Chapter 11 chapter Ten

A few months later, Holmes found himself alone in Roger's cramped bedroom (for the first and last time he set foot on one of the boy's few enclaves).It was a gloomy morning, and there was no one in the guest cabin.He opened the residence where Mrs. Monroe lived. The room was hung with opaque curtains and there was no light. No matter where he went, the bark-like smell of mothballs was everywhere.He stopped every three or four steps, looked into the darkness ahead, and readjusted the crutch in his hand, as if he was worried that some unimaginable vague shadow would jump out of the shadow.Then he would go on—the sound of his cane on the floor was far less heavy and weary than the sound of his footsteps—and at last he walked through Roger's open door and into the only room in the cabin. A room with a little sunlight.

In fact, it was a very tidy room, far beyond Holmes' expectations, and not at all like the room of a lively and careless boy.He thought, after all, Roger's mother was the housekeeper, and he must be better at keeping it tidy than other children, or, this bedroom was tidied up by the housekeeper's mother.But thinking of the child's fussy character, Holmes was convinced that it should be Roger who had done his duty to clean up all this.Besides, the pervasive smell of moth balls has not penetrated into this bedroom, which means that Mrs. Monroe should seldom come in here; on the contrary, there is a musty smell like earth, but it is not unpleasant.He felt that it was a bit like the smell of dust in the heavy rain, and like the smell of fresh mud.

For a while, he sat beside the boy's neatly made bed, looking at the surrounding environment—the walls were painted in light blue, the windows were hung with transparent lace curtains, and the room was decorated with various oak furniture (bedside table, a bookshelf, chest of drawers, etc.).Looking out of the window directly above a student's desk, he saw criss-crossing slender branches outside the window, which seemed very ethereal behind the thin lace, brushing past the window almost soundlessly.Holmes' attention then turned to the personal belongings Roger had left in the room: the six textbooks stacked on the desk, the bag hanging loosely from the handle of the wardrobe door, the butterfly net standing upright in the corner.Finally, he stood up and walked slowly from wall to wall, as if reverently visiting the exhibits in a museum (he stopped now and then to look carefully, and resisted the urge to touch some impulse of something).

But what he saw didn't overwhelm him or teach him anything new about the child.The room was filled with books on bird watching, bees, and war, several tattered paperbacks of science fiction, and a lot of National Geographic magazines (which, in chronological order, filled two full shelves); drawers On the cabinet are rocks and shells that the boy found on the beach, arranged in the same number of rows according to size and similarity.In addition to six textbooks, there are five sharpened pencils, drawing pens, blank paper and a glass vial containing Japanese bees on the desk.Everything is organized and neatly arranged.On the bedside table are scissors, glue and a scrapbook with a black cover.

The most revealing things about the child seemed to be taped or hung on the walls.First there were Roger's colorful paintings (regular soldiers shooting at each other with brown rifles, green tanks bursting open, red paint bursting from the chests or foreheads of blind-eyed people, yellow flak guns on blue-brown Bomber fleets unleashed barrages of artillery fire, the bodies of those killed in the carnage littered the bloody battlefield, and the orange sun was rising or setting on the pink horizon).There are three sepia photos in three frames (one of a smiling Mrs. Monroe holding her infant son, the young father standing proudly beside her; one of the boy standing with his uniformed father on the train platform; another of Roger the toddler running to his father's open arms. One by the bed, one by the desk, one by the bookshelf—each with There was the stocky, stocky man with the square rosy face, the fair hair brushed back, and the kindly eyes. He's dead now, but he's clearly missed deeply.)

Of all things, the scrapbook was the one that Holmes had the longest attention on.He sat back by the boy's bed, staring at the black cover of the scrapbook, scissors, and glue on the bedside table.No, he said to himself, no peeking.He had already peeked into too many secrets to continue.He warned himself, but reached for the scrapbook and dismissed rational thoughts. He unhurriedly flipped through each page, scrutinizing all kinds of carefully cut-and-pasted content (all photos and text cut out of magazines, and then skillfully glued together).The first third of the scrapbook showcases the boy's interest in nature and wildlife: an upright grizzly bear roams the woods next to a spotted leopard perched beneath a large African tree; Cougars hide together in van Gogh's sunflowers; owls, foxes and mackerel lurk among leaf litter.However, the next content changed. Although the design was similar, the picture was no longer beautiful: wild animals were gradually replaced by British and American soldiers, the forest became the ruins of a bombed city, and the fallen leaves became Corpses, words such as defeat, force, and retreat are scattered across the page.

Nature is self-contained, but human beings are always against each other; Holmes believes that this is the boy's yin and yang worldview.The front of the scrapbook, he thought, had been put together years ago (suggested by the yellowed, curled edges and the long-gone smell of glue) when Roger's father was still alive.The following content should have been completed bit by bit in the last few months. They look more complicated, more artistic, and more systematic in layout——Holmes has smelled the smell of paper and carefully checked three or four puzzle pieces After the margins, this conclusion is drawn.

However, Roger's final handiwork was not yet complete.In fact, on that piece of paper, there was only one image in the center, which he seemed to have just begun to work on.Or, Holmes thought, that's what the boy intended it to be: a monochrome photograph, floating alone in a dark void, in a desolate, baffling, but symbolic way. Way to sum up everything that came before (overlapping, lifelike wildlife, ruthless, determined battlefield soldiers).The photo itself is not mysterious, and Holmes is also familiar with the place, because he and Mr. Meiqi have seen it in Hiroshima—it was the former Hiroshima prefectural government building that was bombed by the atomic bomb (Mr. Meiqi called it "the atomic bomb") Exploding top").

But when the building is presented on paper alone, it is more desolate than witnessing it with one's own eyes.The photo should have been taken weeks, possibly days, after the bomb was dropped.Inside, there is a huge ruined city. There are no people, no trams, no trains, and nothing recognizable in shape. On the scorched earth that has been razed to the ground, only the county government building looks like a ghost. The shell still exists.The first few pages of the final photo are all black paper with nothing affixed to it, and page after page is completely black, which also intensifies the unsettling shock of the last photo.Holmes closed the scrapbook, and suddenly he felt overwhelmed by the weariness he had felt when he entered the cabin.Something must have gone wrong with the world, he thought, something had changed in the deepest part of his bones, but I couldn't figure out how.

"So, what is the truth of the matter?" Mr. Mei Qi once asked him, "How did you come to this conclusion? How did you unravel the meaning of those mysteries?" "I don't know," he said aloud in Roger's bedroom, "I don't know," he repeated.He lay on the boy's pillow, closed his eyes, and hugged the scrapbook to his chest: "I really don't know anything—" Afterwards, Holmes fell asleep.However, it is not the kind of peaceful sleep after exhaustion, nor the kind of nap where dreams and reality are intertwined, but a state of laziness.He fell into endless silence.The large and deep dream transported him elsewhere, dragging him away from the bedroom where his body was.