Chapter 6 Fives

Joe and his books (4) Maria said to Joe as she cleared away the dishes. "Why don't you weave a story? A story with all the patterns in it, full of wonders?" Joe said the first thought in his mind, and then regretted it, for fear that his wife would ask him. "I don't have such a story in mind, how can I weave it? Hey, look at you, you are stepping on the cat's tail." The cat screamed and moved away.Jo rose in confusion and went upstairs to the study.He went to the toilet with the book written by the Japanese in his hand, sat on the toilet and continued to read.In one sumo match, Koi, a hulking man from the north, is thrown offstage and crushes his young son, his pathetic figure disappearing into the black audience.A strange dirge began to play from the tweeter, not like sadness, but rather joy suppressed by something.Reading this, Joe's eyes straightened again.When he returned to his study, he saw that the Eastern story he was reading was integrated with the Western where he was in some other space.He closed the book and tilted his tired head back. At this time, another story flourished in that other space, and there were sky-blue kimono triangles flying in the midair.When he heard the cat scratching the door outside the study, he thought in his heart, let this cat also go to the square. There is a row of black dogs squatting motionless on the side of the square.

Joe's bedroom was very much like a typical old bachelor's bedroom, with no pictures or ornaments on the walls, just some inexplicable yellowed photographs, framed in copper frames.There are photos of a hat, of a cane, of a pipe, of enlarged dentures or screws, or something like that.Some of them can’t tell what it is, for example, in a rectangular photo, there is a puddle of porridge that doesn’t look like porridge or paint that doesn’t look like paint flowing on a brown path, giving people a feeling of bewilderment.The furniture in the bedroom was old-fashioned and austere, and there was no sign of a complex mind in it.Joe didn't smoke, but there was an ashtray on the bedside table, and in it were some small pieces of bone that had been taken out of his knee during an operation.For about five or six years, Maria suffered from insomnia, and they lived in separate rooms.As soon as Maria moved away, Joe quietly transformed the bedroom into a bachelor's room, and then even cats and dogs were kept out of his bedroom.Joe knew he was getting weirder by the day.On the other side of the study is Maria's bedroom, which was originally spacious and bright, but she covered two windows with dark curtains, and a small lavender lamp was turned on even during the day.One day Jo, thinking of her, went into her room.The room was filled with the familiar perfume smell of Joe, and Maria was getting up and getting dressed.Without looking back she said to Joe:

"You're late, Jo. How can you keep thinking about those things? Look at this lamp. It burns in my heart day and night, and lights up those dark places." They went to bed anyway, and Joe was amazed by his wife's passion, there was something unfamiliar to him in her desire, she straightened up in the most excited moment, and Joe saw the light in her dazed gray eyes. Two purple lamps.Joe had not been in his wife's bedroom since, and he was terrified of that depth of desire, and the thought sent a chill down his spine. "What the hell is going on with Maria? She doesn't love me," Jo would occasionally think wistfully. write a letter."

Joe's little world is his bedroom and study.The books in the study were piled up to the ceiling, and every once in a while, he would climb up the stairs to vacuum the dust. In the "buzzing" sound of the vacuum cleaner, Joe's stories were blowing in the wind like fishing nets in the sun.Recently he has often encountered Japanese, these long-eyed orientals who are erratic on the edge of his square, and if the sun is high, they evaporate like water. "Evaporate like water, beautiful metaphor." Joe said to himself.Once a month or so, Joe cleared his books, moving them one by one to the floor and then re-arranging the shelves in a new order.He has no bookcase, and all the books are placed on open shelves, not neatly arranged at all.

Sometimes he also took a book into the bedroom and put it under the pillow.They were often novels that evoked horror associations, and he felt that putting them under his pillow would calm the violence and commotion between the words.On such nights, Joe's dreams are often full of storms, as if the end of the world is coming. The peaceful Joe doesn't like this feeling, but he still reads these horror novels one after another, sometimes He read it in the office, too, so that clients saw his face distorted by terror. Maria is keen on mysterious things, is she infected by him?Or was it the other way around, that Joe was infected by her?As soon as Jo was still, she recalled the two lights in her eyes.The roses in the back garden also gave Joe a sense of electricity. When his hand quickly retracted from the petals, he even heard the slight sound of electric sparks.It was a large patch of roses that Maria had planted and where she and Daniel had sat drinking tea in the spring.As Joe looked down at them from the balcony, the voices of their conversation hung in the air.Daniel said: "Mom, you will see the quarry when you pass the well." Maria replied in a dry voice: "You can have everything when you sit at home." Joe sighed in his heart. To mother and son.But one night, Joe saw Daniel destroying the roses.It was the day before he went back to school.Under the moonlight, Daniel looked like a ghost with a green face and fangs, his movements were hesitant and hasty, making mud all over his body.Joe couldn't bear to call him, so he stood aside and watched.Finally, he finished venting and sat on the ground covering his face with his hands. Could it be that he was crying?Joe knew he was a child who couldn't cry.The lights in Maria's room flickered on and off, and a slender figure was printed on the curtains.This small town in the south always falls asleep very early, perhaps because of this, the people living here are always on the verge of madness?