Snow

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For years nothing has happened, and there is this tugging at his heart, gnawing like mite, making him remotely wistful for any possible difference.

She regretted it the moment the gravity started to drag her down. But the process was so much faster than she had estimated, and before she could taste the twirling flakes she heard the flop and was on the ground, perfectly supine, just as she had calculated. According to her research this was the fastest way and most definite, for the direct concussion would smack open the parietal and bestow on her the promptest doom, almost as easy as a shot. It was also the best blend of ferocity and beauty: a posture that would not mash her countenance too completely. Then something went wrong. It took so long, the hiatus after the landing, that she doubted if the haemorrhage would ever really come. She was afraid that it would not; all plans she schemed had always been successful and she was afraid to bungle on this one. It took so long that she saw prongs of people gathering, most of them terrified, some of them disgusted; either way they swarmed to the periphery of her little scarlet puddle, bustling like a seething vessel of ants, reminding her of being in the spacious bedroom with her father at one of the summer nights with the ceiling light so dazzling white that the darkness trimming the door was veiled in a nacreous film. The air-conditioner was on, its coolness licked at her back. Her father, at the time, was telling her how people who caught rabies would feel millions of ants trailing on their torsos, and then into their bones. She was still thinking of the itch that sometimes crawled on her back when she was alone and poising very still as he proceeded to other symptoms, and thought maybe she had been bitten by a dog when neither of them was aware – in a dream maybe, for sometimes a dream could feel excruciatingly real – then she felt it again, a belt of chafing beads on her spine, climbing upward onto the nape of her neck, and together with it, cods of goosebumps sprawled out on her forearms; the door pattered behind her and she turned, frightened, to see if anyone – a thief or worse, a murderer – was breaking in.

Now she lay there bleeding, feeling the liquid of her life seeping into the carpet of powdery snow, then blended gradually with it, producing a slight friction that numbed her scapulas. As her vision started finally to blur she conjectured vaguely what would her father react when seeing her. This time it was not to be explained by a push of wind, though the door – the lid of her casket – would clap close anyway, and after that the wind would cease for her, too, eternally. But still she had some time to picture his face; there was a lot of things that he did not know, one of them the fact that she had had the risk of getting rabies, when the cat of her mother’s student’s scratched her as she cuddled it. Tacitly they forged an ally, hiding from him everything that would jar on his fragile nerves and trigger unwanted harangues, though the first thing that had occurred to her mother was to phone him, and though for the first time he did not pick the phone up in time.

In this daze she wondered what he would look like, and what he would do.

And she regretted it.

People are swimming past him in the liquidly gelid air, their hands gloved or reddened, occupied by bulgy plastic bags. Black ones, mostly, throbbing and clattering with shrimps and fish that care to struggle a bit. It is sad, he thinks, that most of them would not be alive to see the new year, despite, what is the point for them to see a new year? After all they can do nothing but wait, in hectic, muddy pools or clamorous marketplaces – and in either case they are exhibits, studied and compared, only in different museums – waiting for an easy demise or a tougher one. In the end they will freeze slowly in fridges, or stop their wriggle on chopping slates, though some of them might die before the buyers reach home, which will be very annoying.

His biceps are sore from the weight of his bags, and the fronts of his thighs from the climb upstairs. They should be. Five more taxing months and he will not be pestered by the youths bubbling with puerile questions. His account in the Disease Control system will be written off, and the endless queue of sample cards will stop stinging his eyes. And the steps were irregular, their heights jagged. He imagines the caking of the cement, picturing in his mind a lethargic cementer pacing down, jiggling his wrists to pour out the compound. Then he finds the face tagged on the puny stem of a neck his own, stubby and gaunt, with two bags of livid under the eyes and occupy two bigger shades.

Slathering the suds on his palms his mind wanders. A melody sluices down from one of the taps in his mind and flows out from his mouth. He lets it out, and brings on the volume. Before he could finish the song, a fish bone pricks him when he is scraping off the scales, leaving on his fingertip a pinpoint, bloody and warm. He clucks, thrusting the stabbed finger into the spate of water that is let out with a tilt too testy, thus the splashes explode onto the chest of his jacket, dying it with dark patches. The iodine, when applied and dried, yellows his nails. Still, he has to rinse the spinaches. As the washing begins, the skin on the backs of both hands struts taut, as if crusting over by a cold, hard, strained shell.

He looks out to the ridges as the mushrooms frizzle in the pan. The hidden speck of bucolic enclave behind this refurbished building in the city centre, weeded over by shaggy reeds, is lounging insouciantly under the greyish sky, beneath the feathers of clouds that indicate snow. It can also be told from the damp, frigid aroma oozing through the kitchen window that there is a sleet brewing. He sniffs from the coldness and waggles his frozen legs. Instinctually he keys to such weather broken bars of piano suites. He has always felt that all music composed for piano is written for it, their notes jingle like globules of snow, only, as blizzards are different from sleets their emotions differ, and the tempo, the rhythm, etcetera. Years ago he has held a concert for his daughter, on which she played rather badly. But when they drove her piano teacher home the lady remarked – it was at the roundabout, he recalls, where hot waves of summery wind gushed in whoops as the Buick swerved, so he remembers also asking politely, though his voice perhaps abrupt and loud: ‘sorry?’ – that his daughter’s hands were ideal for playing, and that was thanks to him. His hands became suddenly sweaty and slippery on the steering wheel when the wind-scattered meaning of those words was pieced together by this confirmation, and he repaid the credit clumsily, somehow strangling the conversation.

A warm foulness whacks out as he rams open the door of his mother’s bedroom. He has crammed into the chink of it a chunk of paper, so that the friction between the two will function better than the bolt in preventing his mother from opening the door. It is weird, but she could almost always find a key to unlock the latter.

Having lost a father and a daughter she is the only one he has got. His ex-wife he has hardly set mind to for years. Shutting his mother in the chamber is not any dark family secret. For too many times his blind old lady has groped out, trying to help with the chores, while every time he, jaded from work, came home piqued by the rag folded in the pot he had swilled out just in the morning. Sometimes worse. Sometimes she lay cramped in bed and would not be called out for dinner. Checking upon her on such occasions he would find bruises or gashes – souvenirs from slips in the bathroom mopped too wet by herself.

He checks the spittoons first and finds it a good day. No sloppy excrements. Thanks, mom. He tugs on the light, and sees the clump of silver hair sticking out from the arc between the dented pillow and the calico eiderdown. He hauls the quilt from her; the skinny body in striped pajamas exposed, making her head – straggly from tangled knots of hair – disproportionately mammoth.

Up, up, my dearest lady, up with you and I’ll guide you to the dinner table.

She is waltzed to the bathroom. His eyes shifts from the two wilted, riled hollows under his mother’s sparse eyebrows to the soap shelf, as water flows out from the rubber pipe, snaking its way into the steel basin, and takes on a coloration of quicksilver there. She has to be dragged to the tableful of cooling dishes, for her bony claws cling agglutinated to the part of the wall where the white and green paints converge. He does not blame her – since timidity is one of blindness’s natural retinue, but is irked anyway by this gawky tardiness. Having her fingers parted with the wall, he sits her down and thrusts into her right hand a pair of chopsticks. How is it, mother, he asks, his banded finger pointing to the bowl in front of her, when the futility of this gesture dawns, as she cannot see it. At times he forgets. At times he forgets also that they would never have much to exchange even if her sight was not lost.

Sitting disconcertedly before the laptop he concedes to himself that nothing can be done to buoy his spirit, and that a programme like the Spring Festival Gala means something after all. At least it stuffs up one of the moments of blankness that singles him out from other, fortunate people. But the television is in the other bedroom with his mother, so the only thing to do is to tuck up the cold quilt that evokes to him the feeling of scooping up his daughter’s body, ignore the proddings of sorrow, and sleep.

He cannot tell whether it is the chill that slaps at his shoulders or it is his somniloquy following the bucking that wakes him. The night blackens his room, but swatches of amber streetlight are travelling languidly past the pastel curtains. Like a bearish moth he is attracted by them.

No wonder the quietude is so intense. He stands reflectively at the balcony window; for it has started to snow. Under the haze of the arching street lamps, flakes of snow are parachuting down like dark plumes. For a dense moment no vehicle passes, and the stillness begins to drone and throb in his ears. The image of the motorcycle that crushed into his father now scythes its way into the lobes of his brain, and the honking of its engine rings in his head like an alarm. Flecks of snow had grizzled his father’s hair.

He thought the man was as lonesome and miserable as himself thus granted the delay of compensations. But he was wrong. The man had only gone to the hospital once, with his sing-song wife who employed her crispy voice and lumpy abdomen so tactfully in the hassle that many patients bobbed their heads accusingly from distant doors down the corridor, and glared at him as if he was the imputable.

He tosses his head to forget.

He looks out. The edifices have been erected and are now standing in the depths of night like lost giraffes. The crane being retracted, the glaring white tentacles of lights on it lost, the buildings look sandy and ropy, their black windows stare back at him with a dourness that bites. He wonders if the wreckers have contributed to their newness and hollowness, and wonders how old their kid might be.

Then as if an avalanche is crushing on him, he is wrenched by the phantoms of the dead; they creep up from the back of his heart and clop at it relentlessly. Since his fifties nothing has happened. How can there be nothing? How can a person live in this stalemate? Why demanding him to hang on – and indeed is there really anything or anyone commanding him to – when there is nothing to do except for eking out the days, hours, minutes, seconds, and what else? What else?

Too late he takes out the violin. His daughter used to peck at him, urging him to pick this hobby up again. Her words were like milk and soaked him like submerging a bread crumb, but in the end the reply was always that he had not played for years, and that he was not a good hand at the first place.

Scents of rosin lap at him once the lid is removed. He lifts the bow and raises the fiddle to his face, staring at it as though looking into a mirror. There are fingerprints that he has never noticed before, etching on the sleek taffy surface of the instrument in white whorls. Out of the blue he perches on the one piece of memory where his father experienced a short steady phase after the accident, and he drove him to see his daughter playing on a school performance. The old man was especially pale among the rosy visages of the youths, and his reticence akin to staid criticism. But he prompted him when his daughter walked to them, patted him on his shoulders to activate him. Then his father smiled and rocked, singing out from his otherwise puckered lips, Good, good.

But the instrument conjures up nothing more than this faint flicker of warmth, and swiftly it evaporates. He slides it back into the case, then the case into the cabinet.

Outside, the snow begins to accrete. Once more he paces to the balcony and stands there, feeling the cold, cocking his head to listen to the peaceful silence from the adjacent window, behind which his mother dwells, tranquil and safe. Tomorrow he will take with him the candles left from last time’s visit, and buy some marigolds, artificial or real. Tomorrow he will visit them, wiping from their stones the wintry grimness, best as he can.

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