After class, he walked side by side with her along the tree-lined avenue that offered no shade, listening to the crunch of her blue boots in the snow. The two lines of winter poplars listened in silence to their heartfelt conversation.
“You lecture quite well, but I didn’t really understand.”
“You’re not in this major, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Do you often sit in on classes in other majors?”
“Only the past few days. I’ll go into a lecture hall at random and sit for a while. I just graduated and will be leaving soon. I suddenly realized that it’s great here, and I’m afraid of the outside….”
Over the next three or four days, he spent the majority of his time with her, although to others, it looked as if he was spending most of his time alone, strolling on his own. It was quite easy to explain to Bai Rong: He was thinking about her birthday gift. And indeed, this was no lie.
On New Year’s Eve, he bought a bottle of red wine, which he had never drunk before, returned to his dorm room, shut off the light, and lit some candles on the table next to the sofa. When all three candles were burning, she sat down wordlessly next to him.
“Oh, look,” she exclaimed, pointing at the wine bottle with childlike excitement.
“What?”
“Look at it from here, where the candles shine through. The wine is lovely.”
Shining through the wine, the candlelight was a deep, crystalline red, the stuff of dreams.
“Like a dead sun,” he said.
“Don’t think like that,” she said, with a sincerity that melted his heart. “I think it’s like… the eyes of twilight.”
“Why not the eyes of dawn?”
“I like twilight better.”
“Why?”
“When twilight fades, you can see the stars. When dawn fades, all that’s left is…”
“All that’s left is the harsh light of reality.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
They spoke about everything, sharing a common language in even the most trivial of things, until the bottle that had contained the eyes of twilight had been emptied into his stomach.
He lay drowsily in bed and watched the candles still burning on the table. She had vanished from the candlelight, but he was not worried. So long as he was willing, she could reappear at any time.
Then there was a knock on the door. He knew the knock came from reality and had nothing to do with her, so he ignored it. The door opened and Bai Rong entered. When she turned on the light it was like switching on the gray of reality. She glanced at the table with the candles, then sat down at the head of his bed and sighed lightly. “It’s still okay.”
“What is?” He used a hand to block the harsh light.
“You haven’t gotten to the point of leaving a glass for her, too.”
He covered his eyes but said nothing. She pulled away his hands, and then, looking straight at him, asked, “She’s alive, isn’t she?”
He nodded and sat up. “Rong, I used to think that a character in a novel was controlled by her creator, that she would be whatever the author wanted her to be, and do whatever the author wanted her to do, like God does for us.”
“Wrong!” she said, standing up and beginning to pace the room. “Now you realize you were wrong. This is the difference between an ordinary scribe and a literary writer. The highest level of literary creation is when the characters in a novel possess life in the mind of the writer. The writer is unable to control them, and might not even be able to predict the next action they will take. We can only follow them in wonder to observe and record the minute details of their lives like a voyeur. That’s how a classic is made.”
“So literature, it turns out, is a perverted endeavor.”
“It was like that for Shakespeare and Balzac and Tolstoy, at least. The classic images they created were born from their mental wombs. But today’s practitioners of literature have lost that creativity. Their minds give birth only to shattered fragments and freaks, whose brief lives are nothing but cryptic spasms devoid of reason. Then they sweep up these fragments into a bag they peddle under the label ‘postmodern’ or ‘deconstructionist’ or ‘symbolism’ or ‘irrational.’”
“So you mean that I’ve become a writer of classic literature?”
“Hardly. Your mind is only gestating an image, and it’s the easiest one of all. The minds of those classic authors gave birth to hundreds and thousands of figures. They formed the picture of an era, and that’s something that only a superhuman can accomplish. But what you’ve done isn’t easy. I didn’t think you’d be able to do it.”
“Have you ever done it?”
“Just once,” she said simply, and dropped the subject. She grabbed his neck, and said, “Forget it. I don’t want that birthday present anymore. Come back to a normal life, okay?”
“And if all this continues—what then?”
She studied him for a few seconds, then let go of him and shook her head with a smile. “I knew it was too late.” Picking up her bag from the bed, she left.
Then he heard people outside counting down, four, three, two, one. From the classroom building, which until then had been resounding with music, came peals of laughter. On the athletic field people lit fireworks. Looking at his watch, he saw that the final second of that year had just passed.
“It’s a holiday tomorrow. Where should we go?” he asked. He lay on the bed, but knew his character had already appeared beside the nonexistent fireplace.
“You’re not taking her?” she asked in all innocence, pointing toward the still-open door.
“No. Just the two of us. Where would you like to go?”
She drank in the dancing flames in the fireplace and said, “It’s not important where we go. I think it’s a wonderful feeling just being on a journey.”
“Then we’ll set out and see where we end up?”
“Excellent.”
The next morning, he drove his Accord off campus and headed west, a direction he chose purely because it avoided the headaches of having to traverse the entire city. He felt for the first time the wonderful freedom of traveling with no destination in mind. As the buildings outside slowly thinned out and fields began to appear, he cracked his window to let the cold winter air in. He sensed her long hair catching the wind, and strands of it blew over to tickle his right temple.
“Look, mountains.” She pointed off in the distance.
“Visibility is good today. Those are the Taihang Mountains. They run parallel to this road, and then bend around to form a block in the west, where the road goes into them. I’d say that right now we’re—”
“No, no. Don’t say where we are! Once we know where we are, then the world becomes as narrow as a map. When we don’t know, the world feels unlimited.”
“Okay. Then let’s do our best to get lost.” He turned onto an emptier road, and before they had gone very far, turned a second time. On both sides of them were now endless fields where the snow had not yet melted completely, the snowy patches and snow-free ground roughly equal. No green anywhere, although the sunlight was brilliant.
“A classic northern scene,” he said.
“This is the first time I’ve ever felt that land without the slightest bit of green could be beautiful.”
“The green is buried in the fields and is waiting for springtime. The winter wheat will sprout while it’s still very cold, then this will be a sea of green. Imagine, all this expanse…”