THE SADDEST GIRL SINCE THE SONG DYNASTY

THE SUN ALSO SETS - PART IV

"Repetition. That is the greatest sadness. Not repetition in itself, but that we perform tasks over and over, we repeat them, like I am doing with the food here, everyday, three times a day, to work at it and make it beautiful – but one day, it will all stop. The universe is too one-directional, you know what I'm saying?" Autumn, stating he wanted to speak as much English as possible for practice, asked Ander to correct any grammatical errors he made. But he didn't make any that Ander, in his native speaker's naiveté, was aware of.

Autumn continued his musings through dinner, Spring listening, and though not understanding what was being said, intuiting its subject. He glanced several times at Ander and pulled a face in apology for his brother, but Ander seemed genuinely enthralled, nodding, looking thoughtful at all the right intervals, getting pulled into Autumn's mood of whimsical despair. Autumn quoted Hegel and Dante and Richard Rorty.

"Take for example this passage. 'Children and photoelectric cells both discriminate red objects, but pre-linguistic children are thought to know what red is in some sense in which photoelectric cells do not. But how can the child know what pain is if all awareness of anything is a linguistic affair?' What are humans except for our words and thoughts, Ander?"

Autumn's guest could only wonder if Autumn really held the dark thoughts and questions he was fleshing out, or whether he was simply practicing his speaking skills.

By eight, Spring and Ander had finished eating, while Autumn, who had effectively monopolized the conversation, had barely taken a mouthful of his tofu-pork-egg soup.

"You know I work as a nightclub promoter near some bars around Jiaotong University? I start at ten tonight, but I'm going to head there a little early to say hello to some friends," Spring said. Did Ander want to join him? If so, they needed to leave soon, he advised.

Using this prompt, Ander expressed his deep and eternal gratitude to Autumn for feeding him so lavishly with not only food but with ideas, also for watering him with so much beer, and then they left Autumn mulling in his high-backed leather chair, book in hand, mineral water poised for consumption, facing a curtained window, alone.

Ander and Spring set out back towards the metro station they had come from. The fog now was thick and brown in the headlamps of cars – visibility was down to the width of a wide street so that crossing the road was like stepping into an infinite expanse of hazard. Taking the subway, it was only once the two had resurfaced nine stops later on Line Number Ten did Ander reveal to Spring what an existential trauma the visit had been.