Vertical Motion. Can Xue
The cigarette was very strong. Gu had never seen this brand before; perhaps he had rolled it himself. Then he noticed that the cigarette case was plastic.
“You know how to roll your own cigarettes,” Gu commented admiringly.
“My buddies . . . We have the right tools . . .” he answered vaguely.
After finishing the cigarette, Gu thanked the worker and stood up, intending to continue up the stairs, when he suddenly heard the worker beside him make a cat sound. It was very harsh. But when he glanced at him, he looked as if nothing had happened. No one else was here. If he hadn’t made the sound, who had? Gu changed his mind; he wanted to see if this person would do anything else.
He waited a while longer, but the worker didn’t do anything; he just put his cigarette butt in his pocket, rose, and went back to the water cart. He pushed the cart into the ward. Gu subconsciously put his hand into his own pocket, took out the cigarette butt, and looked at it, but he saw nothing unusual. In a trance, he twisted and crushed the butt. He saw an insect with a shell moving around in the tobacco threads. The lower half of its body had been charred, but it still didn’t seem to want to die. Nauseated, Gu threw the butt on the floor and, without looking back, climbed to the eighth floor.
Everything was in a hubbub in the eighth floor corridor, where there were a lot of people. Probably someone’s condition had worsened, for he saw a cart of instruments being pushed into the ward. After resting for a moment, Gu started up to the ninth floor—the top floor.
When he had almost reached it, he looked up and was so startled that he nearly fell down the stairs. A person clothed all in black and wearing a ferocious opera mask stood there, looking as though he were waiting especially for Gu.
“Hello, Mr. Gu!” he said in a loud voice, as harsh as a chapel gong.
Gu sat on the floor, gasping for breath and unable to speak. Suddenly, he felt tired and his belly began aching. It seemed that no patients were on the ninth floor, so the corridor was empty. Gu wondered which room the “catmen” were in. Was this masked person a “catman,” too?
“I was your student!” the masked person said loudly. “I’m Ju—the one who jumped into the icy river to save someone. Have you forgotten?”
“You’re Ju? Take off your mask and let me look at you. So you didn’t disappear, after all!”
He took off the mask, and Gu saw the pale face of a middle-aged man who was a stranger to him. How could he be the Ju who had jumped into the icy river to save another person and then disappeared? That had been a warm-hearted boy. Something was wrong with this middle-aged man’s eyes; there was a film on them—probably cataracts. But never mind: Gu felt quite emotional about encountering a student he had liked in the past.
“I’ve been looking for you all these years, and not long ago, I finally ran into someone who knew where you were. He said you were hiding out here. This place is really concealed!”
Ju took Gu’s arm and said he wanted to go into a room to talk. They went into a ward and sat on the beds. It was dark with the blinds closed. Gu started coughing because of the dust raised from the bed. Puzzled, he wondered how long it had been since someone had stayed in this room. Ju sat on the bed opposite his. When Gu looked up to take stock of him, this middle-aged man seemed to have turned into a flimsy shadow. Gu watched him writhing as he lay down, lifted up the dusty quilt, and covered himself. Gu started coughing hard again.
“I’m so lucky,” he said, “to be in the same room with the teacher I loved and respected. Please sit on my bed and put your hand on my forehead, okay? I’ve been dreaming of this for a long time.”
When Gu placed his right hand on Ju’s forehead, his own body trembled as if an electric current were running through it. It was plain to see that this person really was Ju! Back then, he and Ju had been chasing a red leaf up to the cliff, talking along the way. Seen from the top of the cliff, their high school had looked like blackened scars on trees. It was that day that Gu had told Ju of his own unmentionable disease.
When someone knocked a few times on the door, Gu wanted to get up and open it, but Ju held him back.
“Who could it be?” Gu said.
“Ignore it. It’s those doctors. They knock a few times to confirm that no one is here and then they leave.”
Sure enough, Gu heard several persons’ footsteps going down the stairs.
“Don’t you find it hard to lie down in all of this dust?” Gu asked Ju.
“It’s wonderful here, Mr. Gu! Would you put your hand on my forehead again? Ah, thanks so much. It’s so peaceful here that three roosters are running over.”
Gu strained to recall what they had talked about back then and finally remembered. Ju had also divulged his own unmentionable disease. He told him there’d been a hole in his chest since birth and his heart protruded from that hole. He could see his own heart beating. Ordinarily, he covered the hole with gauze and then taped it in place. He confided to Gu that he didn’t feel this defect was a major handicap, and he also added innocently, “Look, I get along fine, don’t I?” Later, he jumped into the icy river and didn’t emerge. So was it just on a pretext that he had come to the hospital? Was the real reason that his life was also nearing its end?
“When I lived next to the maple forest, where were you?”
“Me? I was in the forest!”
Ju suggested that Gu lie down too, and so Gu did. When he covered himself with the dusty quilt, a thread of pleasure germinated in his heart. He heard a sound from his fifth-floor room: a group of doctors and nurses were looking for something there. Ah, were they looking for Lei? They said that Lei, who had been tied to his bed, had disappeared. Not only this, but Lei had also pulled a prank: he had tied a piglet onto the bed. He was really devilish! Gu heard not only the doctors’ conversations but also the very familiar meows coming from the fifth floor corridor. Gu thought the meows were coming from a “catman.” That “catman” was with him day and night. Could Lei be a “catman”? Or had those “catmen” set Lei free? Gu looked around the large ward and was surprised by the desolation. When he was downstairs, he always thought the top floor was very busy; it was even more possible that those “catmen” were hiding here. The other day, he had sat in the wheelchair and an aide had pushed him to the flat roof on the ninth floor. At the time, he thought he was about to die. The big fellow pushed the wheelchair around the periphery of the flat roof and told him to look down. He looked a few times: muddy waves were all around. Then he heard all kinds of screams coming from everywhere in the building, as if the end of the world had arrived. Still later, grumbling and swearing, the big fellow took him downstairs and pushed him into his own ward. At the time, five other patients were still in the room. As soon as he entered, everyone rose respectfully and looked at him with envious eyes. One of them—a young person named Bei Ming—said, “This is like winning the lottery!” His entire day floated amidst everyone’s compliments.
“Mr. Gu, have you seen my mask?” Ju said. “I must have left it on the stairs. Without it, I can’t see anyone except for you.”
Gu thought for a long time, but he couldn’t figure out why Ju had to wear a mask to see people. He really wanted to ask him what he had experienced after he disappeared, but he could never broach the subject. He thought it would be the same as asking his student: “After you died, where did you go? What unusual things did you see?” He just couldn’t do it. He slowly massaged his fluid-filled belly, and his thoughts flew to the beginning stages of his disease. He’d felt then as if a load had been taken off his mind. In high spirits, he had moved to the slope at the maple forest and had spent some lovely days there. In the autumn, the red leaves had intoxicated and entranced him. He’d never felt so sensitive to the world around him as he did then. In his excitement, he even saw eagles. Autumn was a long season. He said to himself: “Autumn is so long—like eternal life.” Sometimes, old friends came to see him, but they weren’t the one he wanted to see. Back then, he couldn’t think who it was that he wanted to see. Only now, lying here, did he know. The one he had wanted to