‘Let’s go,’ she said.
She stood and the dog followed her to the bottom of the staircase where it spun in a few circles before lying down.
Back in her room, Jia Jia undressed and climbed into bed. The rain drummed against the windows until morning. And she lay half-awake, her heart pounding strong and fast, tapping to the rhythms of water.
12
The Tibetan guide never stopped talking. He called himself T.S., short for something that Jia Jia had already forgotten. T.S. remembered her husband, he told her, because he never forgot a Beijing customer. He had lived in Beijing for a year and learned what he called some ‘authentic Mandarin’ there, even had a local girlfriend. But of course he did not want to stay in Beijing, he told her, he was proud of his home and wanted to return to promote his culture. He had aspired to become a tour guide and his ambitions had come true. Chen Hang had been his twentieth Beijing customer, and Jia Jia was his thirty-second.
Chen Hang’s trip had gone mostly according to plan, T.S. recalled, until one morning when he had asked to cancel his final destination.
‘We were supposed to go to the Lamaling Monastery,’ T.S. said, scratching his head. ‘But your husband was a little weird that morning. He seemed to be very angry when I met him at the hotel, and he yelled at me, yes, he really did, he yelled at me, “Forget all these temples, I’ve seen enough temples, let’s go somewhere else.”’
The two men had sat down in the hotel lobby with a map of Tibet, and T.S. had suggested every sight within a day’s drive that he thought could possibly have interested Chen Hang. Chen Hang had listened and nodded intently without saying a word, and finally he had decided, ‘Let’s go to your village.’ T.S. had explained that his home village was far too underdeveloped, and without proper tourist accommodation or restaurants: where was Chen Hang supposed to sleep and eat? T.S. had suggested that perhaps Chen Hang could stay in a larger city nearby, and if he wanted to visit T.S.’s home, they could make a day trip.
‘I’ll sleep in your house,’ Chen Hang had responded. ‘I come from a humble background too. I can sleep anywhere.’
‘He stayed in the room that used to belong to me and my brothers. They both moved out after they got married.’ T.S. made a thumbs-up gesture and said, ‘Your husband was not boasting, he really didn’t seem to mind the poor life in the countryside. He even helped out in the qingke fields!’
Jia Jia understood then that her careful itinerary might be in vain. She considered going directly to T.S.’s village, but she decided to visit all the temples anyway and pay particular attention to every detail, trying to extract for herself some meaning from it all. Over the next few days, when she came across paintings or objects involving fish, she stood in front of them and prayed. But the fish-man left no clues for her.
It was not until the drive towards Nyingchi, while she was snoozing on the back seat of the car, that the fish-man appeared in her dream. She seemed in the dream to have no memory of anything that had happened to bring her there: Chen Hang’s dream, his death, the sketch, Leo, moving out, the wall painting, her trip, Ren Qi. She was alone with the fish-man in a boundless white room and the fish-man was swimming in the air away from her. Jia Jia’s legs were weak and trembling, and she was sitting on the ground without casting a shadow in any direction. Puzzled, she called out to the fish-man, not because she recognised it as the one thing she had been looking for, but because it was the only creature in sight.
The fish-man must have heard her. She was loud enough.
‘Don’t wait for me for dinner,’ it repeated in a rusty voice. ‘Don’t wait for me. Go ahead and start. Where the hell am I anyway?’
It waved its fin in the air as it spoke, swimming forward without acknowledging Jia Jia’s cry for help. Jia Jia crawled towards it with her elbows on the ground, dragging her legs behind like a wounded soldier. She swore at the fish-man.
‘You bastard! Help me, you cold-blooded shit! Fine! Leave me!’ she yelled.
When she woke up, she found they had arrived at the hotel where she was supposed to spend the next two nights, and she could not remember how the dream had ended. She locked the door of her room that afternoon; she wanted to make a rough pencil sketch while the image was fresh in her memory, so that when she returned to Beijing she could try to paint the fish-man again. She made sure to be as meticulous as possible with the body, and found that the more the fish-man took shape, the more she began to feel a balloon of hope expanding within her. With every line her pencil drew, her heart pounded faster and her muscles tensed. When she had completed the body, hands shaking from having clutched the pencil too tightly, she held it next to the one she had found by the bath at home.
Nothing looked alike. With the two drawings in front of her, her feeling of hope, as if having undergone a chemical reaction, transformed into fury inside her. She felt as though she had reached the sudden end of a long, arduous road. What was she doing, making pictures like a child, betting her hopes of conclusions on meaningless drawings? Did she even know how to do anything else?
Jia Jia phoned the hotel reception and asked for a pair of scissors. While she waited, she took nail clippers from her bag and began cutting and tearing up her drawings of fish. She started with her sketchbook, ripping out those fish she had drawn on the day at the river, the ‘mechanically drawn’ pictures, as Ren Qi had observed. She wanted to slice through all of them at the same time, but the pile was too thick, so she shredded them one by one and flushed them down the toilet. Then she took out the paper that was folded inside the zipped compartment of her wallet.
‘This one has emotion,’ Ren Qi had said.
A young woman in a long black skirt delivered the scissors. Standing at the open door, Jia Jia cut the drawing in two, in front of the woman, right down the middle. There it went, the drawing that had emotion. As the part with the fish head fell to the ground, a look of panic and unease rose to the woman’s face. She stood stunned, her mouth slightly open.
‘Can I help you?’ Jia Jia asked, wanting to sound calm but her voice getting caught, as though there was something stuck in her throat that she could not swallow. She pulled her sleeves down over her hands, dug the nails of her left hand into her right palm, cleared her throat, and opened her mouth again.
The young woman spoke first. ‘So sorry, so sorry, sorry,’ she interrupted Jia Jia and darted off, her skirt getting trapped between her legs as she scuffled quickly around the corner.
Jia Jia stepped into the hallway and lingered for a moment, waiting for something to happen. Nobody came. Back at her desk, she gazed at the two fish-man drawings, the one she had just finished and the original sketch from Chen Hang. These were the only two that she had not destroyed. Finally, she held them one on top of each other, and cut them both down the centre.
Somebody tapped on her open door. She heard T.S.’s voice.
‘Ms Wu, are you ready to go to dinner?’
Jia Jia stood up. Perhaps going out to dinner would do her good right now. She went into the bathroom to tie her hair. When she came out, T.S. was standing at the desk, pointing at her sketch.
‘I’ve seen this guy,’ he said.
He picked up the two parts of her drawing and pieced them together.