Zhuang mulled it over for a while and said, “I won’t sell it, but you can take it to make a drum, as long as you promise it will be hung over the north city gate even after the festival. It will be good enough for me if its sounds could remain in this city forever.”
Elated, Ruan asked if he could take the hide down right away, so Zhuang went over to give him a hand; to their surprise, it crashed down from the wall and wrapped itself around Zhuang, who had to struggle out of it. Ruan then rolled it up and got ready to leave.
“Are you really going to take it?” Zhuang asked.
“I really am. Hate to part with it?”
“At least leave me the tail.”
Ruan went to the kitchen for a knife. He lopped off the tail, then walked out with the hide over his shoulder to hail a taxi.
Zhuang had not anticipated giving away the hide, something that made him unhappy. When the shop owner delivered his noodles over the next few days, they didn’t taste as good as they had before. “Why do the noodles seem to lack flavor? In the past I’d be drooling as I waited for you to deliver them.” The woman just smiled. “Does that mean I’m unhappy with what I’m eating?” he asked.
“I’m going to be frank with you, but you can’t tell anyone else. If you do, they’d shut me down. I’d suffer and you’d go hungry. In the past the noodles tasted so good because there were opium poppy pods in the soup.”
“Poppy pods! No wonder it was so fragrant. But how could you do something like that for money?”
“Now I regret telling you. Of course we shouldn’t do that, but it’s not the same as smoking opium. It makes you just addicted enough that you’ll return to our diner. It can’t hurt you. Do you prefer it that way? I was worried you might find out, so I didn’t use the soup the past few days.”
“Well, I guess I’ll have it the old way.”
As he requested, she brought him the delicious noodles that afternoon.
If she hadn’t told him, he would have thought only that she made delicious noodle soup. But now that he knew about the poppy pods, he had the sensation of smoking opium after finishing the soup, which gave him a buzz as he lay in bed. The sensation intensified over time, and he often had trouble distinguishing between reality and illusion. One night, after watching television for a while, he felt that he was walking into the TV as the characters on the screen came out to bring him in. He went deeper and deeper into the set until he saw tiny openings on the sides. One of the openings had a sign for “spirit writing.” He opened the door and walked in; four people were using planchettes to write in sand. He laughed at their superstitious practice and began cursing all the health products that were so popular in Xijing, complaining that everyone was obsessed with their health, which was why there were products such as magic head covers, magic stomachers, even magic shoe inserts. Now a turnip was no longer just a turnip, but a health product that warmed the stomach and increased virility. And bok choy? It wasn’t just cabbage; it was a nutritious health food that nourished the yin and supplemented the qi. Vegetable market vendors even put on white smocks and caps with a red cross. Hearing his fulminations, the four men told him to shut up, adding that what they were doing provided accurate predictions. So Zhuang said he would offer a word for the deity to interpret. When he wrote the character for vagina, he did not expect to see a poem appear in the sand, a sight that made him cry out in shock and that brought him out of his reverie. His eyes snapped open. The same gangster drama was playing on TV, which told him he had been dreaming. But he had never been able to remember his dreams in the past, yet now he actually recalled the poem: Standing it’s a monk with palms together / sitting it’s a lotus with blooming petals / stop the horseplay / it’s where you came from.
Filled with confusion and questions, he could not get the poem out of his mind all that night. Then he began reliving his relationship with Tang Wan’er, followed by a trancelike trip to Shuangren fu to see Niu Yueqing. She wasn’t there, and her mother stopped him at the gate. “Why haven’t you been to see me for so long? Your uncle was mad at you, so I had to lie and tell him you were off writing somewhere. But what have you been doing? Can’t you even find time to stop by? Has Zhou Min’s woman come back yet? I tied a rope around her clothes and shoes and hung them down the well to make sure she’d return. Have you done the same thing?”
“Zhou Min’s woman? Who’s that?”
“Have you forgotten her? I just saw her yesterday. She was crying in a room; she couldn’t move because her legs were bent. I asked her what happened, and she showed me. My god! Her privates were a bloody mess under a lock. I asked her why. Didn’t she need to pee? She said it didn’t affect her peeing, but it had gotten rusty from the urine, and she couldn’t open it. I asked her to give me the key and I’d open it for her. She said Zhuang Zhidie has the key. Since you have the key, why don’t you open it for her?”
“What crazy talk is this, Mother?”
“I didn’t say anything crazy. I did see Tang Wan’er. Go ask your father-in-law. He was there, and I had to push him aside. I said to him, ‘What are you looking at? You can’t see this.’”
Zhuang woke up drenched in sweat. He didn’t dare fall asleep again, so he drank some coffee and sat up till dawn. He then went to see Meng Yunfang, hoping to tell him about his dream, to see if he could make sense of it. But Meng wasn’t in, while his wife was home crying her heart out. When he asked her why, she told him that Meng had left for Xinjiang with his son and his son’s master. With her face wet from crying, she added that Meng Jin’s master had said that the boy was highly intelligent and would grow up to be an extraordinary man. Yunfang’s doubts were allayed when Meng Jin could recite the “Diamond Sutra” from memory after six months of reading, and he believed that his son might indeed become something special. So he was determined to make the boy meditate, recite sutras, practice qigong, and study Buddha’s Dharma Eye, while lamenting that he had nothing to show for half a lifetime of dedication; he figured he must have been sent by heaven simply to wait on and enlighten Meng Jin, which led him to give up his own studies. He had not planned to go to Xinjiang, not until the mayor, who complained that the revised text seemed worse than the original, had called him. Had Zhuang Zhidie really lost his ability to write? Meng understood why Zhuang had sent the revised article directly to the mayor, so he echoed the mayor’s speculation and said Zhuang was indeed a has-been. Then the mayor ordered him to write the articles himself. He complained about it when he got home, but he had no choice other than to copy the original and send it back to the mayor, which convinced him to go to Xinjiang. Xia Jie opposed the trip, and they ended up fighting, but Meng left anyway.
After telling Zhuang about Meng’s trip, she continued to moan about what she’d gone through at home, grumbling that she couldn’t live with Meng anymore; in her view, he was someone who needed an idol, and that had turned out to be his own son. How could she live with a man like that? Zhuang waited silently for her to finish, then got up to walk out. When Xia Jie, who had begun to cry again, saw that he was nearly out the door, she came after him with a note, saying it was from Meng. There was nothing on it but a line of six digits. “Is this an incantation he wanted me to recite to avert calamities and prevent troubles?” Zhuang asked. She replied that Meng had said it was a phone number, of someone who had asked about Zhuang’s situation, but he did not say who it was. He said only to give it to Zhuang, who would understand. Zhuang took the note, but he did not recognize the number. If it was a friend, there was no need to ask Meng. He shrugged, tucked the note into his pocket, and walked off mournfully, his head down.