One Night, One Day, One Year, One Lifetime

Eleven

When I heard these words, I did not place much thought into it. I was nearly thirty-years old, so how could I sleepwalk without knowing it myself. But Jiajing said these words with surety, as though they were real. She said that in the depths of her sleep, she had a blurred, indistinct feeling that I was not lying next to her.

I disagreed with her; she insisted that she had not lied. As she grew increasingly agitated, I became afraid that her heated temper would harm our child and no longer argued with her. Instead, I hugged her, placing my hand on her slightly swollen abdomen as I smiled, 'If I am not by your side, could I be inside you?'

She laughed, a little exasperated, and hit me, saying that I was indecent – as a man about to become a father, I was not setting a good example to my child. How could I conduct antenatal lessons in this manner?

I laughed, and said that it was evident that I did not practice what I preached, for how else could our child have arrived in this world?

I thought that I was extremely normal.

Besides, if I were really sleepwalking, where would I have gone, and who could I have met?

***

Yet things did not simply conclude in that manner. Jiajing seemed to be exceedingly concerned about my sleepwalking.

She often repeated to me that I must have been leaving the house in the middle of the night. Eventually, I grew frustrated and blew my temper, forbidding her from saying such words again in the future.

She was frightened, for she had never imagine that I would lose my temper. She fell silent as she looked at me. Never bringing this topic up again.

I accompanied Jiajing in visiting the gynaecologist. Occasionally, I would follow her in. Other times, I would sit at the seats in the waiting area, outside the corridor.

The hospital walls should have just been repainted, for they were an unrealistic shade of white. Combined with the white ceramic tiles, it seemed like even the sunlight had been cleansed, cleansed until it paled and lost all its colour and radiance. A sea of white stretched on forever in front of me, until my eyelids began to grow heavy.

The corridor was a couple of meters long, a white window at the end of its path. Beyond the windows were green grasses and red flowers. I smelled the fragrance of the flowers, and saw He Yujin walk out. She continued to smile, as though that was the only reason for her existence. Then, her image transformed into the way she had looked the day she lay on the hospital bed after the traffic accident, the way she had yearned for some porridge after she had woken up, but refused to speak to me.

Hypnotised, I walked forward, rearranging the scenes in my mind. I must rearrange them, otherwise I would never be able to continue acting them out. I drew near to her, sat down beside her as I stared closely at her. I did not understand why, but the corners of my eyes filled with tears.

I buried my head in her collarbone. I said that these were not tears, yet they continued to flow.

When I finally returned to my senses, Jiajing was standing by the windows next to me. Her head was tilted to a side as she looked at me, her eyes lit with amusement and curiosity.

I stood and walked over to her. I said, let's return.

If, instead of telling me that I sleepwalked, Jiajing instead insisted that I had begun to think fondly of the past, perhaps I would have agreed without hesitation.

But Jiajing no longer mentioned a word about my sleepwalking.

Yet one day, as she suddenly burrowed herself into my arms, she said to me, 'Fei, I have something to ask you.' I hugged her, inhaling the intoxicating scent on her hair. Jiajing used Clairol's lavender shampoo, and the smell was extremely overpowering.