Sick Boy[s] Paddle Club↓

The Copernican Revolution

Sea Slug 海蛞蝓

Translated by: Charley Wang

Father never grew tired of mentioning the old story of how his whole family saw the eclipse together. Back then, they were living in a single-storey house against a row of apartments with colors and shapes like ribs. The lawn on the other side smelled like baked dust and fresh grass on early summer mornings. He racked his brain, digging some objects from his blurry head: damp room corners, a large box of chocolate chips, dents on the soles of his feet that toy bricks left, and a twitching tail of a gecko in the sink. These were all strung together in his mind. If one was plucked, the other echoed softly.

He was just over one back then, and only seven now, yet kept too many trivial details about things in mind. No wonder his grade was not good, nor did he remember anything about the eclipse. When father mentioned the day the eclipse was reported on TV, he would struggle to imagine it. He could only remember a gargantuan hole with a dark rim, and many people, similar to dry, ant-like small sticks moving and crawling around.

The eclipse was caused by the moon shadowing the sun; therefore, there should not be people crawling around on the 6000-degrees-Celsius surface. But he just could not forget it. A set of encyclopedias that mounted up almost to his knees—his birthday present this year—informed him that the eclipse is similar to what he had imagined, only darker with a white dim of light, like the spout of a tap in the dark. He often stared at it when washing his hair in the kitchen. He dedicated more time to this practice after the discovery, to polish his fantasies into perfection. He even began to correct his father. The astonishment of seeing a broken-tail gecko for the first time, the guilt after devouring a whole box of chocolate chips, and the intrigue when he noticed the dark green slime molds between the bedhead and the wall—his experience was composed of many sounds, chorused in his head, and rang like a new pianola.

He gradually convinced himself of what he thought. He told his friends from middle school with full confidence how his whole family went to the rooftop of the apartment, greeted neighbors and watched the eclipse on military stools. The neighbors would join them for barbecue. In early summer, the sunset was a red iron sheet. They would barbecue under a clear plane-shaped cloud. They grilled cheese sausage that took forever to defrost, and venison, he uttered in a deliberate calmness, which tasted a bit like beef, for they both belong to artiodactyla.He read about this before sleep yesterday. The girl who traveled across the midwest in a caravan would sing a perfect chorus upon his slightest strum, and satifaction would emerge on his friends’ faces. Dried peeling wry lips with half teeth of ivory color (false as well, borrowed from the picture of ivory on the back of his workbook), with a drop of sweat sliding from temple into the collar. For no good reason, he started to tell his friend that he would put mustard in his father's tea and trick him to drink it. The itchy, prickly nose; his father’s roar in a random midnight; and the drop of sweat glimmering on his friend's cheek all whispered in his ears. They against each other under the afternoon sun, clinking and clanging like glasses. As he peered out, his friends were far away, two chestnut irises reflected in his dark pupils, like two eclipses splitting into four.

They had called each other one or times, and stopped after he changed phone. All he had in his new phone was his parents' and grandmother's numbers and 13621501, meaning: left turn at 1st crossing, 3rd apartment complex, building 6 unit 2 room 1501. He made valiant attempts to rescue his performance in maths there, yet all hopes were lost once he moved up to 11th grade. Teachers treated him with indifference just as they did to everyone else. Occasionally he would scratch a black ball on his test papers, then add a circle of red along its borders. The teachers saw it all the time but ignored it. This was the symbol of his irritation, as the symbol was used everywhere else. He tore it out and stuck it in the novels half-done before putting them back on the bookstore shelves. Or he bought the book, picked an afternoon break, and spent the whole time copying down the press logo design: a deer head with sharp antlers.

The classroom was steaming with heat after the monthly exam. A war film that never made much at the box office was playing on the screen. His classmates whispered and stared with awe as the protagonist wandered through the scorched ground until an apartment building collapsed onto his spine. Piercing outcries made their way through a great number of technical devices and, by the time they reached his ears,  there was nothing left but laughable exaggerations. Absentmindedly he colored the antlers red, shutting his eyes. Residues of the vision clustered into pale spots on the back of his eyelids.

His eyes always ached. In college he received a call from an unknown number. When he dialed back, his eye pain started to come in sharp pangs as though, succeeding the lashes, another layer of thorns were forcing their way out. He dialed many times, but the line was always busy. Later he picked it up as a ritual before smoking until his eyes no longer ached. Once, and for that one time only, the call went through. He heard a stranger’s wheeze on the other side, sounded like the echoes of waves in a conch, to which his Ma had instructed him to listen attentively when he was little. He had never heard of it, but nodded anyway. Then another call cut in—from his office. His other hand trenbled, the cigarette, still intact, slipped, rolled into the drain, and floated, white like a row of demonstrative teeth, among the dead leaves brought about by yesterday's rain. He paid his bills online and went on to transfer money to his parents when a notification popped up: ONCE-in-139-year Eclipse on the other side of the world RIGHT NOW—miss it, and you’ll be DEAD before it comes back!!!!! Five exclamation marks. He recalled from his encyclopedia: during the next five billion years or so, the sun would continue to increase in size, engulf every planet around it, and finally turn into a white dwarf, into nothing but a shriveled peach pit. Five billion divided by a hundred and thirty-nine would be thirty-six million, which means the sun has to go through such futile suicidal attempts for a good more thirty-six million times or so. By then he would have been broken up into some kind of substance unfettered and formless by any means, possibly even more so than atoms.

His father mentioned the eclipse again, recounting how he bent down to pick up a bucket half-filled with inked water. He pretended he had heard nothing as he tucked his Ba's hand, which swayed around blindly, back beneath the sheets. Two days later the old man grew all shiny and distended, after another two he began to defecate nonstop until he shrank back—as if to imitate an accelerated lunar cycle—and then eventually, quietly into his death. Another year it was his mother, sick in bed, unable to get on her feet or even utter a word. He sent her to a nursing home and visited her once a week, each time for two hours. On the third week he arrived on Wednesday, too late to see her off. She greeted him with her pale, flaccid corpse and sunken sockets. Her face, on the other hand, was uncannily smooth, appearing to be younger than when she was alive. Her orderlies admitted that she had made them fairly depressed in her final hours. He didn't press on. Like ripe persimmons dropping from their branches, those her age left one by one. Those who lived got a sense of rotten stenches. When another reunion was arranged, less than twenty came. The sense of emptiness lingered in the golden hall as they maneuvered their way around each other like misplaced planets, keeping a proper distance. Wisps of superficial sentiment trailed after spoken words, spreading out across the emptiness, like goldfish feces floating in their tanks.

He moved back to the place where he grew up, and everything was gone. The single-storey house became a far-stretching ramp. Children wooshed down on bicycles during summer nights. He moved to those apartments with insulation where he could see the lawn. Chinese roses sprinkled all over during blooming season but completely barren otherwise. He saw his neighbor less often than he saw cats next to the trash bin, although he would go to the rooftop when the weather was clear and hang up a great many washed and unwashed garments. In the fourth year of his moving back, from the rooftops he saw many people with binoculars and ink-painted sunglasses. Children were writing in their notebooks: In remembrance of an eclipse…

The sky turned into a murky yellowish-brown, reminding him of his father's urine before his death, against the glaring white basin. He couldn’t help but squint his eyes. People were putting on their sunglasses and carrying ink to cover half or more of themselves, heads raised towards the sky, mouths wide open into dark caverns. In the continuous waves of shouting, he was stucked. The Earth, in fact, is a gargantuan hole, with people crawling on the surface. For all those years he had done his best to imagine the surrounding world as a well-educated person, to imagine how the whole universe, including him, is composed by the simple clashing of dusts. They bounced inside him the way they do inside the sun. Therefore, why—he raised his hand over one eye, splitting the white-hot sun into distinct shards from a corner, the shadow of the moon crept into sight at a sluggish, steady pace—why not let it be that way? He asked himself. He stood there, experiencing his first, and likely his only eclipse. It might be the only eclipse for him, for it might refuse to show up again a hundred and thirty-nine years later, nor repeat for another thirty-six million times. Even if the sun would become a hateful, wrinkled little old man, it is a one-of-a-kind gigantic hole, where his parents, friends and sand-like people he had passed through would gather and crawl around, just as they do, endlessly.

Sea Slug

Mollusca, Gastropoda, Nudibranchia, student of literature. Only three years left until it dies as a rockstar. Unlearnable, immune to cultural literacy, otaku with questionable taste, indelible fandom tumor, victim of British rock culture, appreciator of Buddhist statues, operator of an internal Fight Club, a drinking enthusiast in dire straits.