Wúshǐ (吳洗) feels dirty. The sweat on his back makes his blue shirt stick to the skin. It has even gone with gravity through the belt down to his underpants. When he looks down while holding back his chin, he sees the tip end of his beard. The beard is not long enough to tangle and stick together. But his hair is. It is as if someone had poured leftover pork grease on his head. It starts to smell.

He feels a torch light shining right behind his neck. It is hot in here. The four dead-grey walls support a blackened white ceiling with a square close window in the center where the strong light comes in. The slim opaque window right up in front of him does not look elegant at all. A child’s ear-size rusty hook makes it impossible to open. The door at the back of him is closed. There is no air in here. He does not feel comfortable sitting on this fading-blue chair. Its right front leg is shorter than the rest. His right leg has been supporting half pressure of his body and starts feeling numb.

He was told to wait here. He doesn’t know why the four men came to the machine room while he was taking a break, ready to eat the rice ball that he brought with him this morning. He doesn’t know them, even though they wear the same uniform blue shirt as he does. They must be working in other department. After all this is a big company. It is natural he doesn’t know all of his co-workers, even though he has been working there for more than thirty years. They didn’t say a word when they came in. His supervisor, a stout man with a moustache above his fat mouth, came shortly afterwards. He told him to finish his rice ball and leave with them. “How about the work in the machine room?” he asked. The supervisor replied impatiently: “You just go with them. Don’t worry about the work.” Wúshǐ was worried that the machine wouldn’t run properly long enough when he was gone because he had heard clinking sound from the below and was about to check underneath the machine as soon as he finished his rice ball. The four men and the supervisor stood there watching him eating. Wúshǐ looked at them while holding the rice ball in his hand close to his mouth and starting eating quickly without chewing much. He wanted to tell the supervisor about the clinking sound, but their silence and staring muted him. He left with the four men with the rice still in his mouth.

No one comes.

He doesn’t know how long he has to wait there, but he must have been in the room for a long time already. The light is weakening. He slowly raises his butt and tries to stand up, but the sharp spasm in his right leg makes him sit right back down. He moves his right leg up a little while leaning back against the back of the chair and supporting himself with the left leg. The pain continues. He steps down the right foot on the dirt floor, and stretches up again in a kicking position. After a few times, the pain fades. He stands up, and walked up to the slim window. He stands on the tip of his toes to look outside of the window, but can’t make out what are out there. Under the dim light through this matte surface window, he only sees a shape of a long wall and a tall structure with a pointed roof in a remote distance. He has never come to this side of the company property after these long years. He doesn’t know there is such a long wall close to the company, but he knows the tall structure must be the light house where he often takes his wife in his days off, one day a week, away from making the molds for making buttons. He stands on his feet again and starts pacing along the walls.

He likes his job. He was passionate about buttons since he was a little boy. He collected any kind of buttons. He didn’t have money to buy vintage buttons. “Money was used to keep a person alive and make him be able to think.” his mother once told him when he asked money for buttons. “You can’t buy the most special button in the world. That kind of button is not for sale.”

He still went to the only button boutique in town from time to time, stood at the display window, and looked at those beautiful buttons. But the way he collected buttons, most of the buttons anyway, were from somewhere else. He went to the cemetery every day after the school. There were always two or three graves ready for bone collecting. By the time he arrived in the cemetery, at least one grave had opened. He had to wait for the family to burn the incense, and the bone-collecting master picked up the bones and put them in a white pottery urn in an order according to vertical allocation of a human body, and then he was allowed to looked into the bottom of the grave where the rag of the rotten coffin and clothes were to see if there was any button he liked. Since he was not allowed to touch the tomb directly, he had to ask the master to pick it up for him before they put the soil back to the grave. He had a good relationship with the bone-collecting masters, because his uncle was one of them. These masters knew that he was just a button fanatic, unlike other fanatics. If they didn’t give the buttons to the little boy, the buttons would have been buried back anyway. They didn’t mind giving the boy little gifts.

Wúshǐ put the buttons in a wooden box. By the time he left home at sixteen, he had so many boxes under his bed. He labeled each box. The way he labeled them was not by the color, the size, or the shape. He labeled them by the year. Before he went to bed at midnight of every last day of the year, he marked the year with a black ink pen on the top of the box, opened the box, picked up every one of them, and looked at them closely. After putting the last button back to the box, he closed the box, made a wish, and slid the box further down under his bed. There was no mystery about his wishes. Every year the wish was the same: having more special buttons.

At sixteen years old, he left his hometown and became an apprentice of button making. His eyes were wild open when his master showed him his supplying room at the back of the workshop. There was no single button there. What he saw instead were many kinds of horns, wood, metals, and threads. A cutting machine and all kinds of carving tools were lying there on the working table. During the years, his master taught him the temper of each button material and how to cut and carve them. There was once that his master showed him a piece of red cedar wood shipped from the east mountain. The wood had a fragrance of forest, but the surface was very cold. The master cut a chip down with an adamantine knife. Hammering with a wooden mallet on a shorter straight gouge directly on the chip, he whittled extra crumble and shaped an oval, and finished two tiny holes evenly in the button with a black slim drill. Wúshǐ was amazed by the master’s deft hands. He was even more amazed when the master told him that some tailors made dresses according to the buttons that they purchased, especially the buttons made by him.

Wúshǐ became a master when he turned twenty, and has been working in the same company ever since. The company produces and sells buttons. It hires Wúshǐ for his craftsmanship, but they pay him even better than any button-making master in the country, because Wúshǐ not only designs and makes the original buttons, but he also makes the modes of the buttons for the mass production. The machine room where the four men came and took Wúshǐ away is where the mode making machine is.

Wúshǐ still thinks of the clinking sound underneath the machine. Soon it is dark. It starts raining. His wife must have been worried that he is still not home yet at this time of the day. He knocks on the door a few times. No one answers. The rain becomes heavier. There must be a crack on the window up there. A rain drop splashes on his right cheek, soon comes another in his right eye. He moves away to the corner next to the slim window. At least it is cooler now. His shirt is dry and doesn’t stick on his skin any more. He sits down on the floor at the corner and watches the rain drops on the dirt floor. In the beginning, the dirt on the floor absorbs the rain. Gradually, it becomes a muddy puddle on that very spot where the rain constantly drops on.

He falls asleep.

Suddenly, a man covers his head with a rice bag, grabs his arm, pulls him up, and starts dragging him out in the open. It is still raining. His hands are shaking. His whole body is shivering. He pisses himself. He can’t see anything. Only a strong light constantly comes and goes. He screams but the heavy rain muffles his cry. He stumbles again and again, but the man keeps pulling him up and pushing him forward. He hears someone cries out: “Halt there.” The man turns him around. Gunshots go off. Wúshǐ falls down.

**The photo is archived in Harvesting the River.

***The layout of this article is better arranged in http://bellaliu.blogspot.com/2009/07/punishmentsecond-draft.html