The Crazed Read Free Page B

down, please!”
    Mr. Yang’s head hung so low that his chin rested on his chest. “Why did you interrupt me?” he asked with his eyes still closed. “Hear me out, will you? When I’m finished you can raise questions.” He sounded as if he were teaching a class. But whom had he yelled at just now? And who were the people he wanted to wipe out? Why did he hate them so much?
    Banping smiled at me with some embarrassment and shook his head. I sensed the meaning of his smile, which showed sympathy for me probably because of my relationship with the Yangs. He gestured me to sit down on the wicker chair and then turned to make our teacher lean back against the headboard.
    The moment I sat down, Professor Yang broke into speech. “All the time he has been thinking how to end everything, to be done with his clerical work, done with his senile, exacting parents, done with his nagging wife and spoiled children, done with his mistress Chilla, who is no longer a ‘little swallow’ with a slender waist but is obsessed with how to lose weight and reduce the size of her massive backside, done with the endless worry and misery of everyday life, done with the nightmares in broad daylight—in short, to terminate himself so that he can quit this world.”
    I was shocked. Banping smiled again and seemed to relish the surprise on my face. Mr. Yang continued, “But he lives in a room without a door or a window and without any furniture inside. Confined in such a cell, he faces the insurmountable difficulty of how to end his life. On the rubber floor spreads a thick pallet, beside which sits an incomplete dinner set. The walls are covered with green rubber too. He cannot smash his head on any spot in this room. He wears a leather belt, which he sometimes takes off, thinking how to garrote himself with it. Some people he knew committed suicide in that way twenty years ago, because they couldn’t endure the torture inflicted by the revolutionary masses anymore. They looped a belt around their necks, secured its loose end to a hook or a nail on a window ledge, then forcefully they sat down on the floor. But in this room there’s not a single fixed object, so his belt cannot serve that purpose. Sometimes he lets it lie across his lap and observes it absentmindedly. The belt looks like a dead snake in the greenish light. What’s worse, he cannot figure out where the room is, whether it’s in a city or in the countryside, and whether it’s in a house or underground. In such a condition he is preserved to live.”
    I couldn’t tell where he had gotten this episode. When did it happen? And where? Was it from a novel, or was it his own fantasy? Since the man’s mistress had a rather Westernized name, Chilla, the story might be set in a city. That was all I could guess. Professor Yang was so well read that I could never surmise the full extent of his knowledge of literature. Maybe he had made up the whole thing himself; otherwise he couldn’t have poured it out with such abandon.
    He interrupted my thoughts, speaking again. “All the time he imagines how to stop this kind of meaningless existence. Mark this, ‘all the time.’ He can no longer tell time because there’s no distinction between day and night in this room. He has noticed some kind of light shimmering overhead, but cannot locate its source. He used to believe that if he could find the source, he could probably get out of his predicament by unscrewing the lightbulb and poking his finger into the socket. But by now he has given up that notion, having realized that even if he identified the source, the light might not be electric at all. He’s thus doomed to live on, caged in an indestructible cocoon like a worm.” Mr. Yang paused for breath, then resumed: “The only hard objects in the room are the plastic dinner set—a bowl, a dish, a spoon, and a knife. There’s no fork. He’s deprived of the privilege of piercing his windpipe with a fork. Time and again he picks up