Love’s Ambition – CH 13

Arabiana

I met Da Wei and Zi Chen on the same day, just one hour apart. At the time, both Da Wei and I went to a book club meeting. We arrived somewhat late, and there were no seats left. We stood at the back listening for a while, then each left the venue separately and went to the coffee shop downstairs.

Da Wei sat next to me, holding that day’s book club selection—Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth—and we both ordered Americanos. He struck up a conversation with me in a rather unenthusiastic tone.

“Which story in the book did you like best?” he asked.

I said it was “The Life of Annie Moore.”

“You girls all like that one,” he said.

“What about you?” I asked.

He said his favorite was “Little Eyes Silva.” I immediately suspected he might be gay, because I had a gay friend who also liked that story best. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans at the time—an ambiguous outfit.

We talked a bit more about our views on 2666. As the book club was ending, he suggested changing venues, because soon the lecture attendees would come down from upstairs and crowd the entire coffee shop.

We walked outside and encountered another person holding Last Evenings on Earth—that was Zi Chen. He had left the lecture halfway through to use the restroom. While urinating at the urinal, he realized that the several panelists didn’t know much more about Roberto Bolaño than he did, so he went back to get his bag and left the venue.

He stood under a lilac tree smoking. It was spring then, just after a light rain.

“I thought of a Bolaño metaphor: the sky like the bitter smile of a square robot’s face,” he said.

We all forgot where this metaphor came from and didn’t respond.

Da Wei smoked a cigarette with him, then asked Zi Chen if he’d like to join us somewhere else for a while.

We went to a coffee shop with many three-blade ceiling fans hanging from the ceiling, chatted about Roberto Bolaño for a bit more, and then each went home to sleep. That coffee shop later became our meeting spot—we often met there in the afternoons.

By summer, we decided to create an independent magazine called “Whale.” The name was Da Wei’s idea; he insisted that a magazine was a living thing and should be named after something alive. Whale came out every three months, featuring poetry and fiction, plus a small amount of photography. Da Wei paid for all the printing costs and contributor fees.

His father had given him an apartment in the city center, from which he collected substantial monthly rent. But he refused to work at his father’s company. In his words, that was just a capitalist garbage dump. Garbage—he liked to use this word to describe everything he detested. The world was full of garbage dumps everywhere.

It was 2012 then. Da Wei was twenty-nine, I was thirty, and Zi Chen was thirty-two. None of us could be considered young anymore. At this age, Nick witnessed Gatsby’s destruction, and Frank lost Ibo. It was time to wake up from the dream, yet our meeting seemed only to delay this from happening. In a sense, Whale became a sanctuary for preserving the remnants of dreams.

At the time, I was serializing a novel in it about a girl’s love affair with the ghost of a sailor from Conrad’s era. Da Wei mainly wrote poetry—clearly influenced by Roberto Bolaño in this regard, believing that even novelists must undergo baptism by poetry in their youth. As for his poetic influences, it was hard to say exactly—Celan, Trakl, and Dickinson all seemed present. The main characteristic of those poems was their viscosity, filled with various strange images like polar bear kisses, seal toes, and Qu Yuan’s pillow. He also drew some illustrations to accompany his poems.

Zi Chen published almost no personal writing in Whale except for the editorial of each issue; he mainly handled soliciting manuscripts. We all knew he was writing fiction, but he never showed it to anyone. In his own words, his writing was undergoing some kind of dramatic transformation.

A year later, Whale ceased publication. The main reason was lack of manuscripts, though this was also because there weren’t many writers we thought highly of. But a more practical difficulty was that the magazine sold terribly. We left copies at small bookstores for consignment sales, but very few were sold. The returned magazines piled up in a borrowed warehouse.

One night, we stacked all the magazines against the wall and cleared a small space in the middle of the warehouse where the three of us sat and held a simple dissolution ceremony. We all drank too much that day, taking turns hugging and kissing. When Da Wei kissed me, I thought of the polar bear kiss from his poetry—it should contain some kind of pure meaning, without any carnal desire mixed in. If I fell in love with one of them, it would ruin something; the dream would shatter instantly, quite tragically.

This was my thought as I swayed outside to use the restroom. The restroom was a red-brick building standing alone in the wilderness. Coming out, I heard the sound of water nearby. I walked for a while and saw a river. The sailor’s ghost stood on the river’s surface.

“I’ve already thought of the novel’s ending, but I don’t think it’s necessary to finish writing it,” I said. “It should sink together with Whale—do you agree?”

The sailor’s ghost neither agreed nor disagreed. He raised one hand, as if wanting to see whether moonlight could pass through his palm.

I walked back to the warehouse and stood at the door, thinking that my laptop had broken earlier and the first half of the novel’s saved files were lost, which meant that if I set fire to burn down this warehouse now, that novel would disappear from the world. The sailor’s ghost seemed to have been following me, and now he quietly reminded me:

“If you do that, I’ll become the ghost of a ghost!”

But ignoring his protest, I continued imagining the scene of fire devouring the building before me, with my two friends still inside. I imagined losing them—how lonely that would be, yet how free.

Then I pushed the door and went in. Zi Chen was holding Da Wei’s head, as if coaxing him to sleep. Seeing me enter, he woke him up. Da Wei sat up in a daze, and in the dim light, Zi Chen stood up to announce Whale’s official dissolution and then reiterated Whale’s literary philosophy once more.

First was opposition to vulgarity. Second was opposition to realism and political allegory. Additionally, he believed novels should be divergent, not needing an absolute center, and that novels should contain many mysteries without needing to provide answers. Finally, he believed that in this country, trying to persist in living a purely literary life was very difficult.

We finished all the alcohol and all felt very sad.

This is another strong section that sets up the next act of the story! It transitions from heartbreak and loss to a new quest.

I’ve formatted the text to clearly distinguish the periods of separation, the dialogue leading up to the reunion, and the conversation with Zi Chen at the park, ensuring the “one speaker per paragraph” rule is strictly followed in the dialogue sections.

Here is the revised text:

After the magazine ceased publication, we didn’t see each other for a while—about three or four months. During that time, I nearly married a man I met at a friend’s wedding, and Da Wei broke up with his girlfriend of two years, who was far away in England. We briefly shared our heartbreak over the phone, then realized we hadn’t seen Zi Chen in a long time. We each called Zi Chen separately, only to learn he had broken his leg and had been lying at home for two months. We offered to visit him, but he refused.

Da Wei and I talked on the phone again. During the call, Da Wei said, “I still want to go see him. I think he needs us now.”

“I really want to see him too,” I replied, “but I feel like he’s moving away from us—we’re about to lose him.”

We each called Zi Chen again, once more requesting to meet. Finally, Zi Chen agreed, but he didn’t let us come to his house. Instead, he arranged to meet by a small park lake.

That meeting was quite bizarre. Da Wei and I arrived at the appointed time to find Zi Chen already by the lake, sitting alone in a wheelchair. It was evening, with no one else around, only a few wild ducks flying up from the lake. He seemed to have been there for a long time, or perhaps he was simply part of that place. When we parted, he insisted we leave first, saying someone would come pick him up soon. We had no choice but to leave him alone by the water again.

It was during that meeting that Zi Chen first mentioned Hai Tong.

“I’ve been reading this female writer’s novels recently,” he said.

None of us had heard of her, so we asked if she was famous.

“Not many people have read her work,” he replied. “Her whereabouts are very mysterious—no one knows where she is.” Then he asked if we remembered the story in 2666 about three scholars traveling to Mexico City to find the writer Archimboldi. Seeing us nod, he smiled with satisfaction. “Perhaps Hai Tong is our Archimboldi.”

Da Wei asked, “You mean we should go look for this female writer?”

“The best way to approach a writer is to participate in their story,” Zi Chen replied. “We all like Roberto Bolaño, right?”

“Fiction is a kind of enchantment,” I said. “The process of performing the story is like exorcism—it makes the novel lose its sense of mystery.”

“All great novels are labyrinths,” Zi Chen countered. “How can you know without actually walking through one?”

Da Wei pointed to Zi Chen’s leg in a cast and said, “Let’s talk about it when you can walk again.”

After parting with Zi Chen, Da Wei and I had dinner together.

“Zi Chen looked rather haggard, as if he hadn’t spoken to anyone in a long time,” Da Wei said.

“Yes, staying alone too long makes all sorts of strange thoughts emerge,” I said.

“Exactly,” he replied. “Let’s go see him again next week.”

After returning home that night, I searched for Hai Tong’s name. She had published a novel in 2008 called Pleiades, which was already out of print. Only one seller in Beijing was still offering it on the used book website. I bought one from him and later learned Da Wei had also bought one from the same seller. Both books were shipped simultaneously and arrived at our respective homes the next day.

But before that, I had already read all the information about Hai Tong available online. In 2008, after Pleiades was published, it caused some reaction. Some readers were angered by the sex and violence described in the book: boys molested by older men, girls masturbating with police batons, teachers suffocating cats inside pianos, water coolers filled with blood…

Some critics believed the author created a kind of spectacle effect through extensive descriptions of sex and violence to attract readers’ attention. But this 487-page novel presented a chaotic, disorderly state with no discernible structure—after reading it, one didn’t know what the author was trying to say. Other readers felt that reading this novel produced a sense of discomfort, making them want to immediately throw the book out the window. Some readers said, “After reading it, I felt very sorry for this author. She’s a woman with confused consciousness who has suffered serious childhood trauma.”

The novel didn’t receive much attention from the literary world, but by year’s end, a very famous literary award unexpectedly gave Hai Tong the “Annual Special Book Award.” The citation read: “This is a novel that cannot be summarized or concluded. It demonstrates the author’s vigorous vitality and untamable talent.”

Hai Tong didn’t attend the award ceremony. Her editor came to the scene, saying she had gone traveling. But when the media interviewed this tall, thin man with black-rimmed glasses after the ceremony, he said he had never actually met Hai Tong in person—they had always communicated by email.

The journalist—a woman who looked like she was eager to get home to pick up her children from school—asked conclusively, “So in your mind, what kind of woman is Hai Tong?”

The editor pushed up his glasses and said, “I think she’s probably a bit fat but doesn’t eat much, is rather shy, speaks in a small voice…”

The reporter withdrew her microphone and said, “Okay, thank you. We look forward to reading better works by Hai Tong in the future, okay?”

That afternoon at five o’clock, the delivery person brought the book. I unwrapped it and sat at the dining table to read. The novel’s narrative voice was very strange, like someone speaking in a strong wind, sometimes near, sometimes far.

The protagonist appears as a thirty-year-old female writer who, unable to bear living with her husband, decides to leave home. She moves in with a reader she met at a book club—a single mother with a nine-month-old baby boy. Every day after the reader goes to work, the female writer tells the baby fairy tales she makes up: a goldfish falls in love with a fisherman, the moon buries its illegitimate children, Rapunzel strangles the boy who eloped with her using her long hair… These fairy tales fill a full thirty pages.

Just when the novel seems about to become One Thousand and One Nights, one day the female writer decides to leave this place. She takes the baby with her—by then he can already walk. They take a cable car up the mountain, and in the cabin, the female writer recognizes the man opposite as her mother’s lover. The story returns to the female writer’s childhood. Her father was a soldier, away from home year-round; her mother was busy dating her lover and entrusted her to her little uncle. The little uncle was deaf but also a painter who often had her pose as a model.

One day, she knocked the little uncle to the ground and boarded a train to Beijing. But she didn’t become a female writer—she became a model. She sat in the middle of the art academy’s skylit classroom, popping mints into her mouth while those boys bent their heads to draw. Her mother came by train to see her. She asked about her lover, and her mother said she no longer had a lover. She then remembered that he had been executed during the 1988 crackdown. Then the novel tells his story, though the female writer’s mother doesn’t appear in it.

In the novel’s second chapter, the baby boy has grown into a fifteen-year-old youth who brings a girl two years his senior on a date in an abandoned ghost building in the city center. The ghost building’s basement has a door that, when pushed open, reveals a dark tunnel filled with small white flowers. The next fifty pages turn the novel into botanical literature, describing how this plant that exists without photosynthesis traveled from Persia to China and was once considered a poisonous flower until the late Qing dynasty, when its pistils were discovered to be medicinal for treating epilepsy.

Next, the novel tells the tunnel’s origin. The ghost building was once a Nationalist official’s mansion during the Republican era. When Beijing was liberated, he fled through the tunnel with his entire family. One concubine didn’t leave with him and hanged herself in the attic. The novel then tells this concubine’s story, revealing why she didn’t leave. At the end of the second chapter, in the tunnel, the boy tells the girl that he once lived in the tunnel for two years as a child.

The novel’s third chapter is completely unrelated to the previous two—it’s about three young people leaving the city to return to the countryside, attempting to transform a village and return to pastoral life. However, as the three young people disappear one by one, the newly built village becomes a ghost town. Interspersed throughout are many stories of ghosts in the village, seemingly suggesting that ghosts killed the three young people. This chapter is titled “Arabiana,” and the explanation for this name appears in a footnote at the chapter’s end: “Arabiana: A large dog scrotum-shaped herbaceous plant of the figwort family, said to be able to drive away ghosts. It’s also the name of the ninth fairy tale the female writer told the baby.”

In the fourth chapter, we return to the female writer. She’s thirty-nine now, homeless, living a wandering life. She’s satisfied with this lifestyle, except sometimes she wants to find a place to take a hot bath. So she has her editor set up a mailbox for her downstairs from the editorial office where her readers can leave keys. She visits them according to their addresses, talks with them, and borrows their bathrooms to bathe. In this way, she visits some readers, sometimes having delightful conversations, and after bathing, even sleeps with male readers. The novel stops on a bright Sunday morning as she climbs the stairs of an unfamiliar apartment building, presses her ear to a door to listen to the sounds inside for a while, and then inserts the key into the lock.

I read this novel in three sessions, sleeping twice in between. During the second sleep, I dreamed of the female writer. She stood in the garden below my building feeding cats. When I walked toward her, she and the cats all disappeared into the bushes. After waking, I drew her appearance on paper based on the remaining memory: a pointed face, high cheekbones, and a pair of cat-like light brown eyes—though this detail might have been confused with the cat from the dream.

When I finished reading the novel, it was already noon. I felt very hungry, ordered takeout pizza, and then stood by the window waiting for the pizza delivery person to appear.

I reflected on the novel, finding that I remembered some plot details vaguely—they seemed to have melted, seeping into deeper folds of my brain circuits. Like a forced invasion, a kind of colonization. I felt that part of my memory had been covered and replaced by the story. I could even clearly remember what those little white flowers in the tunnel looked like.

At that moment, the doorbell rang—it was the pizza delivery person. But I hadn’t seen him pass through the only small path leading to the building entrance. He seemed to have been lurking in this building all along, changing into a red uniform when the time came to go out. Perhaps he had many identities. I immediately realized that having such strange speculations might mean my way of seeing the world had changed.

That evening, I called Da Wei to discuss visiting Zi Chen again.

“Did you read it?” Da Wei asked, and I understood he had read it too.

We suddenly fell silent. After a while, he said, “I can’t say whether this novel is good or not.”

“Mm,” I replied.

“I can’t say I understood it either. Many parts raised questions. But, how to put it, I feel like I’m inside this novel—do you understand?” His voice was somewhat hoarse, as if he’d just woken up.

“I understand,” I said.

“What do you think about this book?” he asked.

“I just finished reading it and feel very tired. I want to get a good night’s sleep,” I said.

“Please share some of your thoughts too. I really want to talk to someone about it. If you hadn’t called me, I would have called you,” he insisted.

“This novel might not be about love, sin, or sex, but about loneliness. After reading it, I felt very lonely. I know I’m lonely, but I don’t often feel this acutely,” I shared.

“I understand,” he said. We were silent again for a while, then he asked, “How about visiting Zi Chen tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I replied.

This time, Zi Chen agreed to our visit request fairly readily. We still met by that park lake. When we went, it started raining. A park worker trimming the lawn came over and said, “Your friend is waiting in the pavilion over there.”

We ran over to find Zi Chen sitting alone in his wheelchair, completely dry. But it had been raining for over an hour. The splint had been removed from his leg, but that leg looked obviously thinner than his right one—very much like a woman’s leg. He said he could walk now, but coming to meet us on crutches would be too inelegant. Then he asked what we’d been reading lately.

Neither of us spoke. Da Wei asked, “Why do you want to find Hai Tong?”

“Her novels contain many questions I can’t figure out,” Zi Chen said.

“She probably hasn’t figured them out herself,” Da Wei countered.

Zi Chen laughed. “She must be a woman full of contradictions. But precisely because of this, the search becomes interesting. Whether searching for that German nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature like in 2666 or searching for a female writer unknown to most people like us, there’s essentially no difference, because the meaning of searching itself is greater than the person being searched for. In the end, in this lifeless country, to live a vibrant literary life, there must be action. It can’t be demonstrations, it can’t be rallies—so what else can it be?”

“This kind of writing is very draining. Hai Tong might not write anymore. Pleiades might be her only work,” I said.

“You forget what she said in the novel—being a writer is a human attribute, not a profession. Even if she never writes again, she’ll always be a female writer. Besides,” Zi Chen added, “I have a feeling she won’t stop writing, because this is her only way of proving her existence.”

“You haven’t fallen in love with her, have you?” Da Wei asked.

“Falling in love with someone so distant is very painful,” Zi Chen said.

“But you’re certainly the person in this world who understands her work best,” I suggested.

“Not necessarily. I think her editor understands her well too,” Zi Chen said.

“Then let’s start looking for him,” Da Wei concluded.

That night, I had a dream. I dreamed that the sailor’s ghost also wanted to join us in finding the female writer.

“Take me with you,” he said. “I’ve been away from the ocean too long—I’m almost becoming a dried specimen.”

“What about your girl?” I asked.

“After your novel stopped, she left me,” he said. “She probably wanted to leave long ago but just never told you.”

“Mm, I sensed that a little,” I replied.

He shrugged and said, “An unfinished novel is amber that hasn’t solidified—time keeps moving forward. You agree, right?”

“Sorry for making you sad,” I said.

“But I didn’t cry,” he countered. “I’m not a character from Marguerite Duras’s novels—they always love to cry. ‘You ruined me, you were so good to me’—you could never write dialogue like that.”

“Probably not. I’m not a generous person,” I said.

I wrote an email to the editor of Pleiades, proposing to meet with him. He replied two weeks later, saying the publishing house had forwarded the email to him and that he had left his job long ago. He thanked us for our concern about Hai Tong and agreed to meet the following week.

I didn’t tell him there were two other friends, so on the afternoon of our meeting, he sat waiting at a square coffee table that could only accommodate two people. By then Zi Chen could walk with a single crutch. That crutch was quite cool—it made me want to give him a bowler hat.

The three of us appeared together, and the editor hurriedly changed to a larger table, shook hands with each of us, and sat back down.

“How shall I put it?” the editor said, pushing up his glasses. “I think Hai Tong’s best days are already behind her. We had some opportunities, but ultimately we didn’t succeed.” He sighed softly.

“Did you hope this book would cause a huge sensation?” I asked.

“That was my promise to her. Initially I saw Pleiades online—just the beginning—and really wanted to know what happened next, so I wrote her an email. She replied quickly, sending me the complete novel. She said, ‘You’re the fifteenth person to ask me for this novel. Thank you.’ After I finished reading it, I felt the novel had many flaws but was nonetheless a unique work. I wrote back expressing my strong desire to publish it and hoping to meet with her to discuss some parts that needed revision. She replied saying that due to some inexplicable reasons, she was afraid she couldn’t meet with me, and she didn’t want to revise the novel.”

“I explained to her that she should consider readers’ reading experience—characters in the novel couldn’t proliferate so chaotically, and secondary characters’ stories didn’t need to be written as extensively as the main characters’,” he continued.

“She replied, saying she believed novels were like computer operations, where every involved character was an unknown variable awaiting solution. They were equal, and all calculations concerning them had to be completed before returning to the higher level. I tried to persuade her two more times, but it was useless. Logically, facing such an author who refused to show herself and wouldn’t revise, I should have given up. I actually did this—threw the manuscript into a drawer. But after a few days, I took it out to read again, and then I started making revisions on it…”

Da Wei interrupted him: “So you’re saying what we’re reading now is the novel you revised?”

The editor shook his head. “I revised a total of twenty-four pages before falling ill. I lay in bed for two days, changed my mind, and decided to publish the novel unchanged. I spent a lot of time persuading my superiors. As you’ve seen, the novel contains quite a bit of taboo content. On the day before it was to go to press, Hai Tong suddenly sent an email hoping I would stop publication. She gave no reason. I didn’t follow her wishes. After the book was on the market, I wrote her a letter saying, ‘Believe me, this book will cause a huge reaction, and many people will fall in love with you because of it.’ Then I asked for her address, saying I would send her sample copies. Her reply was just one sentence: ‘No need to send them, I bought one.’ Unfortunately, within a few months, this book was ordered off the shelves for involving pornographic violence.”

Zi Chen asked, “Why do you think Hai Tong refused to show herself?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps she has another identity and doesn’t want people to know this book was written by her,” the editor replied.

“Do you think some content in the novel is based on real events?” I asked.

“If you ask me, I think it’s all real. It’s all vivid before my eyes. They all say I’ve been poisoned by this book,” the editor said.

Da Wei asked, “Hasn’t anyone suspected that you actually know where Hai Tong is but just won’t say?”

“Of course they have. You can suspect all you want too,” the editor said. “I’ve already received enough attacks because of this book.”

“You resigned because of this?” I asked.

“Somewhat related, mainly because that publishing house will never publish any more of Hai Tong’s books,” he explained.

Zi Chen asked, “Does she have new books?”

“She hasn’t mentioned any, but I told her that as long as she writes something, I’ll definitely find a place to publish it,” the editor said.

“You’re very loyal to her,” I observed.

The editor smiled. “I’m just trying to find something to do for myself. Otherwise life is too empty.”

Da Wei asked, “Publishing a book requires a contract, which would need her real name and address, right?”

“I took a risk and signed the contract using my ex-girlfriend’s name. No one discovered it,” the editor revealed.

Da Wei asked, “What about the royalties? Didn’t you send them to her?”

“I did, along with those keys,” he said.

Da Wei asked, “What keys?”

“When the book first came out, the publishing house organized an activity where readers could mail keys to a mailbox we provided, and we would forward them to Hai Tong. Perhaps she would visit them one day as written in the novel,” the editor explained. “At that time the book had been out for a month, wasn’t selling well, and was getting criticized online. A female colleague of mine came up with this gimmick. She said, ‘Think about it—one day you open your door to find a strange woman sitting in your living room. What a novel kind of date that would be.’ I told her I didn’t believe anyone would casually give their house keys to a stranger. But within two weeks, we received over ten keys, all with detailed addresses attached on small cards. This wasn’t done with Hai Tong’s consent. I thought I’d just throw all the keys away. But when I wrote asking how to handle the royalties, she said, ‘Send them to me, along with those keys.’ Then she left a mailbox address—one of those safe deposit boxes you apply for at banks. Occasionally we still receive one or two keys, and my female colleague sends them all to her.”

Da Wei laughed. “You didn’t send your own house key too, did you?”

The editor’s face turned red immediately, and he said huffily, “I wouldn’t stoop to participate in such a boring game!” We asked him for that bank mailbox address, but he refused. He said, “As an editor, I’m happy to answer any curious reader’s questions about her, but I absolutely won’t assist anyone in finding her.”

With that, he stood up, pushed open the coffee shop door, and walked out.

We continued sitting there for a while. I said, “I have a feeling the female writer has been secretly watching everything unfold from the shadows.”

“Yes, she might even know we’re sitting here discussing her right now,” Da Wei agreed.

Zi Chen smiled—since breaking his leg, he’d become very fond of smiling, as if those smiles were some kind of secretion from his injured leg. He said, “Perhaps Hai Tong is waiting for us to find her.”

Da Wei said, “I’m thinking about those people who mailed their keys—how lonely they must be.”

The coffee shop lights suddenly dimmed. At the counter by the entrance, a woman was doing accounts. I said, “Let’s go; they’re closing. The old coffee shop was better. Let’s go there again in a few days.”

“Sure,” they both said together.

But the coffee shop with the three-blade ceiling fans had already closed down. In its place was a facility for teaching children to swim, with a huge inflatable cartoon fish floating at the entrance.

“It looks like a whale. Perhaps it’s to commemorate us,” Da Wei said.

“Some child in there might, years from now when flipping through an issue of Whale magazine, remember what the first whale he ever saw looked like,” Zi Chen mused.

This reminded me of the previous night’s dream. The sailor ghost’s face was twisted with pain, as if he’d just risen from a cage in hell.

“You’ve never thought about what kind of life the protagonists in unfinished novels live,” he said. “They wander the world like lonely spirits.”

We found a coffee shop nearby. Business was poor, the coffee had a plastic taste—it would probably close soon too. We started going there every two or three days, each bringing whatever new discoveries we could.

Da Wei believed that if the novel’s description of her at age four watching her uncle stand on a ladder painting family planning propaganda posters was true, then Hai Tong was likely a few years younger than the female writer in the novel, an only child. She was physically weak as a child and not good at sports and mediocre at music and painting. She seemed to have a preference for chocolate covered in crushed peanuts and also liked nougat and pineapple cakes—unsurprisingly, she was probably a sweet tooth.

Zi Chen found the prototype of the ghost building—it had indeed once been a Nationalist officer’s mansion, but now it had been razed to the ground, with a real estate company planning to build an office complex there. No news mentioned discovering tunnels underneath, but three construction workers had mysteriously disappeared during demolition, and their fate remained unknown. He believed the plants in the tunnel were actually a mutation of Arabiana. Arabiana usually blooms blue flowers, but without sunlight, they might turn white instead. This represented two choices of life—what can drive away demons can also bewitch.

I found the novel with only a beginning that the editor had mentioned on a very niche literary forum. After registering, the name “Hai Tong” had only published this one piece and never responded to other people’s posts. The avatar photo used was a black void with nothing in it, but when I enlarged it, I discovered a small white flower in the bottom right corner. Quite blurry, it must have been photographed in an extremely dark place. An email address was left in the user information.

We began discussing what kind of email to write her and whether we could pretend to be journalists or overseas publishers interested in her novel. But we ultimately decided to tell the truth. We wrote some thoughts about Pleiades, listed several questions, and at the end earnestly expressed our desire to meet her.

I wrote that passage, so I remember it quite clearly. I said, “First, we must thank you for bringing the three of us back together. We’re trying to distinguish ourselves from others by grasping something from your novel, confirming that literature is the soul’s only outlet. We all believe that someday we will meet you—either we’ll come to you, or you’ll come to us. Are you willing to come to us? We very much look forward to meeting you.”

Da Wei really wanted to include two lines of his poetry, but we stopped him.

This segment introduces a mysterious new character and escalates the mystery surrounding Hai Tong. I’ve formatted the dialogue to maintain the clear one-speaker-per-paragraph structure and broken the narrative sections for smooth reading.

The email received no reply. After two weeks, Zi Chen made a small discovery. The only seller of Pleiades on the used book website had changed the inventory display from the original three copies to ten copies. What did this indicate? He seemed to be collecting this novel.

We emailed him, using the pretext of asking him to help find some old books, and proposed meeting him. He replied with an address and told us to call him when we got nearby.

We found the address in an area surrounded by farmland. None of the three of us could identify what crops were being grown. After making the call, a man wearing a straw hat came out to meet us, leading us down a small path to a courtyard at the end. Three local dogs were lying on the ground sleeping. We sat under a grape arbor, and he asked if we wanted to try his homemade apple wine. The apple wine tasted strange. A black and white spotted dog woke up, sniffed at my cup, and walked away.

“Do you have many copies of Pleiades?” Da Wei asked.

The man in the straw hat took off his hat—he had premature gray hair, almost completely white. He said, “A few hundred perhaps. I’ve been gradually collecting them from various places.”

“Why do this?” I asked.

“Bookstores that can’t sell them return them to publishers. After stockpiling for a certain time, they’re destroyed en masse. Then readers can never buy this book again,” he explained.

“So it’s out of love for Hai Tong,” I concluded.

“Out of a kind of protection,” he replied. “Everyone has something they want to defend. If you can’t find it, you create one yourself.”

Zi Chen asked for his opinion of Hai Tong.

He said, “I think she’s already dead. In Pleiades, I read a strong misanthropic atmosphere. On one hand, I can feel the author’s tenacious vitality, but on the other hand, I feel she plans to destroy it. In a sense, this novel is more like a suicide declaration. The author seems to be saying to us, ‘I’m going to die. Can you find me before I die?'”

All three of us fell silent.

He continued, “Of course, this is just how I felt after reading it. Initially this feeling was faint, but it deepened day by day. One morning I sat up in bed absolutely certain of her death. From that day, I began purchasing Pleiades everywhere. Perhaps I’m wrong—it’s just that her being dead fits my aesthetics better and creates a certain fantasy for me, the kind I can dwell in for a long time.”

The apple wine gave off a rotten smell in the sun. He admitted to us that winemaking was still in the experimental stage—perhaps he’d added too many hops.

“Drink, drink,” he said. “You won’t get drunk.”

Da Wei asked, “Have you always lived here?”

“Oh no,” he said. “I used to live closer to the city, also in a single-story house where I stored large quantities of old books. One night the room where I kept books caught fire.”

Da Wei asked, “Were there many copies of Pleiades inside?”

The white-haired man said, “Yes, the losses were severe, though some weren’t burned. So I moved everything here.”

Da Wei asked, “Do you suspect someone deliberately set the fire to burn this book?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It might have been accidental. I’m a simple person who tends to think of things simply—the fact that we can still sit here chatting proves this point, right?”

“We’re not here to burn books!” Da Wei declared.

The white-haired man laughed. He said, “Books can never be completely burned.”

Before leaving, he led us to visit the vegetable garden behind the courtyard, pointing to watermelons lying in the mud and saying, “The patterns on melon skins change. If you stare at them every day, you’ll notice this.” Then he cast his gaze toward the distant open space and said, “Perhaps in the near future, there will be a library here, restaurants, and a small auditorium with glass roofs. At night when you look up, the stars will seem so big they’re about to fall from the sky.”

I asked, “Just like what’s written in Pleiades?”

“Haha, I’ll remember to plant more Arabiana to drive away ghosts,” he said.

We sat again in that declining coffee shop. Autumn had arrived, and leaves drifted in through the open windows, settling on cooling coffee cups.

I asked, “Do you think she’s dead?”

“I feel she’s not yet,” Zi Chen said. “But I agree with that man’s assessment—Pleiades is indeed shrouded in a heavy death atmosphere. She probably does have suicide plans, perhaps setting herself a final deadline.”

“If we could find her quickly, we could prevent this,” Da Wei said.

“Death cannot be prevented,” Zi Chen countered.

I asked, “If someone really deliberately wanted to burn those books, who would it be?”

“Maybe Hai Tong herself,” Da Wei suggested. “She doesn’t want those books to remain in the world. Remember, in Pleiades, the female writer said she hoped to have exactly 3,999 readers, no more, no less. The print run should exceed that number.”

“There’s no used bookstore address online—how would she find it?” I wondered.

“As long as you buy books from a bookstore, you get their address, right?” Zi Chen pointed out.

“That’s crazy—according to the delivery slip address, she finds the used bookstore, sneaks in at night, and burns his warehouse…” Da Wei exclaimed.

“What we like is precisely her madness,” Zi Chen concluded.

This segment advances your search, leading to a surprising discovery about one of the book’s readers. I’ve formatted the text to strictly adhere to the one speaker per paragraph rule for all dialogue exchanges.

I called the white-haired man again, asking for contact information of people who had bought Pleiades.

He laughed on the other end, saying, “Are you forming a book club?”

“Mm, we want to hear their thoughts on this book,” I said.

“You want to find some clue about Hai Tong,” he countered.

“We still prefer to believe she’s alive,” I affirmed.

“That’s wonderful,” he replied. “If you discover anything, remember to tell me. By the way, the apple wine experiment succeeded.”

According to the list the white-haired man sent, he had sold a total of sixteen copies of Pleiades. Twelve people were in other cities. Since the editor said Hai Tong’s safe deposit box was opened at a local bank, we decided to start with those four local people. We called separately, saying we wanted to hold a Pleiades book club and asking if they’d like to participate. The first three who answered were all men—one forgot he’d bought this book, another said he only bought it because he was interested in ghost buildings but found it not scary at all, so he was quite disappointed. The third man agreed to attend the book club; we said we’d notify him of the specific time and place later. The fourth person who answered was a woman who simply said she wasn’t interested and hung up. The address she left was Room 217 in a university’s literature department, with “Teacher Luo” filled in the name field.

We came to that university and found Room 217 in the literature department. The room wasn’t large but was filled with many flowers and plants, like a tropical greenhouse. A young man was sitting under a large-leafed plant filling out forms.

We asked if there was a Teacher Luo here.

“Mm, Teacher Luo Xuewei, she’s not in,” he said.

We said we really wanted to attend her class and asked him to tell us the specific time.

The man checked on the computer and said it was Thursday afternoon at 2 PM, Public Education Building Two, Room 2113. He walked us to the door, saying, “You’d better go listen soon.”

We asked what he meant.

He said, “Teacher Luo won’t be teaching next semester—she’s about to have a baby.”

We walked out of the humanities building onto a patch of withered yellow grass.

“She’s going to have a baby,” I said.

Da Wei glanced at me: “You look as sad as if your beloved man had betrayed you.”

“Perhaps pregnancy delayed her suicide plans,” Zi Chen mused.

“I wonder what kind of person she married,” Da Wei said.

Thursday afternoon, we arrived at the classroom on time and sat in the back row. There were about twenty students, some with purple-dyed hair, others wearing nose rings. A girl in front told a boy, “I took Prozac with beer and saw a mirage. I grew up by the sea but was always too embarrassed to tell people I’d never seen one.”

Teacher Luo arrived, her round belly wrapped in a black sweater dress. She walked to the podium and said, “Today we’re discussing Joyce’s story ‘The Dead.’ Everyone has read it, right?”

A male student said, “The story is quite bland.”

Teacher Luo shook her head: “It actually contains enormous sadness…”

Another male student raised his hand: “Teacher, do you have erotic dreams about ex-boyfriends?”

The boy next to him asked, “Do you still have erotic dreams when pregnant?”

Teacher Luo wasn’t angry and maintained a smile throughout. She analyzed the story in slow tones, repeatedly mentioning words like “grief,” “harm,” and “shadow.” Students frequently interrupted her, recounting their own painful experiences—being abused by fathers or attempting suicide over breakups… Teacher Luo’s gaze was kind, like a priest listening to confessions. After class, we asked a nearby student what this course was called. She said she forgot, but Teacher Luo taught all depressing stories anyway. We asked if this was Teacher Luo’s preference. She said, “No, it’s our need. We like listening to these very depressing stories.”

We went to her office again. She was watering flowers when she turned and saw us. We all startled each other. She found several chairs for us to sit among the plants. We discussed her class with her, thinking it was like some kind of spiritual counseling.

She said, “Yes, the kids who choose my class all have some psychological issues. Sad stories can help them process their inner pain.”

Da Wei asked, “Do you write fiction yourself?”

“I wrote a little in college but stopped later,” she said. The three of us exchanged glances.

Zi Chen asked, “Have you read a novel called Pleiades?”

“Yes,” she replied.

I asked if she liked it.

She smiled: “Of course I like it—it’s my story. Not all of it, but part of it.”

“This might be an aftereffect of reading this book,” I said. “After I finished, I also felt I’d witnessed some events described in the novel, like the little white flowers in the tunnel.”

Da Wei and Zi Chen said, “Yes, we felt we’d seen them too.”

Teacher Luo said, “Did your mothers also have lovers who were executed? Did your little uncles also make you pose as models?” We fell silent. She said the female writer’s childhood experiences in the novel were exactly like hers.

Da Wei said, “Okay, did you tell these experiences to anyone?”

Teacher Luo said, “In college, I had a very close roommate. I told her, and she encouraged me to write these stories. I wrote a little, but then my mental state became very bad, so I took a leave of absence.”

Zi Chen asked, “Now, is that part in the novel the same as what you wrote then?”

“I can’t remember how I wrote it,” Teacher Luo admitted. “I heard about the content of Pleiades but was always afraid to read it. I wanted to find what I’d written before, but never could. I finally bought a copy from the used book website. After reading it, the novel’s story covered my memories. Now the only thing I know is that it’s my story.”

Da Wei asked, “What kind of person was your roommate?”

“A very tall, thin girl who didn’t talk much about herself. When I returned to school after two years’ absence, she had already graduated and changed her phone number—she probably didn’t want to contact me. Later when I recalled her, I realized I knew nothing about her past.”

Da Wei asked, “Did she like sweets?”

“She had mild anorexia and only drank celery juice,” Teacher Luo replied.

I asked, “Do you hate her for stealing your story?”

“Her image in my mind is very blurry. I can never quite believe this novel was written by the person I knew,” she explained. “Every time I recall my childhood, the memories slide toward the later plot developments in that novel. I’ve become a person without a past, so I must have some future.” She placed both hands on her belly, as if warming herself.

We left her office.

Winter came, and we huddled in the corner of the coffee shop. The waitress, wrapped in a cotton coat, watched expressionlessly as workers repaired the heating. We had obtained the name of the female roommate from Teacher Luo: Chen Sining. According to information on the campus network, she went to Spain after graduation and now lives in Córdoba in the south.

She had uploaded three photos to her album: one of the bullring in Zaragoza, one of a flamenco dancer in Seville, and the third showing her standing on the balcony of her residence, surrounded by many bougainvillea. Searching for the ID she used on the campus network, we found posts she’d made on a beauty forum asking if anyone experienced rib pain after breast augmentation that made them afraid to sneeze. No replies. That line of inquiry from 2011 hung lonely on the page, conjuring the image of a woman in a foreign land trying hard to suppress sneezes in the depths of night.

We all felt somewhat dejected—perhaps unable to believe that what the female writer cared most about was her chest.

Da Wei suggested we should still make the trip to Córdoba, with him paying. He said, “Córdoba might be our Araby, but we really must go there.”

Zi Chen stared out the window at the bare tree branches and said, “That’s right. ‘The Last Leaf’ is a terrible story, but honestly, if someone painted me such a leaf right now, I’d be very grateful.”

“Córdoba is quite warm, with many leaves,” Da Wei said.

“I hope so,” Zi Chen replied.

“It doesn’t matter if she’s not the person we’re looking for. We can stay in Spain for a while until I spend all my savings,” Da Wei concluded.

From Chen Sining’s third photo, behind her apartment, you could see the golden spires of a mosque. We circled all the mosques in Córdoba on a map and booked a hotel near one of them.

The day before departure, Zi Chen committed suicide. He swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and was discovered by a family member—a very old aunt—when he still had a trace of breath. She immediately called an ambulance. The ambulance encountered citywide martial law—a head of state had just concluded a five-day state visit and was heading to the airport. The ambulance stopped before the security line, its red light overhead like a shaking prophet. By the time they reached the hospital, he had stopped breathing.

Da Wei and I went to Zi Chen’s funeral. Very few people came; they didn’t know each other, attended the ceremony alone, and left. I went to speak with the elderly aunt. She wasn’t exactly sad—rather, she seemed relieved. I proposed coming in a few days to help her sort through Zi Chen’s belongings. She suggested I come after 3 PM, as her afternoon naps were quite long.

Da Wei went out alone to smoke. Later I found him under a pine tree. It wasn’t particularly cold that day, and watery snow was falling.

“The sky is like the bitter smile of a square robot’s face,” I mentioned this metaphor.

Da Wei responded with a bitter smile.

I fell ill with a high fever that wouldn’t break. On the phone, I told Da Wei I probably didn’t have the courage to sort through Zi Chen’s belongings.

“I understand. I’ll go,” Da Wei said. “Take good care of yourself.”

“You too,” I replied.

Da Wei and I didn’t see each other for four months. During those four months, I moved once, went on two blind dates, and began dating one of the men. Someone also called several times asking whether the Pleiades book club was still happening and why there had been no notification.

Additionally, the sailor’s ghost reappeared, telling me about some of his failed romantic experiences. I advised him not to be obsessed with love.

“Characters in novels aren’t real people—they’re usually busy with just one thing,” he said. “In the personality you gave me, there’s only love.”

I asked if he encountered many characters from other authors’ unfinished novels.

“All the girls I meet are like that—they’re like naturally underdeveloped embryos, which is why they act so unpredictably,” he explained.

I asked if he could help me find a character from a novel written by a friend of mine, named Wu Zi Chen.

“I’ll try,” he said. “Generally we don’t mention which author created us, unless the author is particularly famous—those novel characters who think they come from good stock love to drop their authors’ names.”

One day in April, Da Wei called to arrange a meeting. His tone was grave, as if he had something very important to say.

“Let’s change venues,” he said. “That coffee shop closed down.”

We went to the bookstore where we first met. The first-floor café had been redecorated, and the server told us there would be a flower arranging class later—we could still sign up. Da Wei sat across from me, fingers interlaced. He was tanned and had grown a beard. I asked if he’d been on vacation, but he didn’t answer.

Instead, he leaned forward and said in a low voice, “I found Hai Tong.” I put down my coffee cup and looked at him.

“Where is she?” I asked.

He showed an extremely pained expression, then told me, “Zi Chen is Hai Tong.”

I shook my head. “Impossible.”

“I’ve been investigating this for months. It’s certain,” he insisted.

Da Wei told me that the day of the memorial service, when he went out alone to smoke, a short man in a tight wool coat came over to ask for his lighter. The man asked, “Are you also Zi Chen’s friend?”

He answered yes.

The man nodded and said, “Me too.” He seemed to recall some past events and told Da Wei uncontrollably that he and Zi Chen had been very much in love seven years ago. Da Wei didn’t seem very surprised. He said he and Zi Chen were friends in literary life and knew little about each other’s private lives.

“Oh, literature!” The short man nodded and said, “I remember Zi Chen saying then that he really wanted to write a book in a female voice and hide himself away so no one would know the author was actually him.”

Da Wei concealed his shock and asked the short man, “Why did it have to be in a female voice?”

The short man said, “Probably because he felt people were prejudiced against gay writers. If he had to choose between a man’s and woman’s voice, he preferred women.”

Da Wei asked, “Did he actually write it later?”

The short man said, “I don’t know. We lost touch long ago. He probably wouldn’t expect me to come today.”

Da Wei paused, then continued. The day he went to sort through Zi Chen’s belongings, he didn’t see any diaries or manuscripts. Everything had already been organized. Only in a long-unused backpack was there a stack of note paper with some unrelated nouns and fragmentary sentences. Among the nouns, “tunnel” and “cable car” appeared more than once. Several pieces of note paper were dated 2010, before Pleiades was published. Among those notes, he also found a dried white flower.

“These might all be coincidences,” I said.

Da Wei said, “Think about it—when we were searching for Hai Tong, almost all the new leads came from Zi Chen, right?”

I asked, “Then why did he want us to find Hai Tong?”

“He needed several immortal readers to be his vigil keepers,” Da Wei said. “We were the most suitable candidates. Aren’t we poisoned deeply enough?” I started crying. “Maybe Teacher Luo’s roommate—Chen Sining—knew him. She told him Teacher Luo’s story, so he didn’t want to go to Córdoba, understand?” Da Wei sighed and said, “Zi Chen’s aunt said that when he broke his leg, it was from jumping off a fourth-floor balcony. He had attempted suicide more than once.”

“Let’s stop here. I want to go home,” I said.

The next morning, I called Da Wei. In the afternoon we met again at the bookstore café.

“I didn’t sleep all night,” I said.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” Da Wei replied.

“At first I hated him very much, but by dawn I didn’t hate him anymore,” I said. “I envied him a little—he could sacrifice his entire life to literature. But we can’t.”

“Yes, we can’t,” Da Wei agreed. “Because life happens only once.”

We stayed in the café until closing, then went to a bar for a drink before going home. The third afternoon we met again and went to the same bar to drink. It continued like this for the following week. Neither of us talked about literature or Zi Chen—we just chatted vaguely about life. He regretted giving up football in college; I wanted to sign up for baking classes. We urged each other to live well. But the constantly extending encouragement seemed to reveal our confusion.

By one evening in the second week, the bar was occupied by people watching football. He asked if I’d like to come to his house for a while. I went. The house was large and empty, with a garden that was also empty in May.

“I’ve always wanted to plant some flowers,” Da Wei said.

“Mm,” I replied.

“What would be good to plant?” he asked.

“Roses or climbing roses?” I suggested.

“Good, I’ll look up where to buy them,” he said.

“The neighbor’s courtyard is full of them—ask them for a few plants,” I advised.

“But I’ve never spoken to them,” he admitted.

“Then go speak to them,” I urged. “Didn’t we agree to embrace life wholeheartedly?”

I didn’t leave that night. The next morning, we walked arm in arm and rang the neighbor’s doorbell. He cut us three climbing rose stems and dug up five rose bushes. We worked all day to settle those flowers, then rushed to the mall before closing to buy two bath towels and two pairs of slippers.

A month later, we got married. Two months after that, I became pregnant. We redecorated the house and invited several new friends over. Two months later, Da Wei started working at his father’s company. On mornings with important meetings, I would get up to help him with his tie. By then I had gained twenty pounds, developed many spots on my face, and spent every day curled up in bed, sleeping and waking intermittently. My dreams were all like repeatedly filtered pure water, without a trace of distracting thoughts.

In the afternoons I walked downstairs and met two women with bigger bellies than mine. They tirelessly discussed stroller and formula brands with me, telling terrifying stories of nannies stealing children. They seemed to like me quite a bit because I knew nothing and always looked completely bewildered. “My God, you actually don’t know…” they would shriek, getting a kind of satisfaction.

Yang Ping was born two months premature and stayed in an incubator for two weeks. During that time, I always felt I had just been ill and forgot there was such a child. When the nurse brought him to me, I showed surprise. He was as small as an exposed heart.

“Don’t worry, he’ll grow very strong,” Da Wei said.

He woke many times each night, cutting my sleep into fragments. Sometimes when he was asleep, I would sit by the window, not even buttoning my shirt, waiting for him to wake again. Outside the window in the garden, the transplanted climbing roses and rose bushes hadn’t bloomed—their branches were bare, without a single leaf.

Da Wei came home very late every day, having drunk a lot. He complained to me about how his company colleagues snubbed and embarrassed him and how his father always said, “You disappoint me very much.”

One day I said, “It’s just a job.”

“Yes, but besides this job, what else do I have?” Da Wei asked.

I didn’t speak.

He continued, “I know what you’re thinking. You think I’ve become very vulgar and can’t do anything right. You’re disappointed in me too, aren’t you? No matter what kind of life I give you, you won’t be satisfied, won’t show the slightest fucking smile when I come home!”

“The baby is crying,” I said.

“Let him cry!” Da Wei shouted.

We sat there in the child’s crying. The child wailed for a while, then softened into sobbing, and finally stopped.

Da Wei asked, “You always think of Zi Chen, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “You do too, don’t you?”

“So our being together is a mistake,” Da Wei concluded.

“Probably,” I agreed.

He leaned back on the sofa with a desperate look. After a while, he fell asleep. I continued sitting, waiting for the child to call me again with his crying. But he didn’t. I went over and shook him awake. He glanced at me, turned over, and continued sleeping. I stood in the quiet house.

I don’t know how long it was before I heard someone knocking on the window. It was the sailor’s ghost, pressing his face against the glass and smiling at me. I pushed open the door and walked into the courtyard.

As soon as he saw me, he said, “I found a character from that novel written by the person called Zi Chen.”

“What kind of person?” I asked.

“A very cool girl from a half-written science fiction novel,” he said.

“Science fiction?” I asked.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “That girl is metal from the neck up, with a particularly smart head that can mentally calculate seven-digit cube roots.” Then he told me somewhat excitedly that he had pursued her for a long time, and yesterday she finally agreed to date him. He said he was very happy—everything was wonderful except that kissing was a bit chilly.

“Blessings to you both,” I said.

“I also have to thank you and your friend,” he said. He waved goodbye to me.

I turned off the garden’s corridor light and returned to the house, taking off slippers soaked with dew.

The next day, I got up very early, made breakfast, and stood at the door seeing Da Wei off. I fed the child and put him back in the crib, then cleaned the house once over and put some clothes in a travel bag. Before leaving, I took my copy of Pleiades from the bookshelf and stuffed it in, zipping it up. I locked the door and walked to the street carrying the travel bag.

The sunlight was dazzling, and water stains left by the sprinkler truck were evaporating. I walked to the subway station and was pushed onto a train by the crowd. A man elbowed me. I stared at him, and he turned his head away. When the train reached another station, I squeezed through the crowd and got off. I sat on a bench and took out a piece of bread, wolfing it down. I suddenly felt a little homesick for the place I had just left, though I couldn’t say what specifically I missed. I stuffed the last bite of bread into my mouth and walked toward the opposite platform.

I walked to the door, put down the travel bag, took out my key, and opened the door. The child was babbling. I didn’t have time to take off my shoes before running into the living room. A woman was sitting beside the crib, her hair braided in a thick plait, dark-skinned, wearing a deep gray robe, her age indeterminate. She was telling the child a story in low tones.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She smiled and said, “I’m Hai Tong. Did you send the key? It was quite a while ago, last year, I think. I never had time to come until now.”

I shook my head and said, “I never sent any key.”

“Oh,” she said, “then someone else in the family must be my reader. They even wrote a love poem on a little note card—quite moving.” She reached into the crib and touched the child’s cheek, saying, “He’s very good, especially quiet.”

I had many questions I wanted to ask her. Those mysteries that could never be solved. But I said, “Please leave. This is my home.”

She looked puzzled and said, “The master of this place invited me to come.”

“I am the master of this place. Could you please leave?” I insisted.

I opened the door and stood there. She shook her head while muttering, “People today are really incomprehensible,” then grumbled as she walked out.

I closed the door and returned to the sunlit living room. Speaking of unsolvable mysteries, perhaps there’s only one: what the future will be like. What I will become, what Da Wei will become, and what Yang Ping will become when he grows up. I sat by the window, looking at Yang Ping, who had already fallen asleep, and placed a blue teddy bear in his hand.