Wild Fire Bids Farewell To Summer Chapter 26

Before heavy snow

There is a thin layer of ice on the floor-to-ceiling windows of the studio on the third floor of the Huang family villa.The ice spreads upward from the lower corner of the window pane, branching out like branches, cutting the green ash mountains outside the window into irregular blocks of color.Wei Zhiheng stood in front of the easel, pressing the upper edge of the quarto paper with his left hand, and holding a wolf-hair watercolor pen in his right hand.

The barrel is of basswood, painted ocher red, and has a smooth surface.His fingertips were unstable – the skin was thin, and the purple blood vessels bulged, branched, and coiled under the pale skin.He mistook it for earthworms burrowing under his skin, or for an underground river tributary that rattled the skylight.

He tried to draw mountains.On the northern slope of Greencen Mountain, there are exposed limestone sections and longitudinal flint strips.

Dip the nib into ultramarine.The pigment is mixed with titanium white in a porcelain plate, forming a grayish tone, stagnant and thick, the same color as the plasma in the blood transfusion bag last week.He put pen to paper, and the strokes slid from the upper left corner of the paper to the lower right.The wrist is suspended in the air and the elbow is supported on the edge of the painting box as a fulcrum.The first line is in an irregular wavy shape. It is not a straight layer on the mountain, but curves downward and accumulates. The paint forms a raised edema in the center of the paper.

False perception: He blinked.The Green Cen Mountain in the field of vision is softening, with vertical flint strips flowing downwards and blurred edges.The limestone turned into molasses, into the flow of spilled turpentine, and merged with the fixed black spot on his retina.

The mountains are flowing.

He looked at the paper again. The lines were still lines, but the mountains had flowed away. The gray-blue mark in the center of the paper was the slip surface in the geological fault, the exudate after the veins burst. It was the blood stain on the pillow on the night of frost that was oxidizing and turning from gray-blue to brown-red.

The right hand is shaking.The subtle tremors of the muscles under the skin started from the inside of the wrist, jumped one after another, and spread to the knuckles.The tip of the pen twitched above the paper, and a drop of paint dropped. It hit the wrong line just now and spattered, forming a star-shaped stain with a radius of about two centimeters.He clenched his fist, and his nails left four crescent-shaped indentations on the palm of his hand, pressing against the coin-sized purpura – subcutaneous bleeding, irregular edges, and the center was so purple that it turned black.A slice of weathering limestone.

“Bent.” Wei Zhiheng said.The voice is dry, and the friction of the vocal cords produces a rough sound. It carries the sweet rotten smell unique to ketosis and sinks to the studio floor level.

Huang Jinye sits in front of the easel on the right.He was not wearing a school uniform jacket, only a black sports vest, with broad shoulders, and his right shoulder strap was stained with white stone powder – left behind when he helped his mother carry stone samples in the morning.

On the sketch paper in front of him, he used a pencil to outline the perspective structure of Green Cen Mountain—the lines were straight and radially converged at a vanishing point in the upper right corner of the paper.The pencil is 2B, with a yellow hexagonal barrel. There are teeth marks on the surface. They were bitten when he was thinking. They are uneven.

Huang Jinye did not raise his head when he heard Wei Zhiheng’s voice.His right hand hovered above the paper, holding a pencil sharpener with three millimeters of the blade exposed, scraping the wood of the pencil.The rustling stopped.He put down the knife, stretched out his hand, and directly grabbed the upper right corner of Wei Zhiheng’s drawing paper.

The paper made a slight tearing sound as it separated from the drawing board, fibers breaking.Huang Jinye rotated the paper ninety degrees, so that Wei Zhiheng’s curved wrong line now appeared horizontal – the horizon, the surface of the underground river.Then he turned the paper over, backside up, and the errant trace of paint pushed up the ridges on the backside, the anticlinal formations in the geological profile.

He turned it over again, right side up, but did not restore the paper to its original position. Instead, he tore off his sketch paper from the drawing board and stuck it next to Wei Zhiheng’s paper. The two papers were juxtaposed and fixed with thumbtacks – his straight perspective and Wei Zhiheng’s curved lines formed an angle of fifteen degrees, two misplaced strata, and a crack.

“Look.” Huang Jinye said.The voice was hoarse, rough, squeezed out from the chest, and hoarse with congestion in the vocal cords.

He did not point out the error or explain the rules of perspective, but used his fingernail to draw a new mark next to Wei Zhiheng’s wrong line.There is black dirt between the nails, a mixture of cinders and graphite.

Instead of using a pen, I used my fingernail to scratch directly on the paper. The wood pulp fibers were scraped up, forming white grooves, parallel to the blue paint lines, contrasting lines on a seismograph.An intervention of objects, nails as tools leaving physical traces on the paper, a shift of power – he is not teaching, he is covering, marking territory, carving his own palm prints on the paper.

Wei Zhiheng stared at the white scratch.The black spots in the field of vision—retinal hemorrhages—made the scratch look like a crack, a ravine in the limestone, a vertical joint at the edge of a skylight.He stretched out his hand and hovered his fingers over Huang Jinye’s sketch paper, five centimeters away from the paper.The fingers are spread out, the joints are stiff, the fingernails are tinged with light purple, and there is purple ink embedded under the nail bed.He tried to touch the vanishing point, but his hand spasmed in the air and was unable to fall. The joints were locked in a grasping posture.

“You can’t see the vanishing point clearly,” Wei Zhiheng said.He retracted his hand and inserted the watercolor pen into the pen holder. The plastic pen holder made a hollow impact sound.He turned around and walked towards the northeast corner of the studio, where there were old things that Wei Mingyuan sent last week: a bamboo pen holder with several brushes hanging on it.He took out a wolf hair, a hard hair made in Anhui Province. The tip of the pen is four centimeters long. The root is tightly wrapped with nylon thread. The pen barrel is made of mottled bamboo and has brown tear-shaped spots.

The pen is sharp and bifurcated.Dead plant roots, exposed bones.He held the pen, his fingers searching for a balance point on the barrel.The elasticity of the hard brush is different from that of the nylon watercolor pen. It is more stubborn and resists the pressure of fingers, a bone, and a frozen finger.

He dipped in the water. The basin was made of enamel, white, with blue curled edges. The edges peeled off in three places, revealing black iron sheets – the same origin as the enamel cup next to the turpentine bottle in the stairwell that night.The water ripples, reflecting the ceiling fan on the ceiling. The fan blades are deformed and curved, and the bleeding spots on the retina make the water surface look like a ball of ink.

Huang Jinye picked up the ink block from the ground.The ink is pine smoke ink, long strip, with ice cracks on the surface, heavy weight, small paperweight, and a piece of bone taken out of the body.He walked to the cement platform by the window, where there was an inkstone, oval in shape, fine in stone, with natural eyebrow lines, a variant of limestone, and traces of sedimentation and extrusion.

He poured water, and the water flowed out from the enamel cup – the wall of the cup was printed with the red letters “Guixi Ergao”, and the paint peeled off – and hit the inkstone. It roared, low, continuous, with a stable frequency, about sixty times per minute, synchronized with the heartbeat, but slower than the heartbeat. It was the spiral flow of the underground river in the limestone cavity, the sound of time being crushed, and the sound of pencil shavings accumulating in the corner of the studio.

Grind ink.Hold the ink in your right hand and grind it clockwise.The ink block makes a rustling sound when it comes into contact with the inkstone.The pine smoke particles spread in the water, forming a suspension, and the color gradually changes from gray to deep black, from plasma to asphalt, to solidified night.Huang Jinye’s wrists were sore from repeated rotations, his biceps were tight, and his knuckles were protruding. The black dirt between his fingernails peeled off during the friction, mixed with the ink, and formed tiny impurities, fossil fragments, black particles on the cinder track of the sports games, and rust scraped off the barbed wire when climbing over the wall.

Wei Zhiheng stood in front of the easel, holding a pen in his hand.He did not dip in the ink immediately, but stared at Huang Jinye’s movements of grinding the ink.The black spots in the field of vision turned Huang’s movements into a blur of gray shadows. Only the rotation trajectory of his wrist was clear – clockwise, circular motion, the rotation of the earth, and the flow of underground rivers in the limestone cavity.

He smelled the smell: the smell of ink, hospital disinfectant – the smell of the infusion room, burnt hair – burnt protein, pungent, heavy, sinking at knee height, a layer of heavier air, mixed with the citrus aroma of turpentine, forming a turbid, organic, basement-like smell.

Huang Jinye finished ink research.The ink forms a pool of black liquid in the inkstone, with oily sheen, tar, and coagulated blood on the surface.He picked up the inkstone and walked towards Wei Zhiheng, his steps were heavy and light, heavy on the right and light on the left. When his knees were bent, they made a dry friction sound – the water in the joint cavity was shaking and gurgling, the dull pain of sports games, the accumulation of water before the cold dew.

He did not hand over the inkstone, but placed it on the ground under the easel, on the cement floor, ten centimeters away from Wei Zhiheng’s canvas shoes – the ones soaked in turpentine that night in the stairwell, with gray and yellow uppers, cracked edges and old turpentine stains.

“Dip.” Huang Jinye said.He stood up. There were three fresh scratches on the back of his right hand. They were left by the barbed wire fence when he climbed over the wall the day before yesterday. They ran across the palm lines. The blood had solidified and was dark red, with white limestone powder embedded on the edges.He used this hand to hold Wei Zhiheng’s right wrist holding the pen – not to guide, but to fix or brake.His fingers dug into the skin and pressed against the radial artery. His pulse beat rapidly and erratically, more than a hundred times per minute.Body temperature exchange.Huang Jinye’s palm was hot, like a soldering iron; Wei Zhiheng’s wrist was cold, like a corpse.

Wei Zhiheng bent down and touched the ink with a hard brush.The wolf hair absorbs water, expands, and changes from a sharp fork to a soft hemisphere, but it is harder and more bony than a watercolor pen, a bone absorbing water.He lifted the pen, and ink dripped from the belly of the pen, hitting the cement floor, forming black dots, which were immediately absorbed by the porous ground, leaving behind dark stains, blood stains on the track, the mark of death that will come on the final day, and turpentine seeping into the canvas.

He turned to the paper.Huang Jinye’s sketch paper was still posted aside as a reference, but Wei Zhiheng didn’t look at it.He stared at the white groove scraped by his fingernails, misperceiving: it was not a scratch, but a natural crack in the limestone, a vertical joint at the edge of the skylight, and a black vortex of cinders from the sports games embedded in the palm of his hand.He put pen to paper.

Dry pen.Thick ink.The brush strokes are dry, the paper absorbs water too quickly, and the ink color forms white marks on the fibers – uninked gaps left at the bifurcation of the brush strokes, dry river beds, the light-transmitting areas of bone cancer lesions on X-rays, tissue that has lost blood, and pores in limestone.He painted the outline of the stone mountain, not the gray-blue of ultramarine, but the black of ink, the purple-black color of cinders and blood.The lines tremble, but no longer bend – the stubbornness of the brush offsets the trembling of the hand, forming stiff, fractured, geological fault line-like brushstrokes.

Huang Jinye stood behind him, thirty centimeters away.He watched Wei Zhiheng paint, watched the ink on the paper forming dry white spots, and looked at the white gaps – the pores in the limestone, the tissue with blood loss, and the bubbles in the infusion tube.His right hand was hovering in the air, the fingers were spread out, the joints were stiff, and there were white stone powder on the edges of the fingernails.He wanted to touch those white spots, wanted to fill those gaps and wounds with his fingers, just like filling the blood stains on Wei Zhiheng’s pillow that night of frost.

Wei Zhiheng painted the shadowed part of the mountain.He increased the pressure on his wrist, and the root of the pen scraped against the paper, making the sound of sandpaper grinding against bone.

The fibers on the paper surface are scraped up, forming rough edges, and the ink penetrates deep into the paper, creating ridges on the back.He made a mistake – the black dots in his field of vision moved, and he thought he was drawing shadows. In fact, the pen tip deviated from the outline of the mountain, leaving an abrupt, vein-like ink line on the paper, extending from the center of the mountain, bleeding, an underground river that changed its course, a change that made the skylight change, and the dull pain of the needle on the long-distance shuttle.

He stopped writing.The hand hovers above the paper, three centimeters away from it.The fingers spasm, ink drips from the tip of the pen, hovering, stretching, the surface tension maintains the hemispheric shape, and the interior reflects the pale snow light outside the window.A drop of black ink, a drop of solidified blood, a miniature limestone specimen, the moment before the turpentine bottle fell in the stairwell that night.

Stop action.

Ink droplets fall.Smashed onto the paper, splashing out, radial stains overlap with the previous dry lines, creating new layers – the bottom layer is the wrong lines of watercolor, the middle layer is the scratches of fingernails, and the top layer is the splash of ink.Wei Zhiheng stared at the stain without blinking.He put down the pen, and the pen holder came into contact with the drawing table. There was a crisp clicking sound, and it rolled to the edge and was blocked by the edge of the table. The pencil rolled down the stairwell that night, and the fingers were about to hover on the final day.

Huang Jinye bent down and picked up the inkstone from the ground.The remaining ink sloshed in the inkstone, black, thick, and unfinished.He placed the inkstone on the painting table and juxtaposed it with Wei Zhiheng’s dry strokes.Then he took out a piece of eucalyptus sugar from the pocket of his sports shorts. It was wrapped in tin foil and had green stripes. It had softened and deformed, and the surface was sticky.He did not hand it to Wei Zhiheng, but stuffed it into his mouth, biting it with his teeth. The candy was hard and scraped against the mucous membrane of his mouth, making a subtle cracking sound.

chew.Swallow.Adam’s apple rolling.He turned around and walked towards the floor-to-ceiling window, with his back to Wei Zhiheng, looking out the window at the outline of the Green Cen Mountain in the pale snow light – that outline was juxtaposed with the dead lines in Wei Zhiheng’s paintings, stiff and broken, the sediments of geological time, the weathering bones, and the corpses that were about to arrive on the final day.

Outside the window, the sunshine of Xiaoxue’s solar term is pale.The same color as the sheets on last week’s hospital bed, the same color as the unglued canvas, the blank space waiting for the ink to seep through.The ink evaporates slowly in the inkstone, and the moisture decreases, forming a thin film on the surface, tight skin, scabs, and blood coagulated on the pillow that night when the frost fell.

Huang Jinye’s right hand was inserted in his trouser pocket, and his fingertips touched the limestone specimen – the one in the stairwell that night, or the stone fragments smashed before the summer solstice. The edges were sharp and stained with the blood of the two people.He tightened his grip, the sting waking him up.Blood seeped out from the old scratches in the tiger’s mouth, dark red, flowing along the palm prints to the wrists, dripping into the trouser pockets, mixing with the eucalyptus sugar on the tinfoil, leaving moist marks.

Wei Zhiheng sat on the high stool in front of the easel.Dull pain in the waist, the grinding feeling of the rotating steel needle deep in the iliac bone, the aftershock of the needle on the long-distance bus, and the tightness of the hospital bed.He stared at the splash of ink on the paper and misperceived: It was not ink, but blood. It was the red on the answer sheet, a mixture of cinders and blood, which was oxidizing, turning from bright red to dark brown.He raised his hand, his left hand hovering over the ink stains, his fingers spread out, the joints stiff, and the purpura on the fingernails appeared swollen purple in the pale snow light.

He ended up not touching.He retracted his hand and clenched it into a fist. His nails left four crescent-shaped indentations on the palm of his hand, pressing against the coin-sized piece of purpura.He lowered his head and smelled the smell of his sleeves: the citrus aroma of turpentine, the smell of ink, and the sweet rot exhaled from the lungs – rotten apples mixed with rust, the smell of ketoacidosis, sinking in the lower part of the nose, a layer of heavier air.

Huang Jinye stood in front of the window, with his back to him.Between them is an easel, a juxtaposition of two pieces of paper—one straight line, one curved line, one layer.Outside the window, the Green Cen Mountain is silent behind the frozen panes. The limestone is exposed, and the longitudinal flint strips are hard, not melting, not flowing, confronting the bleeding spots on Wei Zhiheng’s retina, confronting the curved ink line on the paper, and confronting the snow that is about to fall.

The ink continues to evaporate in the inkstone.The water content decreases, the surface film tightens and cracks, forming fine cracks that spread from the edge to the center in a radial pattern, the soil cracks, chunks fall off, the limestone weathers, the skin becomes chapped, and calcification takes place over time.