After the adultery began, vague news of the scandal reached the office where he worked. His good colleague advised him to ‘‘end it’’ to avert trouble. He not only didn’t feel grateful but blamed that person for not helping him. He castigated him for being a ‘‘time- server,’’ ‘‘a hypocrite,’’ ‘‘hard as nails,’’ and so forth. He also began shouting and smashed the window with a hammer. In short, he became someone else, doing all sorts of unimaginable things. His colleague had no choice but to forget his good intentions and resume his usual gloating manner. There’s no evidence that Q wanted to ‘‘end this.’’ Rather, he was like dry wood going up in a blaze. He paid attention to nothing else. He became irascible. ‘‘Just try that again,’’ he’d say, grabbing your arm if he thought you said anything suggestive. Only after all kinds of sophistry and excuses by the other person would Q let go. One day, his superior handed him an assignment. He accused his superior of making things difficult for him, and a fist fight broke out. He actually ‘‘grabbed the superior’s head and smashed it against the wall until it bled.’’ He groaned and told people trying to intervene that he would ‘‘resign’’ and go off and ‘‘be a beggar.’’ The others were speechless with fear. Madam X’s sister said that Q had told her several times: he was predestined to have no way out, and so he had resolved to do something in desperation. His eyes were bright when he said this, and his face shone with a beatific luster. ‘‘There are still eyes like this in the world. Up to now, I still haven’t figured out what makes your sister tick.’’ Yet, his eyes told people that he knew very well what made her tick. Knew too well. He just didn’t know what he himself was all about. If he did, God knows what might happen. How come a good man can change overnight into a gangster, a crook? There’s got to be an explanation. The only conclusion we can reach is that the fortune-telling incident was the cause.
At one time, Mr. Q had embraced nihilism, and had been confused for thirty or forty years, and now suddenly he had started talking about waves in eyes and how some mysterious power had arrived. Of course, it was all nonsense: the sticking point was his superstitious thinking and passive attitude toward life. It’s said that he has worried about calamities ever since he was eleven, worried that death would befall him before he had a chance to say good-bye to friends. He had always been frightened when walking on the street, and he also began to suffer from insomnia, ‘‘as if numerous rabbits were running out of my head.’’ That’s how he described it. What on earth was that instance of fortune-telling all about? Our Mr. Q had walked unsteadily onto Five Spice Street and helped the felt-hatted widow push the coal cart. Then he ‘‘stood for seven or eight minutes’’ in her home. After emerging, he ‘‘encountered’’ the lame woman, and finally he ‘‘passed out’’ and fell at the entrance of Madam X’s home. No one saw how he got inside. Could it be that everything that happened later was only a matter of ‘‘flickering eyeballs’’? (This also brings ‘‘hallucinogens’’ to mind. Was it possible that in the instant he was unconscious, he had been injected in a barbaric way? Wasn’t ‘‘Phantoms in the Boarding House’’ playing then?) Waves were projected and the man’s destiny was decided! Mr. Q has never divulged this detail, because ‘‘there’s no way to recount this episode,’’ ‘‘any language is a kind of blasphemy,’’ ‘‘the moment I express this, I’ll be dizzy,’’ ‘‘this definitely can’t be translated into words,’’ and so forth. He simply spoke of ‘‘how bright’’ it was when he talked with the eyewitness, X’s sister. Although that idiotic sister was there, she ‘‘couldn’t see any of the evidence’’ and innocently told people, ‘‘I can vouch for this: it was love at first sight. Neither of them said a word, nor did they touch. They were just silent. That proved the strength of their sentiments and their morality.’’ ‘‘As for telling his fortune, who says so? That didn’t happen.’’ On the surface, it seemed that ‘‘there wasn’t any’’ fortune- telling. It’s exactly this ‘‘nothing’’ that was the basis for everything that came later. Everything germinated in the midst of supposition. In this glaring light, Mr. Q completed his metamorphosis from a pupa to a butterfly. He bit off his shell and fatefully changed. (This was exactly what Madam X was so good at: using invisible idiodynamics.)
From that day forward, this man took an absolutely preposterous view of himself and felt that he was different from everyone else: not only was he different, he was also a cut above others. He shoved all of his responsibilities to the back of his mind, stuck his hands in his overcoat pockets, and, like a playboy, stood on the corner ogling women. He would pull at a woman’s sleeve and unburden himself of his innermost thoughts. (The female colleague said he went on for nearly ten minutes.) This included words like ‘‘turkey’’ and ‘‘duck’’ and so on-words that clearly implied ‘‘going to bed.’’ He seemed desperate and could ‘‘hardly stand still.’’ Some thought he was ‘‘going to pounce.’’ He also grew fond of looking in mirrors. Every day he would close the door and look at himself in the mirror at home (Q was very sensitive about his reputation). Passing a store window on the street, he would take stock of himself. He would stand in front of the window for a long time, until the shopkeepers became nervous. As for his wife-this woman as beautiful as a god- dess-who loved him so much, he now just said ‘‘uh’’ to her soulful prattle and couldn’t wait to get back to the mirror. One day, he said to his wife that he couldn’t wear his coat any longer, because bugs were crawling on it. ‘‘I had a premonition a long time ago that this would happen. Have you heard it in the middle of the night- streams of them crawling over the coat? So many.’’ He made a face, and his wife gave him a panic-stricken look. She was really frightened. Afterwards, he seemed sorry about this and quickly explained that he had intentionally talked of bugs. ‘‘A certain evil thought made me say that.’’ Sometimes he was whimsical, but now he was okay again. His tone, however, was so melancholic and uncertain- as if he weren’t ‘‘okay again.’’ After a few days, his malady returned, and he mentioned bugs again, saying that his overcoat was ‘‘just threads’’-no good at all anymore.
‘‘As soon as I put it on, they start biting me.’’ He poured this out painfully and picked the overcoat up with a pole to show his wife. He said, ‘‘They all fly in from the window in the middle of the night.’’
‘‘What?’’
‘‘The bugs. Can’t you see?’’ He insisted on burning the overcoat.
His wife started crying.
‘‘Please don’t cry. What I said doesn’t matter.’’ He patted his wife’s shoulder kindly to calm her down. ‘‘I’ve been hallucinating a lot recently; maybe it’s because I’m getting older. Is there anything that we can’t discredit?’’ His tone at the end was unsteady, almost as though he were asking himself a rhetorical question.
He no longer worked in his melon and vegetable gardens (and so the plants withered away quite soon), nor did he play with the cats and dogs. He just moved a cane chair outside and sat alone dozing in the sun. He smiled slightly and flexed his fingers over and over. No one knew what he was doing. If someone roused him, he answered brusquely, and then raised his hand and stared intently at the blazing sunlight for a long time before he turned around to face the visitor. It seemed as though he had just returned from another world.