When I got the call, I was debating whether to eat dinner at the malatang joint downstairs, the one likely using gutter oil, or go home and boil myself a bland bowl of instant noodles. On the other end, my mother's voice sounded like it had been sanded down – rough, dry, carrying an unnatural calm. She said, "Your brother... he's gone."
Wang Fang felt that the past dozen years or so were like a compressed biscuit, all the flavor, nutrition, and expectation tightly pressed upon her son Xiao Jun's soon-to-be-revealed Gaokao score. To be precise, they were pressed upon the two words: "Peking University."
When K woke up, he felt something wasn't quite right, but he couldn't put his finger on it. The sky outside the window was the usual dreary grey, like the expressionless facades of the buildings he passed on his way to work every day. He reached for the phone on his nightstand, an action as natural as brushing his teeth each morning. Today, however, the phone felt somehow different. Beneath the cold glass screen, something seemed to be vibrating faintly, continuously—not like a notification, but more like... breathing?
Lin Mu finally managed to buy the ticket. Four hundred and eighty yuan. He checked the ticket information over and over, as if the seat number printed on it wasn't a number but a complex legal provision requiring careful study to grasp its full meaning, especially the tiny, almost illegible additional clauses. The ticketing website was like a spinning maze, leading him down "Sold Out" cul-de-sacs countless times before finally, in an unexpected corner, spitting out this strangely numbered ticket. He wasn't even sure if he really wanted to go, but the process of obtaining the ticket itself, like completing an arduous and meaningless task, brought a kind of weary satisfaction.
That room, less a home than a forgotten corner of the city, cowered in the perpetual shadow cast by towering buildings. The air hung thick with the damp smell of mold, mingled with the scent of cheap wood and the decay of old age. This was Old Liu's entire world, a space less than ten square meters. His bed occupied a third of it; the rest was filled with wood shavings, blocks of wood, carving knives, and wooden lives yet to take shape.
Old Wang felt like one of the old grandfather clocks he repaired, ticking away in the torrent of time towards an inevitable silence. His watch repair shop, hidden deep in a nearly forgotten alley in the South City, seemed separated from the outside world – a world frenzied over gold hitting 1039 yuan per gram – as if by a pane of dusty glass.
K arrived at the "Comprehensive Affairs Processing Center" on a grey morning. No one knew exactly what "comprehensive affairs" this center processed, only that if you wanted to legally continue breathing, walking, existing in this city, you had to obtain a specific permit from here. No one remembered the permit's specific name; people vaguely referred to it as "that thing" or "the permit."
The Center was a massive, ugly concrete building, like a crouching grey beast, swallowing and spitting out anxious crowds. K took a deep breath; the air was thick with dust, sweat, and an indescribable musty odor, like old paper. He entered the main door and was immediately seized by the sight before him—a queue so long it disappeared from view, like a giant, docile, grey python composed of countless human figures, coiling through the hall and vanishing around a distant corner.
The weather in Sang Town, lately, always seemed covered in a layer of unwashable gray. Not that there wasn't sun; the sun was there, hanging brightly in the sky, yet it couldn't penetrate that invisible haze. When it fell on people's bodies and faces, it was merely tepid, unable to stir the slightest vitality. The townspeople, too, were much like the weather; their eyeballs were alive, able to move, to see, but looking around, there was nothing novel to behold, so they retreated back inwards, hidden beneath half-closed eyelids, as if this could conserve some energy.
When the plane landed at Keflavík, the sky was an indescribable grey-blue, mixed with a faint, elusive smell of sulfur. Three in the afternoon, yet the sunlight was as stingy as the residual glow before midnight. I had come to Reykjavik for a small translation seminar, the topic unimportant, at least to me. What truly drew me was the name "Iceland" itself, like an uncut piece of obsidian, cold, sharp-edged, yet potentially hiding unexpected light within.
Wang Cuifen's legs had always been straight.