1. The Book of Skin

Originally, people were drifting souls, emerging from hills, edging along treetops, and flowing on rivers. The emperor conceived the dreams, ones that were about stars, roses, and graves. And then blew air into these dreams vast like primitive champaigns and deep oceans, until the outside coat was extended to a misty cloud of fabric. He made a puncture, and the air gushed inwards, swirling in the souls scattered all over the plains and mountains. This natural, gravitational pull had a name called desire. The drifting beings followed the fugue of desire like a Fibonacci sequence, and crept in one after another.As every X entered, the emperor tied close the dream and cut the knotting clean with a sickle, just like a cannery worker doing packaging. These wrappings were made of sighs, as he thought of the boisterous children and his wife he would see after work.

Therefore, everyone’s skin belonged to the emperor since the origin of their pedigree. All people’s skin belonged to the emperor. They only had the right to use it, but the emperor held its ownership. It was only leased temporarily to animals for tillage, padded under their soles. 

For every solar term, the emperor would take his inspection in the form of a sacrificial ritual, recording the people and animals existing in a period on a certain part of everyone’s skin. Every night, the emperor sat on his imperial bed and folded people. Her body was folded for times, and taken apart like the pedals of roses. In villages covered with scattered flower pedals, people lay on the road, their skin lined up as chapters of history.

The emperor sent eyes all over the state, installed on every villager’s body. Every man had an eye on his body, all in different places. Its location was kept as an utmost secret, and would never be shared with outsiders. People covered their entire body, concealing the emperor’s eye. They wore full-body ropes with only their own eyes shown. They thus never saw others’ eyes, but the shared knowledge was, that they all had an emperor’s eye on others’ bodies.

The emperor stayed at the center of the state, observing only one thing every day: others’ eyes.

Anyone had the freedom to leave the state at any time, but the emperor would take back the skin from state deserters. They were flayed from the head to their feet. Those no-skinners walked towards the border, naked, and fell to the ground hundreds of steps from the boundary mark. No one could fully enjoy their freedom to leave the state alive.

Many years later, they overthrew the emperor and regained ownership over the skin, through eating one of his dreams. 

This was that dream:

In his late years, Caesar wanted to see himself fighting again, and gathered a group of magicians to build a dream player. He lay himself in the wooden box they built, and indeed returned to the battlefield.

In fact, the box contained mesmerizing drugs that would swoon Caesar, followed by a real war waged by his own troops.

Caesar grew addicted to the box, since it would bestow him with regained vitality. As he dreamed every day, his troops killed each other in the real battles, encroaching on the number of soldiers. At last, the neighboring country invaded, ending Caesar’s reign. Before he died, Caesar didn’t know why his troops never showed up.

Besieged by enemies, he opened the box and huddled himself up inside. For the first time, he had a dream.

This was that dream:

After the Romans conquered Greece, they followed the prophesy in the classics written by a late Greek philosopher: they destroyed all the clay-built architecture, and rebuilt the church with the rust-proof lead. The women used water transferred by lead gutters, they drank water in lead cups, cooked with lead pots, applied lead make-up, and brewed wine in lead barrels…They redeveloped the nation’s recipe, transportation, and festivals based on lead. Eventually, miscarriages ensued, a testament to the prophecy. Those who lost their first children, chose to adopt animals as sons and daughters. Bearing no posterity anymore, in its nature, means bearing no dreams anymore, and dreams are the bodies to carry on the mythologies. In the end, the dreamless ancient Rome lost their own mythology.

She has been pealing the pomegranate when she is slacking off at work. She swallows pieces of seeds and stores them in her stomach. The seeds are attached to the stomach wall, sucking the bodily fluid out of it. A month later, she disgorges a whole pomegranate. As she looks for the cause behind this, she finds the inner side of her skin covered with words—still forcibly occupied by the emperor.

 

2. Punishment

He started his history in a poor village: levering schemes for power, eliminating dissidents, eventually monopolizing power for himself, and seizing emperorship. But at the coronation, his mind drifted away, and then he found himself back in the poor village. He had to find his feet again in poverty, and grow accustomed to being bullied by people around him, instead of receiving their flatteries. He had to remember everything fast, and make sure every event was repeated exactly like the previous time, until he sat on the throne again. But at the coronation, his mind drifted away, and then he found himself back in the poor village…He knew, this was some kind of punishment, but he could not stop.

One day, he was flogging a disobedient civil official, wielding the stick and beating him until the skin was covered with lacerations. He didn’t know, that the official was from a distant, foreign world, where injustice, oppression, and bullying were extinct. However, as people there sometimes missed the ancient feeling of being mistreated, which led to the birth of “the journey to being enslaved”. Tourists would travel to ancient dynasties and play the role of tyrants’ lackeys, rekindling the life experience of ancient people, whose freedom was deprived from them.

Sometimes, tourists might inadvertently kill the king, and the game would automatically restart. 

 

3. Ginkgo

In the summer, you were in the cold basement with your father, learning how to make water ice. Stab the knife into the ice mortar, twist it, and mince up the fleshes of ice. 

Father used to work on a whaling ship at his younger time. They would use a massive drilling machine, opening a hole on the vastly bulk icy surface. The pipe twirled around the ship was freed, extended under the surface meter by meter, and some mysterious creature deep under the ice would swallow the pipe into its mouth. 

The crews were asked to take physical examinations for creatures under the ice. Each one of them would hold a mirror and climb into the tube, traveling along the claustrophobic cylinder, until they reached the creature’s inside.

The person at the front captured its heart with his mirror, and the heartbeat was passed up, glass by glass, as a string of pulses showed on the captain’s monitor. 

On the screen, father saw a heart in the shape of a ginkgo, shedding pieces of leaves as the heart pounded. Anyone who touched the ginkgo would learn some unknown characters, but he who learned a new character, would have a tooth fallen out from the mouth.

Trading all their teeth for characters, crews in the tube sent dozens of characters above ice, and back to the continent.

Years later, you asked him about the characters he once transported. At that time, he had lost all the fallen teeth—only with the tooth, could one carve out the character on the ground.

 So he could only tell you some stories, intertwined with each other, to touch upon that character’s color of skin, category of the noun, and its phonology:

People in this village earned a living by making paper dolls. On one Lantern Festival, a lantern ignited a paper doll. Attached to one another, the fire passed on and burned down the village. On the pitch-black ground, for every Lantern Festival, a paper city erected itself. Every person walking on the street was a piece of clothing.

The traffic policeman was guiding a group of goblins to cross the road. For every step taken, there would be a shoe left. As the goblin walked, a trail of shoes was left on the lake surfaces and in the valleys, traversing countries and continents.

If people living in different mountains pick up one of the shoes and put it on, they will, no matter how physically far from each other, fall asleep in the same dream, and encounter the others who also have shoes on their feet.

The weight of the universe is equal to the weight of all the ongoing dreams combined. As one sleeps, a creature grows—eventually to the length of a lifetime’s dreams. On the land made of its body exists many doubles of the asleep, transcribing scriptures day and night.

 The civilization beyond the galaxy has been attempting to lure us out of our physical dreams once and for all, through literature, films, music, dance, architecture, and sculptures, among many other ways. Eventually, the weight of our universe will continue to diminish, curling up to a piece of paper, like a piece of ginkgo leaf.

 

4. Elegies

Climbed out of a land of clay after death, he could only learn the craft of pottery. During their unending death, they molded men from clay, one after another. The only figures there to mimic after, were the ones who were learning pottery. Everyone has a ball burning fire on their face. Every taste bud became a piece of farmland, and they divided each one’s tongue into some ten thousand farmlands, like tenant peasants were pulling the noses of water buffalos, walking between the paddies, piercing rice seedlings into the soil. Eventually, their craftsmanship of pottery became impeccable, and the molded men were identical to the living souls. 

The clay man wanted to speak, but was found wanting in words. The dead then climbed into the clay man from its mouth, becoming its word to be spoken out. At the same time, the dead traveled along its path of voice, and was born from the molded body he built himself.

Grandma returned to lie in the cradle in her remaining years. When you were humming the lullaby and gently shaking the basket, every night, she passed down a part of the ritual through her dreams. You had been doing a special business since the Shang dynasty: after receiving a parcel, shove it into the vagina, and a week later, send what came out of it to an enigmatic address.

If a baby refused to be born, it would return to death, and its family would contact you. But most of the times, parents were negligent of this minute change of emotions, as it only quivered like dews on cicada’s wings.

You had opened a surrogate parcel once, inside was an animalizing elegy. 

You followed the faceless postman, to a tribe of people from the Zhou dynasty. They lived in rooms separated from each other, with only water balls as messengers to the outside. You read out a piece of poem, and it returned a prescription. You took the script home, and let it simmer with seaweed soup. The words and symbols moved about like tadpoles, and grew in your body as he drank them.

The dead people in the village, who lost their lives long ago in floods, droughts, and conflagrations, held their human shape by swallowing gulps of memories of the Chu Elegies at night. They kept drinking, until a word got wrongly recited. The water within then dissolved their skin, turning them into lanterns, flickering in the wind.

You put the lantern of your mother in the fish tank and fed it. The candlelight below the water blew out glaze bubbles out of the liquid. The bubbles paced themselves with the desire to breed and the desire to crawl, so that the frequency resonated with your pulse. 

By that resonation, your heartbeat stopped, for three seconds at first, then with some practice, for one minute, three minutes. In those minutes between the heartbeats, you saw a historical version of the evolution of everything in water—the Chu kingdom underwater and spacecraft. Those pilots had invented a language that would not sink in water, just like fish eggs.

 

5. Rivers

In this country, in the upstream, midstream, and downstream, reside the past, present, and future.

People living along the upstream are forever in a childhood state.

The only way of growing up, is to sit in a coffin, and drift along the river. 

Reaching the plain along the midstream, they stand up from the coffin, step on the ground, and live the life of the middle-aged.

The only way of aging, is to sit in the coffin, and drift down the river.

 

6. Invention

Every king was a great inventor, like a puzzle-playing child, he invented every aspect of your life: clothes, food, funerals, marriages, and sleep. 

In the history of invention that shaped the country, the first king invented clapping. It would automatically defeat all the enemies of every tribe: hitting the spear-gripping left hand and the shield-holding right hand, they smashed all of their weapons.

The second king invented the laugher. It will make the captivated tribe automatically forget their wounds: a clown stood on the stage, grinding his bare shoulder blade to make painkillers, and casting the powder under the stage light, to every mutilated bud of tongue. After all of his bones were ground to dusts, the next one succeeded to the stage.

The third king invented boredom. It would make every resident to engage automatically in labor:

…

You elected the cloned man as king, codename Kafka, hoping he could invent a new format of memory. He compiled conscientiously like a programmer, and left with a hundred questions, fifty of which were about fifty emotions unincluded in the dictionary. 

The twenty-seventh emotion was the one when a child was reciting tongue twisters, he realized the dog’s hometown was the only one that had been left. It was originally a tribe of tongue twisters, and everyone in the tribe was a piece of tongue twister. When addressing each other, people would read out the entirety of the wordplay:

Time tick-tocks with a tacky rhyme to topple the sky

A chick eats and pecks, at the technique that memory begets

The skinny skeleton smothered by the thick skin

Go out from the north gate and bridge across, look down the bridge for the sight of corpse. Collect them with a rod, red ones are less, blue ones are more: one corpse two corpse three corpse four corpse five corpse six corpse seven corpse eight corpse nine corpse ten corpse

…

The tribe leader had the most difficult tongue twister. No one could read out his body.

After committing his assassination, Kafka dissected him, putting his cells under a microscope. Kafka discovered, that in his body, the tribe leader treated memories and everyday life with set theory. The leader asked every member for the weather, input the answers into a pseudorandom number generator, and brewed out 30-year proverbs (all the weather one has seen in 30 years) and 60-year proverbs (all the weather one has lived through in 60 years)…

Kafka cut open his pancreas, double-clicked and opened the master program of proverbs. A perpetual process named Adam started its execution. It burst out, like the beating heart, submarines to the deep ocean, seeking the asylums for the forgotten things.

One of the containers accommodated the forgotten steel. Kids dropped their farm tools, running to pick up steel wastes from the mill: the chamber-pot ones used when robots were leaking out oil late at night, and the stubble ones, like the remaining paddies when the star was shaving its hairs grown on craters.

After that, all the steel disappeared, along with all the characters and slogans, reclaimed over the night. Mother, who was wearing a red armband, slept on a blackboard, waiting for the slogans to come home. On the flowing dark land, Mother’s missing father was found, he had hanged himself on a pipe inside the factory water tower. He was already drunk down by everyone.

Mother collected everyone’s urine, trying to retrieve her father by distillation. Amid the patriarchal mist in the greenhouse, she filtered out the fathers of different ones—it was human nature to be obsessed with unimaginable things.

On her death, she only left one sentence in her entry: he was the biggest frog in the world.

 

7. Working

You are hired to work, not for doing something, but for not doing something.

The human destiny planning department behind every boss will hire everyone to work. For example, if Hitler were to be hired to work on the Foxconn assembly line, there would be no World War II.

If most people have the freedom to choose whatever life they want, the world will be filled with all kinds of weirdos. To guard human destiny against interference, the human destiny planning department will hire all of you for work.

 

8. War

His son died in a war. He started to gather everything he could find about it: new reports, scholarly works, atlas, diaries, oral accounts, videotapes and audio cassettes… 

He assembled all the accounts about the war in the world, and built a battlefield.

Stray bullets flew by, illuminating the body of night like striking a match. He sat on the middle of his rebuilt war, trying to discern, the figure who killed his son.

 

9. The Camp of Tails

You were recording grandpa’s oral accounts in his later years, like pricking leaves of tea through his teeth. Floating on the water, the leaves formed a book of memoir, recording every massacred soul in that concentration camp. As the executioner at that time, grandpa chopped down everyone’s tail, and released them free.

You sniffed for the weight of rain and thickness of frost, once dropped on and layered on the tea leaf, following its humidity, temperature, and dimension, looking for the trace left by the survivors.

You published your research about the memoir in an anthropology journal. Many scholars were skeptical about the existence of a concentration camp like this, as it defied other records and materials.

You spent the rest of your life looking for the camp, hoping it might reflect the glory of humanity within your grandpa, an executioner.

Years later, you excavated the ruin with a hoe. Under the eyes of many anthropologists, the ancient incinerator was opened. The scraps of bones sorted out were not tail bones, but skulls, one after another.

Despite your objection, they published all the research materials. No one understood your rejection, sorrow, and despair, as popularity also found you because of this historical discovery.

On that day, many people, even a whole clan, who saw or heard of the reporting on this concentration camp on newspapers, television, and radio, were not found anymore.

The milk-suckling baby disappeared, a pacifier rolling down from the dining table; the sewing machine spun alone, water cascading down the sink…In the coffin, the survivors, the dead ancestors, disappeared too.

 

10. Name Tag

Uniforms were ripped off from dead soldiers, and were sent to the washing pool behind the factory, stirred and pounded by women workers. As cloths were in shortage, the names sewn on the collar were not removed. They were just given to the new soldiers, and the new kid would step on the battlefield wearing the last soldier’s name, until his death. And the uniform would continue to be passed down. 

Herds after herds of people died on the battlefield, all wearing the uniform of the soldier who died first. In that war, we lost some ten thousand Bao Wenyuan.

 

11. Hot Air Balloon

The first thing prisoners had to go through upon entering the prison, was to follow the warden to the empty field at the center, and visit a hot air balloon that was parked there.

Until a certain late night, a prisoner sneaked into the middle of the prison and took that unwatched balloon. He lit up the torch, and slowly ascended with the ballon.

The warden and some old prisoners watched the ballon, this was their regular show: when the hot air balloon reached some a hundred meters, it would explode like fireworks, with all the residues fluttering down on the ground.

As the warden had installed a preset barometer inside, the balloon would blow up at a certain height. Upon every new group of new prisoners, he would take them to the balloon. And the old prisoners, who had spent years here, would wait silently for a certain night of fireworks.  

On a certain late night, a new prisoner sat in the balloon and lit up the torch. The warden and a group of old prisoners sat on the empty field and watched coldly, anticipating the sarcastic fireworks to blow up in the sky.

The balloon ascended, traveling higher and higher, beyond the dense mass of heads, beyond the prison walls grown with glass shards, and beyond the bullets of soldiers on the watch tower. But it did not explode. Leaving the astonished gaze of the warden and old prisoners, the hot air balloon disappeared into the sky. People were sure that its exploded scraps were blown away by high-altitude winds, with body and rubber debris falling into the river valley.

A hot air balloon, drifting across mountains, plains, and valleys, gradually extinguished its torch before landing on a grassland. The prisoner walked out of the balloon, and from the sunk-down balloon, another person’s corpse tumbled out. It turned out a man had been hiding in the balloon, and traded the air in the balloon with his own breaths.

When the next prisoner sat in the balloon, lit up the torch, the explosive and poisonous gas would have already been substituted with breaths of the other person. Every breath he exhaled started to burn on the ground, jacking up the heat, driving the balloon to ascent, fly, and fall.

A man and a man’s corpse, gained their freedom at last.

 

12. Shell Crater

Grandpa said, during the war, they huddled up in the trench. Every night, in craters created by hand grenade explosions in the middle between us and them, they would see a kind of life that seemed between a plant and an animal—parts of the body that each one of them missed—like grandpa’s missing arm, has grown from a grenade pit, itself being an independent living entity.

Among lines of craters, independent hands, mouths, and ears sprang up like new-grown bamboos…They were not reliant on humans, but acquired their own consciousness and autonomy.

The war had been over for a century. Deep inside the rainforest, lived a group of independent organs. Just like stand-up comedians, each of them was performing shows in the crater: the mouths talked on the stage, the ears listened, no one could laughed.

 

13. Hero

He died a heroic death. The flood of propaganda campaigns washed every page of the newspaper. But he didn’t die, he had to only because needed to finalize the mythology of the hero for the people, since people needed such mythologies as mental foods.

So he could never use his original identity, and lost his original name forever—it did not belong to any living person like him, rather, it needed to be worshiped before the burning incense.

He spent the remainder of his years hiding in the village, living on the back side of everyone’s life. Those who paid homage to the hero’s shrine, and kneeled before the divine effigy, no longer recognized him.

The vagrant who stole and ate the tribute fruits died last winter. He was bitten by a dog when trying to climb over someone’s wall and collect the discarded cardboard. He died from a thigh infection after that.

 

14. Dust

In the literature of physics class, the writers were doing an experiment by adjusting a quantum lamp, trying to modulate the penetration and intensity of dust’s drifting movements under the light.  When they found a new sand of dust, and confirmed its novelty, unobserved and undescribed, after comparing it with every historical image, they would capture the dust, and give it a name.

In the afternoon, the whole class attended the funeral of dust ζXV391, which collided with βGC482 and crashed. The supervisor, also the host of the funeral, told the story of the dust: floating across every multiverse along the endless quantum tunnel, it only traveled one inch for its entire life, but that was longer than a lifetime’s journey of any human.

On a certain slide of the universe filmed by the quantum microscope, upon its crash, an alien standup comedian was trying to amuse a stone to the point of tears. He wrote with the wandering light: “Men’s life was composed of countless meaningless conversations—that was the gentle sound of friction between me and the world.” That never stopped, until that sound crashed on every sand of dust in the universe. And, until the collision of every dust wore away all the mass of the whole universe.

 

15. Wabi-Sabi

During WWIII, men produced phonon weapons and imposed them on their enemies. The radiation bursting out from the explosion would dissolve the time within anyone who speaks.

The survivors had to give up speaking, or every word would grow on their skin due to the radiation, and the memories would be visualized as line-ups of words in time. After a hundred sentences, their mouths and noses would be blocked by the burgeoning words, suffocating them. In other words, everyone had only a hundred sentences left to say.

Someone called out a hundred people’s names and greeted them; someone narrated a hundred poems; someone named a hundred celestial bodies; someone yelled out a hundred sex moans; someone said nothing, clinging on to the one hundred sentences until their death…

Mankind thus evolved a unique form of civilization, and every life existed within the length of one hundred sentences. They are evenly distributed over the whole length of one’s life: By the tenth sentence, they grew from babies to children; by the twentieth, they completed their teenage education; by the thirtieth, adults would walk out from universities and stood beside the assembly line, processing the voice left on the world… 

The deaf-mute people on the line were cutting and processing their voices, pressing every throat, swollen, gory, moss-covered, gilded…in cans.

The whole family sat before the dining table and opened the cans, enjoying today’s voices. Pairs of chopsticks picked up the “wabi-sabi”, the beauty emerged from imperfection and incompleteness, transported from the banana plantation: 

On the tallest tree in the banana plantation, stood a group of crows. This type of crow was extremely short-lived. When they were born, they fell from the tree, took a deep breath with their dark beaks, narrated a string of sound along the way, and ended their lives in a crash.

There were two short-lived crows, which spent the entirety of their falling lives, kissing each other. They remained silent during their entire lifetime of falling, A string of sound was held between their black beaks, unspoken—it was named “wabi-sabi”.

Through the kiss, the submarine was passed to another unfallen crow. The one again held the submarine with its loved one, and passed it to the next through kissing. And the next couple held the submarine, passing it on to the subsequent pair of beaks…

Before the crash, the crow at the bottom lifted up its head, and passed the “wabi-sabi” up to the crow above it, and the next one kissed the one above it before its own crash, continuing the passing of “wabi-sabi”…

Sometimes, the passing was faster than the speed of falling. The “wabi-sabi” then floated itself by stepping on each crow’s beak. Like a sun, it rose to the highest branch in the banana plantation. Otherwise, the “wabi-sabi” slide down like descending stars and moon… Between their beaks, “wabi-sabi” resembled a cruising submarine, floating or diving, but never landing.

Crow after crow crashed and died with a short life, like the sparkling dews burst open on grass leaves. The “wabi-sabi” was kissed into different beaks, unspoken, forming an eternal space without a terminus, like an unsinking submarine traveling on boundless death. Behind the hatch, “wabi-sabi” collected the wonder of crows. It was a sound that every being longed to listen to, yet the only sound that, even if heard, could never be spoken.  

When grandma died, you saw a little man coming out of one of her ears. It turned out that all the sound you heard in life, was not produced by the ones in front of you, but communicated to you through a little man living in your brain. He made up all the utterances that you could hear.

When one was born, they would draw lots with their substitute, and one would go out to form the body, the other into the brain through the ear. The latter was responsible for building a house since birth. He would use a possessor to separate grains of language in a centrifuge. Emotions would be blended in the way of making cement, and the painted building has a structure resembling the topology of time… After all the renovation was done and had ones moved in, no new memory would be generated. This was the connotation of death.

After the war, as all kinds of radiation disrupted the audiospace, and any sound ever created would not die down. The sound of animals and cars, human voices and roars, and languages, from yesterday, today, or last week, would be forever wandering in audiospace. 

By calculation, within a month, the earth will be stuffed with various sounds created by every living being. Any sound could ever be captured by the human ears would only be the ones created in the past. 

Men had designated “decibel space”, one that was yet to be stuffed with sounds, as a scarce public resource, which should be distributed uniformly. No one would speak legitimately without using the sound quota issued by society. Every day, they could be distributed with a sentence, or the right to listen to a song, or to produce a sound of an object within the 10-second duration. Anyone who broke the rule would be “silenced”: locked into the soundless void. 

It was said, that this rule could delay man’s extinction for one hundred years.

He went to the bank today and took out his sound quota deposit accumulated for ten years. He closed the door and windows stuffed with soundproofing foams, and started to play a record for of a concert.

An hour later, depleted all his accumulated savings, he made a sound defying the quota, the sound of him collapsing onto the ground from the tenth-floor window.

Later, when the “decibel space” was utterly depleted, all sounds would coexist all at one time. But just like everything had gone mute, no one ever heard of anything. Every frequency of sound disappeared one after another. The wave smashed into the rocks, only leaving silent images. 

In the past, when people were born, they were prohibited from pressing the stop button of the recorder on their chest, which recorded every beat of their heart. In ancient times, some ten thousand people once recorded their heartbeat at the same time. The sound converged and gathered as an ocean, and was said to be the origin of the blue water.

After the sound disappeared, the tribe leader was the only one who remembered the whole sea. Now, he was on the hospital bed, undergoing emergency treatment for decades. This was the only way to restore man’s sea.

He stole the ocean of man and stored it in his memory, while what was left remained the boundless seabed. Lying on the bed, his ears kept leaking out sea water spilled over from memories. People stood in line, walking past his bed one after another. They caught the seawater from his ears with bowls, cups, basins, toilets, and other different containers. And they walked along the seabed in a line, pouring the water back into the sea.

He stole the sea to resuscitate the fish fossils in his brain, and to restart its evolution. 

During his entire lengthy pre-school years, his parents were hesitating about discarding him, as he could not speak. 

His vocal cords bore a unique structure, vibrating uncontrollably every second without stops, but the frequency of which was out of man’s range of hearing. Even though he exerted all his power to scream and yell, to the point of exhausting all his strength, people could not hear anything from his moving lips. He was therefore treated as a mute person.

But he could hear people speak, and he soon learned their languages, math, and knowledge of composition.

Even when he sang in class, louder than the teacher’s voice; even when he sang in meetings during work, louder than the voice of his boss; no one would hear and care about it.

From his birth to his demise, he spent every moment awake hearing a low, rumbling sound of drums. It was like a person’s dance steps, 7.83 hops per second, landing gently on the ground before jumping again. This was the frequency of the earth’s vibration: 7.83 Hz. 

He composed music with this vibration, ones that traveled beyond people’s ears, and could only be heard by himself. And sent the music into space through sound waves. When he woke up the next day, the song had left the atmosphere. By the next week, it reached the moon. Decades later, when he died, the song was gradually getting rid of the sun’s grip of gravity, and started to fly to the galaxies farther away.

When he was young, he used to climb up his father’s telegraph machine. When his throat touched the needle, the vibration would be passed through the mechanical device, which punched holes on the paper stripes.

His father tries to decode the holes he made with his throat, with every deciphering technique man has mastered. The holes were translated into a number: 4.135196817,and the number would increase by one every second. This seemed to represent a specific time. This was the only utterable thing for him.

He eventually died of anorexia. Before his death, he dragged his frail body and touched the needle, telling you the scene he had seen: 

He treated every character as a convex lens, through which he would observe the past and future reflected from the glass. As he looked at the vegetables and fruits, he could see the history of fibers and meat at every moment. They, through the long history of time, transformed into everyone around him—Dad, Mom, sister, and himself—this was the past and future of food. He could not gulp his friends and families into his stomach.

He saw the sand and soil under his feet overlapping with every face he was familiar with. And he could not take a further step, for he could not step on anyone’s face.

He saw, that air was the cells that once lived, died, and decayed. They were now splitting themselves and flowing. The cells became the ones in priests and criminals, parents and children, lathes and cyborgs. He saw life in the centrifuge bursting into the uttermost sensitive, honest, and pure forms of vision, sound, touch, smell, and taste—mythologies, human bodies, animal furs, plant roots, stems of artifacts, customs, positionings of patterns, spectrums of numbers, mathematical power of colors…

He saw, that characters would transform into the bodies of the living and lifeless. When he was transcribing, he caressed every body of men and objects. This was almost the only thing he could do: obsess, wallow, and indulge, feeling the desire of history through himself. 

He sliced pages of bread from his ribs, which resembled a book of faith coated with rain and fog. His father in ancient times, his mother at present, and his son in the future, were buried in the collapsed mine at different locations. On himself grew the summers of apes and his grandmother. He dissembled himself, and assembled into an island. His families on the island could fold their sensations. His mother folded her memories into a windmill, and he a snake.

Now, he unfolded the paper snake. Free from the oxygen tube, he slowly disgorged every can he once ate. He opened the cans, revealing the ears of different animals, giving birth to sounds. 

At last, couldn’t eat, move, or feel anything through contact, and he died with a sinister posture.

He felt his self-consciousness flowing like a string of MIDI information, and a pieced physically visualized music was talking to him. “Song” said, every creature there evolved into the MIDI form. Every planet’s unique vibration, its rhythm and tone, constituted a piece of melody, and creatures were a product of planet evolution, the physical music scores recording this type of information.

The song-creature spent their days listening to a grand song together. And different melodies recorded on the bodies of every song-creature from their planets, were representative of an instrument or musical phrase. “Song” told him, that this grand song would soon come to an end in one minute, and after every tick of MIDI information was played, the whole universe would diminish.

He, also assimilated as a song-creature, compressed all his memories to a string of MIDI information, and played it out in the last one minute:

It has a theme: How to tell a creature about the ocean.

When portraying the oceans, one shall describe the role of every drop of water: finding words that fit every drop, and using each drop to simulate an emotion. The great entirety constituted by every drop describes the ocean.

When the universe stopped expanding, it contracted back to the size of a water drop. At that time, for the life locked inside the void, the way to restore everything was to reimagine the matrix of the ocean with memories, in which every drop of restoration was made by acknowledgment. As long as one acknowledged something, a structure would be retrieved in time and space: acknowledge anger to retrieve weapons, illness for medicine, cowardice for currency…However, they dared not to acknowledge history, and time had still yet to be restored.

Now, he had completed the description of a river: “Plop, plop, plop…” This was the sound of everything jumping into the water, who dived into the depth of sorrow with their bodies finning in the water, spreading out ripples with varied tiers as different civilizations.

The tide ebbed away. On the highest mountain peak emerging above the sea surface, a newly born animal retrieved a sound recorder. It pressed the play button: “Flop, flop, flop…” One could restore many new physics and civilizations out of this.

…

Every story above was the sound of the water at present, the wabi-sabi.