Five Spice Street

We still haven’t mentioned the opinion of an extremely important person: X. How does X view Q? How could we forget her? Without her, there would be no story! Her image of Q was simple: ‘‘I’ve never laid eyes on him.” Someone doubted this: wasn’t X joking — playing with words? No, ‘‘what she said was sincere’’ (the female colleague’s words). In truth, X didn’t look at people with her eyes. (Here, she was much different from Q. Q wanted to look at people with his eyes, but some obstacle always prevented him. For example, when he looked at X, his tear glands turned into a major obstacle. Thus, Q’s disposition wasn’t nearly as clear-cut as X’s, but was always hovering between seeing and not seeing, always ambiguous.) Someone else suggested: maybe X has never laid eyes on her hus- band-this handsome man-either, and so she has no idea that he’s so handsome and therefore she mistakenly cast him off and got hung up on ‘‘the ugly’’ Q? Wasn’t this the most regrettable thing she’d ever done in her whole life? Not necessarily. You have to realize that X hasn’t always been like this. When she was young, she chose this handsome man only with her eyes; she reeled him in and they became husband and wife. X’s personality grew ever more eccentric and inappropriate since she began her occult practices (about this, later). After she bought the mirrors and the microscope from the junk shop, she even announced that her eyes ‘‘had retired.’’ That is, except for things in the mirror, she looked at nothing. Some people were unconvinced, for this presumed that X hadn’t seen Q and didn’t know what he looked like, and thus she didn’t have any way of knowing if he even existed. How could she have a relationship with him? Here something is worth emphasizing: that is, X definitely knows what Q looks like, though without seeing Q with her eyes. Instead, she senses him by means of a supernatural ability. This is ten thousand times truer than seeing. (X’s own words.) This only seems absurd. According to the colleague’s report: on a certain fine morning, she saw X-as usual-walking along the crowded main street, looking in her mirror and taking bold strides, as if she had some sure plan in mind. The colleague swooped down. Scurrying up, she seized hold of X’s shoulders and carefully took stock of her eyes. Her appraisal of X’s eyeballs left her ‘‘speechless’’: ‘‘all the life had gone out of them, and they had lost any ability to see.’’ The colleague sighed sympathetically. ‘‘It’s self-glorification and a hairsplitting mentality that have poisoned her. If she were a little more objective, she would have noticed a long time ago another woman right next to her who was in fact much more remarkable than she, though she had never openly entered into a contest with her. X wouldn’t have ended up this way if she’d been aware of it.’’ (From this, we can also infer: in his letter, Q’s strange description of X’s eyeballs was probably something he imagined.)

Okay, since X did not see Q with her eyes but ‘‘sensed’’ him, we’ll take a look at what this ‘‘Q’’ she sensed was all about. X’s younger sister divulged that X had said that Q was the man she would meet at the intersection on Wednesdays: he wore a woolen overcoat (actually, Q didn’t even have a woolen overcoat), his voice was deep (this was essentially true), and his eyes possessed at least five different colors. (How could this be?!) She had no interest in men with sonorous voices and monochromatic eyes. Now she had met Q, and his eyes were precisely the eyes she had ‘‘sought in her dreams.’’ She didn’t have to mention his deep voice. With Q it was ‘‘the second time she fell in love.’’ When she said this, X lost control, ripping a sheet of white paper into scraps with her long, slender fingers and then tossing them into the air, where they flew up like butterflies. Such behavior suggests ‘‘hallucinatory drugs.’’