《Be someone people like.》艮下

4、Chapter Four – Star-Stitched Paper and a Fifty-Inch Moon

　　On the thirtieth day of the twelfth lunar month, beneath a sky the color of oxidized pewter, Wei Laoban—proprietor of the town’s only reclamation yard—was aligning the first of two scarlet duilian scrolls when a dull, hollow thud lodged itself against the corrugated-iron gate.

　　The impact was too soft for a delivery, too deliberate for wind. It carried the acoustics of ritual.

　　He turned, brush still dripping cinnabar, and saw the boy.

　　Tie Dan—“Iron Egg,” a name that had outgrown every statute of irony—was kneeling in snow that had already begun to crystallize into a crust of minute knives.

　　Above his head, extended like a supplicant’s shield, he held a rectangle of pasteboard warped by frost and adolescent sweat. A pair of child’s underpants—faded orchid, printed with an indigo five-pointed star—had been appliquéd to the center with surgical red thread. The stitching was so dense that the cotton beneath looked almost embroidered rather than merely patched.

　　The star itself had the pallor of a campaign ribbon left too long in a widow’s drawer.

　　Tie Dan’s forehead was pressed into the snow, forming a small, devotional crater.

　　“Uncle Wei,” he said, the words muffled by ice, “I have come to vend the family treasure.”

　　Wei Laoban wiped his hands on the flank of his padded coat, leaving two vermilion handprints like stigmata. He lifted the cardboard to the anemic winter light.

　　The五角星—its outline locked by vermilion filament—quivered like a medal that had forgotten its own citation.

　　For a duration measurable only in exhalations, Wei studied the artifact, watching the way the star’s depleted pigment seemed to absorb and then repel the day’s last photons.

　　Finally, half to himself, he muttered a single epithet—“Neuropath”—yet pivoted toward the tin-roofed kiosk that served as both office and confessional.

　　From the lowest drawer, beneath ledgers recording the weights of copper lament and aluminum regret, he extracted a chip-cardswaddled in a rubber band the color of arterial blood.

　　“Five thousand even,” he said. “My daughter’s lumbar-fund. Take it before I develop a conscience.”

　　Tie Dan neither lifted his gaze nor extended his palm.

　　“I require fifty inches,” he replied, the syntax formal, as though reciting from a lost classic.

　　Wei’s eyebrows executed a brief, incredious pas de deux.

　　“Fifty inches of what—apology? snow? the sky?”

　　“Television,” the boy answered. “Measured diagonally. Wider than Mother’s burial quilt. She instructed that capital be husbanded, but I fear her patience is amortizing faster than grief.”

　　Wei’s gaze traveled from the boy’s frostbitten auricles to the cardboard constellation in his mittened hand.

　　Three seconds—perhaps four—elapsed, the interval necessary for a middle-aged man to audit the ledger of his own impending decay.

　　Then Wei pressed the card into the pocket of Tie Dan’s jacket, a garment originally cut for a larger, hypothetical child.

　　“Purchase the contraption,” he said. “By tomorrow’s cock-crow return five thousand and one yuan— the extra coin accruing as interest, usury being the last dignified religion.”

　　Tie Dan touched his crown to the ice once more, a gesture so archaic it seemed transliterated from a forgotten dynastic code.

　　When he rose, the snow released him with a reluctant sigh. He ran.

　　Behind him, the footprints resembled a line of ellipses typed by a drunken scribe—each dot a syllable of unuttered thanks.

　　Wei watched until the final parenthesis of heel and toe vanished beyond the turnip fields.

　　Only then did he return to the gate, aligning the upper scroll so that its final character—痴, the radical for sickness nested inside the radical for knowledge—shivered in the wind like a diagnosis no one wished to deliver.

　　He left the lower scroll unhung; the horizontal tablet he tacked askew, its three characters—星星知—asserting that astral bodies, not men, would arbitrate the accounting of lunacy.

　　…

　　At eleven fifty-nine on the eve of the new year, the entire village—infant, crone, dog, and the ancestral photographs watching from soot-darkened walls—heard a sound that was not firecracker, not thunder, not the lament of displaced air as the past cedes to future.

　　It was the arpeggiated chime of a liquid-crystal deity awakening: a fifty-inch screen tasting electricity for the first time.

　　Tie Dan had lashed the television to a hand-cart whose wooden ribs squealed like a Confucian hinge.

　　From the township’s solitary electronics boutique he had dragged the apparatus seven-and-twenty li across rutted snow that now bore two longitudinal scars—sutures attempting, and failing, to sew the epidermis of the earth back over its own memory.

　　He parked the monolith before the convex tumulus that had become his mother’s only doorway.

　　A power-bank—its plastic shell printed with a cartoon sun—was coupled to the screen via a USB umbilicus.

　　The display flickered, coughed, then resolved into a prerecorded tableau:

　　There stood Tie Dan himself, wearing his mother’s bifurcated rose trousers, the waist cinched with sisal so that the fabric ballooned like a pair of over-inflated lotus petals.

　　He bowed to the lens with the gravity of a mandarin approaching the imperial presence.

　　“Mother,” the apparition said, “this is the first occasion on which I have traversed fifty li without once surrendering to gravity.

　　You admonished that currency ought to be metabolized gradually, yet I have metabolized it all at once—an act of fiscal bulimia.

　　You petitioned that in my next incarnation I be granted increment intellect; I acquiesce in advance.

　　Nevertheless, during the remainder of this present incarnation, I petition to remain your son—even if that remainder be calibrated in minutes.”

　　The prerecorded boy produced a remote control the way a magician produces a dove, and the scene cut to a live-streaming interface whose title contained exactly eight sinograms:

　　“Please tender Mother a single thumb-elevated affirmation—thank you.”

　　At the stroke of intercalary midnight, pyrotechnics seeded the zenith with chrysanthemums of magnesium and regret.

　　Every villager—grandmother clutching great-grandchild, migrant laborer Face-timing from a Guangzhou dormitory—unholstered a telephone.

　　The integer in the lower-right corner of the screen began its ascension: zero, one, ten, one hundred, one thousand—each increment accompanied by the soft plosive of a half-yuan note being interred beneath the snow.

　　Tie Dan knelt, inserting the coins edgewise so that the banknotes stood like translucent scales on a burial mound that was slowly molting into a dragon.

　　The counter halted at 3,467—neither round nor auspicious, merely accurate.

　　Tie Dan brushed the remaining crystals from his knees and addressed the monitor a final time:

　　“Mother, the money has been metabolized unto the final decimal. You may now rest in a liquidity unburdened by arithmetic.”

　　…

　　Chen Zhiyuan—documentarian, lapsed classicist, collector of obsolete metaphors—later excised these fragments into a three-minute diptych.

　　His caption, laconic even by the standards of a civilization that had traded calligraphy for clickography, read:

　　“If sapience be photons, then benevolence is the umbra they trail behind them.

　　We dismiss the shadow as useless until the moment darkness arrives—and it is the shadow that enfolds us first.”

　　Beneath the post, the most up-voted remark—typed, it was rumored, by an insomniac professor in Helsinki—declared:

　　“He possesses less intellect than the village idiot, yet outscores the entirety of us on the only examination that will not be graded posthumously.”

　　…

　　By the following Qingming, a sapling pear tree had volunteered on the grave’s summit, its leaves freckled with silver as though dusted by the residue of unspent mourning.

　　No one watered it; rainfall sufficed.

　　Tie Dan wedged his obsolete smartphone into the soil at an angle that approximated a stele, its screen frozen on a thumbnail: Wang Cuihua—his mother—occupying a rose-colored armchair before a fifty-inch moon, her smile blooming like freshly spun saccharine.

　　Tie Dan never again permitted himself to be filmed in the act of falling.

　　Instead, he apprenticed himself to the circuitry of resurrection: cracked screens, ruptured batteries, motherboards whose copper capillaries had been severed by the gravity of human clumsiness.

　　Whenever a child arrived weeping over a fissured display, he trimmed the star-stitched cardboard—now soft as chamois from years of handling—into a pentagon no larger than a fingernail paring, and inlaid it over the fracture.

　　“Cracks are merely windows,” he would explain, “through which the detained luminescence may finally stage its escape.”

　　…

　　Many circumambulations of the sun later, a ribbon of asphalt—two lanes, government-issue—bisected the village.

　　Schoolchildren careered home on bicycles whose frames flashed like shoals of mackerel.

　　When one inevitably capsized—knee blooming crimson against the gray tarmac—the others circled like planetary fragments.

　　The injured child, instead of tears, pointed to the wound and laughed: “Observe—I have been granted a star forged by Iron Egg!”

　　At that instant, it was said, Wang Cuihua materialized beneath the ancient pagoda tree, her indigo apron unfurling into a kite whose tail spelled out, across the sky’s cracked porcelain, the sole sentence she had never needed to utter aloud:

　　“My son, you have at last mastered the art of falling—

　　for what tumbles is no longer the body, but the light it has been hoarding.”

　　May you be cherished by this world with a tenderness as deliberate as twilight folding the day into its arms.

　　For you are not mere flesh and rumor of heartbeat—
　　you are the stray ember that refuses the night,
　　the quiet arsenic of wonder in a field of complacent flowers;
　　you are that soft, inexhaustible ash
　　which once was petal, now is covenant,
　　sworn to nourish every root that will never know your name.

　　While the earth rehearses its old din of hammers and headlines,
　　you keep a counter-music—
　　a private score inscribed on wind and tendon—
　　the tone of “high water meets high mind,”
　　a melody the years will never quite learn to whistle,
　　yet somewhere, in a room whose lamp has forgotten dawn,
　　a stranger is already humming it in his sleep.

　　Therefore, may the world—
　　that rough-handed sculptor that chips too hard and kisses too seldom—
　　may it sand its edges when it approaches you;
　　may it pause, glove its iron thumb,
　　and offer you the hush usually reserved for cathedrals and snow.

　　Yet if the world forgets its manners,
　　if it storms your gates with iron rhetoric and the usual betrayals,
　　may you still rise—
　　a monsoon of clarified will—
　　rooted like the bamboo that clasps the cliff in a lover’s quarrel with gravity,
　　green certainty that fractures stone rather than release its hold.

　　May you become your own argent moon,
　　a silver that needs no sky but the interior dark it chooses to transfigure;
　　may you be sunrise even when no witness lingers,
　　epiphany in an empty kitchen,
　　light that keeps its appointment with itself.

　　And should the road unroll like an ancient parchment of smoke,
　　should the horizon hoard its harbors,
　　may you still sail—
　　a galleon of ligaments and laughter—
　　your prow carving promise into the cheek of the tidal dark,
　　your laugh the bright jib that catches every contrarian wind,
　　until even the night unbuttons its collar and admits the dawn.

　　May you remember, in the marrow and the mirror,
　　that you were composed against non-existence—
　　a comma inserted by the cosmos to keep its sentence from collapsing—
　　and that every breath is a signature on the contract of continuation.

　　Thus, may you walk the world’s abrasive stages
　　with the unhurried dignity of a stanza that already knows it will be quoted long after the play is dust;
　　may you carry in your pocket a private anthology of mercies to scatter like birdseed on the concrete;
　　may you be both manuscript and lantern,
　　text and translucence,
　　so that every eye you meet reads a line it did not know it was starving for,
　　and every heart you leave behind keeps glowing, a small unauthorized sunrise.

　　Finally, may you be permitted the double gift:
　　to receive the world’s reluctant velvet,
　　and to return it as visible music—
　　a cadence of civilities, a counter-weather of kindness—
　　until the very air grows guilty of its former harshness
　　and learns, slowly, awkwardly, the etiquette of awe.