From the Recorder’s point of view, throwing away the notebook was, of course, perfect. Though it did have some drawbacks, however, one being that he was now more and more dependent on the dreamers. He had classified his life into several periods, according to the kind of dreamers who arrived. He no longer remembered how much time he had spent in the shed. In fact, his concept of time had completely disappeared. Whenever he was recalling certain events, he would think this way: “That’s the day when that dark, skinny-faced man arrived…” or “That afternoon when the woman with butterfly freckles arrived…” “That day when nobody stopped by…” or “That morning when the person came, then left without saying anything…” et cetera. Such classifications appeared very convenient, yet because fewer people were coming to him lately, his memory was deteriorating. This method of classification, as a result, embodied great vagueness and even error because it distorted sequence, and very often uncertainty would creep in. Fortunately, now he didn’t care that much about such things, and he had become increasingly casual.
If on one day more than two dreamers arrived, the Recorder would regard that day as a festival. When they had departed, he would still sit in the shed with his straight back and with his solemn expression. His whole body, including his heart, was trembling amidst the light that nobody, not even he himself, could see. Such an event was not common, and the Recorder knew it himself; therefore, he didn’t appear anxious. He also knew that the dreamers did not come of their own free will. The will that determined their arrival was in fact inside his mind. Now that he had stopped stretching out his neck to stare down the road, most of the time he felt calm. His only hint of impatience would occur at the moment when a dreamer arrived, because he already knew what the consequence would be. Afterward, he could be seen creeping about, shivering in the cold wind and blowing warm air onto his fingers, which were as swollen at the joints as little steamed buns, yet in his eyes there danced indescribable ecstasy.
Many people say that the Recorder was a fictitious being because he couldn’t even prove his own existence, and they are right. There was no proof of the existence of the Recorder himself, at least for the middle and late periods of his career in recording. He was shrinking into his strange and unique shell, until finally nobody could see any trace of him. What they saw was only an empty shell that had been abandoned by the roadside. The shell was similar to the most ordinary shell of the river clam. Once in a while someone asserted that he could hear the sound of the Recorder as though from an extremely deep rock cave, but because that cave was so profound, when the sound reached his ear it was almost like the weeping of an ant. Such assertions were of little value.
It’s true that every day we saw the Recorder sitting in the shed by the road in the same posture and behaving in the same way. The strange thing was that whenever we thought of him as being a member of our own species, there would arise unexpected doubts about his personal life, as well as that mysterious communication between him and the dreamers. But these were things that had been explained from his own personal perspective. Without that, everybody felt it would be impossible to make an adequate analysis of him. Almost nobody could remember any specific details about him, such as a word or phrase, a facial expression, a gesture, a line he had written, and so on. Everything about him existed in his own description, yet that description was only dimly discernible and lacked continuity. The key here was that others could not re-create him, describe him, in their own words.
Nineteen-ninety was the tenth year after the Recorder set up his shed by the roadside. There was an unparalleled snowstorm. After the big snow, all the inhabitants swarmed into the streets, stamping their feet and blowing warm breath into their hands while they discussed the storm. When they walked into the run-down shed of the Recorder, they saw that the storm had blown away half of the roof, and inside the snow was piled up more than two feet deep. People found the Recorder sitting quietly in the snowdrifts. His eyebrows and hair were piled with snowflakes. No one noticed that a column of steam was rising from the back of his neck. What kind of energy source was burning inside his body?
“From now on no one will come to discuss their dreamlands,” the Recorder declared to the arrivals in a firm tone. “That era has passed. I have decided this just now.” Nobody was listening to him. Nobody was noticing him. Nobody had ever thought of noticing him.
The Recorder was still sitting by the roadside waiting. Now there was no longer anybody to come to him. That is to say, what he was waiting for was no longer those dreamers. His body was seated straight. His dried, skinny face was always inclined toward the north, and on his face there was an expression of having abandoned everything. He was still indulging himself in that empty image, yet people could no longer discern his reaction toward it. What people saw was a person in rags, perhaps an idiot, wasting time, sitting in a tumbledown shed by the roadside. Such unconventional behavior did not arouse people’s good feeling toward him; instead, now people snubbed him. When they were passing by, they would turn their heads away intentionally, or they would raise their voices, pretending not to notice the shed.
Thus, for the Recorder, external time had stopped. Pretty soon he had lost the feeling of time passing. Once or twice a day he would walk out of his shed to look at the vehicles passing by, the pedestrians, and the sky above him. Of course, it’s more likely he did not see anything but only pretended to be observing. There was no set time for his walking out of the shed — sometimes it was in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the middle of the night. At the beginning he didn’t know what he was doing himself. After several days it dawned on him that he was now classifying time according to his own subjective will. This was a brand-new kind of time. From then on he was going to live in this kind of time, and he had decided this himself.
Once upon a time there was such a Recorder. Yet this was not a very important thing because for us nothing that cannot be proved is important. We only recognize that there existed this person, we saw him and remembered him — we said so in 1990.
The inner world of the Recorder was more and more carefree. He could hear ten thousand horses galloping in his chest, and he felt the temperature of his blood rising and rising. Every thump of his heart would intoxicate him in the extreme. But he still could not see that miraculous image. Even if he had seen it, he could not have described it because he had abandoned his skill and he no longer knew how to describe. That was the source of his secret sorrow. Yet this sorrow itself was the spring of his happiness, and this could never be known by others.
As he walked out of his shed, he felt vaguely, his whole body and heart, that he was walking into that image. He could see nothing, but people saw him watching the passing cars. Thus the time that he calculated subjectively was increasing. He felt deeply that there would no longer be any recording. Yet in comparison to his former recording career, he felt that the present life was fixed, like an iron railroad that drove straight into the emptiness ahead. Although the forms in his imagination were still obscure, he was no longer bothered by this because he didn’t need to express anything. He was only recording inside his own mind. This, of course, was only our guess because nobody knew.