In his dark bedroom, Chen Munian stares at the ceiling listening for a pair of slippers above. Slippers on the feet of Mr. Jin, who lives on the sixth floor. Munian has never met Mr. Jin but is familiar with his slippers, which have shuffled and flapped over his head many nights, bak pak bak pak, getting kicked off and thudding on the floor. As soon as it started, he could pinpoint from the sound exactly where in the room Mr. Jin’s slippers were, and in the last six months he has further deduced that those slippers are plastic, hard-soled, size 40 with a slight heel. The cheapest kind on the market. He can see them looming above him in the darkness, soles rising and falling on the other side of the ceiling. After eleven o’clock at night, they’re as high-strung and imperious as a prima donna, trampling roughshod over Munian’s sleep until he finally drops off in the small hours, utterly exhausted.
At the moment, he’s listening for a different pair of slippers, ones that will sweep over the floorboards as tenderly as a squirrel’s tail. They’ll still produce noise, of course, but not enough to trouble Munian’s sleep. Perhaps they’ll even lull him into slumber like a gentle breeze over flowers and fallen leaves, in some otherworldly rhythm. Yes, that could happen.
Instead, silence. As if there’s nothing up there. Munian imagines his own bare feet on the floor upstairs. If only Mr. Jin would pad around barefoot like a cat. That will never happen, of course. He then imagines his feet walking across the ceiling, leaving footprints that glow silver, accumulating till they have turned the whole surface white. Still not a peep from Mr. Jin. Munian stretches his stiff neck and watches as moonlight pours through the window, splashing onto the ceiling. One of his roommates snores in the next room.
Maybe Mr. Jin isn’t home. Munian’s eyes twitch and he shuts them apprehensively. No need to count sheep tonight.
Then, a sudden nightmare: slippers stomping across the ceiling, over his forehead, his eyelids. Bak pak bak pak. Plastic, hard-soled, size 40 with a slight heel. Munian’s eyes pop open—he wasn’t actually asleep. The prima donnas are growing restive. Munian listens closely. Yup, that’s them. He lies there awhile with his eyes open, then with-out pausing to turn on the light he jumps out from his bed and heads up to the sixth floor, startling himself with how loud he knocks.
It takes forever for the door to open. The infamous Mr. Jin’s scrawny body is wedged into the gap, doorknob in his right hand, one paintbrush in his left, another clamped between his lips. Munian had heard that Mr. Jin is an oil painter. Quite a few people at the university think he’s a genius who may someday become a great master. Munian was prepared to face an artist, but Mr. Jin challenges his imagination. His hair is a tangle of long curls, a style that was fashionable for women years ago. He doesn’t look like any artist Munian’s ever seen on TV. Beneath the thicket is his face: smallish, thirty-something, beard trimmed to look like a Shaoxing Master’s. Baggy denim overalls smeared with a riot of colors—an impressionist masterpiece. He looks more like a house painter. Or stick a white hat on him and he’d fit right into a restaurant kitchen—those overalls might be a food-spattered apron.
“Who are you?” Mr. Jin removes the paintbrush from his mouth.
“Fifth floor.”
Mr. Jin pokes his head over the banister and looks down the stairwell. “Oh. What is it?” Weird voice, hard-to-place accent.
Munian glances at Mr. Jin’s slippers—plastic, as expected. “Pick up your foot.”
Confused, Mr. Jin does as he’s asked. His slippers are more respectable than the rest of him, hard-soled with a slight heel.
“Size 40?” asks Munian.
“Yes.” Mr. Jin transfers the paintbrush to his right hand, smearing red paint into his beard. “Is that what you came to ask?”
“Why aren’t you wearing the soft slippers?”
“Huh.” Mr. Jin bends down to pick up a pair of bed-room slippers. “Yours?”
The note is still attached: For you. Please wear them tonight.
“Why would I want these?” asks Mr. Jin.
“Why bring them inside if you didn’t want them?” says Munian, disappointed.
“They’d have gotten wet,” says Mr. Jin impatiently,
pointing at the water stain on the ceiling; the dilapidated building leaks when it rains. “Take them back. I need to work.” He shoves the slippers at Munian and shuts the security gate. “I never wear soft slippers. I find them uncomfortable, you know.” Before Munian can ask him just to try and keep it down, the door is shut.
It’s well past midnight. Munian heads back downstairs, slippers in hand. He’d bought them that morning and thought he was being clever asking the cobbler to glue fake fur to the soles. Both of his roommates’ snoring rises in pitch. In a rage, he flings a slipper at each of their doors. The rumbling continues unabated.
Both of his roommates’ snoring rises in pitch. In a rage, he flings a slipper at each of their doors. The rumbling continues unabated.
Even if he’s able to wake up on time tomorrow, he’ll be out of it. Might as well turn off his alarm. This after-noon, Professor Shen Jingbai warned him to take the next day’s hearing seriously, and he promised to have a word with General Services. The main thing is just to make sure Munian keeps his job. Munian sits on his bed and smokes in the dark. A couple of drags into his second cigarette, he feels a twinge in his gut and opens the window to toss the cigarette out. Cold air rushes into his open mouth. He shuts it and swallows the wind, feeling it transform his body. Light and transparent. As he lies down he mutters, “Fuck you!”
On the sixth floor, the slippers pace back and forth.
Bak pak, bak pak, bakpakbakpak.
The next morning, Munian wakes up to Wei Ming’s wife dry-heaving. It’s three minutes to nine; his meeting was at eight. He gets dressed quickly while Wei Ming’s wife continues retching, bringing up nothing but noise. That’ll be another trip to the clinic to get rid of it. Wei Ming says that not counting the ones they handled with pills, they’ve been to the clinic three times in the last two years. He seems smug about it. Years ago, during their college military drills, Wei Ming was anxious about his bad marksmanship—he consistently missed the target at every shooting competition. Well, he’s doing great now, thinks Munian, pulling on his shoes. Bullseye every time.
Because she’s bent over the bathroom sink giving it her all like the gym teacher she is, Munian skips washing up and just rinses his mouth with yesterday’s cold tea. Downstairs, he realizes he’s forgotten his bike key, so he jogs to the office. When he arrives, Deputy Director Zhang Wanfu looks exceedingly displeased, and each section head looks unhappier than the last.
“What time do you call this?” The deputy director taps his wrist, then realizes he isn’t wearing a watch.
“You’ve got some nerve, making the four of us wait for you!” His face is so rigid it looks stale, wearing one of yesterday’s leftover expressions. He failed to get a directorship during the last middle-management reshuffle and no longer remembers how to smile. His features are permanently unyielding.
Munian knows they just got here. The tea leaves in their cups haven’t even unfurled yet.
“This meeting is very important,” says Deputy Director Zhang. “It will decide whether you’ll be able to keep working in this department.”
“Okay,” says Munian.
“Tell us honestly: Are you a murderer?”
The same question he’s already answered more than twenty times. It’s starting to get tedious.
“No, I’m not.”
“You understand the importance of this question,” says the deputy director. “Let me put it this way: if you were anyone else, anyone at all, even a tenured professor, I’d have sent you packing long ago. We’re a university, we need everyone to be squeaky clean. Understood?”
“Understood.”
Section Head A says, “All right, so tell the truth. Did you kill him?”
“No.”
“Really?” says Section Head B. “Really.”
“Then why did you say you did?” asks Section Head C. “I was joking.”
“What kind of joke is that?” says Section Head D. “Think harder.”
“The police have already done the thinking for me.”
“So, you’re saying…” Deputy Director Zhang lights a cigarette and nudges Sun, his distracted secretary, who was supposed to be taking notes. “You never killed anyone?”
“Right.”
“Just tell us one more time. That night, you were crossing Water Gate Bridge, you wanted a cigarette, so you…” Zhang mimes strangling someone.
Munian feels a dull ache in his chest. He is having trouble breathing, and all the blood in his body rushes to his head. Nausea sweeps over him, his face might blow wide open. “I…I need to step out,” he says to his interrogators. Without waiting for a response, he runs to the bathroom and, not even checking if anyone is around, bends over the sink and retches. Like Wei Ming’s wife, nothing but sound emerges, yet he feels as if all his organs are pouring out of his mouth. He’s been at it for awhile when Sun comes in. “What’s going on, do you need to go to the hospital?”
Munian shakes his head.
Going through the motions? They don’t seem like they’ll stop until they get a murder confession from him.
“It’s fine. They know you didn’t kill anyone, they’re just going through the motions.”
Going through the motions? They don’t seem like they’ll stop until they get a murder confession from him. Munian retches again, snot and tears streaming down his face. He looks up at his chaotic reflection next to Sun’s, whose face is even cleaner than the mirror. They were roommates when they got to General Services four years ago, and now Sun’s a deputy section head with his own two-room apartment. Meanwhile, Munian is still a temp who gets interrogated three or four times a year at random intervals.
“Just relax. Come back in when you’re done throwing up, the brass might want another word.” Sun pats him on the shoulder again before leaving.
Clutching the sink with both hands, Munian stares at his face. How could it have gotten so filthy? He realizes his gums are bleeding and rinses his mouth, but it just brings up more blood. Finally, he gives up and just presses his lips together, choking down the gunk. He throws more water on his face and heads back to his room.
Wei Ming’s wife is still puking—it looks like she’ll be hogging the sink all morning. Her name is Zhong Xiaoling, and she’s really only Wei Ming’s girlfriend, but everyone calls her “Wei Ming’s wife.” She doesn’t seem to mind. She used to live in staff housing at her high school close by, but Wei Ming found that annoying because she had a roommate and he had to keep one eye open even if they were just kissing. So she moved in with him, since he’s lucky enough to have his own room with a door to shut out the world. They can do anything they like in there, eyes shut in bliss.
“Finished with work?” says Xiaoling, lifting her head from the sink.
“Yes.” More like work is finished with me, he thinks. He doesn’t want to explain so he goes into his room, but he’s only just lain down and lit a cigarette when she knocks. “Wei Ming called. He says an old classmate of yours is in town. He wants you to join them for dinner.” Her voice is feeble, the endless throwing up having exhausted her.
“Who?”
“Uh, something like Second Leg? Third Limb?”
Munian grunts. A few of his university classmates stayed in this small town and have a presence in virtually every decent department. In their university—more accurately, it’s just an unaccredited institute of higher learning—it’s only him and Wei Ming. Wei Ming went overseas for grad school and now teaches freshman comp to science majors while serving as the secretary of the Chinese Department’s Youth League. Meanwhile, Munian has been doing odd jobs around campus. It feels like everyone except his father and Professor Shen Jingbai assumes he’ll be a temp all his life, everyone including himself. Eight hundred a month for as long as he stays at this goddamned school. He stares at the piles of books on his shelf as he smokes, wondering if he should actually run away. He probably ought to—he left his bosses like diapers hanging out to dry, they won’t have taken kindly to that. He blows a puff of smoke at an annotated Songs of Chu, then stabs his cigarette through the pages.
What a refreshing pleasure to slowly burn through the book at twenty pages per second. It feels like the end of a march, his body lightening with each heavy object he puts down, coming back to life inch by inch, returning to himself. The cigarette scorches a black-rimmed hollow right through Songs of Chu, like a creature burrowing through a wall. He turns the pages, looking at the countless holes that make up the big hole, all the work of a single cigarette. What a sense of accomplishment, even more than for the two months he’d spent digesting the book’s contents. Hundreds of pages! Wait, how many exactly? He tries to check, but the cigarette has turned the page numbers to ash. He picks up the now number-less book and looks through the hole at the next book on the shelf, Bai Juyi’s Collected Works. The phone rings and, a moment later, Xiaoling calls his name.
“What’s wrong with you?” yells Sun on the phone. “The bosses are seriously pissed! But they decided to let you stay on. Come back to work this afternoon.” He hangs up.
Munian stands there with the receiver in his hand until he notices Xiaoling looking at him oddly. Oh right, he ought to hang up. No sooner has he done so than it rings again.
“Munian?” It’s Professor Shen. “Deputy Director Zhang called to say he didn’t like your attitude. How are you doing?”
“Okay.”
“Okay isn’t good enough. You need to study hard and work on having a good attitude. Loneliness, dishonor, humiliation—what do these matter? Did you finish the books I told you to? Good, I’ll give you more. Write up your reflections and send them to me in the next couple of days. It doesn’t matter that you’re just a temp. Wasn’t General Han Xin forced to crawl between the legs of a street thug? They made me cut grass and feed cattle during the Cultural Revolution, and I got through that, didn’t I? Do you think your problems are worse? At least at the university you can learn. Make sure you don’t lose your foreign languages. Get through this, earn your degree, apply for grad school—and no one’s going to care about your past.”
“They’re still hung up on that business.”
“So tell them you’re not a murderer.”
“I did. They keep asking.”
“What’d they say to that?”
“They just called—I can stay.”
“That’s all fine, then.”
__________________________________
