qiming felt that her soul was joining her pet in the earth.

  “Ms. Grace, you have to take care of yourself.” Qiming frowned as he looked at this skinny woman.

  “My health isn’t important. Old Qi, if your living space shrank, getting smaller and smaller, so small that it couldn’t hold even a coffin, what would you do?”

  “What?” Old Qi was at a loss.

  “I’m talking about that baby. She cries day and night. Lee is very sick. He hasn’t gotten out of bed for a week. What a strange baby! Just when Lee fell ill, the dog died. The dog was afraid of that baby. I could see that.”

  “Ah, the baby. It’s a really adorable baby.”

  Qiming noticed Lee entering the guesthouse. The man’s face was pallid and his hair disheveled. His clothing looked ragged, and he glanced in all directions. Qiming turned and looked back: Grace had tamped down the earth so there was no trace of what she had done. Qiming was still watching closely when Lee appeared in front of him.

  “Old Qi, do you think we’ll have a snowstorm tonight?”

  Lee sat on the ground, as if too exhausted to move any more. He also pressed his hand into the left side of his chest, and said he wanted to lie down here and get a whiff of the wind from the snow mountain. His eyes were dull, as if he were dying. Then he lay down on his stomach, his face pressed on the ground. Qiming asked if he wanted help. He said no. Then he said, “I’m listening to the dog barking.”

  Because he still had a lot of work, Qiming left him and went into the guesthouse.

  Lee breathed the wind for a long time and still didn’t want to get up, but a large flock of crows showed up, jumping back and forth. They defecated next to his head and made a mess of the grass. A group of visitors also arrived. He heard some old people walking toward him and crying out in surprise. He knew they misunderstood his lying on the ground, so he sat up at once. They asked “Do you want some help?” Lee shook his head wearily, but they persisted in asking. Finally growing impatient, he shouted: “That garden has sunk into the ground. You can listen to it, but you can’t see it!”

  “What? Just listen? Can’t we see it?”

  “Did we come for nothing?”

  “Doesn’t the sign say, ‘garden in the air’ . . .”

  The old people were chattering and asking questions, but no one answered them. Later, they took some bread out of their bags and started eating. They grumbled that they shouldn’t have come. After eating, they threw their bread wrappers one after the other at Lee. He stood up, wanting to leave, but they held him back. They didn’t want to let go of him until he told them where the garden was. Being pushed and pulled, Lee broke into a cold sweat. His vision blurred. He said weakly, “I’m getting sick.”

  “Really?” they asked.

  One of them said he had seen the garden in the air, and so the old men and women left Lee behind and headed in the direction the man pointed out. Now, Lee really couldn’t see anything. He squatted and touched the ground with both hands to keep from falling. After a while, he heard José talking and the baby crying. Hadn’t he come to the garden to get away from the baby? Lee heard the old people surrounding José and the baby, tut-tutting and admiring her. They used such words as rose, lemon, orange, evening primrose, durian, ginkgo, and so on. Lee thought it sounded as if they were describing the baby, but what were they really thinking? Could the baby be the garden in the air that they were looking for? He thought back to the spiritual agony caused by José’s baby when he was at home. After a while, he felt much better, and he could see again. He saw the group of people walk away from the entrance. When he turned around, he bumped his head on the banyan’s aerial roots; he warded them off with his hand. The air rippled with the strong scent of the plants, and in an instant he felt refreshed. The pavilion was behind the banyan. Someone was standing in the pavilion and looking out.

  “Old Qi!!” Lee shouted loudly.

  But he couldn’t hear his own voice; he heard only the baby’s crying. He gestured, but old Qi turned his back. When he looked again, the small pavilion seemed to be hanging in midair. He couldn’t see the grass under his feet, although when he took a few steps, he could still feel himself trampling on the ground. He made up his mind to go inside the building and meet up with old Qi. He would ask him to clarify some things. When he headed in that direction, the small guesthouse retreated. He stopped and looked all around, but a vast expanse of whiteness had settled everywhere; he seemed to be standing in a void. A strange bird was making a drilling sound. Even though Lee covered his ears, he could still hear it.

  Qiming stood in front of the window in the guesthouse auditorium and said to Grace, “Look, your husband is still really energetic.” Below, Lee stood in a bosk, seemingly smirking. He was standing right on the spot where Grace had buried the dog. Grace stared nervously at her husband and answered Qiming, “He’s unstable.” No sooner had she said this than a gecko appeared on the windowsill. Grace screamed; she thought a snake had bitten her right hand. But when she looked more closely, she saw only the gecko. It was about two feet away from her.

  “Ms. Grace, are you sick?” Qiming asked. He also saw the gecko.

  “I think my husband is at a dead end. What do you think, Mr. Qi?”

  “I think there’s no need to worry. Your husband can’t be at a dead end. The frontier is so broad. Listen! There’s a long-life bird—two of them! Ha, Mr. Lee has heard them, too!”

  Grace also saw two small celadon-colored birds. It was the first time she’d heard this bird called “long-life bird”! She thought Qiming was quite humorous. She thought she and Lee had been wearing white mourning flowers for such a long time and now the dog had finally died. What if the dog had also been a long-life dog?

  “There are a lot of long-life things in the city, aren’t there?”

  “Yes, so you needn’t worry about Mr. Lee. He’s far from the end of his life. He’s crying softly. That’s because he’s happy.”

  A continuous explosive sound came from afar. It was from a construction project on the snow mountain. Grace said, “They’re going to implode the snow mountain. I’ll have no place to hide at night.”

  Nancy had been working in the office for three days—just reading the files because the institute hadn’t assigned any specific work. Her office was on the second floor. From the window, she looked out on the rocky hill outside the wall. On it were weeds, and a small black-colored bird hopped in and out of the weeds and sang shrilly, like porcelain being smashed on concrete. Now and then, one or two people walked past the hill, gleaning scraps.

  When the sun was setting, the gleaners wal
ked faster, as if in a panic—as though they had reached the end of the earth. The person in the section office next to Nancy’s told her that this rocky hill was called the gate of hell. She recalled that she and José had gotten lost here; it still felt spooky. Back then, she had certainly seen the Design Institute, but she had thought it was some abandoned houses. At twilight that day, as the sun was setting, these houses had looked very shabby. Nancy had been terrified at the sight of them, so she hadn’t mentioned them to José. Now facing this rocky hill, Nancy’s emotions rose and fell as some strange thoughts popped up.

  First, the institute director: Nancy felt that she and the director had known one another well before she had come to Pebble Town. She had simply forgotten this. Maybe the director had been her teacher, or maybe she was the mother of one of her colleagues. She was very sure that they had spent some time together. Nancy was dismayed that she’d completely forgotten this. The feeling was accentuated when those little black-colored birds all returned at dusk to the thicket on the rocky hill. At times like this, she sensed clearly that there were many empty spaces in her memory, and each one of those spaces must have held the most amazing incidents of her life.

  Next, her precious daughter Liujin: she had fled from Liujin, left her behind with José, and hidden here because she couldn’t stand the baby’s crying. And because of the baby’s gaze. Her daughter was so little, and yet her gaze was so bright—not like a baby’s gaze. Nancy had grown up in Smoke City and was accustomed to people’s blurry expressions. And so when her eyes met her daughter’s, she felt hollow inside, as if she were going mad. Her daughter’s crying was kind of strange. She didn’t seem to cry because of feeling uncomfortable. Rather, her crying sounded threatening. José was infinitely patient in taking care of their daughter; he never stood up to her will. In the apartment, he scurried back and forth waiting on her, and this annoyed Nancy. From time to time when her resentment rose to a certain level, she would purposely carry her daughter outside and place her on the ground. Her daughter was clever. At first, she continued crying, and then she would calm down on the ground. Nancy realized that her large eyes could even follow the birds in the sky; she was a really precocious baby. As she sat in the office thinking of her daughter, all at once she felt that this baby was an abyss, a quagmire, and she herself was sinking into it step by step. Each time she sank a little more, she felt she was drowning. She had given her daughter such a pretty name: Had she hoped it would help to control the evil?

  She also had a strange feeling about her husband. Previously, while in Smoke City, she’d been close to him. They were frequently on the same wavelength. Their first day here, she felt her husband’s train of thought slowing down on this rocky hill: he seemed to have grown a shell and wrapped himself in it. When the crazy man had abandoned them on the hill, she had squatted on the ground and sighed—not because she regretted coming here, but because a feeling of loneliness had surged up within her. Yet, José thought it was regret. She knew, too, that José’s train of thought wasn’t static; it was simply that she couldn’t penetrate it. Now, she watched these little black birds fly up from the thicket and disappear into the clouds without a trace. She felt disconsolate. She still couldn’t make up her mind about one thing—would she face retribution for discarding her baby daughter? She consoled herself that in any case José was there with the baby, and that would preserve her indirect relationship with her daughter. In this transparent city, it was best to keep personal relationships indirect.

  Just then, Nancy looked up and saw the large gecko on the ceiling. The geckoes here were huge! It had apparently been here for a few hours.

  “Ms. Nancy, it’s time to quit for the day.”

  It was a black person speaking. He smiled a little, revealing bright teeth. When Nancy had first arrived, she’d been startled when she ran into him because she hadn’t imagined there’d be an African black person at the Design Institute—and one speaking her language. The black person’s name was Ying. Slender and handsome, he was about thirty years old. He showed up at Nancy’s office several times a day; he seemed to be the timekeeper. Sometimes he said, “It’s an hour and fifteen minutes until quitting time.” Sometimes he said, “Look how fast the time is flying. We’ve been working for two hours.” Nancy couldn’t figure out what he had in mind. Once she had gone to his office and seen a lot of skulls hanging from the ceiling. Ying had the curtains drawn. The room was dark and terrifying. He was drawing a blueprint by the faint light of a reading lamp. He looked a little fierce, like a black leopard, but when he looked up and saw Nancy, he smiled kindly and affably.

  The canteen was some distance from the office; they walked there together. Now and then, Ying bent down to pick wildflowers. He told Nancy he had lived in Africa since before he was eight, tramping from country to country. The institute director’s father had adopted him and brought him here. Unfortunately, the old man had died soon afterward.

  “As soon as I came to Pebble Town, I became fanatically interested in studying. I studied and studied and became the person I am now. Who would think that I used to be a vagrant child?”

  Ying also said that nighttime was the hardest for him. He felt that his black body had disappeared, yet he could hear the African drums of the ancient mother earth. Sometimes he went out to the fields and bayed at the moon like a wild animal.

  “Why are you named Ying?” Nancy asked.

  “The old man gave me this name. It’s lovely, and I like it. Do you?”

  “Mm. I’m imagining how it would feel if my body vanished.”

  Nancy slept in a small room next to the office. Now she started having insomnia. She walked to the dimly lit corridor: a cracking sound was coming from the office. She pressed her ear against the tightly closed door and listened; it sounded like skulls bumping against each other. She had seen only the black man’s office. Could skulls be hanging in every office? A small animal scratched her on the instep. She looked down: it was a gray kitten. When she picked it up, it meowed loudly. It sounded like her daughter. She let it go at once, her heart pounding. She remembered the director’s warning: “Don’t leave the room.” On a night like this, the Design Institute, which was built on the rocky hill, seemed like a giant grave. She even saw some rats, holding something like meat in their mouths and scampering quickly along the wall. She returned to the room. She had no sooner sat down than she heard her daughter’s crying again. Ah, it turned out to be another kitten—a black one. Its blood-red mouth was wide open, facing her. Nancy’s mind went blank. Her hand shook as she opened the door and let the kitten out.

  Sleeping in the office, Nancy had particularly deep and wild dreams, as though she were walking in a no-return grotto heading to the earth’s core. She stopped from time to time to ask herself: Had she always been longing to come down into the depths of this place? There were no small animals in the grotto. She couldn’t even hear her own footsteps. And yet lights glimmered faintly in the distance. Three of these lights alternately ascended and descended as though dancing. When she walked ahead, she felt lighthearted—ah, at last she had broken free! She’d broken free at last!

  One afternoon, as she stood on the hill enjoying the breeze, she suddenly noticed José standing and holding Liujin in some couch grass in the distance. Liujin seemed to have grown a lot. She even had little braids. Why didn’t he come over here? As she ran over to them, the wind blew harder.

  “Nancy, Nancy, stop! The baby will cry!” José shouted.

  And then, she heard the shrill crying. Nancy suddenly dropped to her knees as if her legs were broken. She saw José leaving.

  Ever since Nancy had abandoned the baby, José had brought her up alone. The rhythm of his life had changed completely. Except for asking Grace to watch her when he went shopping, he didn’t leave her for a moment. He noticed that Grace was afraid of the baby—as though the baby weren’t a baby, but a little animal that would bite people. But José had no other option. After leaving his daughter in the playpen nex
t to Grace, he ran down the stairs. He was uneasy as he shopped, always afraid that the sulky Grace might mistreat his daughter. Luckily, nothing like that had happened. But it was plain that Grace didn’t want to hold the girl.

  Liujin was growing up remarkably fast. When she was only three months old, she ate the same food as adults. José chopped meat and vegetables and boiled them in rice gruel for her. She ate happily—and she ate a lot. The baby didn’t sleep much, so he was busy all the time. The two of them fell asleep and got up at nearly the same time. Over time, his daughter cried less often, and José no longer felt as stressed out as before. But it was still stressful to make eye contact with her unusually bright eyes. He sensed reproach in her gaze. One morning after they got up, Liujin pointed at the drapes and screamed time after time, just like an older child. José walked over and opened the drapes. Outside, the sky and the earth were spinning: he nearly fainted.

  He couldn’t get a good look at the memories that his daughter had been storing up. He wanted to observe them calmly, but he couldn’t. His life had become a muddled mess.

  One day, he pressed his cheek to his daughter’s, and told her about his life. As he did so, his daughter babbled. Was she interacting with him? Or simply speaking her own language at the same time? José was telling his story in the voice of another person—an ephemeral wispy youth who liked to sit on the roof and play with his pigeons. As the wind tapped on the skylight, he talked and talked in a thin voice, his daughter babbling along. The various sounds converged into something a little like a lullaby. But his daughter was so excited that probably no one would be able to put her to sleep. José thought perhaps Nancy had been pregnant with her for many years, or maybe she’d been born while they were still in Smoke City. She certainly wasn’t like most babies. She was even capable of narrating. It would be wonderful if he could understand her stories. Then when he looked at her eyes, he wouldn’t be nervous. After he transformed himself into a youth in his stories, he felt some knots in his heart had been untied. Once more, he had prospects in his life. He even saw the possibility of communicating with his daughter. He got the housework out of the way quickly and bathed little Liujin. Then he went on telling his stories.