He’d left the basement at mid-morning and taken the path along the river in the park. In a patch of riverside sunlight, four barbers had set up chairs. Practitioners of that ancient craft could set up shop anywhere, all it took was a high-backed wooden chair, basin and basin-stand, cold water in a bucket and hot water in a thermos, manual clippers, a shiny strop, and an old guy in glasses and a white coat, but you didn’t even see them in the countryside anymore. Dunhuang had a sudden urge to get his head shaved. When he was young his father had cut his hair for him, with clippers — either a bowl-cut or a flat-top. When he got older, he protested — his father never learned anything but those two dorky styles. He started going to barbershops and hair salons where gentle girls washed his hair. It was no longer a haircut, it was “getting my hair done.” Now, standing in the sunlight, he wanted his head shaved. He said to one of the old men, “Need it shaved.”
The man craned his neck to look at him, and when he was finally sure he’d heard him correctly, he laughed. It was one of those laughs of deep satisfaction, as though the head were already shaved. Dunhuang threw himself into a chair the likes of which he hadn’t touched in years; the three other chairs beside him were all occupied by old men. Old men shaving old men. His barber turned on the radio, first tuning it to Peking Opera, then to a pop station. Dunhuang heard Zhang Huimei’s voice straining at the top of her register as she wailed on some mountaintop.
“Flat-top?” the barber asked.
“No top.”
“All off?”
“All off.”
He closed his eyes while the man worked, and the radio played one pop song after another. The old barber wasn’t listening, and hummed a bit of Peking opera to himself, something from Su San Sent Out Under Guard. The warm sunlight was like hands caressing his increasingly exposed scalp, and Dunhuang’s thoughts grew turbid and vague, as if he was dreaming, as if he was traveling back to when he was small. Having his father cut his hair in the summer dusk, and afterwards washing in the river, wearing some old long johns of his father’s that hung below his knees, and not even underpants underneath. He’d plunge straight in, and when he came up his head would be clean.
His shaved head made his body feel lighter and his feet fleeter. He sold DVDs in four different places, and it was eleven by the time he returned home. When he walked in the philosophy student asked him, point-blank, “Have you seen my cellphone?” Dunhuang said he hadn’t, then put down his bag and went to the toilet. When he came out again he noticed something was wrong. The students of foreign languages and mathematics were rooting under the beds and in the corners like mice, while the philosophy student stared at Dunhuang as if he was drunk, the whites of his eyes growing wide.
“You really haven’t seen it?” he asked.
“I really haven’t,” said Dunhuang, shaking his head just in case he wasn’t making himself understood.
“This place must be fucking haunted!”the philosophy student said. He’d put his cellphone on the table before he went to sleep the night before, but had forgotten to take it with him when he left in the morning. When he got back it was gone. “There’s only the four of us here, that’s eight hands — where would a ninth hand have come from?”
“Unless it was a ghost, it had to have been one of us,” said the mathematics student, his expressionless face drawing even longer.
“It must’ve been,” agreed the pudgy language student. “Maybe we should report it?”
Dunhuang looked from one to the other and discovered that all three were looking at him. He took a big step back, then raised a hand and said, “Sure, I vote we report it.”
The philosophy student called 110. On the phone he kept repeating the phrase, “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” Dunhuang thought this was a senseless thing to keep saying. The four of them stayed silent until the police arrived. After a few questions, they were all taken to the police station to make a report. The four were questioned separately, the philosophy student first, then the pudgy language student, then the skinny mathematician, and finally, Dunhuang. It was 1:20 in the morning at that point. He’d spent the whole time up until then sitting in a chair and looking at two girls opposite him. They’d also come to make a report — a theft. They also lived in a collective dormitory. Half of their Chinese was rural dialect, and the two obviously came from different places, but they appeared to have found a common enemy. They were both wearing low-necked little shirts over round white breasts, and as they spoke they threw glances toward Dunhuang instead of looking at each other. So the wait went by quickly, and he wasn’t nervous like the last time he’d been caught. As far as he was concerned, he was only here, in the police station in the middle of the night, to look at buxom girls.
“You really didn’t see anything?” the officer asked.
“I really didn’t,” Dunhuang said.
The officer was tired. He lit a cigarette, dragged, and took a long time exhaling. Through the smoke he said, “I hear you’re selling pirated DVDs?”
“I don’t sell them.” Dunhuang got nervous. “I’m just helping a friend temporarily.”
“You do know that selling pirated DVDs is illegal?” The officer was making notes.
“I know, of course I know. I’ll give him the movies back right away. I’m applying for my doctorate — really, I’m in the doctorate program in Peking University’s art department.”
“Oh. . a doctorate.”
“Right, a doctorate. I really didn’t see that phone, honestly. I don’t even know what it looks like.”
“So it was a ghost.”
“Sure, it was a ghost.” Dunhuang felt a little more relaxed. “Like they said — a ninth hand appeared.”
The officer laughed, then pushed his notebook over and said, “Take a look, sign it if everything’s in order.” After he’d signed, the officer added, “Watch it with the DVDs, there’s going to be a crackdown.”
The only result of the night’s investigation was a pile of documents — the whereabouts of the phone remained unknown. The doctoral student kept persisting until the officer finally said, “That’s enough for tonight, there’s no need to create bad blood. We’ll come visit you in the morning, I can’t imagine the thing sprouted wings. None of you are to leave before ten.”
They walked back together, in unprecedented unity, along the way discussing what grisly end the phone might have met, then sighing over Beijing’s crime, then complaining over the high price of phones, the unfairness of two-way charges, and so on, as if the loss of the phone had no direct connection to them. When they reached the basement room and saw the empty table, however, the shadow of the theft fell over them once more. “My phone. . ” said the doctor. No one comforted him, they said nothing. They washed up in turns and went to bed.
Dunhuang woke suddenly at around five in the morning, something that had never happened before. The pudgy master’s student was snoring and the skinny one occasionally ground his teeth disconsolately — as if he had a rat caged in his mouth. By the light spilling in from the corridor, Dunhuang could see his bag of DVDs on the table, and knew why he’d woken. Gingerly, he got out of bed and dressed, stuffing a few clothes and his toiletries into his bag, and headed for the door. They were still asleep. He closed the door, but then, feeling that vanishing in the night like this was too suspicious, he left a little note on the handle of the door: “If I stole the phone, may I lose a hand to rot and marry a wife with no asshole.”