Status Updates From Night Train

‘—he wonders how a greenhouse worker could quote Xin Qiji’s Song dynasty poem—squatting and carefully arranging each pot—He finds a tree to sit—gets out his cigarettes, offering one to Xu, who refuses. In Nanjing, he chose a train at random and ended up with a ticket to Sichuan—Hunan, Hubei, Jiangnan, and Beijing. In Viktor Pelevin’s novella, ‘The Yellow Arrow,’ a train misses its destination & keeps going forever—’

‘—burn through the book at 20 pages per second—his body lightening—coming back to life inch by inch—The cigarette scorches a black-rimmed hollow right through Songs of Chu, like a creature burrowing through—He picks up the now numberless book & looks through the hole at the next book on the shelf—Bai Juyi’s Collected Works. The phone rings—he thinks about the Cao Zhi line, ‘Such sorrowful wind on this high terrace.’’

Munian is meeting up with a friend “Third leg”