Thirteen days after moving into Weixiuyuan, Dunhuang bought a television and a DVD player. The DVD player was new; the TV came from a secondhand market, lightly used, two hundred kuai. It looked good. He ate two packets of instant noodles that night, and watched four movies in a row. Well after midnight he went out to use the bathroom. A strong night wind was blowing over the asbestos tiles, and grit got in his eyes. Instead of going to the public toilet at the mouth of the alley, he just pissed beneath the scholar tree at the entrance to the yard and hurried back. Fucking sandstorms, showing up in the middle of the night.
The next morning he heard someone talking excitedly outside his window about the dust. He couldn’t get back to sleep, so he got up and went outside to find them still talking. His landlady pointed at his feet and said "Look, young man, dust." Dunhuang looked down to see a thick layer of fine yellow dust under his feet. He stomped one foot and raised a little cloud, then stomped again and raised another. He stomped a dozen times and dust rose into the air; his landlady and neighbor backed away yelling, “Stop it! Stop it! We’re choking!”
He stopped. “Where’d this come from?” Everything around him was covered with a thick layer of yellow. “The sandstorm?” The wind had stopped and the sun was in the sky, though it looked white from all the sand still in the air. Yellow sky, white sun.
“It rained dust!” his landlady said excitedly. “The heavens rained dust on us!”
All the neighbors were excited, old and young. All these years — who had ever seen it rain dust? Dunhuang had never seen it, anyway. He gave the scholar tree a kick, and yellow dust came floating down. It had actually rained fucking dust. Dunhuang got excited too. He washed, packed his bag, and got to work. Everything he saw was covered in dust, glistening yellow or dingy gray. Plenty of kids were stomping, too. In some places the street-sweepers were still sweeping, and the dust was piled high at the sides of the streets. Bizarre. No wonder he and his friends had all ended up in prison — it was a year of bad omens.
What was really fun was being on the pedestrian bridge. From that vantage point he could see how the streets and the low residential buildings had all turned the same dirt-yellow color overnight, the way winter snows might blanket the earth. But the feeling was completely different; it made the dustcovered buildings and streets look like ancient ruins, silent and deathly. It was hard to believe there was something besides snow that could make the whole world appear so simple and two-dimensional, and at the same time so decayed and desolate. Watching the expressionless faces of the people hurrying by, Dunhuang was overcome by a sudden hopeless lust, and he shouted, “Xia — Xiao — Rong!”
No one knew who Xiaorong was, but they all turned their heads to look at the curious madman. He nodded and smiled at them with private pleasure, the way they abruptly turned their heads and bodies in concert seemed to swing the whole world into motion. He noticed a car parked by the side of the road, in the dust covering it, someone had written:
Fucking sandstorm
This seemed like fun to Dunhuang, so he trotted down from the bridge and added: But of course. He observed his handiwork with pleasure, feeling a bit of his old calligraphic skills returning. When he was in middle school there was a bit of a calligraphy fad, and anyone who could hold a pen was practicing. He went along with the fad, first using a broken branch to practice in the sandy riverbank outside the school gates — he’d write, let the waves wash it away, then write again. Later, he used a brush and water, writing on the concrete in the sunlight. By the time he got to the end of what he was writing, the beginning had begun to dry, and he would trace over the disappearing characters. There were crowds of kids out there on the sidewalk at noon, their rear ends all raised high — quite a sight. Writing “But of course” wasn’t enough, though, so he went around to the trunk of the car and wrote: I didn’t write this.
Then he went on his way. He noticed a BMW parked on the street, so he went up to it and wrote: Fucking BMW
He did it on three more cars in a row, changing the brand for each one. He reached the fifth car and was about to write “fucking,” when he remembered how they’d once left ads for fake IDs, in permanent ink or spray paint, in places where pedestrians might notice: Fake IDs, call 130. . Why not leave an ad for DVDs? So he wrote his own number: DVDs, call 133. .
He was pleased with this small stroke of genius. He kept it up, writing on every car he passed, on the hood if no one had wiped it off, on the trunk if they had. One after another, until his finger was tingling, his arm sore, and his right hand looked like it was made out of mud. He ignored the people watching him, he concentrated on his writing, and when he was done he moved on. At two in the afternoon he stopped and made a rough tally — at least three hundred cars. He found a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and ordered two beers and a couple of dishes to reward himself. As he drank, he thought with satisfaction, Now I’ll just wait for the orders to come in. He imagined that, years from now, other DVD sellers would remember him with gratitude as the originator of the DVD delivery service.
Before he finished his meal his phone rang, and he picked up enthusiastically. The caller said, “Are you the guy selling DVDs?”
“That’s right. What would you like to see, miss?”
“Are you a fucking idiot?”
That wasn’t what he’d intended. Dunhuang tried to lighten the tone: “I’m sorry, miss, I don’t think I’ve got that one.”
“Don’t play cute with me. Listen, don’t go scrawling on everything you see, if your little claws itch you can scratch them on a rock!” Then she hung up.
Dunhuang was energized. He took another swallow of beer, and said to himself, I’ll scratch them on your mom’s leg!
Fake ID sellers dealt with this sort of thing all the time. They’d leave an advertisement right where it would piss someone off, or glue a flier to something important, and then get a phone call from some idiot with a temper. Dunhuang was thrilled because his advertisements were having an effect. If one person was willing to spit on him, another might do business.
As he was settling the bill his phone rang again. It was a young man, asking if he had DVDs to sell — he’d seen the ad on a car. Dunhuang said, “That’s right, what do you want?” The man said his office was at Changhong Bridge, and he had some co-workers who wanted to browse. Once he got the address, Dunhuang got on a bus. It was four thirty when he arrived. The man, named Yu, was on the fifth floor, and Dunhuang told him he had a big bag of movies he could look through. Several colleagues crowded around, all of them knowledgeable about film. Their offhand comments were all right on the mark, and Dunhuang noticed it was an arts management company. The whole building was arts related — fiction, poetry, theater, and also dance, music, film, and nonfiction publishing. The man named Yu said a DVD seller used to come regularly, but they hadn’t seen him in three months. Dunhuang said he’d come regularly from then on, and if they wanted something in particular they could call ahead. The workers were impressed with the quality of his merchandise — something Dunhuang was fairly confident about. They were pirated, but they were pirated well. Honor among thieves, right? He sold thirty-one DVDs.