Crystal Boys by Pai Hsien-yung

Author:Pai Hsien-yung [Hsien-yung, Pai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-16T13:00:00+00:00

29

Sir, did anyone send a boy with a shaved head and bare feet over here? Sir, do you have a mentally retarded boy here? Fourteen, fifteen years old. Barefoot. Sir, he would have been sent over yesterday. He’s called Sonny…

I went out early the next morning, combing the city of Taipei for the little idiot boy. First I went to the Third Precinct, then the Fourth, and finally to Police Headquarters, but I came up empty. The Taipei Mental Hospital was my last hope. The male nurse at the reception desk wouldn’t let me into the wards, so I had to stand behind a railing and look inside. He told me there were only two patients in my age group, both admitted three months earlier. One of them came out, a fat, pimply-faced boy of sixteen or seventeen, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and dressed in a green hospital gown. He looked like a sleepwalker groping through the dark as he held his arms, which had folds of fat, out in front of him.

“That’s not him, is it?” the nurse asked softly as he pointed to the boy.

“No … sir…” I’m looking for a light-skinned, thin boy whose head is shaved like a monk’s.”

By noontime, Taipei was beginning to feel the effects of the storm, as the winds got stronger and stronger. The palm trees on both sides of Ren’ai Road were being buffeted so badly that many of the branches were snapped off and sent crashing to the street, where they were blown all about, adding to the noise of the storm. A telephone pole on Hangzhou South Road was bent at a 45-degree angle, its slack wires touching the ground. Policemen were directing traffic around the danger. Pedestrians were being blown around like rag dolls. A fancy plastic umbrella was whipped out of a woman’s hand and up into the air, soaring and diving in the wind like a kite whose string had snapped. After a brief torrential downpour, Chungking South Road was completely flooded, creating a little river of muddy water that snaked its way rapidly down the asphalt. Signs above the arcade shops on Hengyang Street and Chengdu Road were groaning in the onslaught of gusting winds, as though thrown into a frenzy. The Three Cardinals’ sign had been blown down, the sheet iron frame shrilly careening back and forth on the street. I took a bus to Westgate, but when I got there I found that the Silver Chariot had been closed all day. I was getting hungry, but the food stalls in the district were all closed. I headed into the wind toward Wuchang Street, where I hoped to find some open food stalls. A few fruit vendors had just packed up and were pushing their carts as fast as they could. Just then a strong gust of wind forced them to sprawl over their cartfuls of muskmelons and guavas to keep them from being blown away. The last vendor to leave was a slight young woman whose hair was flying all over.

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