Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

  I’d swung around only partway. My shoes weren’t even firmly planted on the ground when I was cordoned off by Shui Ling. A stone hit my heart. Then another one or two or three broke through. Their numbers kept growing until it seemed like only a matter of time before every last rock on earth had hailed down on me from the top of Mount Everest.

  I don’t know when it started, but I naturally began having what you’d call a sexual fantasy. It started back in junior high, after I saw Valley of the Dolls. My fantasy didn’t follow the original plot, which was replaced instead with one about Shui Ling. Sexual fantasies about her invaded my thoughts, and I sensed that, in due course, I would enter the narrative.

  To this day, I’ve never understood my fear. Where does it come from? I’d been keeping my deviant sexual desires in check for most of my adolescent and college years. I reassured myself that I’d done nothing wrong. It felt like the fear was coming from inside of me. I never did anything to attract it, nor did I choose to be this way. I had no hand whatsoever in shaping the self that was crawling with fear. Yet I grew into exactly that: a carnal being stirring the cement of fear with every step toward adulthood. Since I feared my sexual desires and who I fundamentally was, fear stirred up even deeper fears. My life was reduced to that of some hideous beast. I felt as if I had to hide in a cave, lest anyone discover my true nature.

  Ever since I asked Shui Ling Can we start over?, I’d become a refugee on the ocean, and in due time, I was drinking seawater. So I decided to confront my desires head on. I would renounce my resistance and hasten toward destruction. I would indulge in reckless behavior until I’d completely exhausted all my past inhibitions.

  My days were increasingly flooded with sexual fantasies about her—as I was riding my bike, walking, talking to other people. At night, I spent more and more time masturbating. When I held her body for the first time, it was as if I’d severed the very tendon of my fear, and it hurt so bad that I gnashed my teeth. One form of pain had been brought to an end by another even more violent pain. Like the big bad wolf, I harbored a ferocious desire to devour her body. And that became my new vision.

  7

  I’d agreed to meet her after the class on The Book of Songs, but in the end, I didn’t go. I locked myself in my room instead. She came to Wenzhou Street and rang the buzzer, but I didn’t answer. I wanted to be alone, to detach from that part of me that was her and leave it outside, and to go live my own life locked away in my room. At nightfall, I went downstairs and opened the door. There she sat, on her bicycle, staring at me with heartbroken eyes. How did you know I was home, I asked. Your bike was here, she replied. Her eyes were reddening. Are you running away again, she asked me, choking back a sob. I said nothing. She’d hit the nail on the head. Instantly, to subdue her, I acted gruff. Don’t get carried away, I said. I overslept, that’s all. She said when she didn’t see me during The Book of Songs, she knew I’d run away again. She’d cried the whole way over.

  “Why are you running away again?” she asked me. I’d called her up late the night before to reassure her I’d be there.

  “I’m supposed to trust your intuition here?” I dodged the question with a facetious smile.

  “Yes.” Her reply was stern and resentful.

  “Fine. You’re right. Your intuition is so scary. Since we’ve been together, I’ve been divided in two. One part wishes I could extricate myself from this. The other part wants to help you make me stay. I’m being torn apart.”

  “When did this start? Does it hurt?” Though her words sounded affectionate on the surface, she was only making accusations again.

  “I knew it would be like this from the start, but I never said anything, okay? I’ve known from the very beginning that we were going to break up eventually. There’s no such thing as eternal love,” I said hatefully.

  “If that’s what being with me is like for you, then we should just forget about it.” She went for the jugular.

  “Ugh. You don’t have to be such a drag, you know. Fine. I’m done.” For the first time, I was up front about secretly wanting to get away from her. Deeply hurt, she pushed me closer to the edge, grazing my heart. I squeezed my eyes shut and leapt.

  The following day. Like a morning lily blooming in a valley devoid of all traces of human life, I locked myself alone in my stinking room, as if enjoying the post-excision, prebleeding sense of liberation after having had a tumor removed. At ten, the time I normally got home after tutoring, she called. Said she was near the number 74 bus stop. Five or six buses had passed, but she didn’t see me. I remained silent. It was as if the weight of a gigantic mountain would crush my skull the instant I opened my mouth. I hadn’t said a peep when that mountain had already pinned her to the ground and shoved her body deep down into the earth’s crust instead. I want to see you, she begged silently. Fine. I opened my mouth.

  She sat in her old spot on the edge of the bed. I asked her how long she’d waited for the number 74 bus. She closed her eyes. Tears fell from her eyelashes. Every last fiber in my body felt as if it were being twisted and wrung. I’d wrenched our relationship to the breaking point and watched it split apart. I know I made you suffer. I’ll never cut you off again. I spit out the words that were caught in my throat. She let out a laugh, and then, as if she’d finally been torn open, a cry of pain. To paint a picture of our embrace, I’d almost have to use her blood and guts.

  8

  Two crocodiles wearing shiny, black, long-haired mink coats walked into a shop, outside of which hung a small hand-lettered pine placard that read LACOSTE (THE CROCODILE LABEL) IMPORTED CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES. They began stroking a dark blond mink coat in the shop. They couldn’t bear to let go of it, as if they (since their genders remain unknown, crocodiles all take the same form of address for the purpose of efficient communication) were the only ones whom the coat flattered. But the crocodiles weren’t eager to expose themselves. They didn’t have the audacity to walk up to the counter to ask the shopkeeper to show them a coat, for then they’d have to remove their own coats, baring it all for everyone to see. If such a thing were to occur indeed, what would the shopkeeper say?

  “Oh, you’re a crocodile.” This shopkeeper has seen crocodiles before.

  “Robbery, eh? Well, I already paid for security.” This shopkeeper only wants to make a buck.

  “You’re too small. It won’t work.” This shopkeeper is an expert, someone with ideas and advice.

  No one really knows what there is to see when crocodiles throw open their coats. No crocodiles had ever entered the Lacoste store and actually tossed off their coats. These two were simply stroking a mink coat, nothing more. Did they do it because they liked the coat? Or were they stroking it over and over for sheer pleasure?

  Who really knew? The average person wouldn’t be able to spot a crocodile. Junior and senior high-school students were a dependable audience for crocodile news. After finishing cram school, they would watch the TTV World News broadcast as they ate dinner. College students were the most indifferent age group, having drifted away from newspapers and news programs so as not to be associated with crocodiles. But according to public opinion polls, this demographic had become the most infiltrated by them.

  Those forty and up reacted to the storm of controversy surrounding crocodiles like archaeologists to the discovery of a precursor to the Neanderthal man. White-collar office workers claimed they only paid attention to legislative battles and stock prices. Blue-collar workers swore off any of that garbage that wasn’t a TV show or a movie, but secretly, they stood at the newsstands perusing magazines like Scoop Weekly and Inside, while white-collar workers simply bought the magazines and took them home. Thus this demographic had opportunities to supplement their archaeological research.

  The crocodiles thought: What was everyone after, anyhow? If that many people secretly liked them, that’d be totally embarrassing.

  9

  Have you seen Chronicle of a Death Foretold? I asked her. It’s a film. At the time
, there wasn’t much sweetness between her and me. On top of that, she wasn’t exactly your basic pretty girl. It’d take a lifetime to dispel the lingering specter of my wrongdoings. She nodded and said she had. What’d you think? I asked. Well, she said, it just so happens that I can’t bring myself to recount this one part that makes me so mad just thinking about it that I want to punch something. She shook her head, saying she didn’t want to talk about it. That meant her emotions were so precious that she didn’t want to ruin something by trying to articulate her feelings about it. Because I had moved on with my life, she offered me only the dregs of reconciliation, a cup of black coffee with no sugar, just cream on the side. I’d taken a sip of each, and I have to say, I preferred the coffee. The cream agreed with me about as much as she did.

  I asked her to think about how to put it into words and tell me what she thought the next day. The male protagonist searches everywhere for the woman of his dreams. After “selecting” the female protagonist with only a glance, he racks his brain thinking of ways to lavish his riches on her before eventually taking her as his bride. But on their wedding night, he discovers that his bride isn’t a virgin. That evening, the half-undressed, sobbing bride is “sent back.” And so the bride’s family takes her in, and every day, she sends him a letter. In the final scene, the male protagonist, carrying an enormous sack of letters, enters the courtyard, where the female lead awaits him. “The journey is littered with letters. . . .” She wanted me to tell her the story from the very beginning, so that she could enjoy the ride all over again.

  This is a metaphor. I can drone on and on about my own love story, which takes place in the short distance between Wenzhou Street and campus. Or I can throw in a few samples à la hip-hop or reggae. These readymades serve as interludes to keep you from getting sick of the monotonous commute back and forth between these same two locations, again and again.

  Shui Ling didn’t know it, but when I saw Chronicle of a Death Foretold and discovered that the bride wasn’t a virgin, I followed in the groom’s footsteps.

  The next day, I slept for twenty hours straight, then got up and wrote her a hateful breakup letter. It was around six in the evening. I wrote facing the window, clouds racing across the open sky like a bay horse in full gallop. I was halfway done when the door buzzer rang. I opened the red metal door. Shui Ling was slumped right next to it. She just sat there, withered. I dragged her over to the stairs and sat beside her, though there wasn’t really room for two. She insisted she didn’t want to come in. I shut the door behind us. At the rehearsal for the Chinese Lit Department’s public reading, she’d made a complete fool of herself and gotten scolded. For someone like her who avoided attention like the plague, it was a major humiliation. She wasn’t handling it so well. Didn’t utter a word about her feelings, even though I would have given my life to kiss those downcast eyes and lick away those tears.

  I can’t recall what I said, but I eventually got her to smile. I just so happen to have the gifts of a clown. I knew there was no way I could protect her from the real world or from being yanked around by the tail. That said, I’d still step in and save her regardless. I was such a shitty human being, why not take advantage of her state of disgrace and kick her while she was down? No matter what kind of trouble she was in, I’d run over in an instant to toss a rope down and pull her back to safety. Now that I’d shown myself to be blindly at her beck and call, she was beaming again. But my malice had already reignited. I could have put an end to my ways that night, instead of treating her like I did. The serial killer in me should have surrendered.

  I walked her to the number 74 bus stop, cracking jokes the whole way. I squinted, and the moment I caught sight of the number 74 bus in the distance, I said nonchalantly: I was just in the middle of writing you the letter in which I dump you, and in a little while, I’m going to go back and finish it, so I can run over to your place in the middle of the night and drop it in your mailbox. A few seconds passed, then she recovered. That won’t be necessary, she said. And she boarded the bus as if nothing had happened. Later she said that she was ready to turn around and storm off right then and there. As for her cool, collected display of superhuman willpower, it was fueled by a desire for revenge.

  It was already a day too late for her to tell me about Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

  10

  First thing in the morning, I put the letter in her mailbox. As if a burden had been lifted—and then dumped into the ocean—my body felt lighter. The letter said that our relationship was over. It was quickly returned unopened, along with a messily scrawled letter that clearly displayed her bitter contempt, as it had obviously been written in a shaky hand. These were the events of April 1988. For about a month, I explored a new dimension of guilt, in which I was swiftly liberated from her influence, and I passed my days alone, silently and uneventfully.

  Two days before my birthday in May, I discovered a huge rose in the basket of my Giant. No one was there. At eight that evening, Shui Ling was back again, sitting on her bike downstairs. I said, Today just happens to be moving day for me. She asked where I was moving to. I remained silent, saying nothing. In that incriminating tone of hers, she said I should be allowed to see you in the future. Because in the past, you told me that after we broke up, if could I take it for a month, then I’d be able to deal with it. But I’ve already taken it for a month, and I’m suffering all the same. Like a cheerful little blade of grass tossed about in the wind and rain, she had explained the entire basis of our relationship. She asked if she could help me move. I shook my head coldheartedly.

  She’d exhausted all her tricks and was slow to abandon her manipulative ways. It was almost midnight when she tried to lure me back to her place. In the darkness, I broke down into two selves: the real me, who was ready to sink my teeth greedily into her, and another me who was plotting cunningly how and when to make my escape. As if I could read her mind, I knew from her sticky-sweet demeanor, with its implication that she wanted to fully “give herself” to me, that she’d gained a bit of new wisdom about me during that month. Never before had she used this kind of language. Its veneer was part of a veiled surprise attack on me, one which she herself didn’t fully comprehend. Her newfound maturity allowed her to see my final ploy as a mere impasse. But to me, her words had struck a fatal blow, not unlike shoving a red-hot piece of wire up a monkey’s ass. It was as if she had ever so lightly brushed up against the edge of a tooth of mine that had been aching unbearably. (What had once been a vague yet screamingly sexual taboo was now my downfall.) In the end, I saw myself with perfect clarity: I had been split in two by some otherworldly force. I was an elusive, two-headed hydra, each head with its own mind. I heard the roar of the beast within me. The question was, which of the two heads was it coming from?

  Having come face to face with the real culprit behind my fear, I had a chance to settle the score once and for all. At five in the morning—as this woman was on her knees, clinging to my legs, begging me not to leave her—I shook myself free. It was not unlike casually bundling up a severed limb. Then, with my tail between my legs, I fled.

  11

  Fled and forgot—that’s how the story ends. I left Wenzhou Street at the end of May 1988. That was my own Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The drama that was my freshman year had concluded its final act.

  So what can I say? Was I angry? Regretful? Filled with self-loathing? I had to get over my feelings and move on already. It was like drowning in a vat of black tar, the victim of a slow death by suffocation. Best not to let out so much as a fart, since you’re not only trapped with your own stink but the tar might overflow.

  I don’t know how other people endure the violence and cruelty they encounter throughout their lives. There’s no way to judge whether fate is playing favorites when it doles out physical disability, murder, and rape, or you’re hauled off to the concentration camp. All I know is that I was forced into a corner, and so I violated myself in order to ward off the threat of being violate
d. I had to sacrifice the real, living, breathing her. To me, she represented beauty in its highest form. And I went and treated her like a piece of meat. It was a mess of my own making, the product of my own savagery and barbarism. But what else was I supposed to do?

  No matter what, Shui Ling, I’ll always feel your absence. From now on, for the rest of my life, I have to change my ways and pay the price for the crimes I committed as an eighteen-year-old. As long as I’m alive and able, I won’t stop talking about humanity and all of its fears.

  NOTEBOOK #3

  1

  One night, the crocodile had a dream. It dreamed that it took a trip with a group of humans. Maybe it was after secretly sending off a payment to a matchmaking agency that organized coed mixers, or after joining the Jinsha Bay Lifeguard Association, which allowed the crocodile to spend its Sundays saving lives while at the same time searching for that someone special. The crocodile packed up chocolate, shrimp chips, dried fruit, chewing gum, playing cards, a skate-board, a Walkman, a point-and-shoot camera, its red lifeguard uniform, and a giant box of saltines. The next day, toting a humongous bag, it went to the bus stop, where it joined a group of young men and women, all of them dressed to the nines. The sight alone made the crocodile euphoric. A grin formed on its snout, which was hidden beneath a human suit, and out came a gurgle (or a snort, a gasp, or a giggle—it was not discernible which). It’d been a long time since the crocodile was this close to humans.

  The tour bus let them off on top of a mountain. Everyone pressured the crocodile into buying a pudding pop (why the crocodile, and why a pudding pop, was unclear). When the crocodile returned with the pudding pop, the main attraction was now an array of ferocious creatures—lions, tigers, panthers—at the summit. A few had gotten into the crocodile’s bag and were feeding on the chocolate, shrimp chips, and saltines. Meanwhile, a little black panther tugged the red lifeguard uniform out of the bag and scurried off with it. A lion, a tiger, and a different panther, each roughly the size of a truck, stood blocking the crocodile’s path. Crouched together in a line, they watched the crocodile muster its courage, every last hair on its body bristling. The crocodile suppressed the tiny, selfsame ferocious creature within itself, and the one within that one, and the one within the one within that one . . . and so on. The crocodile called it the lion, tiger, panther propagation dream. But who’s to say it was only a dream?