Black Sheep Beyond the Balustrade

A small crowd gathers on a flight of stairs by the river, by the food carts and their blinding white lights; the ping of a bottlecap can be heard as it hits the pavement, the shrill of gas as a can is opened, and the crumple of a plastic chopstick wrapper. A man in his twenties stands with his back to the river, a microphone before him. The streetlight paints his black hair with white streaks like rivulets, like moonlit water. He cradles his guitar lightly in his arms, rocks it back and forth as though singing it to sleep, and as his fingers caress the strings, Nora shovels another spoon of rice into her mouth. She cracks the plastic spoon between her teeth and examines the slit, the wound, her eyelids heavy with drink, her fingers blue with cold.

Sometimes she sits here like this—droopy-eyed and melancholy, tangled hair, faded lipstick—and imagines more. She imagines something, someone, that might pluck her from this abyss, the abyss that is ennui, that is world-weariness, that is disillusionment; surely there’s more than this, I mean she’s only twenty-three, and yet life seems to stagnate like a heartbeat flatlining. Still, she projects her fantasies onto every blank face behind the microphone. He wants to be singer, she wants to write; he has his coffee with milk and sugar, she has it black; he hates blue jellybeans, and she adores them. But he doesn’t look up, they never look up, and the ennui never fades.

“Wo lai,” squawks a voice in dialect. The music stops as a man rises from a plastic stool, spitting out sunflower seed shells; they’re scattered by his feet, by empty glass bottles. He wears an oversized jacket and ripped jeans, and his earring glints beneath the streetlight as he grabs hold of the microphone. Maybe he’ll look up, maybe he’ll take her home; and although there’s no promise in this stranger, there might be just one less lonely night. And sometimes that’s all she needs, something to ensure tomorrow; and hey, I suppose that’s a promise in one way or another, a promise she makes to herself. Chatter fills the silence as he fiddles with cables, audible chewing, slurping, a distant burp.

Nora feels a presence, imagines a presence, and glances over her shoulder; she sees only the street vendor hocking up phlegm which he then spits on the floor behind her. She stares into the green glob but feels only resignation; she’s too tired to feel disgusted, and so she turns away as he adds water to the wok. A searing sizzle, a hiss. He’d take her home, surely, and she wouldn’t rule it out. She could resign herself to his leather skin, dry lips, grey gums, yield to his wrinkled and calloused hands. None of this is real, anyway, not with this ripe sense of displacement, not with her sense of novelty rotting like a persimmon. Why is she still here?

A rustle in the bush draws her drifting attention; the branches bounce, the leaves quiver, their stubborn green washed out by the streetlights. Does she imagine the shadow in there? Does she imagine the starry eyes? She rises and follows the rustle, she follows it like a girl after a lost balloon, stumbling, grasping in her drunken clumsiness. Its slinky form finds the pavement, an ink black cat, its grey shadow trailing behind it like the semi-dry brushstrokes of water calligraphy, and then the shadows swallow it up again. Does she imagine the distant yowl? She stumbles up the steps of the Nine Eyed Bridge, the uneven tic-tac of her heels pursuing her as she pursues the whispers, the snarls shivering on the wind. Does she imagine the cat squeeze its head through the balustrade? rub against it? purr?

She outreaches a languid hand, feels its whiskers, its warm breath against her blue knuckles. She didn’t imagine its starry eyes, its cotton purr; the vibration envelops her like a duvet. It’s warm here, warm in this upright slumber, this silky somnambulism of sorts. She overlooks the balustrade, stares into the dreamy depths of the river, its black infinity, and it beckons beneath the bar lights: black satin bedsheets dotted with colours. If only she could close her eyes and dream. She dreams of little things, of big things; she dreams of owning a bookstore, of living in a penthouse; she dreams of coffee and bread, of champagne and caviar. She’s dreamt of falling from this height, of the second between action and inaction that changes everything. But she doesn’t mean it, it’s just a passing thought, passing as often as Shanghai trains. The red line, blue, pink, purple; lights paint a rail network across the water and they interweave like threads, they interweave with her fantasies, they interweave with the breeze. Her dress clings to her as the wind whistles like a train through her hooped earrings; it clings like a nightie, and she’s just a small girl again, a small girl who’s woken from a nightmare, standing alone in the dark by the kitchen light above the stove. A glass of milk helps with insomnia, helps with nightmares.

Music floats across the river and reaches her like a lullaby, Zhao Lei’s Chengdu. She stares into the water; she could fall asleep there, wrap herself up in its tangible darkness like dyed fabric, rest her head on its unyielding density like a foam pillow. She craves to be one with this oneiric water painting, its bleeding ink, and the distant laughter murmurs as though submerged in water. She begins to count the black sheep, their dark wool beyond the balustrade. One sheep, two sheep, three, four. The wind snores and rattles through the bridge as though it were a throat. Five sheep, six she—

“Nora?”

It jolts her awake and she emerges from her reverie as though from water; she hears the bars again, the distant rattle of dice, the ping of bottle caps hitting the floor. There’s something sobering about his voice, and reality reclaims its form, its substance; the balustrade feels cold against her bare hands, the wind against her skin, her fantasies against her skull. Cold, it’s cold, and it’s this latter that gives her goosebumps.

“Chao Jun?” she says, and her voice is louder than her thoughts, louder than the lullaby; it’s closer and there’s something grounding about that proximity, for it places her somewhere concrete, tactile, somewhere real. She’s no longer floating like a canoe in the vast sea that is the imagination; she’s docked, she’s safe, she’s here.

“Ni zai gan ma?”

“Just looking at the water,” she says, stepping back from the balustrade. Maybe he’d take her home where she could close her eyes and dream.

She dreams of little things, of big things; she dreams of mint patties, of love; she dreams of warm baths, of fulfilment; she dreams of raisin toast, of revelation. She’s dreamt of falling from this height, of the second between action and inaction that changes everything.

Sometimes she stands here like this, on the Nine Eyed Bridge, and she imagines more, but she didn’t imagine those starry eyes, that shadow, that ink-black cat; she imagined only that it was what led her here, and not something else, not something dormant, not something within.

“Yao bu wo song ni hui jia?”

“Zhen de ma?”

“Zhen de.”