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The Fire’s Wish
He left behind a cookie tin and a note, then went back to England.
On the afternoon of January 1, Chuan 川 was swelling inside my belly. I lay in bed sweating and did not get up to see him off. He kissed my belly and said, see you next time. We had long since trained ourselves in clean, neat goodbyes.
After nightfall, I got up to check on the dog who shared his name. He did not leap toward me. He paced back and forth by the door. Every now and then, he bent down, pressed his nose to the crack beneath the door, and sniffed at the smell outside. I had never seen him like this before. I asked, Leo, what’s wrong? He threw himself down with force and kept scratching at the door. Then he suddenly stopped, listening for movement outside. When there was no response, he went back to pacing, stopping, lying down, stopping, scratching, stopping. Repetition is prayer: a refusal to give up summoning and waiting.
His wish fell through. He walked to the corner farthest from the door, collapsed limply, and buried his head in the dark. Though I was close to giving birth, I held him in my arms. Leo, don’t cry. Leo will come back soon. I sent him a message. He replied with a pile of crying-face emojis, and one fuck.
No one can come to know him and retreat unscathed. To be tamed by love is to risk tears.
That day, he crawled on all fours, running and barking, wrestling with the dog all morning. Neither would give in. They grew so tired that they lay down and nestled against each other. The dog licked him, and he screamed, “Damn it! So sticky! If you didn’t have fur, I’d bite you to death!” He arched his back and grabbed the dog’s tail. The dog bit him, and he burst out laughing, crawled to the corner, then charged at him again, waging a tender war. He was always like this, losing his original form in an instant. As if having no original form meant continually encountering and mimicking, fluidly becoming a new creature. When asked what he looked forward to every day, he said: I look forward to all beings watering me with Their lives.
And however he transformed, he remained full of adhesiveness. Everything he encountered stuck to him and would not let go. Like my dog and me. I picked up the note, turned it over several times, and finally understood that those unrelated three dots and three strokes had formed the character zhou 州. I opened the cookie tin and thought of the night before, when we rewatched The Consequences of Love. The man withdrew his lingering gaze, lowered his head, and wrote: “Never underestimate the consequences of love.” By the time the film ended, it was already the new year. From his backpack, he took out a rusted cookie tin.
It was the tin from my engagement cookies. He had eaten them all, and put the whole ten years of us inside. I picked up my camera. He said, no, you can’t, you’ll steal their souls. I put the camera down and, together with him, reread the history of taming: torn-out pages from books, exhibition flyers we had seen, blessings and confessions written on all kinds of paper, feathered leaves from Dulan Mountain and fallen sugar apples, a line from a Shuntaro Tanikawa poem stitched in Turkish blue thread through peacock-blue cloth, the tissues with which we sat facing each other and wiped our tears every time we parted…
Those tissues had clotted into lumps. When I loosened them and opened them up, there was nothing inside. Like the purple dress I wore as I sat on a high chair, its skirt trailing to the floor. Filled with emptiness, like my engagement ceremony. My lover and I had agreed: in this life, we would lie together only twice. Engagement and marriage. We checked each other’s faces. Good. The masks were properly in place. And he stood in the corner, watching everyone rush to take photos with the masks. At the last moment, everyone called him forward to take a photo with Teacher. He came to stand beside me and said softly, “Your dad is here.” From his backpack, he took out a ceramic doll.
My tears instantly pierced the mask. Everyone fell silent and panicked, thinking this child was ill, unable to leave the doll behind. I cried harder and harder, and through my ruined makeup, I joyfully recognized myself. The night before, he had found in my house a palm-sized ceramic doll: a faded, dust-covered bride and groom. He asked, if your dad were still here, would he walk you down the aisle? His flame burned out a wish. He found a body for my father.
After my father died, all the bright red Spring Festival couplets were torn down. Only the rice vat in the kitchen corner still bore the character man 滿, “full,” written by my father’s hand. When the rice grew worms, even that upside-down fullness could not get what it wished for. When we met, it happened that one of us was so empty as to be full, and the other so full as to be empty. He was not afraid of disappearing, so he kept pouring himself out. He searched through trash cans in the park and ate leftover food. After my wedding banquet ended, he walked toward every empty table and ate all the leftovers. His mouth glossy with oil, he said, “I’m so full I could puke. Help me eat. We can’t let them flow into the sea. The fish will die.”
He voyaged over land, letting his sea flood over my head. For the wedding gown he made me by hand, he stitched fine white threads over the entire white skirt, like schools of black fish swimming through a lightless, dark sea. I asked, why make something invisible? He shrugged. His fish had swum to the far side of the sea. His mother walked into the room and said she had made an appointment. I asked, what happened? He said, nothing. His mother said, he sews all day long; I’m afraid he’ll become nearsighted. He snapped at his mother, why did you tell her?
On the morning he was supposed to come and receive the bride, I waited in the hotel for the wedding gown he had stayed up all night trying to finish. He called and said, I’m sorry, I fell asleep. What should I do if it’s not finished? I said, it’s fine, I’ll wear anything. After I hung up, my mother asked, why aren’t you angry? I shrugged. Nothing was more important than him.
What was important, he had left for Chuan. I put the note into the cookie tin and decided not to tell him that he had written 川 as 州. Rivers and land can both water life. None of that mattered. He recognized only a few characters, but it did not matter in the slightest. He lived at the source of words, in the primal state where things were still indistinct and whole.
Late at night, he sent a message, saying he wanted to come back to Taiwan to see little Chuan: “I want to board his boat and let him take me anywhere. Home is memory, the people and the environment around you. Although I haven’t met him yet, I know he is already home.” What cannot be seen has already entered the sea. If the past had meaning, it was because it had not died completely enough. Love ignites too easily; let everything catch fire.