There was a black shadow behind the woman’s body. Half of her beautiful face was blocked by the shadow, so Joe could only see one of her eyes. Her narrow eye still burned with the desire he’d seen in it before. She raised a hand, as if to welcome Joe over. The black shadow slowly enveloped her. Joe couldn’t see her. He wanted to call her name, but he didn’t know how to pronounce it. Looking once more, he saw the shadow already absorbed by the darkness of its surroundings. The work site’s sole lamp shone quietly. Joe sadly recalled that river.
Inside the work shed Vincent struck the bones on the table with a wooden stick. He’d gathered them inside of the Five Dragon Tower, the bones of wolves and dogs. He didn’t know why he’d wanted to say they were from Lisa’s skeleton, perhaps in order to give himself something to feed on. To search out Lisa’s tracks he had gone to many places across thousands of kilometers. The farther he went the more his heart lacked assurance. The Long March was only a long march, Vincent had learned this point profoundly. After she went missing Lisa never reappeared. One time, in a temple, Vincent saw a woman who looked like Lisa. But when he went over to her, he discovered it was a woman of a different race altogether. Although he couldn’t find Lisa, Vincent had never felt so close to her. Yes, he felt that he had already become Lisa. A longing sprang up in his heart to trek from one place to another. His soul melted into the landscape, strange to his eyes, of the Eastern world.
Lisa had disappeared from his side in a crowd of people. They were coming out of the largest department store in the city, and Lisa had told him to wait for her a moment because she saw a girl from her hometown. She squeezed through the spaces between people and soon disappeared. Vincent waited, but she didn’t come back. At last the black woman named Joyner came. Joyner told him she’d seen Lisa at the train station. She was rushing to catch a train. The night before, Lisa had told him she wanted to make an inspection in the field, to get a clear idea of the makeup of the troops who constituted the long march army. Vincent asked her whether she would journey to countries in the East. Equivocally, she made no answer.
Vincent didn’t start his journey until the second day. He understood that Lisa was using her action to point out a direction for him — to go to a place where he’d never been, a place of which he had no perception. So his first intention wasn’t even to search for Lisa, which was almost impossible anyway because there were no clues. His first intention was to throw off everything he had now and go, as Lisa had hinted to him, to try another kind of life. Of course he didn’t plan to abandon his clothing company. He only meant to let this long journey make him lose his way and become a different man, then afterward he would return. He thought it was probably the same with Lisa. When he passed the high-rise building in the car, the Eastern woman was standing at the doorway. The infinite emptiness of the expression on her face left him once again deeply shaken.
The first conveyance he chose for himself was an airplane, not a train. He thought that at high altitude he would recall Lisa’s appearance from their early years together. Before, he thought, he had not paid enough attention to many critical facts. These facts had revealed themselves to him many times in the early years. But on reaching high altitude, he discovered that his plan had come to nothing. People cannot return to the past through recollection. Not only did he fail to recall all sorts of details about their life; he couldn’t even call up the image of Lisa in those early years, as if when he met her she was already a woman of a certain age. He grew dejected and stopped trying to remember. Later he went many places, and Lisa’s face grew vaguer in his mind. And not only her face from earlier days. Little by little he forgot even her more recent appearance. On this point he was both anxious and upset.
One day he slept in a large courtyard belonging to a family of farmers. He slept until midnight, when he was startled awake by the repeated crowing of a rooster. He walked to the threshing floor and saw shadows in the landscape of the paddies where the water and sky met as one color. At the time the moon was bright, and a busy scene, very much like the Eastern markets he had seen many times in the previous days, appeared in the sky. But it was only an image, there was no sound. After careful discrimination, he made out that those shadows were all attempting to enter a structure resembling a casino, but a ferocious tiger stood on each side of the door. On top of the dome of the structure, an enormous hawk looked majestically over the shadows underneath. All the shadowlike people were blocked at the doorways by the tigers. Vincent wanted to look closer, but the old farmer, named Xiao (some people called him this), came out from the house. Xiao was smoking a pipe, his creased old eyes alive with vigor. He spoke a foreign language Vincent didn’t understand, and he seemed agitated. He talked and talked, making all sorts of gestures with his hands. Suddenly, Vincent’s mind opened, because when he stared at the old man’s face, he unexpectedly grasped the import of what Xiao was saying. The gist of the old man’s speech was: do not watch the scene in midair. It is extremely frightening. It kills people daily. Xiao painted a large circle with his hand, to show that there were human corpses buried in all the paddies in front of them. As he spoke the illusion in midair disappeared and became a ghostly atmosphere. Xiao abruptly shouted at Vincent. Vincent heard him say, “What did you really come here to do?”
Vincent turned and ran into the house. In the large courtyard he saw that everyone had gotten up. They stood at the doors of the rooms watching him. The halls and corridors were lit by pine torches. He couldn’t find the room where he had been sleeping. Every room had changed to look exactly alike. He went in and retreated again, ridiculed the whole time. Later a boy walked up to him, making a sign that he would show him the way. Vincent followed as they rounded one turn after another and at last reached a large chicken coop. All the birds inside were roosters. Once Vincent appeared they started to crow, so loudly even the deaf would have heard. The young boy ran away. Vincent was tired and scared, so he simply stayed in the coop. He didn’t know how it had gotten there, but an old sofa sat in the corner. He fell onto the sofa and went to sleep. There was a kind of extremely small mosquito that bit his skin painfully, but he paid no attention to their bites. In a dream, he marched heroically through cannon fire. Shrapnel bloodied his whole face. Blood ran into his eyes until he couldn’t see anything.
In a fishing village by the sea Vincent came across a man from his own country. He was an elderly tourist. He wrapped his head in a white turban like the local men. This man sat in a wicker chair on the beach every day. They conversed facing the distant waves.
“There are people from our country everywhere here. I don’t think this is by chance,” the old man said.
“I hadn’t thought about it closely.” Vincent felt slightly ashamed. “But you, do you live here? Don’t you intend to go back?”
“I want to pass the last day of my life in this little fishing village.”
The old man’s face revealed a smile. To Vincent, his expression seemed to say that he was the only one who knew the mystery of the way of life in this fishing village, but he didn’t intend to communicate it to Vincent.