Frontier

by Can Xue

  “Grace?” he shouted.

  Grace didn’t move. The room was so dark, and yet the dust looked pink. Lee felt as if he were suffocating. He wondered how Grace could breathe.

  “Grace?” he shouted again.

  The music from the flute stopped. Grace walked out slowly, looking frazzled.

  “No, we don’t need to look at the other vacant rooms. We’ve figured it out,” she said.

  “What did you figure out, Grace?”

  “I can’t say. With time, you’ll understand. Take another look at the door to the right. There’s a huge cobweb on it, but the old spider has left. You’ll understand that.”

  They went down to the second floor. Lee was observing Grace. She didn’t have a speck of dust on her. He was surprised: Just now, she’d been standing for a long time in the dust, hadn’t she? Grace opened the door to the room on the west, and they walked in. This apartment had three rooms, all vacant. The floor was thick with dust. Judging by the air, this apartment had never been occupied. Because there were three connecting rooms, and there was no light, it was even darker. They had to feel their way around. They sensed they were stepping on some soft objects, but they couldn’t see what. They were nervous, afraid a disaster would befall them.

  Grace’s legs gave way and she sat on the floor. She propped herself up with her hands and then grabbed hold of a little feathered thing. It appeared to be a dead bird. This whole room seemed full of dead birds. She saw Lee standing against the wall, afraid of stepping on them. Oh, he was moving away from the wall, apparently intending to exit. Grace said silently, “Coward—what a coward!” Lee exited, and Grace lay down. Dead birds kept dropping from above. Although she couldn’t see them, she could smell the fresh blood. She started thinking back. She recalled that when she was a child, the old woman she called Granny (perhaps not her real granny?) smoked cigarettes. She had a little turtle in her pocket. Grace wanted to look at the little turtle, so Granny pulled it out and placed it in her hand, warning her, “Careful—it bites people.” One day, it did bite her palm. It was gory, for it broke her skin. She cried. As Granny bandaged it, she kept saying, “Didn’t I warn you?” Grace still had a scar on her palm. When Granny lay in her coffin, they put this living turtle in with her; they put it in her pocket. Afterward, Grace thought about it for a long time: How long could the little turtle live underground if it ate Granny’s flesh? As she remembered this, she touched her stomach: three dead birds were stuck to it. She whisked them off. Two more landed on her chest. Another struck her forehead. Lee was calling her from the doorway, but she didn’t want to move. The smell of the birds’ blood reminded her of the unresolved riddle from her youth. She didn’t intend to solve it. She just enjoyed pondering it in the dark. After a while, Qiming showed up, too, and called to her. She had to get up. When she walked toward the door, her lame leg was worse than usual and she nearly fell down.

  “Ms. Grace, why are you so pale?” Qiming asked.

  Qiming held a large photograph of the director wearing white clothing, her white hair floating. Grace didn’t answer Qiming. She glanced at the photo out of the corner of her eye. She appeared to be uncomfortable. Qiming said he wanted to frame it and hang it at the end of the corridor. Curious, Lee held the photo up high and took it to a spot with more light. He was shocked at what he saw.

  “Some birds are hidden inside,” Lee said.

  “You have very sharp eyes.” Qiming started laughing. “I’m going to hang her here. Then you won’t have to be afraid of anything. The director protects everyone.”

  Squatting on the floor, Qiming put the photo into a frame and then climbed a ladder and hung it up. Lee and Grace went downstairs hand in hand. Lee asked Grace, “Do you like having the director’s protection?” Grace answered, “Sure, what’s wrong with you?” It was a slight rebuke.

  When Lee stepped onto the cobblestone path, he felt the ground floating. When he bent to pick up a leaf, he doubted it was a real leaf. He leaned against a poplar tree and felt the tree trunk falling apart behind him. He asked Grace what the director’s protection consisted of. At this, Grace sank into deep thought. They snuggled together on a bench under the poplar, and for a moment they were silent. One by one, the strange things that had occurred since their arrival in Pebble Town appeared in their minds. They sighed with emotion. However, for the moment, they couldn’t see any connection between those incidents.

  Wildflowers blossomed everywhere. Besides the little birds gamboling about, ratrabs—Qiming had told them the name of the little yellow-furred animal—frequently appeared along the way. They looked a little like rats and a little like rabbits, but not quite like either. Sometimes they stopped on the cobblestone path and watched Lee. A strange light beamed from their black eyes. Whenever Lee met their eyes, his heart beat regularly, as though he were joined with the mineral resources deep underground. Grace commented that the animals’ bodies contained gold mines. Fish were jumping in the brook beside the poplar grove. One by one, they leapt out of the water. A spectacle like this was seldom seen in the interior. Lee thought, Even the fish are impulsive here. Grace was still deep in thought. Suddenly she said, “If we can get to the bottom of one thing, then everything else clears up, too. Am I right? Lee, last night, I dreamed of gold mines, but I couldn’t recall it after I woke up. When I saw the ratrabs’ eyes, I remembered it. Look, Lee, that flower is called salvia. The one next to it is calliopsis. Ha! In fact, we’re living in the flower garden. We can see the snow mountain from our window. It’s all because of the director’s protection, isn’t it?”

  Lee wanted to say “yes,” but he wasn’t sure. It was quite pleasant to sit under the poplar tree with Grace’s hand in his, enjoying the frontier view all around. But soon Lee heard the faint sound of dogs barking—a large pack of dogs barking menacingly. Before long, he saw Qiming dash up, chased by the feral dogs. All of a sudden, Qiming fell to the ground. Two big dogs snatched the shoes from his feet and ran off. All the other dogs scattered, too, and quickly disappeared. The barefooted Qiming was like a drowned mouse as he walked up to them. He looked thoughtful. Lee didn’t understand why the dogs had run off with his shoes. He was going to ask, but Qiming spoke first. “Ha, they think the shoes are my feet! Isn’t this curious?”

  “These dogs are really mean. They’re menacing!”

  Lee shrank back from the cold wind blowing in from the snow mountain. Beside him, he heard Grace say some inexplicable things, “Mr. Qi, what you saw were dogs, but what I saw were some falling leaves! Lee and I have to keep from falling here, isn’t that right, Mr. Qi?”

  Qiming didn’t reply. It seemed his soul was no longer present. Turning, he headed toward the guesthouse. Lee stared at his bare feet. Whenever he stepped on the fallen leaves, the leaves were silently pulverized. He walked with a light, smooth gait. Lee imagined the minerals underground dancing in time with his footsteps. A ratrab skipped over to their feet. They blushed, and their hearts beat faster. Neither of them dared to look at the little animal. It scratched their feet and ran off again. Between cracks in the foliage, the steel-blue sky was divulging some information to them. Deep down in their hearts, they understood, but they couldn’t say what it was. They could only sigh repeatedly, “Pebble Town, oh. Oh, the frontier. Oh . . .”

  When the poplar leaves turned golden yellow, Lee and Grace entered the underground mines. That was during the last part of the night. A girl in black appeared in their bedroom, and they followed her out. As Lee felt his way ahead in the tunnel, he was full of doubts: “Is this Grace? Are she and I dreaming the same dream? Is this possible?” They walked and walked, and the black-clad girl’s footsteps disappeared. They could hear only the echoes of their own footsteps. The ground was bumpy. With each step, they had to lift their legs high. Lee couldn’t figure out how Grace kept her balance. He wanted to talk, and he tried, but nothing came out. It seemed he really was dreaming. Then he pulled Grace along, and the two of them sat down. Lee sensed that Grace was saying somethin
g, although it wasn’t clear what. Some fragments of sentences crossed his mind—all related to a quartz mine. Lee touched the wall of the cave: yes, it was quartz. He was overcome with excitement and a little afraid. It was wonderful to dream with Grace. Why hadn’t they ever done this before? But the tunnel might collapse, and they might be smothered to death. In the quiet, Lee started whenever he heard a suspicious sound. Each time, Grace did her best to pull him back down. Grace was so calm that Lee thought she was meditating—communicating with the quartz all around them. Although Lee was excited, he certainly couldn’t communicate with the things around them. When he touched the hard ore, his heart seethed with a bizarre excitement, but he didn’t understand why. He heard his wife say something strange: “Sleep tight. It’s okay.”

  So was he awake? Lee wasn’t sure. From somewhere above came another sound—the crackling of quartz. It was obvious that the ground was gradually sinking. After a while, the sinking accelerated. At first, Lee was going to scratch the wall beside him, but he couldn’t. His hand slid, and his mind was fuzzy. Just then, he remembered what Grace had said: “Sleep tight. It’s okay.” He closed his eyes right away. In the dark tunnel hallway, he saw several bright spots.

  Grace couldn’t hang onto Lee. She looked on helplessly as he fell, and later wondered if this was his good fortune. She sat down and exhaled. She brought her feverish face to the hard stone, and stared guardedly into the tunnel. Several spindly human shadows wobbled and glimmered with light. She coughed noiselessly a few times and stamped her feet. She actually heard echoes from underground. Grace felt intoxicated, her thoughts galloping ahead. She opened her eyes in the billowing yellow dust and identified those mobile shadows. As she was doing this, she kept visualizing herself as a baby in diapers. Once more, she shouted noiselessly for Lee. She walked to the edge of the chasm and stretched out her lame leg to test its depth. She remembered that when Lee was lying under the truck, he had whispered, “We won’t die.” She had forgotten these words right after hearing them, and hadn’t remembered them in all these years. Now they had come to mind again.

  “Here I am, Ms. Grace!” Qiming’s voice echoed in the cave. “Above us is the snow mountain. Didn’t you guess? In the morning, we’ll be blown by the wind from the snow mountain.”

  Grace thought Qiming’s voice contained a wealth of experience.

  Chapter 8

  LIUJIN, HER PARENTS, AND THE BLACK MAN

  The year that Liujin was ten, the Design Institute assigned her family to a bungalow with a small courtyard. One Sunday, they happily moved in. Two young poplars were growing in the courtyard, and disorderly weeds stood three feet high. In the beginning, Liujin hated their new home because of the many mosquitoes and because of strange animal sounds at night. When it turned dark, she withdrew inside, not daring to go out. From the window, she saw some suspicious black shadows moving through the weeds: they looked a little like foxes or birds. She heard her parents walking softly in the adjacent room, discussing something. They were apparently very pleased with this new home that they’d been looking forward to for a long time.

  José did a great job tidying up the courtyard in only two of his days off. Besides cleaning out the weeds, he planted a few flowerbeds and planted vines next to the fence. This resulted immediately in fewer mosquitoes. Strange birds still hooted at night, but the sounds were less terrifying. No longer panicky, Liujin began exploring her new home. The courtyard was large, and the backyard even had an old well. Liujin craned her neck and looked down into the well; this gave her goose bumps. People said the water wasn’t safe to drink. She saw a gecko on the red brick wall next to the main entrance. It looked as if it had lived more than a thousand lonely years. Liujin touched it, but it didn’t move. For a second, Liujin wondered if it was dead. But after a while, it began crawling slowly: it crawled from the wall to the ground and then into the house. Once in the house, it climbed the wall again—straight up to a corner of the ceiling. There, it stopped. Liujin thought it was absorbed in its own reflections.

  “Liujin, Liujin, it’s time to do your homework!”

  Mother spoke to her from outside the window. Through the glass, Mama’s face looked distorted—short and broad, a little like a tea urn. While Liujin was doing her homework, the bird on the poplar in front distracted her. What kind of bird was it? It wasn’t an owl, even less likely a crow. Maybe it was the same one she’d heard at midnight. How she wished she knew for sure! Mother didn’t seem the least bit sentimental. She was a strong-willed woman, always acting in accord with her own strange principles. When they lived in a third-story loft, she had never fussed about the sounds made by large birds on their skylight. She was no different now. She seemed to be used to strange phenomena. Though Liujin was young, she had sensed this long ago and admired this side of her mother.

  Although the weeds had been pulled, the dark animal shadows still traversed the courtyard. From a crack in the curtains, Liujin peered at a lonely little animal, and her heart thumped. She wondered where it slept. If it didn’t sleep, did it go from this courtyard to another, and then to the highway? Or could it sleep while it was walking? As she was mulling over these things, Liujin felt chilly air on her neck, as if an evil spirit were aiming a knife at her back. She put away her schoolwork and hung her backpack from the clothes rack. Hearing a sound in the courtyard, she opened the curtains and took a look. She saw her father bending down, looking for something along the fence. Then he apparently found it, for he held something up high and shouted.

  “What did you say?” Mother yelled from the window.

  “It’s the gecko. It slipped out again. It should stay inside.”

  Liujin thought this was an odd notion. But after thinking it over, she felt it made sense. This home once belonged to the gecko. Her family had invaded its home. The door creaked again: Father was entering. He set the gecko down inside the house. Liujin went into the dark living room. She shouted “Dad,” but no one answered. She looked inside her parents’ bedroom; it was dark, too. She didn’t think they could have fallen asleep so quickly, for they’d been talking just now. Out of curiosity, she pushed their bedroom door open. In the dim moonlight, she saw the quilts folded neatly on the bed. Mother lay on the rattan recliner, her head to one side. She seemed asleep.

  “Mama!” Liujin shouted.

  “Huh? Aren’t you asleep? What do you want?” Nancy asked hoarsely.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “In the kitchen. There’s a hole at the base of the wall there. Maybe a fox made it.”

  Liujin felt her way to the kitchen. No light was on there, either. Her father was sitting on a small recliner.

  “I couldn’t sleep, anyhow, so I’m keeping watch here. I want to see if anything sneaks out through this hole.”

  “Dad, you must mean comes in.”

  “No, I meant what I said—sneaks out. There are some weird creatures in this house. I’m not sure what they are.”

  Liujin sat down on a stool. She and her father were worried. The wind poured in from that hole. They shifted their position in order to shelter from the wind.

  “On a windy night like this, they probably won’t go out,” Father said.

  José glanced absentmindedly at his daughter, who was sitting beside him. He noticed that his little girl was growing quieter over the years. Too quiet for her age. Sometimes he wondered if her previous impetuosity now had truly disappeared. As he watched, his daughter’s shadow began wobbling and separating into a few parts. When he looked hard, the parts took the form of a person again. Liujin’s body could break up in the dark (perhaps he was only hallucinating). He’d seen this happen several times, and each time it surprised him. Why had she cried all night long when she was a baby? Was she scared? José’s insomnia gradually worsened. Somehow Liujin became aware of her father’s nighttime activity and began keeping him company. José sighed: a daughter was close to one’s heart. A boy could never be the same.

  “Dad, how big is Pebble Town?”
>
  “We circled around it one time, didn’t we?”

  José thought, Liujin worries too much. She can’t be easily reasoned with. Now, for example: his answer didn’t satisfy her and even made her a little angry. After saying nothing for a while, she returned to her room and went to sleep. How big was Pebble Town, really? Could she be sure of its size just because he had taken her around it once? José couldn’t understand his daughter. He had seen her lying next to the granite well twice, listening attentively at its opening. She had also sat for half an hour next to the well and absentmindedly gazed down into its depths.

  In the summer, José kept his word and took Liujin to the snow mountain; they traveled by car. Once in the frozen region, Liujin stood there numb and unmoving as if going crazy. Her reaction had been over the top—beyond José’s expectations. He quickly led her down into the needle-leaved forest. While walking there, she wasn’t aware of the little animals that jumped back and forth in front of them. Only the two eagles circling in the sky could attract her attention, because she was afraid the eagles would pick her up and carry her off. Halfway up the mountain, she asked about the snow leopards. She was walking ahead of José. Gazing at her gaunt form, José kept saying silently to himself, “Daughter, my daughter . . .” He kept saying this, even though his heart ached. He felt that the snow mountain was becoming much less mysterious. Was this because of Liujin? What an unfathomable little girl.

  After his daughter left the kitchen, José opened the window and looked out at the house across the street. The light there was still shining. The family were local tenants. They had a foible: they hardly ever turned out the lights at night. If there was a power outage, they lit a kerosene lamp. Did they work at night? Recently, in an energy-saving move, street lamps weren’t being lit, so that family’s home had become the only source of light in this large area. It made José’s imagination run wild. These people were in the sheep-butchering business. They purchased sheep from out of town and sold the meat to the market. The husband was the most somber person José had ever known. One day, José saw him crossing the street. When he reached the middle of the street, a medium-sized truck rushed across, but—as if deaf—he didn’t deviate from his exasperatingly slow pace. The truck screeched to a stop and almost hit him. For several days afterward, José, who had witnessed this, felt extremely lightheaded: he staggered when he walked. Outside, the wind was howling, as if Pebble Town were giving vent to rage. In his mind’s eye, José saw Nancy and Liujin as they slept, and for a moment he felt a rush of sentiment. What did the people over there think about this strong wind? Ever since he began having insomnia, Nancy had slept really soundly. Now and then, she would talk to him as she dreamed. Although she couldn’t hear his answer, she continued conversing with him from a deep valley. José was deeply moved at times like this. But in the daytime, Nancy told him that she wasn’t sleeping, she was awake. She felt she hadn’t slept in a hundred years. When José thought of this, he saw Liujin’s small figure in front of him.