Marseille in Light by An Yu

Winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of short fiction.
Final Judge: Kristen Millares Young

Liu Ge woke up to a sky so bright that he thought he had slept until noon. He checked the clock. It was one in the morning. All the furniture around him was cloaked with a stark, bleached shine. There were no shadows – not even from his own body, and all the things he could see seemed to have merged into a collective whiteness.

Suspecting that something had gone wrong with his vision, Liu Ge went into the bathroom and shut the door. It was dark in there, like how it was supposed to be at this time of the night. He closed his eyes and focused on the cool, ceramic floor touching the bottom of his bare feet. It calmed him a little. After taking a deep breath, he opened the door and stepped back into the main room, where it felt even brighter than before, as though the light was a liquid that was seeping into all the crevices, flooding the room. He poured himself a glass of tap water, sat on the bed, and tried to organize his thoughts.

Three weeks ago, after a long period of filming in Paris, Liu Ge had decided to take the train down to Marseille to spend a summer in solitude. It’d been years since he’d gotten some extended time to himself. Wherever he went, there were people who would recognize him, but apart from some small inconveniences, he hadn’t felt overly troubled by anything until his last evening in Paris. While he was preparing for his flight back to Beijing, he flipped to the photo page of his passport and, for a moment, thought that he had taken somebody else’s. The impression lasted no more than a few seconds until he was able to identify his own features on the face in the photo. Still, a disturbing feeling remained, as though there’d once been a link between him and the man in the photo, and now the link had been cut, leaving nothing more than a face on a white background.

Believing that he must’ve overexerted himself, he decided, right then in that hotel room, that he was going to take a break.

In Marseille, he avoided staying at a hotel and opted for a small studio not far from the opera house. He’d arranged a few viewings before making a decision, not because he was particularly specific about his requirements, but the exact opposite. He didn’t quite know what kind of a place he had in mind. The apartment he eventually chose was located on Rue Paradis, which he thought was charmingly ironic since the space looked rather dreadful. It was a small studio devoid of decorations, only a single bed, a two-seat table, some pots and pans, and four wine glasses. The only thing that appealed to him was the large and polished window that extended from the floor all the way to the ceiling. It felt like it had been trapped in place.

Now, with the light, the window appeared larger than ever and he could barely make out its frames. He decided to check the time again with someone in Beijing.

“What time is it there?” he asked Zhou Kun through the phone.

“Haven’t heard from you in so long! Where are you these days?”

“Marseille. What time is it there?”

He heard his friend give a disgruntled sigh and move the phone away from his ear to
check the time. “It’s 8:17 in the morning.”

“Are you sure?”

“Hold on, let me take out my sundial and measure the position of sun for you.” Zhou Kun
laughed.

Liu Ge thanked him and told him that he had to go, upon which Zhou Kun gave a resentful comment about not hearing from his friend for so long just to be his human clock. Liu Ge apologized and promised that they’d see each other soon.

When he hung up the phone, he heard some noises on the street. By now, his vision had adjusted and he looked out to see a group of intoxicated young men stumbling their way home, yelling something to each other. They didn’t seem bothered by the light.

Unable to go back to sleep, he got changed and went outside. To his surprise, it wasn’t as warm as he’d imagined it to be. All the businesses were closed for the evening, as though nothing couldn’t wake the city up. He wandered around for almost an hour and found himself at Plage du Prophète, where the sea was glistening like a carpet made from diamonds and a woman was sitting on the sand, watching the horizon.

He recognized her as the Mirror Woman. After he moved to Marseille, he adopted the habit of going for a run every morning along the port and stopping by a café near rue Caisserie for breakfast. No matter how early he arrived, the Mirror Woman would already be seated at the inner corner of the terrasse. It was the only table that wasn’t cramped, perhaps because it was on the other side of a patch of uneven ground and the closest table had to be set at a distance. At first, Liu Ge had avoided that café, because he’d suspected that she was Chinese and feared that she might recognize him. But each time he passed by, she paid no attention to anything besides the table mirror in front of her. The mirror was round, about the size of a face, with a peach-colored porcelain base and a silver frame.

Almost two weeks after he first saw her, Liu Ge finally decided to have breakfast there, partly to avoid the morning showers, but mostly out of curiosity. Still wary, he’d taken the table farthest from her. She was ordering with the waiter and the mirror was nowhere to be seen. But as soon as the waiter left, the woman rocked the table cautiously and, upon deciding that it was steady enough, fished out the mirror from her bag with both of her hands and placed it on the table.

She watched her reflection intently with a calmed yet curious expression, only looking away when the waiter came with her coffee and bread. Right as the rain stopped and the clouds began to make way for the sun, she finished the last bite of her bread, paid her bill, packed the mirror into her bag, and quickly walked away.

Every day after that, Liu Ge spent his mornings at that café. Once, he considered following the Mirror Woman, but thought better of it as he wanted to avoid any trouble. He was not willing to risk shortening his stay. As a result, he’d never managed to find out anything about her, so to him, she seemed to have only existed in the space of that table. Now, seeing her sitting on a bright yellow towel on the beach, Liu Ge was at a loss for how to react.

She turned and looked at him when he approached.

“What would we see if everything was flipped?” she shouted in a thick southern Chinese accent.

Her question caught him by surprise. Of course, he had never considered the possibility that she’d speak to him. On top of that, he didn’t understand her question.

Before he could respond, she beckoned at him as if she was late for a meeting and he was holding her up. As he walked towards her, she turned to face the sea again and seemed to have relaxed a little. A large white shawl that was wrapped loosely around her body had slid off a little down one side of her body, revealing her bare shoulder.

“It’s like a giant mirror, isn’t it?” she said in a more inquisitive tone, like the voice of a child contemplating the meaning of an unfamiliar word. It reassured him to learn that he wasn’t going mad; that somebody else was aware of the light too.

“If,” she continued. “All of a sudden, the sea becomes the sky, what do you think we’d see when we look up?”

“You really have a thing for mirrors, don’t you?” he said, squatting down next to her.

He regretted saying this, realizing that he’d just made it clear that he’d been observing her before. But she seemed neither alarmed nor disturbed. Rather, she began meditating on his question. Her thin eyebrows contracted into a puzzled look, as though she was reaching into a mental dictionary in search of his words one by one. Each breaking wave swashed softly up to her feet that were peering out of the shawl, gently touching them before retreating into the sea again.

“I suppose you’re right,” she eventually said. “But how could you not be curious about mirrors? There is another you entirely made of light.”

“So you’re saying that a reflection has some sort of a life of its own?”

She pushed herself up and stood on her tiptoes, as if this way she could see beyond the Mediterranean Sea.

“Whenever I look in the mirror,” she said. “It seems like a long time ago that I ripped a part of myself away and stored it in there, and since then, it’s grown and evolved with me, but slightly astray. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to be a reflection. Maybe that’s the real me.”

The Mirror Woman let go of her shawl and it fell to the ground, revealing her naked body beneath. Her tanned skin glowed gold like honey, and her elevated collarbones flickered in the brightness as though there were little stars resting there. Instinctively, Liu Ge wanted to turn away but something kept his eyes on her. It must’ve been the way she held herself, which was different from before – less hesitant, more daring. She was like a snake that had shed its skin and, with it, discarded all the things she’d learned to fear throughout the years.

“Will you swim with me?” she asked and began walking towards the sea. Whoever she was speaking to, Liu Ge was sure that it wasn’t him. She took her time striding forward across the wet sand and into the water, leaving behind shallow footsteps that were smoothed out by the next incoming wave.

Liu Ge watched her dive in and swim for a while. He knew he couldn’t have gone in with her – it was as though he didn’t belong where she was. Not once did she look back, just like how the world around her seemed to have disappeared when she was staring into the small round mirror at that café. They stayed that way for a while – her bathing in the water, him sitting on the  beach watching – until an hour or so had passed and she made her way back to shore and draped the shawl over her wet body, clothing her again with the vulnerability of being human.

She lay down on the towel and took a deep breath that was just loud enough for it to still be considered quiet. He followed suit and nestled into the chill of the sand, resting his forearm over his eyes. A saltiness invaded his senses with a force so strong that it has never left him since. The flavor soaked into his nostrils, his mouth, his throat, and his pores. It was as if he was lying on the ocean floor, being swallowed up by the earth.

“Have you seen this light before?” he asked.

She held her palm out in front of her and clenched it as if trying to catch the light.

“I can’t recall,” she said.

They didn’t speak for the rest of the night. He heard the distanced and refracted noises of birds and a few cars driving by, which eventually lulled him to sleep. When he woke up, the sun was rising behind him. There were a few families and couples splashing in the morning water. The ocean was a dark blue and the Mirror Woman was nowhere to be found.

For the rest of his stay, days were bright and nights were dark. Every morning, he went to the café but never once saw the Mirror Woman again. On his last day, he asked the waiter whether he’d seen her. The waiter took a moment to think but ultimately shook his head in regret. In the taxi to the airport, Liu Ge looked at his passport again and saw himself in the old photo from years ago. His face was young and plain, but ever so faintly, there was a shine in those eyes.

An Yu was born and raised in Beijing, and spent parts of her life studying and working in London, New York, Paris, and Hong Kong. She received her MFA from New York University. Her first novel, Braised Pork, was published in 2020 by Harvill Secker in the UK and Grove Atlantic in the US, and is forthcoming in six other languages worldwide. Her writing has appeared in the Sunday Times Style, Freeman’s, Literary Hub, among other publications. She lives in Hong Kong. You can find her on Instagram @anna_an_yu or on her website www.anyuwriting.com.