“How dare you take such liberties!” Mother shook her head, chewing loudly on a mouthful of beans. “When I found your father, he was no more than a chicken thief.”
“What kind of fiancé is it?” My brother put on an air of surprise by raising one eyebrow. He asked, “Is that the guy who cured your sickness? That man? I’ve investigated him extensively. The two arms in his sleeves are only two wires. That is to say, he has no arms whatsoever.”
“In fact,” I cleared my throat and stated word by word, “it’s that old garbage collector.” Watching mother collapse, showing the whites of her eyes, I continued, “We’re birds of a feather. We’ve been cherishing the same ideals and following the same path for a long time.”
At that pronouncement, Mother choked on the beans in her mouth. Later on she was sent to the hospital to get the beans out. Hardly had she arrived home from the hospital than she punctured herself with her needles. Her body looked like a toad.
The first time the straw toy appeared at the window, I was having an attack of malaria. That creature was a man with a longish face. He looked funny with his mouth frothing and eyes glaring with rage. In the dark of night, rats were tearing at something. Turning on my light, I entered Mother’s room. I saw her twisting madly in her bed, her pillows and blankets flying everywhere. As soon as she paused, the bed dripped with water. There was a small puddle underneath already. I imagined her having so much sweat in her body that she appeared to be melting. On the hill outside resounded a strange whistling sound. It came and went, whizzing in at one moment and quieting down at another.
“What wind is this?” The detective and I were squatting under a cotton rose tree, our teeth chattering.
“The sound of rats,” I said with a suffocating voice, something pressing my chest.
The wind swept back and forth on the waste hill.
“Let’s get married — it’s neat and tidy.” When he said this, his teeth chattered louder. I felt that all his organs were breaking.
Heavy, threatening footsteps could be heard. The shadow of the old woman reflected in the window.
“Of course you don’t believe I’m a real being. You have a skeptical, indifferent attitude toward my existence,” he said, still squatting motionlessly. “Not long ago, you told your brother while hiding behind the door that I was nothing but a product of the collective imagination. Everybody refused to expose the fact on purpose and pretended to be on guard, because they didn’t want to appear ridiculous. I don’t think you can deny that there’s something between us. For example, we are squatting here together. That in itself indicates something. Your corridor is horrifying. One night when I opened the door, I could hear screaming and shouting from a battle pouring out like a flood. What magnificent things were happening in that dim light?”
That night, we whispered like two mosquitoes in the darkness under the cotton rose tree. The next morning, when I looked in the mirror, I could see scratches from the branches on my face.
“Mother, I want to get married.”
“The cannas under the cotton rose were all trampled,” she said in a flat tone, while digging in her ear with a hairpin. “Such zeal is frightening. At that time your father was not more than a chicken thief. That is to say, the matter is obvious.”
I shouldn’t have let that person stay at our house. For that reason, the old garbage collector hanged himself unaccountably. He hanged himself on our doorframe like a dried up locust. I had fallen into my own trap. After this happened, Father started to laugh every day, covering his mouth. There was a festival atmosphere in the family. Purposefully, Father and Brother would talk some nonsense in loud voices, such as “Hey, say, has that gourd you planted borne diamonds?” “Look, while I was asleep, three cats bit my ear during the night!” And so on. These conversations would end up in their nipping at each other merrily like dogs.
When he came, he crept in like a mantis, clutching a roll of rotten cotton wadding. Stroking his sparse beard, father sniffed cautiously at the cotton while clamping onto his arm.
“Hey, you, young chap, what’s your attitude toward family and marriage?” Father pestered him, his leg sweeping out in a secret attempt to trip him flat unexpectedly.
At that particular moment, I wished he were a moth or something so he could crawl to the ceiling and scare the shit out of them, just as he usually scared me. But this weakling had already lost his ability at transformation. Instead, he could only keep quiet and crawl on the ground with his back bent low.
“Pah!” Mother spat at him. She kicked his cotton wadding so hard that it rolled into the corridor. He followed it rapidly and opened it up. Then he lay there on his stomach.
At first, he was completely quiet. But as soon as people dropped their guard, he started to sneak into the house, making a peculiar sound. It was such a faint yet sharp pulsation that people felt there was something sinister going on. Once a classmate of mine came for a visit. After she sat for a while, her face began to show surprise. She stood up and peeped out. Immediately, I knew what was happening. I coughed loudly, inquired how she managed to cure the tinea on her scalp, and asked her for a prescription. She tried to calm down. Stretching her neck, she struggled to neglect the annoyance. Then she appeared more restless, or even angry. She walked around the room, looking here and there, complaining that I was treating her rudely. Finally, she stamped her feet and called me a shameless liar. Waving her fist threateningly, she left the house. As soon as she was out, I went wild. I kicked down the cupboard and knocked over the tables and chairs, charging toward every possible hiding place. I dug for a long time, my cheeks red with fury, my bent nails carved deep into my flesh. Yet I could find nothing. The noise was everywhere, yet it was invisible. Touching my forehead, I found a smooth bald spot.
My classmate lived on the third floor. She, too, was a mysterious figure. Since she was thirteen, she had been eating a kind of tiny insect called sea ox. At the beginning, it was said that it was for curing the ailment in her eyes, then for curing hemorrhoids. In short, she had illnesses all over her body. Consequently, her pockets were full of the insects. They frequently crawled out and dropped to the ground. “Some people tried to take the treatment, yet they failed to stick it out. How can any treatment be effective without consistency? I have been persistent for six years,” she told me upon her high-school graduation. At present I go to visit her about once a month. She is a small skinny person, always lying sick in a huge wardrobe. (Inside she has put a chair for sleeping that is made of cane.) The glass door of the wardrobe is always tightly closed. I can’t figure out how she can breathe in there. When I come to visit, she asks me to sit in the middle of the room, while she herself remains in the wardrobe. We talk through the glass door. Even with her light weight, she has cracked the cane chair and broken the two back legs.
“Poignant memories!” She always ends her comments with this. Then she stares at her pale, transparent fingers, raising them and turning them around in the light. So far as I remember, she can only talk about one subject, that is, how lonely and damp it is to live in a wardrobe and how bad the air is. According to her, she is disheartened and has given herself up as hopeless because of the bad living conditions inside the wardrobe. If only there were any hope, she would strive forward and do something extraordinary. But there is no hope, not even a hint of hope.
Our break-up happened two months ago, when she discovered my relationship with the detective. I was combing my hair when she arrived. She gave me an angry stare and said between her teeth, “What a damp day it is today.” She threw something wrapped in a newspaper at me. Before I could recognize what it was, dozens of lumps appeared on my neck.