Chapter 5 chapter Five

The third girl I slept with called my dick "your raison d'être". In the past, I wanted to write a short story on the theme of the reason for human existence.After all, the novel was not finished, and during that time, due to my continuous thinking about the reasons for human existence, I acquired a quirk: everything must be converted into numerical values.I lived with this impulse for 8 months.When taking a tram, first count the number of passengers, count the number of steps of the stairs, and measure the number of pulses whenever you have time.According to the records at that time, between August 15, 1969 and April 3 of the following year, I attended 358 lectures, had sex 54 times, and smoked 6,921 cigarettes.

In those days, I really thought that this conversion into a numerical value might have something to say to others.And I firmly believe that as long as I have something to convey to others, I can really exist.Needless to say, however, no one was interested in the number of cigarettes I smoked, the number of stairs I climbed, or the size of my penis.I felt like I had lost my reason for being and was reduced to staring at myself. So when I got the news of her death, I smoked my 6,922nd cigarette. That night, the rat didn't drink a drop of beer.This is by no means a good sign.He drank five glasses of ice-cold Jim's whiskey in one breath.

We passed the time playing pinball in a dark corner of the store.This thing is really worthless: spend a few coins in exchange for the dead time it provides. Rats, however, are serious about everything.So it was almost a miracle that I won two out of six rounds. "Hey, what happened?" "Nothing," said the Mouse. We went back to the table and continued drinking beer and Jim's. The two hardly talked, just silently and inadvertently listening to the records that continued to play on the jukebox: "Ordinary People", "Wooden Snow Stick", "Soul in the Sky", "Come on, Lonely Girl"...

"I want to ask for something." The mouse said. "What's up?" "I want you to meet someone." "……female?" The Mouse hesitated a little, then nodded. "Why do you beg me?" "Who but you?" the Mouse said quickly, taking the first sip of the sixth glass of whiskey. "Have a suit and tie?" "Yes. But..." "Tomorrow at two o'clock," said the Rat, "hey, do you know what women really live on?" "Leather soles." "how could!" The mouse's favorite food is a hot cake just out of the pan.He stacked the pieces in a deep tray, cut them neatly into four with a knife, and poured a bottle of Coca-Cola on top.

The first time I went to the mouse's house, he was moving out of the dining table in the warm moonlight and pouring this disgusting food into his stomach. "The advantage of this food," said the Rat to me, "is that it combines eating and drinking into one." In the spacious yard, there are green onion cages, all kinds of wild birds are flying around, desperately pecking at the popcorn sprinkled on the lawn. Talk about the third girl I slept with. It's very difficult to talk about dead people, let alone girls who die young.They remain young forever by dying. On the contrary, we who live in this world are getting older year after year, month after month, and day after day: I often even feel that I grow a year every hour.And the scary thing is, it's absolutely true.

She is definitely not a beauty.But "not a beauty" may not do it justice.I think the correct statement would be: "She's not the type of beauty whose looks complement her." I only have one photo of her.On the back is the date, August 1963, the year President Kennedy was shot through the head.She was sitting on a coastal tidal bank that seemed to be a summer resort, smiling slightly unnaturally.His hair was cut short, in a Sebag style (in general, the hairstyle reminded me of Auschwitz), and he wore a red checkered dress with a long hem.She looked a bit rigid, but she was beautiful, a kind of beauty that seemed to be able to touch the most sensitive part of the other person's heart.

The gently closed lips, the upturned nose like slender tentacles, the bangs that seem to be trimmed by myself hang down on the wide forehead inadvertently, from here to the slightly raised cheeks, there are faint traces of acne scattered. She was 14 years old, it was a beautiful moment in her 21 years of life, and then it passed away-I can only think so.Exactly why and for what it happened, I can't fathom, and no one else knows at all. She said seriously (not jokingly) that she went to college by inspiration. It was not yet four o'clock in the morning.We lay naked on the bed.I asked what the so-called revelation from heaven was all about.

"Then how do you know," she said.After a while, he added: "However, it's like angel's wings descending from the sky." I picture angel wings falling on college campuses.From a distance, it looks like a piece of toilet paper. No one knows why she died.I even suspect that she herself may not understand. I had a nightmare. I became a huge black bird and flew west over the forest.Moreover, he was seriously injured, his feathers were stained with blood that was about to turn black, and there was an ominous black cloud covering the sky in the western sky, and there was a faint smell of rain floating around.

I haven't had such a dream for a long time.It took me a long time to realize that this was a dream. I rolled over from the bed and turned on the shower head to wash away the nasty sweat all over my body. Breakfast followed with toast and apple juice.Due to the relationship between the smoke and the beer, my throat felt like it was completely blocked by old cotton.After tossing the dishes in the sink, I picked out an olive green cloth suit, a shirt ironed to the max, and a black knitted tie, and sat down in front of the air conditioner in the living room. Newscasters on TV smugly assert that today will be the hottest day of the summer.I turned off the TV, walked into my brother's room next door, found a few books from the huge mountain of books, and read them crookedly on the sofa in the living room.

Two years ago, my brother left behind a house full of books and a girlfriend.He went to the United States without giving any reason.Sometimes she eats with me and says that we brothers are really alike. "Where?" I asked in surprise. "All," she said. Maybe as she said.It's also the result of our 10-year rotation of shoe shines, I think. The hour hand points to 12 o'clock.Thinking of the heat outside made me a little apprehensive, but I put on my tie and suit anyway. With more than enough time and nothing to do, I drove slowly around the city.The market is long and thin, so pitifully slender, it stretches from the seaside to the front of the mountain.Streams, tennis courts, golf courses, row upon row of houses, continuous walls, several pretty restaurants, clothing stores, old libraries, grasslands with night lilies, and a park with monkey mountains—— This is always the face of the city.

I turned along the unique detour at the foot of the mountain for a while, then went down to the seaside along the river bank, got off the car near the mouth of the river, and put my feet in the river to cool off.On the tennis court, two tanned girls in white hats and sunglasses hit the ball back and forth.The sun suddenly becomes overwhelming by mid-afternoon.The sweat of the two splashed on the tennis court with the swing of the racket. I watched it for 5 minutes.Then he turned around and got into the car, put down the back of the car seat, closed his eyes and closed his eyes, listening to the sound of sea waves and the sound of hitting balls mixed in it for a long time.The gentle south wind brought the fragrance of sea water and the smell of burning asphalt, reminding me of the past summer.The tenderness of a girl's body, the outdated rock and roll, the freshly laundered tank top, the lusciousness of smoking in the swimming pool locker room, the fleeting premonition—a never-ending sequence of sweet summer dreams.And in the summer of a certain year (when did it come?), the dream disappeared and never came again. At two o'clock, I drove the car to the front of the jazz bar.I saw the mouse sitting on the roadside guardrail, watching Casazakis's "Christ Crucified Again". "Where is she?" I asked. Shu quietly closed the book, got into the car, and put on sunglasses: "never mind." "never mind?" "Forget it." Sighing, I loosen my tie, throw my jacket on the back seat, and light a cigarette. "So, there must be somewhere to go?" "zoo." "Okay." I replied. Talk about the city—the city where I was born, raised, and slept with a girl for the first time. The front faces the sea, the back is surrounded by mountains, and there is a huge port on the side.Actually the city is small.When I come back from the port, if I drive fast on the national highway, I will never smoke.Because the car drove through the city before the match was struck. The population is slightly more than 70,000, and this number has hardly changed after 5 years.Almost all of these people lived in two-story buildings with small courtyards. They all had cars, and many families had two. This number is not my random imagination, but the city government's statistics department officially publishes it at the end of each year.Owning a two-storey house is indeed a joy. The mouse's house is a three-story building with a greenhouse on the roof.The garage is a basement dug out along the slope, where my father's "Benz" and the mouse's "Triumph TRM" are parked side by side lovingly.Oddly enough, the most family-like aspect of the Rat's house was the garage.The garage is so spacious that even small planes seem to fit in it.There are also obsolete or disused TV sets, refrigerators, sofas, tableware, stereos, dining cabinets and other objects that are close to each other.We often have a beer here and have a good time. I know next to nothing about Rat's father, nor have I ever seen one.I asked him what kind of person he was, and the mouse gave a straightforward answer: he was much older than him, male. I've heard people say that Shu's father used to be very poor, but this was before the war.Towards the beginning of the war he managed to get a chemical factory and started selling insect repellent cream.It was doubtful how effective it would be, but just as the battle line was advancing southward, the ointment sold like flying. As soon as the war was over, he put the ointment in the warehouse, and this time he sold a non-descript nutritional supplement.When the Korean battlefield ceased fire, it was suddenly replaced with household detergent.The ingredients are said to be the same.I think it's possible. Twenty-five years ago, in the forests of New Guinea, the corpses of Japanese soldiers covered in insect repellent cream piled up like mountains; now every household's toilets are piled with toilet pipe cleaners with the same brand. In this way, the mouse's father became a rich man. Of course, my friends also have children from poor families.His father was a city bus driver.There may not be any rich bus drivers, but my friend's father was one of those poor ones.Since his parents are hardly home, I get to hang out there a lot.His father was either driving or at the racetrack, and his mother worked day and night. He is my high school classmate.We became friends because of a small episode. One day when I was urinating during my lunch break, he came to me and unbuttoned my pants.We didn't talk, ended around the same time, washed our hands together. "Hey, here's something good." He said while wiping his hands on the bottom of his trousers: "Oh." "Show you?" He took out a photo from his wallet and handed it to me.It turned out to be a nude photo of a woman, with a bottle stuck in the middle. "Amazing, isn't it?" "indeed." "Come to my house and there are even more powerful ones!" he said. In this way, we became friends. All kinds of people live in this city. In 18 years, I really learned a lot in this place.It has firmly taken root in my heart, and almost all my memories are associated with it.But when I left the city in the spring of my college year.I breathed a sigh of relief from the bottom of my heart. I come back here during both summer and spring break, and mostly drink beer to pass the day. For about a week the rat was in very bad shape.Maybe it's because of the approaching autumn, or maybe it's because of the girl.The Rat didn't say a word about it. When the mouse was away, I grabbed Jie Xunfeng to find out: "Hey, what do you think happened to the mouse?" "This——I don't know why. Is it because the summer is coming to an end?" With the approach of autumn, Rat's mood is always a little depressed.He often sits at the dining table and reads a book in a daze. When I talk to him, he just copes with the matter listlessly.And when the dusk was dark and the cool breeze was blowing and there was a hint of autumn around, the Rat stopped drinking beer all of a sudden, and drank ice-cold Baben whiskey angrily, and endlessly dropped coins into the jukebox beside the table, Jay panicked as he clapped his hands and feet in front of the pinball machine until the red warning light came on. "I'm afraid there is a feeling of being abandoned, and the feeling is understandable." Jie said. "yes?" "Everyone left. Some returned to school, some returned to work. You too?" "yes." "It takes understanding." I nod. "Where's that girl?" "It will soon fade away, for sure." "What's wrong with it?" "how to say?" Jie made a vague statement, then went about his business.Without further questioning, I dropped a coin into the jukebox, picked a few tunes, and went back to the table for a beer. After more than 10 minutes, Jie came to me again and asked: "Why, the Rat didn't say anything to you?" "Ok." "Weird." "Really weird?" While wiping the glass in his hand repeatedly, Jie began to think deeply. "It should be discussed with you." "Why don't you speak?" "It's hard to speak. It seems to be afraid of being robbed." "Where is it going to grab white!" "It looks like that, I've felt that way before. He's a considerate kid. Well, how should I put it, it seems that there is something resolute and decisive... Not to speak ill of you. " "Know." "It's just that I'm 20 years older than you, and I have encountered a lot of bad things. So, how should I put it..." "It's hard work." "right." I smiled and sipped my beer: "Let me tell you about the mouse." "Ah That's good." Jie put out his cigarette and turned back to work.I got up and went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror as I washed my hands, and drank another quick beer. There was a time when everyone tried to live calmly. Near the end of high school, I resolved to say at least half of what was on my mind.I forget why, but I have been practicing this idea for several years.And one day I found myself really half-talking. I don't know what this has to do with calmness.But if an old refrigerator that has to be defrosted year-round is called cool, then so am I. For this reason, with beer and cigarettes, I continued to write this text while kicking up my consciousness, which was about to be drowsy in the puddle of time.I took countless hot showers, shaved twice a day, and listened to old records over and over again.At this moment, Peter, who is behind the times.Pol and Mary shouted right behind me: "There is no need to think about it any more. Isn't everything in the past."