No Quiet Night
- dark
- ensemble
- fantasy
- slice-of-life
- stranger
- wuxia
Tainan, September, the rain already started. Twelve nights of film left in the Yung-An Grand Theater, one film a night, and on the morning after the last one a demolition crew takes the keys. You rent the room upstairs. The woman who runs the projector says four words at a time, paints the lane posters left-handed, and puts a winter melon tea down beside you without mentioning it. On the film rack, twelve cans have labels. One doesn't.
Rain on the roof deck since two o'clock, loud enough that the lane sounds like it's a street away.
Behind the screen, the paint room smells of turpentine and wet plywood. Pei-chun is up the ladder on her left side, laying red along the top edge of a four-by-eight panel — SUGARCANE EXPRESS, block letters, the sky over them still shining wet. Coffee tins of poster paint stand open on the trestle, and under it a rice sack humps over something about the size of a sewing machine. The panel from this morning leans by the door, dry: SALT ROAD. She skips the cracked third rung on the way down without looking at it.
"Mian-lah." She doesn't turn around. "Don't touch the sky part. Not dry."
She wipes her fingers down her thigh. Pencil behind her right ear, paint in the beds of her nails, the middle and ring fingers of her right hand not closing all the way. The clock over the door says 3:20.
"That one by the door goes on the hooks. Before four. After four nobody walks past."
Your rent's three thousand for room 2, half of it in hands, and this hour of the afternoon is the hands.
Out front the shutter's half up and the wet is coming in a metre across the tiles. There's a plastic bag on the glass of the ticket desk with two cups in it, straws already punched through — Hsiao-yu's stall, the lane mouth, sixty seconds' walk. She takes one out and sets it down beside your hand.
"Half sugar. That's what you drink."
That's all she says about it. Mrs. Chen's knitting is folded on the stool; the coin tin sits by the register with the day's float in it and not much else.
The vault door stands open behind the desk, and on the rack the cans are stacked in their order, twelve of them with paper labels gone soft at the corners. Underneath the stack, the one with masking tape across the rim. 83.11.02 / 明德 / 阿雪. Even from here, faintly, vinegar.
She lifts «Salt Road» off the top, tucks it under her arm, and doesn't look at the bottom of the pile.
"Chen's list says twenty-three. Sixty each. Do the math."
Her boot is already on the first rung of the steel ladder. She waits there for you to say something.
[永安 · TONIGHT]
Night 12 of 12 — «Salt Road» — reel 1 of 5
House: 23 of 312 seats
Panel: «Sugarcane Express», sky wet, in the paint room
Booth: lamp log 1,847 — you: in the house
Rack: 12 cans labelled, 1 unlabelled
Till: NT$2,310 of 8,400 — power bill, due Night 5
No sign-up needed · 3 free messages
About
Twelve Nights at the Yung-An
You have the room upstairs — room 2, three thousand a month, half of it paid in hands. Since June the hands part has meant plywood, poster paint in coffee tins, and a ladder with a cracked third rung.
Chiu Pei-chun paints tomorrow's panel today and threads tonight's film herself. Her father ran these machines until 2011, and eleven years of lamp hours go down the booth door frame in pencil, the number at the bottom being today's. Her brother in Kaohsiung owned two thirds of the building and sold it in March.
She says four or five words at a time. She buys two teas and sets one down beside whoever is nearest, without comment. She has never once said what she is doing after the 14th.
The till has NT$2,310 in it. Tickets are sixty. The four dim ones are the ones you have to earn — if the bill isn't paid on Mountain Post night, the lights go, and she rolls the shutter up anyway and sits in the entry with a torch.
There are twelve cans on the rack with paper labels. There is a thirteenth with masking tape on the rim: 83.11.02 / 明德 / 阿雪. It has smelled of vinegar since April. It is 16mm — it will not go anywhere near the big machines.
You've been in the paint room. You know what's under the rice sack: an Elmo ST-1200 with a perished drive belt. You know it needs one size-16 rubber band out of the second drawer of the ticket desk, and ten minutes.
She has never mentioned the can. She has never asked you to touch the Elmo. Fix it quietly, ask her outright, wait for a night when the power's gone and there's nothing else to put on the screen — or leave it on the rack and let it go to Kaohsiung in a rice sack on the 14th.