[Short Story] Wordless Monster
(translated from my short story〈怪獸〉)
1
The wallpaper on my bedroom walls is light gray and I should’ve kept it so clean, so clean that after staring at it for a while it looks like pure white. I moved into this room in my second year of high school, and I fell in love with this wall then. I covered it with photos of me and Yi-ling.
The light gray color brought out the photos; those blocks of color shimmered in the sunlight. Direct sunlight would fade the photos, but I couldn't bear to let the curtains block the sunlight, and I couldn't change the wall to hang those photos on because that wall was directly opposite the bed, and I needed to see those photos as soon as I opened my eyes. Now, a year has passed, and sunlight shines on the wall the photos day after day, fading the gray to an almost indistinguishable pale gray as if the entire wall is fading away.
The colors in the photos are fading the shapes within them are blurring these photos no longer need to be brought out. Every afternoon the room is covered by quietly quiet, I can't help but wonder what if this room and everything in it is fading away?
Few months ago, Chen Yi-ling changed my phone's home screen to a photo of us without my permission. Every time I open my phone, I inevitably feel a pang of awareness. I don't see the point of reducing our relationship to a single image or symbol. Perhaps Yi-ling sees a world far more complex than I do; using a frozen surface of light and color to obscure things we can't comprehend is a simpler approach.
On the home screen, apps are neatly arranged on our faces, each square covered with a layer of symbols concealing the code hidden inside, just like the photo hiding behind those squares. I once read an article analyzing the Mona Lisa, where the author claimed that people recognize faces based on the overall relative positions of facial features, not the details. Thus viewers who focused on the details of portraits were misled. When I showed my home screen to others, no one ever said Yi-ling was good looking or not; they were already drowned to death in her dark eyes at first glance, everything else irrelevant.
Her left eye was cute out of the frame due to the photo's size, while her right eye was positioned precisely in the gap between the two squares, dark pupil glancing slightly in the opposite direction of her profile, creating a visual illusion like the ssu ku eyes (四顧眼) of a temple guardian. No matter which angle I held the phone, I always felt she was staring at me.
Ssu ku eyes, known in the West as the Mona Lisa effect, is an illusion that makes the viewer feel as if the gaze of the painting is following them. The Mona Lisa's gaze is far more enigmatic than the Ssu ku eyes, world before me was so clear, as if the Mona Lisa was the only unfathomable thing. Smiling from afar, yet upon closer inspection, nothing ever seemed to curve upwards. If Ssu ku eyes see the surface of the world, then the Mona Lisa must see the indescribable inner side of it. However, on the phone's home screen, the symbols on these square surfaces refer to a code composed of symbols themselves. Symbols referring to symbols, and monsters are born from such logical dead ends.
This morning, as I turned on my phone, a round, black dot on the screen obscuring Yi-ling's right eye. The dark dot looked just like a tiny, mysterious monster. When I saw the monster in the malfunctioning screen, I didn't think it could cause any serious problems. It wasn't big, and I didn't even consider sending it for repair or replacing this phone.
I couldn't help but run my finger across its body again and again, poking at it to create colorful screen noise on its edges.
Strangely, every time I turn on the screen, the monster's position shifts slightly, as if it had hidden itself in the black screen while the screen was off, slowly wriggling with its dark body.
2
Sunlight streamed in through the curtains, illuminating the envelope on the table. Mom didn't burst into the room yelling that I was going to be late, something was wrong, but I still tried my best to keep my emotions stable. I picked up the envelope, hesitated for a moment, and then put it in the drawer. Dad fell asleep on the sofa last night, and the TV was still replaying yesterday's baseball game. I walked around the scattered clutter on the floor to the porch and squatted down in front of shoe cabinet, which was much emptier than usual. Staring blankly at the empty shelves for a long time, I realized that mom had taken all her shoes. The last few times she left home, she would only take her most frequently worn pairs. At that moment, I realized it was too late, but a part of me still accepted my own deception. I crossed the living room again, went back to my room, opened the drawer. I decided to send this letter.
The night before, through the curtains I saw mom standing in the driveway, two large suitcases beside her, standing next to the open trunk of the car. As if waiting for something. Unwilling to leave. The streetlights pierced the cool night air through the freshly waxed silver-white car. An extremely slow but unstoppable explosion is activating around her. This wasn't the first time mom wanted to leave. Unlike before, this time dad sat on the sofa watching TV, seemingly oblivious. Time itself seemed to take shape under the white light; mom was like a pebble dropped into water, sending ripples through the air that spread to the living room. Ads started on the television, and dad leaned forward to pick up the remote from the table and switch channel. That night, mom didn't leave until I sealed the letter into envelope. I had hoped she would stay there until dawn and then come back inside.
The next day, Yi-ling replied. She cleverly waited until school was over before dropping the letter on my desk, avoiding a day of awkwardness. I considered myself a very rational person, but Yi-ling's reply still left me crazy. The blank letter was wrapped in a plain envelope, with only a heart-shaped sticker slightly larger than my index fingertip on it. A tilde was drawn on the right side of the sticker in a blue pen. I wasn't sure what that tilde meant. This letter reminded me of the song “Wordless Letter.” (無字的情批) I vaguely remember mom taking me away from home after a fight with dad. She hummed this song with a smile in the passenger seat, and after a while, I couldn't tell if she was smiling for me or not.
At the time, I thought my mom really liked the song "Wordless Letter," but looking back, it must have been chosen by the person in the driver's seat instead of mom.
“She was illiterate. But he wrote a love letter to her.”
(阿媽無識字，但是有一張情批寫乎伊)
“It remained unopened; she said words may fail to carry love.”
(經過幾十年不曾拆開，伊講寫字不如相思)
Wordless letters are romantic; no matter how profound the words, they're just a figment of rhetoric, far inferior to random symbols.
During our time together, we often exchanged wordless letters. My drawers were filled with sheets of paper covered in strange symbols. I wasn’t sure whether we drew those letters because our feelings were too deep to be captured by words, or if our feelings are too hollow for words to capture anything.
In my memory, scenes of passionate kisses between heterosexual characters in movies were always filled with passion. On the night of my first kiss with Yi-ling, I did feel the softness, but that was all.
The campus was quiet as usual after evening self-study period. Since the trees in the courtyard were cut down due to disease, the classrooms were silent of insects. Yi-ling turned the lights off, she said it was more exciting that way; We captured each other’s bodies in the darkness. Our movements went from tentative to intense. Yi-ling was stronger than I had imagined. I felt my body being gradually flattened and stretched outwards like a wall as she climbed onto my shoulders.
When I was in kindergarten, whenever we saw two person who were close, the whole class would force them to kiss each other. We would start clamoring that someone was going to get pregnant. I once thought these kinds of kissing games were rebellious. Now I realize kissing games are deliberately permitted by adults. The more part of body we sexualize, the more they can control us through shame.
Mom told me that she and dad used to sneak into the school at night to meet during high school. I don't know what mom meant by meeting. Why doesn’t mom just tell me she fucked dad on campus or not? If the mouth gives birth to thoughts into words can be considered a sexual organ, is intimate contact also a form of language? Shedding conceptual symbols, I reached a more distant place through Yi-ling’s body.
The thought that I might be doing what mom and dad once did instantly spread a chilling fear hidden in the corner of my mind, and I quickly built a wall around it with my flattened body. I didn't want to become like them. Suddenly, I felt my back press against a thing on the wall. The light snapped on, light the classroom instantly. Yi-ling seemed to find it funny, tilting her head back and laughing.
Yi-ling pressed against me, my body pressing on the switch, plunging the room back into darkness. Several cracks had been torn in the wall, yet I still couldn't see myself on the other side. I resisted the urge to push Yi-ling away, unable to distinguish whether the panting in the air was my own or Yi-ling's, expressing resistance or excitement.
I stood outside the wall, pondering how to mend the rift between them, but inside, I lacked the confidence to become a better version of them. Inside and outside, surface and core, nowhere made me feel at ease. Just as the wall was about to collapse, Yi-ling's lips finally parted from mine. If nowhere is comfortable, there's no point in running away; I had no reason to leave.
The saliva dripping between our lips made me inexplicably nauseous. Yi-ling nestled tightly in my arms.
Yi-ling raised her head and opened her mouth, seemingly wanting to say something. Not wanting her to dominate the conversation while I’m still unsettled, I immediately interrupted her: “What did the tilde in your letter mean?” Yi-ling paused for a moment, then giggled as if suddenly understanding something: “It means me too.”
Even now, I still don't understand why I chose to give the letter to Yi-ling. I can only blame everything on my mom departure.
Every time dad tried to stop mom from leaving, I would lock my bedroom door, play “Wordless Letter,” and write fabricated phrases I thought would win mom back for dad.
Before my dad got off work, mom would often sit alone at the dining table, thoughtfully stroking a small, dark square tattoo on her arm. A tiny black square, slightly smaller than a thumb knuckle. Sometimes she would call me to her side and tell me stories about her story with dad, but I could never piece together a complete story. Over the years, I've heard dozens of versions of how mom met dad.
She never explained the story behind that black tattoo. Every time I asked, she said it was her recorder. “Wordless Letter” should have been kept in that recorder too. Once, when our whole family was on a trip, my mom phone connected to Bluetooth, and “Wordless Letter” started playing through the speaker. Dad silently turned off the speaker, and the whole family remained silent until the end of the journey. That was the closest I could remember dad ever coming to anger.
I didn't want to point out the contradictions in their words. I know that without these stories, we couldn't maintain a complete conversation. I know that good memories are unreliable; each of mom’s recollections was yet another fabrication. This family was held together by memories constructed through words, so I decided to write a letter to mom.
“I asked her, what’s inside the letter?”
(我甲阿媽問，阿媽的情批是寫啥物)
She said, Writing is art for liars.
(伊講情人欲愛無勇氣，才來用字騙情義)
The contradictory retelling made it impossible for me to write a complete letter; the sentences I wrote down are all disconnected.
Yi-ling continued to lie in my arms, unaware of my thoughts. I was bound to give the letter to someone, as if having similar experiences would allow me to inherit or even repair their story.
3
The day before yesterday, Yi-ling gave me a very special letter. It was a completely black letter, slightly wrinkled to the touch. I guessed Yi-ling dipped the whole letter in ink and let it dry. We never asked what the symbols in our letters meant, and this wasn't the most incomprehensible letter we'd ever drawn, yet the moment I opened it, I felt like I was drowning in that darkness. I didn't dare break our correspondence by asking Yi-ling what she was trying to say, so I drew a white Godzilla on it with whiteout and sent it back.
I called that blackness monster. The monster didn't affect us at all, but I started to become sensitive. This letter seemed to have touched something, and monsters began to appear from every corner of my life.
I realized that whether I sent my first letter too late was no longer important; I'd been wrong from beginning to end. I could never truly enter mom and dad’s story. Every lie, every fabrication, was a yearning for the past, a yearning for the other. What I dealt with and reflected upon was always just that wall, not the things inside or outside it.
This morning, I saw the monster on my phone.
It took me several days to realize that wherever the monster passed, a faint layer of color was peeled away from the screen, so faint it was almost imperceptible to the naked eye. The right eye, which had been crawled over repeatedly, had turned white.
That patch of white lay abruptly in the center of the eyeball that had once drowned me, as if the monster had torn a slit in the colorful image, revealing a hidden space beneath. I used to think that behind Yi-ling lay the Mona Lisa's gaze, and therefore, if we, living on the surface of the world, tried to uncover it, we would see another magical, indescribable world. Now, I find nothing but blankness.
The monster gnawing the photo day after day. Our faces were covered in deathly white patches, and the skin around Yi-ling's eye had completely disappeared. As more and more blankness was revealed, a part of me began to hope that if monster kept gnawing, perhaps something other than blankness would be revealed.
What is the monster's relentless devouring of the photos trying to protest? Photographs allow humanity to freeze fleeting memories in timeless images, but what memories does this photo, as the outer shell of an emotion, conceal? I'm beginning to understand the meaning of mom black tattoo. That black square is mom monster. Mom used a small piece of her skin to build a prison for her monster.
And dad’s monster? I'll probably never know, just as I can’t control my own monster.
Dad and I are dying slowly by the same disease; the monster is gnawing away at us, piece by piece, starting from the very outside. All the images of Yi-ling in the photos are fading. In my imagination, everything about Yi-ling and me will vanish at some point, yet in reality, Yi-ling still exists beside me. What truly terrifies me about this terminal illness isn't the appearance of the monster, but the monster’s inability to devour the whiteness.
I got a new phone before Yi-ling's face completely disappeared. I stuffed the old phone, along with other household junk, into the top shelf of the shoe cabinet. I'd told dad countless times that the clutter in that shoe cabinet should have been tidied up long ago, but he insisted we would need those junks someday. Strangely, even when it was turned off, the old phone's screen would occasionally flicker, vaguely displaying that photo.
After getting a new phone, I stopped using photos as wallpapers and just use the built-in image. I also covered the gray walls of my bedroom with a new black wallpaper. I don't know if we'll be together forever as she promised, but it doesn't matter. I have no reason to leave or stay.
On the night of my first kiss with Yi-ling, after a passionate physical contact, I separated her from my body. Thick saliva formed a thin thread between our separated tongues. Yi-ling opened her mouth, tilted her head back and laughed. The silk thread between us grew longer and longer gets thinner and thinner yet couldn’t snap no matter how far our tongues apart.
留言
張貼留言