Frontier

by Can Xue

  The room in question was next to the bathroom. Qiming walked ahead with Lee close behind. Since he knew the way, Qiming could find it in the dark. They entered the room. Lee saw a person in white standing against the wall. Qiming said, “This is the director.” Qiming told Lee to touch the director’s clothing, saying this would make him feel more at ease. Lee did this, but he didn’t feel any better.

  “She’s sleeping. If you want to ask her something, go ahead.”

  Lee’s question was about the director herself. So he approached her and said, “Director, why aren’t you ever willing to see me and Grace?”

  The director gave a strange laugh, scaring Lee so much that he retreated a few steps. Qiming criticized Lee, saying he shouldn’t have bothered the director with a question like this, because she wasn’t yet well. And it wasn’t a good time for her to meet a stranger, because she had a big ice pack on her head. Although she wasn’t awake, even in her dreams she could distinguish annoying questions from non-annoying ones. Lee’s question annoyed her, so she had only laughed.

  After telling him this, Qiming asked Lee to touch her white clothing again. He said this would make the director sleep more soundly. He went on to say that the more soundly she slept, the better her recovery would be. And so Lee touched her clothes a few more times. He thought this method was really strange.

  “Do you also have psychological problems, Mr. Lee?” Qiming took Lee by surprise.

  “Me? I have no idea. Maybe. I do have a serious heart condition.” Lee was a little flustered.

  Qiming said time was up and they had to leave. They felt their way through the dark and walked out of the room. A fierce bird in the bosk called out to them. It gave Lee goose pimples. After seeing the odd way the director slept, Lee’s esteem for her diminished greatly all at once. Instead, he felt sorry for her because of her suffering.

  Grace waited for Lee in a completely dark corner. She grabbed his arm and asked urgently, “How is the director? Is she in danger?” Lee answered that from what he had seen, she wouldn’t be in danger. Grace said, “I see,” as if disappointed. After a while, Grace said the director was sleeping like a “zombie.” As she talked, Lee felt an evil wind blowing on his face. Then Grace bent to catch something. It took several tries before she finally grasped it. She looked at it in the light. Lee saw that it was a little black-colored bird. When Grace let go, the bird flew away.

  “This is a wagtail; a wagtail is the bird of destiny. It shows up when people are paying no attention, and it goes into hiding when someone notices it.”

  Lee asked how she knew, because they had never seen this kind of little bird before. Grace didn’t answer. When they walked to the moonlit lawn, Lee saw more than a dozen of these birds running there. As soon as they approached, the birds flew into the bosk.

  “I’ve known this kind of bird for a long time. Before I knew you.”

  As Lee listened to her, he gripped her ice-cold hand, as though if he let go, she would slip into a dark cave and never emerge. Muddleheaded, he muttered, “Together, we can deal with—”

  “If you think they’re in the bosk, you’re wrong.”

  Grace dashed to the side of the bosk and kicked the bushes for quite a while, but no birds flew out. She turned around and sat down on the grass with Lee. She complained, “Things are always like this here. Once they disappear, they can’t be found again. I’ve tried many times. I think the birds and flowers here are merely props.”

  Lee wondered why Grace was in such a bad mood. But she wasn’t downcast. She was deep in thought. Once more, she thought of the director’s being like a “zombie.” She felt this was infinitely significant. The next time she saw Qiming she intended to ask him about this side of the director.

  “Are you sure that you touched only the director’s clothing?” she asked.

  “Absolutely. It was white poplin.”

  “I don’t know why, but I don’t think it was she. No, it must have been.”

  Lee wondered what Grace really meant to say. Just then, the bosk grew noisy again. Little birds chirped continuously. Grace walked closer to the bosk. She stood there listening attentively for a long time. Looking at her gaunt profile in the moonlight, Lee recalled the past when she had searched for something on the winding paths in Mountain City. Grace could hear the summons contained in Mother Nature; he couldn’t. Grace loved the wind because it brought messages to her.

  In a place not far from this couple sat Qiming, implementing the responsibility that the director had given him: watch over this newly arrived couple. What the director had said was simply “pay attention to,” because she hadn’t arranged work for them yet and had made no demands of them. She seemed to be treating them as guests. Since they were the director’s guests, he still had to “pay attention to” them. When he noticed Grace observing the birds, he was moved.

  “Ah, I can tell now. There she is!” Grace said.

  “Who?” Lee was startled.

  “The director—who else? She’s the person you just saw. I figured it out by listening to these birds talk. The truth is that the director is with us, but actually, she’s also cutting wheat on the land in her home village. Oh!”

  “That’s a good way to put it, Grace. Let’s go back to our room.”

  Hand in hand, they reached the guesthouse. A dim light shone in the corridor. As they walked upstairs, they felt lightheaded. Someone had put a ladder on the second floor landing. Lee stumbled and nearly fell. After he steadied himself, he looked up and saw a large white thing poised on the ladder. It was a person!

  “The director is standing on the ladder,” Grace whispered in Lee’s ear. “Look at how beautiful she is. Be careful, be quiet. We mustn’t startle her.”

  They went around the ladder and cautiously entered their room. Lee was afraid of bumping into something in the dark. He kept groping with his hand.

  “Who?” Lee jumped.

  “It is I—old Qi. Good night.”

  The moment he entered the room, Lee fell into bed. He’d been so frightened that he almost got sick.

  He lay there, wanting to ask Grace to pour some water for him, but she had disappeared. The door stood open, and a faint ray of light from the corridor illuminated the small area there. Everything else was in darkness. Some small black animals flooded in; they were much like that kind of small bird. Oh—so many of them. The moment they entered the room, they seemed to disappear. Lee tried his best to call out: “Graaaaace . . . Graaaace . . .”

  But he couldn’t get a sound out. He thought anxiously, “Am I dying?” His heart was still beating, but arrhythmically: it beat a few times and stopped for a while. He pulled medicine out of his shirt pocket and took a few pills. After a while, the symptoms eased, and his feeling and strength returned. He started reflecting on the fright he had just experienced. He felt surprised by old Qi’s and the director’s weird behavior. What on earth was this old Qi doing, and what kind of mission had the director assigned him? Maybe Grace knew, or maybe she didn’t completely understand and was trying to figure it out . . .

  Grace bent down to check on Lee. She held the hand that he extended. She put some sand-like things in Lee’s palm, and told him this was bird feed which she had bought at the market.

  “You can try to feed them. Then they won’t leave you.”

  “But I don’t want them hanging around me—they make me jittery.”

  “You’ll be okay after you get used to it. Lee, trust me. Scatter this bird feed.”

  Lee scattered the bird feed next to the bed and heard the birds pecking at it. Grace rushed to the window and leaned out, as though she wanted to fly. Worried, Lee propped himself up. Grace turned around. Her voice sounded as if it was coming from a grotto, echoing in the tiny room. “I see a large banyan in midair—the tree of the south.”

  Lee wondered why these strange little birds were connected with the banyan tree. Once more, he felt a puff of gas reverberating in his chest. He opened his mouth and said loud and cl
ear, “Oh—” Feeling completely recovered, he even got out of bed. Grace went over and helped him right away, and walked with him to the window, where they faced the large fluorescent banyan. They heard the ringing of the aerial roots colliding in midair. The tree was filled with the chirping of the wagtails.

  “Lee, these are the birds that you just fed.”

  “But I didn’t see them fly away.”

  “They’re everywhere. Sometimes they hide themselves; sometimes they show themselves.”

  While Grace spoke, the banyan tree blurred and then—bit by bit—disappeared. The moonlit night sky seemed to be urgently asking them something, but what was it? When Lee gave voice to this question, Grace said she was pondering this. Perhaps it was nothing that one could get to the bottom of. Such things did happen. For example, they had survived being run over by the truck. There were so many questionable things that couldn’t be explained. Lee wanted to turn on the lights and look for the little birds in the room, but Grace stopped him, “Once you turn on the lights, it will be another world.” And so they felt their way to bed in the dark.

  They didn’t fall asleep for a long time. Lee didn’t sleep because he wanted to listen closely for those birds; he thought they were still in the room. And Grace didn’t sleep because she wanted to remember an adventure she’d had in a shop in Bell City. Though she tried hard, she couldn’t remember it. She knew only that it was an adventure. The words “Why are the dishes flying in midair?” crossed her mind. Just then, the ladder in the corridor collapsed with a bang. Lee and Grace jumped out of bed and raced to the corridor.

  The ladder had collapsed, and the director had fallen onto the concrete. In the shadows, the beam of white light was more dazzling than usual. Not until they bent over and stretched out their hands did they see that this wasn’t a person at all, but a piece of white cloth. How ironic it was! “Didn’t the dream come true just now?” Grace whispered. But Lee thought Qiming had played a trick. What had he been up to? They heard someone going downstairs. The footsteps were loud, sounding defiant. Grace shouted down, “Old Qi, leave us a way out, will you?”

  Her voice echoed on the stairs. It was eerie. From high up on the wall came the sound of beating wings. The birds! They both smelled danger, and they held their heads and ran back to the room.

  They latched the door and went back to bed. The night became even longer than before. Lee sensed that Grace’s inner darkness was spreading toward him, as though it would enfold him—yet also as if it would keep him out. This was a new darkness, one he was unfamiliar with. He said to himself, “Grace—what a woman!” For a moment, in the depth of darkness, he felt that he and Grace had become one person. But in the next moment, an iceberg separated them. Grace was guarding her dark shadow and staying on the other side of the mountain while he trudged in the snow with his pant legs soaking wet. In the past, when they lived in Mountain City, Grace supported him whenever he walked uphill; she was with him almost all the time. Now that they had arrived here, did she really want to go her own way without him? He wondered if this was an omen of his bleak future. He had never seen wagtails before coming to Pebble Town. Here, they were everywhere—a little overpopulated. Grace was apparently interested in learning more about their habitual nature, but these birds made it hard for him to breathe.

  The footsteps were still sounding on the stairs. Maybe it wasn’t Qiming; maybe it was the worker on duty at the guesthouse. He seemed to always be going down; it never ended. Lee didn’t think he was going down to the first floor, but to an abyss. Normally, departing footsteps would grow softer and softer, but this noise was uniform—not too close and not too far away. He asked Grace about this. She said it was the sound of his heart beating: even she could hear it. Lee climbed out of bed and pressed his ear to the door. Someone was walking out there for sure. It definitely wasn’t his own heartbeat that Grace was hearing. He listened a while: the sound didn’t vary. All he could do was lie down again.

  After going through that interminable night in the guesthouse, Lee was uneasy about everything in Pebble Town. When he walked on the cobblestone path, he would take a few steps and then stop and stamp his feet—checking to see if the ground was firm. Before long, they moved into an apartment building. They were the only ones living there; the other apartments were vacant. They usually bought groceries at the market and cooked at home, but sometimes they ate their meals in the canteen. After they settled into their apartment, Lee felt much better. The pure air on the frontier enabled him to breathe easily. As a result, his heart condition improved. He could also engage in more activities. Now he often went out alone, sometimes staying out for a long time. He no longer depended so much on Grace. If she wasn’t there and he fell sick again, he calmly took his medicine and lay down until he was better. He did this successfully several times.

  Their bedroom was on the third floor—the top floor, which was slanted. At first, they kept the skylight open all day. Later, when Lee began feeling dizzy, they closed it and nailed it shut. Grace was the first one to see the flower garden. It was early morning: she slipped out of bed, walked barefoot to the window, opened the heavy drapes—and all at once she saw it. It was a miniature flower garden hanging in midair in the distance. Tropical plants greeted the breeze. It gradually moved closer—until it was right before her eyes. “Whoa—whoa . . .” Grace couldn’t stop marveling at the scene before her. She stood transfixed.

  “Grace, what’s wrong with you? What are you looking at?” Lee sat up and asked.

  “It’s the scenery at Cloud City, where I’ve never been. It’s the southernmost place. My God!”

  They stood side by side, embracing each other. They were excited and on edge. This tropical scene so close to them made their life—never very concrete—even more illusory. Yet both of them felt an unusually strong desire to live. Tears spilled from the corners of Lee’s eyes. He kept saying, “Grace, Grace, I can’t believe we’re finally here!” Grace fixed her eyes on the palm trees; she felt her heart might stop beating. In a trance, she heard Lee calling her. She answered him time after time, and dug her fingers into his flesh. But he didn’t hear her, nor did he feel her. Then, struggling free of her arms, he turned and walked from the room to the corridor. A little worried, Grace pulled the drapes and went back to bed. She heard Lee talking with someone. It seemed to be Qiming. Mingled with their voices was a woman’s voice. Was it the director?

  Lee returned after a while. He had seen the director. She had exhorted the two of them to “observe their geographical position.” She was a profound woman. Lee went back to bed. The scene just now had tired both of them. Grace joked that they were now like two corpses in delicate shrouds lying in a large coffin. She was holding Lee’s hand. Lee was amazed that her hand—always cold before—was now radiating heat. Even her fingertips were hot. Unable to sleep, they sat up and looked at the black-and-white pattern on the quilt. Grace said the director must be using the design of the quilt to hint at her expectation of them, but she couldn’t figure out what that expectation was. Lee said he couldn’t, either, though he was sure the director meant well and must have a training program for them. But if so, he didn’t have the foggiest idea what the program might entail. Lee said, “Everything will be all right as long as we follow the director’s instructions. Even though her words are sometimes unfathomable, we can do what we understand her to say.” Although their discussion was inconclusive, they did feel better and better. They got up and decided that, from now on, they wouldn’t open the drapes on a casual impulse to look out at the scenery. If they wanted to look at it someday, they had to mentally prepare for it. Now they understood why the drapes were so thick, and even double-layered with the top part on rollers. This was to keep illusions out. They had never before used such high-quality drapes. Grace thought this building still held numerous secrets for them to explore. Maybe they simply needed to get through each day rhythmically, and the director’s expectations of them would eventually be actualized. What she needed
was the power of persistence. Had she already found it? Maybe she already had this power without knowing it.

  “Lee, listen: many things are hitting the window. They’re like birds.”

  Lee had already heard them. He was excited. He opened the drapes a crack and saw dazzling sunlight. He let go of the drapes at once. He suggested that they explore this whole building and complete the mission the director had assigned them.

  They went to the corridor and opened the room next door: a cloud of dust choked them and they sneezed repeatedly. After the dust settled, they got a good look. This room had a bed just like theirs, with a quilt in the same odd black-and-white pattern. A layer of dust covered the quilt. Lee walked over to the window, intending to open the drapes, but the pulley was broken. And so although the sun was out, it was like midnight inside the room. Because he’d pulled the drapes, the dust soared again. Lee couldn’t stand it and fled. As he stood next to the door, he heard the melodious sound of a flute coming from outside the window and saw Grace standing motionless in the dust.