Shuangshuang by Yang Hao Translated from the Chinese by Michael Day

Two years ago, I spent the summer in a residential neighborhood in a small town near Yixing. From July to September—the most intolerable months of the year, according to the locals—humid, low-pressure conditions persisted. There was never a downpour, but the clouds never cleared. My landlady, a teacher at a nearby middle school, glanced at me suspiciously as she handed me the keys: “No one comes to the south this time of year.” She had a point. The reasons for my presence were opaque, preposterous, suspicious.

If I had any motivation, I guess it was gluttony. I suffered from a neurotic disorder relating to the geographic location, the air quality, and the surrounding people. The first sign of the affliction, as every sufferer knows, is hunger, vast, unrelenting hunger; I tried from morning to night to plug the hole in my gut, but I was like a grit chamber, my ceaseless eating only inviting more intense hunger. At first, my digestive system and excretory system mounted a robust stress response against this onslaught of unnecessary sustenance, but then one day my digestive system suddenly refused to function, and the surplus foodstuff accumulated in my stomach began to expand, shuttling back and forth between nerves and cells like suppressed desires, left with nowhere to linger and no release, congested, stagnant. And I was still hungry. But the indigestible food I swallowed grated against the rejected food already impacted in my gut, producing a sickening dissonance—a nauseating vibration—and I realized that if this continued, I was fucked. So I decided to leave Beijing, believing the southern damp would effectively regulate my outlandish appetite.

The neighborhood showed its age. I went about all the activities of daily existence—eating, sleeping, excreting—in my fifty-square-meter rented room. There was a window, but it was set high in the wall, too high for me to reach unaided. I would drag a tall stool from the dining table, climb atop it, and stand on tiptoes, at which point I could open it just a crack. However, for various reasons, such as fatigue, I mostly failed to even think of opening the window, so the room remained stuffy and dim. And I was never in the room for more than half a day at a time. The room had a cellar, a former air-raid shelter from Resist America Support Korea days. The landlady said that before I moved in, she had cleaned out the cellar, so I could put anything I wanted in it. I seriously considered this, decided I had nothing to put there—the clothes I’d brought from Beijing were damp and moldering, and the old books I’d tried to bring had vanished aboard the train. The cellar was lit only by the rice-yellow light of one old, bald bulb; despite the years, this light source had remained startlingly consistent, brighter even than my upstairs room—it wasn’t a delusion. After that, I began descending to the cellar more and more frequently, spending longer and longer in this sealed, windowless space, until I was upstairs only about half the time and spent the other half in the cellar.

As I suspected, in just a week, my ravenous hunger nearly vanished. The southern damp largely suppressed my abnormal appetite. Simultaneously, however, a new obsession stole my attention—I yearned to open the window in the room, fully and completely. What I failed to notice was the emergence of a deep doubt: I yearned for an immediate, violent mishap, an indefinitely postponed hunger, and a halt to the indefinite postponement of my death. The more I longed to climb the stool and open the window, the more I thought of burrowing into a bottomless pit. I was constantly slipping off to the cellar with this longing burning in my brain, immersing myself in the chill, damp, static air and in fantasies of what lay outside the window.

In the night I had heard, or thought I heard, the sound of the ocean (doubtful), the signal of an oscillator (there was none), and the cries of fishermen dredging their nets (maybe); the world outside the window was full of countless shifting wavelengths, geologic striations, and cavernous indentations, and amid these distortions in perspective, everything seemed to grow riotously, sicken, and shrivel. During the day, I descended to the cellar countless times, seized by the same urge. I would stand immobilized and listen to the persistent, monotonous sound of water—drip, drop, drip, drop—now soft, now insistent, settling into a repetitious cycle of suitable force and frequency, like all our lives do. I determined that this sound originated from an old, unrepaired water pipe somewhere in the building. There was nothing strange about that. It was the sort of thing that could happen anywhere and at any time. Particularly in a former air-raid shelter, a place of refuge, this was both an ordinary daily consolation and a sign of complete atrophy. Thus, consumed by the off-white light and the monotonous dripping, I completely forgot about the window: it was still there, but it didn’t matter. Each time I returned upstairs from the cellar, I was numb all over and nearly asleep; on waking, I would descend again to the cellar, and while there, I would envision the height of the window while the dripping was simultaneously erasing the entire thing from my mind; then I would go back upstairs and continue bumbling about, half in a dream…

It was then that Shuangshuang appeared.

Or maybe I should say, it was then that I first saw Shuangshuang. I finally understood my meaningless, absurd predicament, and I realized the world outside the window was nothing like I had imagined—here (I am purposely not saying “there”) there is no ocean, no vast, sweeping vista at all. Still more troublingly, when my appetite waned, I lost my sense of direction, and was left stumbling in an indescribable weightlessness. I was like a vagabond who wanders to pass the time, though the scope of my vagrancy was restricted to the upstairs room and the downstairs cellar. The same scenes occurred over and over: ash-grey concrete building, door frame with peeling green paint, fetid damp odor wafting from the commode, clamor of the neighbor’s door opening and shutting. This repetitive scenery cast doubt on time, and as the concept of time unraveled, I glimpsed layer after layer of my own debilities (was I or wasn’t I myself?). Time’s existence depends on man-made concepts, just as we blink merely to regulate the inflow of light, and thus, the instant I rapidly opened my eyes, Shuangshuang appeared before me.

Don’t ask who Shuangshuang was—I still don’t know. I can only describe the whole affair using the ancient gender-neutral pronoun “it.” This weakens the power of description and memory, saving me the effort of describing and recalling the reality underlying the term; also, with repeated use, this seemingly picayune pronoun automatically generates an inscrutable, secret corpus of knowledge, converting my tale into objective, incontrovertible scientific truth, even though my memories of its (Shuangshuang’s) appearance are in question. In the beginning, its looks and features originated from a distant place, and due to a dual synchronicity neither light nor time can encapsulate, its appearance continually changed—a child, a woman, a man, a cat, someone on the brink of dying, a puff of air. It did not rely on words, speaking instead in language itself, asking me, What time is it? I had no way to answer. I asked it, Who are you?

Its answer to me was of unknown provenance, like a toast at an ancient banquet: it said it was an emblem of an abandoned time, an orator, an intellectual, a writer, an architect, a performer, a great artist.

And all these things are the same, it went on, the emergence of all these vocations must rouse the human spirit, drawing others in, easily securing a blind trust. With this, Shuangshuang’s outlines began flickering indefinitely, owing not to grief but anger. Its response persuaded me that it was one of us, and I momentarily forgot the outlandish reverberance in its voice, a profuseness which deluged the basement air, producing a prolonged sympathetic resonance to which I couldn’t not nod my head and also reach out for Shuangshuang. Just then, its outlines solidified and turned murky grey from head to toe; instantaneously, like an enormous stone statue, it cracked and shattered. This emblem of the times was an image of time, built of our fabrications, our desires, our illusions, our egoism, our naivete and our blindness.

I ran back to my room, finding the persistent dripping had permeated the upstairs, suffusing this air too with slow, heavy thudding. I grasped the tall stool, finding my skin had turned thin and brittle. I sensed time was evaporating from my body; this too is a lie, as I lost my grip on time the day I began shuttling back and forth between the upstairs and downstairs. It occurred to me that my hunger might revive now that the moist air, in addition to suppressing my appetite, had aroused a counterreaction, transforming my hunger into an expeditious satiety; now that there was no longer an excess of food in my stomach, everything, it seemed, was a waste of energy. This realization brought on a fresh wave of fatigue, so I curled up atop the stool and slept, forgetting again to open the high window.

I slept—for an hour, for a day, it doesn’t matter. I sensed my stomach was shriveling ceaselessly into itself, then expanding out again, or maybe it was expanding and contracting at once. This was its great teaching, its timeworn murmur. I had to return to the cellar, where Shuangshuang remained. This time, it emitted dull, throaty noises. Each time phlegm became lodged in its esophagus, I would make the same sound, a sound which sometimes struck fear into my core, because I believed in childhood nightmares; when you can no longer take three continuous breaths, you’ll die of suffocation. I had many such nightmares: I was done in by suffocation, by drowning, by sheets twisting around my neck, by imbibing too much foamy cola, by my hair twisting around a chair, by an errant roadside tree branch beating my brains in, by the heart-stopping shock of a deer leaping out from nowhere. These endless possibilities of a facile death set my nerves on end, preventing me from accomplishing anything. I believed to the bottom of my heart that Freud’s supposedly great theory of the “death drive” was some tommyrot he thought up on the loo, but the apparent truth of this despondency wrecked the meaning of movement, time, and existence itself, throwing us immediately into an out-and-out unending tragedy.

I asked Shuangshuang again what it was (I hadn’t forgotten, and I didn’t dare remember), and this time it answered that it was a product of chance. Of course it was a “product”; this word, despite its cruel familiarity, served to draw a distinction between Shuangshuang and me, showing that it existed, and I did not.

I was assailed by the urge to flee. There was still, outside the window, an unknown, dubious ocean which I would be able to see if only I climbed high enough. However, my predicament was so awkward, festooned with so many loose ends, and I was arrested by so many proliferating desires, that I whittled away my time on an unavoidable path fixed in advance by destiny. In fact, on this path I could not see, my time was erased, silenced, and blotted out: I could not answer the question “Who are you?”, as Shuangshuang had, and in fact my fate was set the moment I laid eyes on Shuangshuang, though I didn’t know that then. I was destined to die.

Then, between belabored exhalations and inhalations, Shuangshuang reached out a finger and shoved aside the cellar wall.

The wall turned out to be extraordinarily durable, and from the gap between the silty muck and Shuangshuang’s cut finger a series of curious pictures emerged. The pictures emitted a pestilent, tomb-like stench more suffocating than any of my nightmares (I now know that it was one of my nightmares). They depicted groves of withered bamboo, dense mountain ranges, and things like snakes entwined around the mountains in redoubling rings. Shuangshuang beckoned me, and I poked my head into the malignant stench: in that instant, the bamboo, the mountains, and the snakes began to rapidly gyrate as if churned by a high-speed blender. In a split second, a wave of vertigo subsumed me, and all four cellar walls transformed into a densely forested vista. I must bring to bear all my rhetorical devices and descriptive apparatuses to depict those enigmatic trees; even so, I believe my nervous system played some devious trick on me. As I struggled to verbalize those pliant, overgrown branches, the trunks dipped and swayed with Shuangshuang’s undulating breaths, and I saw that each knot in each mysterious branch bore a human face. 

Trees with human faces—I had seen those faces before, in a nearby fishery. My parents, along with their colleagues, would cast nets into that lagoon and wait for throngs of silver carp to become entrapped; snarled beneath the nets, innumerable fish would thrash disconsolately in a final bid for freedom. When the nets were fully dredged, the people who had gathered to watch the spectacle would whoop and huzzah. Then, one day, the carp beneath the nets billowed like fleshy fruits, shining all night with a silvery light, infatuating the people. Only later did the people realize the silver carp had grown strange, excessive organs. The male fish had sprouted ovaries and oviducts, and testes dangled from the abdominal cavities of the female fish. These fish spawned frenziedly day and night, discharging a radiance the people had never before glimpsed. This deathlike light shrouded the entire fishery, and the people began showing signs of toxicosis, for instance, vomiting. When they revived, their appetites had vanished, an aftereffect no doctor could diagnose. Therefore, the people gave up fishing, and wave upon wave of fish washed ashore. When night fell, the bodies of the carp began to putrefy, and six months later, the lagoon disgorged an all-consuming stench, as if cursed. This is the term the people placed upon the incident: a nightmarish mishap. I never went home again after that, but I remember every face that populated my native land: both the living ones and the dead ones hung on the tree that sprung from the wall before me, like the doomed, silvery radiance emitted by the carp.

Drip, drop, drip, drop—it was the sound of water again, closer now than ever. Shuangshuang said, Listen, the eyes of the forest are blinking. Time flowed on, or should I say it didn’t move an inch. Or should I say, if time is merely a man-made means of measurement, a candied delusion meant to suppress death’s final descent, then all description is bound to be incinerated—it is meaningless. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, time has no discernible direction, and our existence is a sliver of an instant. Shuangshuang implied to me several times that it was neither alive nor dead, neither rejected nor accepted, neither a monstrosity nor the shadow of one. Did this mean that, in Shuangshuang’s place of origin and destination, time had never existed? Perhaps time had always been chaotic, anarchic, rumpled like soiled laundry, and all our reckonings of time were violent wishes. We even used the same numbers we used to measure time to tally money, turning time into absolute artifice—the rent for those three months came to ten thousand yuan, but to me ten thousand years was unutterably remote, and in that sense, the accumulation of money far outpaced time. Perhaps the countless worlds dreamt by ancient sages were the truth beyond my window. Perhaps I myself had been dreamt up by Shuangshuang ten thousand years in the future.

After that, I never again went to the cellar.

But there will come a moment when the violence of time encroaches, and I will stand upon the stool and open that window, and I know that when it is halfway open the latch will give way (as it did before), violently striking the windowpane and shattering it into uncountable fragments—this is the mishap of my nightmares. Then, an artery sliced absurdly by such a shard, I will die a comical, meaningless death. Death is quick, quicker even than ten thousand years, and its coming will obliterate my appetite, eliminate my hunger, wipe my memory and efface my story.

                                                                                双双

两年前的夏天，我在宜兴附近镇子上的一个居民区住了三个月。七月到九月——当地人说这是最难受的几个月，气压低，潮湿，既不完全下雨也不完全放晴。我的房东是那边的一个中学老师，她把钥匙交给我的时候疑惑地看了我一眼：“没人在这时候跑南方来的呀。” 她说的没有错，我来这里的动机不详、荒谬、令人难以置信。

如果动机存在的话，我想，那应该是一种贪吃症。一种神经症的分支，和地理位置、气味、周围的人都有关系。感染了这种病症的人首先就是感到饥饿，巨大的、无法被填满的饥饿：我几乎从早到晚都在往胃里填东西，我的胃仿佛一个排水池，而永无止境的吃换来的是下一次更强烈的饥饿。最开始，我的消化系统和排泄系统以自身强烈的应激反应超负荷地处理着这些过量的食物，突然有一天我的消化系统拒绝工作，堆积在胃里无法被吸收的食物就开始膨胀，它们如同过剩的欲望一般穿梭在每一处神经和细胞之间，无处逗留也无处释放，充斥，停滞。我仍然感到饿。但我此时吞下的无法被消化的食物和已经进入拒绝状态的身体混合出令人作呕的违和感，我意识到，再这么下去，我就要完蛋了。于是我决定离开北京，我相信南方的湿气能有效抑制我过于旺盛的食欲。

我租的屋子只有一个房间，五十多平米，吃饭、睡觉、上厕所都在里面。有一面窗户，但窗户很高，平时我根本够不到，必须把饭桌前的那把高脚凳搬过来踩在上面才将将能把窗户推开一个缝。可是大多数时候，我因为困倦或是其他别的什么事情根本想不起来去开那扇窗户，这就导致屋子里总是暗沉沉的。而且一天里有一半的时间我并不待在这间屋子里。这个房间还有一个地下室，据说是当时用来做防空洞留下来的。房东说在我住进来之前，她专门打扫清理了这个地下室，我用来放什么东西都可以。我认真想了想，自己也没什么东西可存放的——我从北京带来的衣物有一大半已经受潮发了霉，随身带的几本旧书也在来的火车上不翼而飞。这地下室只吊着一个光秃秃的灯泡，米黄色的光，虽然有些年头了但光源异常稳定，甚至比我在楼上那个屋子里的光还明亮。之后我来地下室的次数多了起来，每次来，都能在这封闭的、没有窗的空间里待很久，逐渐，我便每天一半时间在楼上，一半时间在地下室。

我想的没有错，过来一周之后我的饥饿感几乎消失了，南方的潮气确实极大程度地抑制住了我那不正常的食欲。在同一时间，另一种渴望又攫取了我所有的注意力——我渴望打开屋子里的那面窗户，彻底地。我无时不刻带着这个念头溜进地下室，在地下室那冰凉、湿润、静止的空气中想象着窗户外面的样子。我曾在某个夜里听到外面有海的声音（不可信），有震荡器的信号声（不存在），有捕鱼撒网的吆喝声（也许）；窗外是无数的波段，无数岩层，无数空洞，一切都在这虚构的角度中疯长，病变，萎缩，就这样。白天，我无数次再次带着同样的念头来到地下室。我动弹不得——“嘀，嗒，嘀，嗒”——一种持续的、单音节的滴水声，由弱到强，然后在一个适当的节奏和适当的力度中间循环往复，就像我们所有人的生命。我判断这一定是这座居民楼某处年久失修的旧水管漏水的声音，不足为奇，哪里都会发生，随时都会发生。尤其对于一个曾经是防空洞的避难之地来说，这声音也许是最日常的慰藉。于是我在这米黄色的光线与单调的漏水声中彻底忘掉了楼上的窗户。就这样，每当回到楼上的时候，我已经全身麻木昏昏欲睡；等睡起来就又立刻钻回地下室，一边渴望着打开窗户，一边在漏水声中遗忘整件事；再回到楼上继续昏昏噩噩。。。。。。

双双就是在这个时候出现的。

或者说，我就是在那个时候见到双双的。我终于意识到了自己当下无意义、荒唐的处境，我意识到窗户外面并没有我想象的东西——这里没有海，不可能一望无际。更糟糕的是，在我食欲减弱的同时，我似乎失去了方向感，这让我处于一种无法具体描述的失重状态中。我如同一个漂浮行走的，用游逛来打发时间的流浪者，只不过我的游逛范围仅仅局限在楼上和地下室之间的局促来回中。场景是重复的：灰色的水泥楼梯，掉漆的门框，由于潮湿从马桶里散发出来的异味，邻居开门关门发出的砰砰声。场景的重复使其中的时间变得可疑，时间这个概念此刻显示出来的是关于自己（是不是我？）的重重破绽。时间依靠人造的概念而存在，就像我们眨眼只是为了调节光线的进入，于是我迅速睁眼的那一刻，双双出现在我的面前。

我至今也不知道双双是谁，只能用最古老的代词“它”来描述整件事情，这减弱了描述和记忆的力量；并且当这个代词反复出现的时候，语言中最微小的词项自动生成不可被掌握的秘密的语料库，我的叙述变成了某种客观的、确凿无疑的科学陈述，尽管我连关于它的容貌的记忆都是可疑的。就这样开始，它的声音和样貌来自一个遥远的地方，由于光线和时间不可把握的双重偶然性，双双的样貌不断发生变化——一个孩童，一个女人，一个男人，一只猫，一个将死之人，一团空气。它不是依靠词语，而是用言说本身在说话，它问我，现在是什么时间。我无法回答。我问它，你是谁？

双双回答了我，它的回答听起来如同一段出处不详的古老的祭酒词，它说它是被抛弃的时代偶像，一个演讲家，一个知识分子，一个作家，一个建筑师，一个表演家，一个艺术大师。

都是一样的职业，它接着说，这些职业的出现必须振奋人心，必须第一眼就要牢牢抓住别人，让别人相信自己。说到这里，双双的轮廓闪烁不定，不是出于难过，而是出于愤怒。它的回答让我觉得它就是我们中的一个，我一时忘记了它声音中不同寻常的回响，那回响在地下室的空间中弥散出悠长的共鸣，我禁不住点了点头，试图伸手够向双双。就在这一瞬间，双双的轮廓一下子变得灰暗而坚硬，从头到脚像一个巨大的石像那样顷刻被击碎、崩塌，这时代的偶像，是我们用谎言、欲望、幻想、自私、愚蠢和盲目造出的时间偶像。

我跑回楼上的屋子，楼下的滴水声已传达到了这里，听起来缓慢且沉重。我试图搬来那把高脚凳，却发现我的皮肤开始变薄变脆，我感知到时间从我身体里蒸发；这也是谎言，因为我从来回于地下室的那天开始就已经失去了时间。我可能还变得非常饥饿，潮湿的空气不仅抑制了我的食欲，而且还起到了某种反作用，我的饥饿感转化为了饱足感，我的身体里不再存有过剩的食物，看起来一切都是徒劳。这给我带来新的困意，我就蜷在那把高脚凳上睡着了，再次忘了打开屋子里的高窗。

我睡了一小时，一天，也不重要。我必须回到地下室，双双还在那里。这一次它发出沉闷嘶哑的喉音，每当痰卡在嗓子里的时候，我也会发出这种声音，这声音有时让我胆战心惊，因为我相信儿时的噩梦：当你无法连续呼吸三次的时候，就会窒息而死。我有很多这样的噩梦：窒息而死，溺水而死，被自己的床单缠绕而死，吞食过多的可乐泡沫而死，被头发缠绕在椅子上而死，碰到路边树枝扭伤神经而死，遇到跳出的鹿惊吓而死。死亡过于轻易发生的可能性令我惴惴不安，一事无成。我打心底里认为那个叫弗洛伊德的伟大人物所说的“死亡本能”是在厕所上编造出的胡言乱语，显然这个绝望的真相抹杀掉了一切运动、一切时间和一切存在的意义，此时的我们处在一场彻头彻尾的没有结局的悲剧中。我再次问双双它是谁，这一次它说它是一个偶然的造物。它当然是造物，尽管这个词听起来陌生又无情，这个词区别了我和它之间的差异，它是存在的，而我不存在。

我无比迫切地想要逃离，高窗外还有一处我不知道的、可疑的海，只要我爬上去就能看到。然而此刻我的境地如此尴尬，我有很多未完成的事情，我有很多正在生长的欲望，然而我却在早已被命定的、不可避免的一条道路上消磨时间。甚至，在这条看不见的道路上，我的时间都是静止不可见的，我无法像双双那样对“你是谁”这样的问题作出回答，我甚至不知道当我能看到双双的那一刻起，我的命运早已被决定。我必死无疑。

于是双双在艰难的呼气声和吸气声之间用它的指头拨开了地下室的墙。墙坚实无比，在肮脏的泥灰和双双被划破的指间处，一排古怪的画显露出来。这些画散发出若尸骨腐烂一般的臭气，比我全部的噩梦还令人窒息。画上是大片枯萎的竹子，密密麻麻的群山，群山之间盘踞着层层叠叠像蛇一样的东西。双双示意我靠近一些看，我忍着那恶臭将头伸近，瞬间全部的竹子、山和蛇开始快速旋转，这些东西像进入了一台高速运转的搅拌机，就在我随之头晕目眩的刹那，地下室的四面墙上长出了成片的树。我必须调动所有的修辞方法和描述方式来讲述这些不可思议的树，即使这样，我相信我的神经系统还是以某种狡猾的方式欺瞒了我。我要说这些树有着柔软的，长得过分的枝干，它们的树干部分随着双双的呼吸声一起一伏，在这些神秘的枝干上每一个关节处都挂着一张人脸。

长着人脸的树——我曾经见过这些脸，就在这附近的一家捕鱼场。我的父母和他们的同伴一道在潭中设好渔网，等待成群结队的鲢鱼进入其中；无数鱼在渔网下方蹦跃，为了逃脱束缚拼命挣扎，最终渔网被完全提起，潭边围着的来看热闹的人们欢呼起来。然后有一天，渔网下的鲢鱼变得无比肥硕，在夜间都持续散发着银色的光芒，人们被迷住了。直到一段时间之后，人们才发现这些鲢鱼身上长出了多余的、奇怪的器官，雄性鲢鱼长出了卵巢和卵管，雌性鲢鱼在腹腔内长出了睾丸，这些鱼日日夜夜疯狂产卵，释放出人们从未见过的光芒。这带有死亡印记的光芒笼罩了整个鱼场，人们开始出现呕吐和中毒的症状，即使活了过来也失去了吃东西的欲望，医生没有任何办法判断这些鱼所带来的后遗症。于是人们放弃了捕鱼，一批又一批的鲢鱼被冲上岸，一到夜间鲢鱼的尸体就开始腐烂变臭，半年之后，水潭已经臭不可闻，如同一片诅咒之地。我在那之后再没有回过家，但我记得家乡的每一张脸，活着的，和死了的，这些脸挂在眼前的树上，像那时的鲢鱼一样发出银色的死亡之光。

“嘀，嗒，嘀，嗒”——滴水声又传来了，声音无比地近。双双说，你听，这声音就是人脸树眨眼的声音。时间在流逝，或者时间根本纹丝不动。如果时间仅仅只是我们制造出来的一个计数单位，一个用来抵御最终死亡时刻的甜蜜幻觉，一切的叙述将灰飞烟灭，没有任何意义。昨天，今天，明天，时间没有箭头，我们的存在不过只是一刹那。双双暗示过我几次，它不生也不死，不被抛弃也不被接受，它不是魍魉，也不是魍魉之影。这是否意味着它来的地方和要去的地方从来没有时间的存在？或者，时间从来都是混乱的、无序的，像旧衣服一样布满凌乱的褶皱，我们对时间的估计从来都是一厢情愿的暴力。我们甚至用计算时间的数字来同样计算金钱，把时间当作完全的人造产品——这三个月的房租费用是一万元，而一万年对我来说却如此遥远，在这样的意义上，金钱的聚集速度竟已远远超过了时间。那么古代哲人在梦里看到的无数个世界是否就是我窗户外面的真相？或许我只是双双一万年后的梦。

自那之后，我再没去过地下室。我终于站在凳子上试图推开那扇窗子，推到一半的时候窗玻璃上的插销掉了下来，重重地敲在窗户边缘，整个玻璃稀里哗啦碎了一大片，这就是我噩梦中的意外。接下来，我大概会被其中一块玻璃可笑地划伤动脉血管，荒唐地、无意义地死去。那么我将不再有食欲，不再饥饿，不再记忆，不再陈述。

Yang Hao (杨好) is a Chinese novelist and short story writer based in Dublin. She is the author of 《黑色小说》 (2017), 《男孩们》(2021), and the short story collection 《大眠》(2025). The English edition of 《男孩们》Diablo’s Boys, translated by Nicky Harman and Michael Day, was nominated for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award. Her writing has appeared in English translation in Two Lines and Copper Nickel, among other publications. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature at Trinity College Dublin.

Michael Day is an award-winning literary translator from the United States of America. His prizes include the 2020 Jules Chametzky Translation Prize and the 2015 Bai Meigui Award for Chinese to English literary translation (joint winner with Natascha Bruce). His full-length works of translation include Diablo’s Boys by Yang Hao (co-translation with Nicky Harman) and Justice with a Smile by Osamu Dazai, and shorter works have appeared in such publications as Words Without Borders, Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Chicago Quarterly Review.

6 October 2026