In the early morning, Lin Pei woke from chaotic dreams. He pulled open the curtains; outside was an apricot-gray sky, with the moon hanging very low, like a small piece of burned-out charcoal.
The last day of the year had arrived. Tomorrow would be the new year.
He sat on the bed, recalling the previous dream. In the dream, it seemed he was about to go on a long journey; a stranger came to the platform to see him off, and at the moment of parting, suddenly ran up and stuffed a handful of fennel into his hand.
He stood at the window, staring blankly at the person’s back as the train rattled into motion.
In the dream, there was no station name on the platform, and the train was empty.
He sat alone in the narrow carriage, not knowing where he was going. All of this was vague, a rather rudimentary dream.
Like being on a temporarily built stage, declaring from the start that everything was fake, with no intention at all to invite you into the play.
Only the handful of fennel clutched in his hand, damp with sweaty moisture, emitting a strong, intense fragrance, so real it was aggressively compelling.
Dreaming of fennel means that something lost will be found; a superstitious ex-girlfriend had told him that before. Not long after she dreamed of fennel, she was taken away by her former boyfriend.
But her superstition seemed to have infected him.
He had even forgotten what she looked like, yet he still remembered her strange superstitious pronouncements.
Lin Pei sniffed the hand that had clutched the fennel in the dream and lit a cigarette. What thing would be lost and regained? He recalled the things he had lost, so many they could fill several pages of a list.
For someone accustomed to loss, finding one or two of them was nothing remarkable at all. But thinking it over, he couldn’t think of anything particularly worth recovering.
For some reason, those things that were once very precious, when recalled after being lost, seemed just so-so, as if they had become much more mediocre. He had no way to keep them, but he had a way to let them rust in his memory.
When the phone rang at noon, Lin Pei was in the small room inside the studio stoking the stove. The stove wasn’t heating up again.
This winter, he didn’t know how many times it had broken. The kind of wheat straw pellets he bought were mixed with impurities, unable to burn completely, filling the room with black smoke.
He set down the iron hook in his hand and pulled out his phone from his pocket. Song Yu’s name jumped on the screen. He squatted on the ground, watching it flash again and again, then go dark.
He walked out from the small room billowing with thick smoke and took off his mask. The studio was as cold as a giant freezer. Overhead were two rows of incandescent lights, the blackened covers removed, the bright lamp tubes exposed, illuminating everything like eternal daylight, making one lose the sense of time.
This was exactly why he liked staying in the studio. Isolated, self-sustaining. He gradually experienced pleasure from this solitude.
He walked to the sink in the corner, one hand pulling down his pants zipper, slightly standing on tiptoe. This sink was originally for washing brushes and palettes; since the toilet pipe froze and cracked, he also urinated here.
He watched the urine flush away the residual cobalt blue pigment on the sink’s edge, and the residual urine was then flushed away by water.
A few days ago, Big Chen from next door had also moved away. The entire art district seemed empty.
The snow from last week still remained intact by the roadside; the stray cats no longer came in front of the house to check their empty bowls. As soon as evening arrived, everywhere was pitch black, utterly desolate.
When he left from here, he occasionally saw lights in a few windows, but the people inside were long not the ones he used to know. They looked very young, probably just graduated from art school, several sharing a studio, making silly sculptures, feeding a mangy native dog.
Sometimes they called it Jeff, sometimes Koons; it was unclear what it was called, and after a long time, he realized it was the famous Jeff Koons!
The artists who had moved in with Lin Pei at the beginning had all left.
Either they moved to better places or changed careers. He couldn’t move to a better place, nor could he convince himself to change careers, so he still remained here.
Several times, he felt those young boys looking at him with pitying eyes, as if he were something as ridiculous as those “Cultural Revolution” slogans left on the walls.
He placed the kettle on the induction cooker and took down the tea canister from the shelf.
While waiting for the water to boil, he took out his phone and looked again at that missed call. It was Song Yu, no mistake.
A name not seen in a long time.
Calculating, it had probably been five or six years without contact, perhaps even longer.
Song Yu was one of the earliest collectors of his paintings; in the years just after he came to Beijing, they had once been very close.
At that time, Song Yu wasn’t as rich as now, and he was still a highly regarded young painter. His first solo exhibition received huge acclaim, various magazines competed to interview him, collectors all wanted to know him, auction house people searched everywhere for his paintings; the future looked bright, success and fame seemed just a step away.
To this day, he couldn’t figure out what exactly happened later. It seemed that overnight, the wind changed direction, and the goddess of luck turned away.
Imperceptibly, everything started going downhill. He thought and thought but couldn’t find the reason, so he could only attribute the turning point to a grain of sand.
That year, on a windy April day, a grain of sand blew into his eye; he rubbed it hard a few times, and his vision became a blur.
At the hospital checkup, it was said to be partial retinal detachment. The doctor prescribed medicine and told him to rest at home. He lay in bed listening to the radio for a month, during which he didn’t paint a stroke. Perhaps it was during that time that his talent was quietly taken away.
When standing in front of the canvas again, a trace of disgust arose in his heart. No inspiration at all, nothing he wanted to paint.
He began to pass the time by dating and attending various parties. He also joined a wine tasting club organized by friends, getting drunk once or twice a week.
After living this dissipated life for a while, later because he owed too many painting debts, he had no choice but to return to the studio to work. Later still, several paintings failed at auction.
Several girlfriends left him. Several galleries fell out with him. After experiencing these changes, his life returned to quiet, just like when he first came to Beijing. The difference was, he had acquired the habit of heavy drinking.
He forgot how Song Yu stopped associating with him.
Too many friends left him in those years; Song Yu was just one of them, disappearing silently from his world like everyone else. The last time seemed to be when he called Song Yu, and Song Yu didn’t answer—now looking at Song Yu’s missed call on the phone, he thought it was finally even.
“Our future master.” He remembered Song Yu liked to look at him with a smile and say that. At that time, he bought so many of his paintings, more confident in his success than anyone.
So later, he must have been very disappointed in him. But that disappointment came too quickly. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t wait a bit longer (of course, facts proved that waiting longer would have been useless)—in the following year, Song Yu sold all the paintings he had bought from him.
Businessmen of course always only value profit; he understood this, he didn’t blame Song Yu, but what he couldn’t accept was that Song Yu even sold the portrait he painted for his son. To this day, he still remembered every detail of that painting.
The little boy lay on the table, staring at a spinning yellow top. Sunlight slanting in from the window illuminated the boy’s right cheek. That fluffy glow was extremely moving, the brushstrokes unbelievably delicate, showing the unique sanctity and fragility of young life. He painted that painting for nearly two months.
“I can never paint a better portrait again.”
When handing over the painting, he said to Song Yu.
“It’s fantastic, this is completely Wyeth’s light and shadow! I’m going to hang it above the living room fireplace!”
Song Yu said. A year later, “Wyeth’s light and shadow” was sent to a small auction company on the verge of bankruptcy, sold for twenty thousand yuan, bought by a merchant selling hairy crabs.
