Short Stories
vol.5Casting Out（1/4）
The curtains on the hotel windows were made with a rubber-like cloth to keep out the sun, but they were too short and the gap between them and the windowsill let in a large chunk of the sky.
The first thing I always saw was the purple-colored light. A great number of skyscrapers stabbed up into the night air, and the spaces between them shone like blue-white bands, while the sky over the buildings was a dark purple that absorbed both color and light. Even the yellow afternoon smog was sucked up into the dark sky as night fell.
I could see that one of the buildings on my right was the Xinxing Fandian Restaurant, but I couldn’t read the names on any of the others farther away. They were all as bright and cheery as sugar confections. The tallest ones were the same uniformly white color, almost like a carefully lit stage set. You couldn’t imagine real, live people on each and every floor of the buildings. Rather you got the feeling you could knock them over with your finger. Some were pointed at the top, but most were squared off. This was an area that wasn’t prone to earthquakes, so skyscrapers were free to stretch upwards as high as they liked.
I looked directly in front of me. The lower half of my field of vision was dark, blocked by a long, low three-story apartment building built in the shikumen style. The window frame hid the left-hand side of it. At night, the building was no more than a black lump with the orangish light from the occasional opened window dimly penetrating the darkness.
There were both old and new shikumen in Shanghai. Some dated back to the Qing dynasty, but most were apartment blocks built in the 1930s and 40s before the Revolution. I wasn’t sure how old the building in front of me was. The roof was heavy, covered with as many chimneys as there were households. There were almost no young people left; the inhabitants, I had been told, were mostly elderly.
My room in the hotel was on the fourth floor, so the roof of the shikumen was just about at eye level. The view over the straight line of the roof revealed the white lights of buildings far off, but the lower half was too dark to even see the ground. If I had been in a skyscraper, I’d probably have an unimpaired view of the lights of Shanghai at night and the shikumen wouldn’t be taking up half of it.
I was staying in an old hotel. The main entrance and the guest rooms were designed in the American style. Only the tower, called the Grosvenor Tower, was new. It was just fifteen floors high, though, and despite its name, it in no way stood out on the Shanghai skyline.
I saw an old man standing in a room on the third floor of the shikumen, meaning he was right across from me. His room was dimly lit, and with the light behind him, I couldn’t make out his face.
I let go of the curtain and it closed. Shanghai disappeared from sight, as did the old man. I decided that I should leave the curtains closed; just not look anymore.
I filled the bath with hot water and stretched out in the tub. I had seen that same silhouette in the building across from me three nights in a row. At first I thought it was a mannequin until I saw the face move. My vantage point put me slightly higher than him, so I couldn’t be sure, but he seemed tall. Since I had heard that the inhabitants were mainly elderly, I had decided that he must be an old man, but now that I thought of it, he could have been someone younger, maybe middle-aged. The rise of his shoulders looked as sinewy as the roots of a tree. The image of the outline of his upper body followed me into the bath, and stuck to one side of my eye, so I shut my eye to get rid of it. Then I breathed out the sigh that had built up inside, and there he was again.
From the shape of his head, I imagined he must be about seventy. No, younger. Maybe fifty. But then he wouldn’t be an old man.
The image of the old man turned younger before my eyes; now he was a man in his prime.
I quickly turned that off. The outline of the man disappeared, and now I was looking at the water in the aquarium next to him, which remained brightly green. There must have been a fluorescent light to make it shine as if the algae itself were dancing. Inside the tank was a large goldfish. It had flecks of red. And it looked as large as my hand, although I found it hard to believe such a goldfish existed. It must have grown as I opened and closed my eyes. Was there just the one? I’d heard that in Shanghai, goldfish were good luck and would make you rich. In my head, the goldfish began to move more slowly, until it relaxed and was gradually covered in vermilion. I was suddenly sleepy.