Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

barely support it, the move showed he’d had practice, was a bit of a prodigy. Then he hung his expensive watch on the apricot tree, backed off ten paces, and expertly slammed a cartridge into the chamber. An adult sneer settled on his face. The wristwatch glittered in the bright noonday sun. I heard Huzhu’s fearful screams retreat into the distance, while the sound of the watch had a profoundly affecting quality Time and space seemed to freeze into a blinding beam of light, as the ticking sound created the image of an enormous pair of black scissors cutting the beam of light into sections. Huanhuan’s first shot went wide of the mark, leaving a white scar in the tree trunk. His second shot hit the target. As the bullet smashed the watch into a thousand pieces —
    The numbers crumbled. Time was shattered.

48

Public Anger Brings on a Group Trial
Personal Feelings Turn Brothers into Enemies
    Jinlong phoned to tell me that our mother was desperately ill. But the minute I stepped in the door, I realized he’d tricked me.
    Mother was ill, all right, but not seriously. Aided by her prickly-ash cane, she made it over to a bench in the western corner of the living room. Her head, now totally gray, quaked continuously, and murky tears slid down her cheeks. Father was sitting to her right, but far enough away that a third person could sit between them. When he saw me walk in the door, he took off one of his shoes, jumped to his feet, and, with a muffled roar, slapped me across the face with its sole. My ears rang, I saw stars, and my cheek stung like crazy I couldn’t help but notice that when he jumped to his feet, his end of the bench flew up and Mother fell first to the floor and then backward. Her cane swung out straight, like a rifle aimed at my chest. I remember calling out “Mother!” and wanting to run over and help her up, but I stumbled backward instead, all the way to the door, where I sat down on the lintel. Just when I felt a pain shoot up from my tailbone, I fell backward, and just when it felt like my head was cracked on the concrete step, I wound up lying on my back, head down, feet up, half in and half out of the room.
    No one offered to help, so I got up on my own. My ears were still ringing and there was a metallic taste in my mouth. I could see that Father had put so much into the slap he was reeling. But once he’d regained his balance, he charged me again with the shoe. Half his face was blue, half was purple; green sparks seemed to shoot from his eyes. He’d experienced plenty of anger over a lifetime of hardships, and I was very familiar with how he looked when he was angry. But there were lots of new emotions mixed into his anger this time: extreme sadness and immense shame, to mention just two. He hadn’t slapped me with his shoe just for show. No, he’d put everything he had into it. If I hadn’t been in the prime of my life, with good, hard bones, that slap could have changed the shape of my face. As it was, it rattled my brain, and when I got to my feet, I was not only dizzy, I even forgot for a moment where I was. The figures in front of me seemed weightless, like will-o’-the-wisps, ghostly floating images.
    I think it was Jinlong who stopped the blue-faced old man from hitting me a second time. But even with a pair of arms around him, my father kept jumping up and down and squirming like a fish yanked out of the water. Then he threw the heavy black shoe at me. I didn’t try to get out of the way; my brain had fallen asleep on the job and forgot to tell my body what to do. I could only watch as the ugly thing flew at me like monster, but as if it were actually flying toward some other body It hit me in the chest and stayed there for a split second before falling clumsily to the floor. I probably thought of looking down at that strange, shoelike object, but the cobwebs in my head and the veil over my eyes kept me from doing such an inappropriate, meaningless thing. My left nostril felt hot and wet for a moment before a worm began wriggling above my upper lip. I reached up and touched it, and when I pulled my hand away, though I was still in a fog, I saw some green, oily stuff that gave off a dull glow on my finger. I heard a soft voice — was it Pang Ghunmiao?—whisper in my ear: Your nose is bleeding. As the blood flowed, a crack opened up through the fog in my brain, letting in a cool breeze that spread its coolness throughout, until I was finally able to emerge from my