by Bi Feiyu
But now that it had reached this point, Jin da-jie pulled herself together. She couldn’t sit around waiting for something to happen to her; she couldn’t do that.
After crying for a whole afternoon, she cooked dinner and delivered the food with a long face; then she went back to the dorm, where she stripped her bed and quietly packed her things. After that she sat down on the edge of the bed to wait. Sha Fuming returned after midnight; so did Zhang and all the other therapists. She picked up her bundle and quietly knocked on the door of Zhang’s private room.
She set down her bundle and came straight to the point, though in a low voice. ‘Boss Zhang, are you still the boss? Do you still count here at the centre?’
It may have been a meaningless question, but it was wide of the mark, and it hit Zhang where it hurt. His eye began to twitch.
Sha Fuming slept in the next room, so Zhang kept his voice low as he demanded, ‘What kind of rubbish is that?’
He’d lowered his voice, but that’s not what she wanted. Instead, she raised her voice, which was loud to begin with.
‘I made a mistake, Boss Zhang, and I’m too ashamed to stay. I’m sorry I let Boss Sha and you down. I let everyone down. I was just waiting for you to return so I could apologise to you all. I’ve packed up my things and will leave for home tonight. I’m going now.’ She had begun to sob midway through and was nearly choking by the time she finished. Her crying grated on his ear. She was nearly wailing, an ugly howl leaving the impression that she no longer had any regard for face.
The dormitory was just an apartment with four bedrooms, plus two other rooms that, along with the master bedroom, were further partitioned to create more rooms, big and small. Who wouldn’t have heard Jin da-jie’s outburst? No one, except those who pretended not to.
Sha Fuming came out, reluctantly. Zhang Zongqi should have taken care of the problem with Jin da-jie, and Sha would only make matters worse if he got involved, but she’d raised such a racket he had to do something. He coughed from where he stood in Zhang’s doorway. ‘It’s almost one o’clock now and everyone is tired. We all need our sleep.’
She heard only that he wanted her to stop making a scene; he said nothing about leaving. His comment was ambiguous. Did he want her to leave or not? Zhang Zongqi also got Sha’s drift; Sha was saving face for him but also handing him a hot potato. Sha’s stance was clear: he did not want to express his view regarding whether or not Jin da-jie should go. He tossed the responsibility to Zhang Zongqi.
All the others, except Du Hong and Xiao Ma, followed Sha Fuming out, crowding into the narrow hallway outside Zhang’s room. It was a good sign. With her face in her hands, Jin da-jie peeked through the spaces between her fingers, saw them out there, and felt pretty good. Even if she was expected to leave, it wouldn’t be easy to squeeze her way through the crowd.
She kept crying and muttering through her tears, mostly to criticise herself and express her remorse, as well as her plan to leave. Then they heard a loud thump on the ceiling. It was very late and they’d been making too much noise, upsetting their upstairs neighbours. As if worried that one thump would not quiet the blind people downstairs, the owner of the foot stomped again, sending the hollow noise echoing in the apartment, in everyone’s ears, including Sha’s and Zhang’s.
Pulling a long face, Zhang said loudly, ‘Did you hear that? Enough already! Don’t you care at all about social etiquette? Go on, everyone, go back to your rooms.’
Not daring to move, Jin da-jie glanced at Zhang Zongqi and noticed the dark look on his face; she then looked at Sha, who wore the same expression. Then she turned her head, accidentally locking eyes with Gao Wei, who shut her eyes and, after a while, opened them to return the gaze. Among the many who could not see, the two pairs of eyes exchanged looks, confident and highly provocative, though, of course, not cocksure. But at least they reached a tacit agreement on the matter; each standing in front of her own room, they issued challenges before looking away: Let’s wait and see, then.
Chapter Fourteen
Zhang Yiguang
THE MUTTON COUNT changed the tuina centre, which was now shrouded in a cheerless and forlorn aura, with an undercurrent of apprehension. Everyone sensed that something was about to happen, but in the end nothing did, though, of course, that did not mean that nothing would. On the contrary, it was only a matter of time. And everyone waited with bated breath, watching with their unseeing eyes. The mood had changed, the clearest sign of which was the cordial way the two bosses treated all the employees. The quality of food also improved noticeably. Zhang Zongqi was clearly more talkative, mixing casual chats with hints of managerial intent. This was not a good sign, as it made known an unspoken fact that a major rift had appeared between the two bosses, who were now engaged in a battle for a united front to win public support for their side.
Winning public support was fraught with peril, for at some point, the public could become a bomb that, when exploded, would leave only some standing.
The employees were caught in the middle – everyone needed to choose sides, one camp or the other, Sha or Zhang. There was no third option. Choosing sides is never easy, since one cannot know beforehand which side will remain standing. To be sure, being on the wrong side would not be the end of the world, since you could leave. But no blind person leaves a job willingly. It’s too much trouble to pick up and leave. Once your bedding is rolled up, you’ll find that countless roads open up before you, and you must walk down one of them, on the road all over again.
Amid this gloomy atmosphere, Zhang Yiguang unexpectedly became friendly with Xiao Ma. Whenever he had a free moment, he groped his way over to Xiao Ma and draped his arm around his shoulders, acting like the younger man’s best buddy. Xiao Ma read him wrong. He had never had much to do with Zhang, and wondered what he was up to, especially at a time when everyone was on guard. He was convinced that Zhang had been sent by either Boss Sha or Boss Zhang. He’d made up his mind not to choose sides, refusing to be anyone’s man. So when Zhang Yiguang’s arm encircled his shoulders, he forced his way free; Ma was put off by Yiguang’s arm, especially his hot, complex underarm odour.
Where are you going? Zhang Yiguang was thinking. I’ve got something to say to you, and it’s for your own good.
Zhang was a unique case among those who had lost their sight after birth. Most people in this category start out being highly excitable, and by the time they’ve calmed down, they’ve probably lost hope, forever giving the impression of total exhaustion. But not him. He had survived a gas explosion that took the lives of one hundred and thirteen of his co-workers, men whose corpses filled a room. He was the only one who’d made it out, a miracle incarnate, though paying the price of his eyes. After the accident, instead of fixating on his eyes, he fixed those ‘black’ sightless eyes on a heart filled with boundless joy and, naturally, endless fear.
His fear was the kind that came after the fact, a tormenting fear that is worse than losing sight. On a certain level, losing his eyesight had stopped being so important. Since he could no longer detect light, for a long time he believed that he was still in the mine. He would sit on a stool, a club in his hand, and when visited by the fear, he would poke into the air, which would then tell him that the space above him was a ceiling, not the roof of a mine.
Fear was a snake that, instead of biting, simply coiled inside him. It slithered up to his heart at times and, coiling its body, began to squeeze. That is what Zhang feared the most, for it took his breath away, though, of course, it was his own heart that was constricting, and that was the undisputed truth. Seen from this angle, fear was not bad; it was good. Since being alive led to fear, then a sense of fear must mean that he was not dead. Hey, you’re alive, young man. So go burn a few incense sticks. You’ve got a second chance at life; you came out on top.
Coming out on top at any given moment makes a person feel good, especially when it means getting out alive. He’d died, and all his responsibilities had ended. But then his wife d
id not become a widow, his parents did not lose a son and his children still had their father. So what did all this mean? It meant his family had come out on top. What does it mean to be a survivor? What if he hadn’t been lucky enough to survive the others? Yet he no longer had anything to do with this world; he was dead, a walking corpse, a drifting, lingering soul of the dead. From that point on, he lived every day for himself only. He was free.
Zhang stayed at home for only six months after the accident before leaving. The freedom he’d enjoyed at home was not real freedom; it was not total, complete. Only thirty-five, he had just passed the midway mark of his life if he was to live to seventy. He still had thirty-five good years, which he had no intention of spending at home. He’d done everything he could for that family, even handing over the compensation for losing his eyesight, so as a living corpse he should not be required to make any more sacrifices for them. Newly reborn, he wanted to grow up strong in the world of darkness.
So he went to Xuzhou to learn tuina, which was not hard, just a bit of physical exertion, easy work for someone who had spent sixteen years labouring in a mine. It was also safe and steady, and he could chat and laugh with his clients. Zhang congratulated himself for choosing this line of work. A year later, he made the successful transformation of his life, turning from a disabled miner to an able-bodied tuina therapist. Of course he’d need a qualifying certificate if he wanted to make a living, but that was not difficult. Was it hard to have one hundred and thirteen buddies die in a mine? Of course it was, it was terrible. So if he’d made it in the mine, what was so hard about a mere certificate? He’d taken care of that with four hundred yuan and a pack of top-quality cigarettes, King Size Sequoia. Certificate in hand, he walked out onto the street, where he discovered there was one cigarette left in the pack. He lit up, and had an immediate coughing fit. Then it dawned on him that he was smoking a fine cigarette, one of those they called ‘tribute cigarettes’. Emperors must have been smokers. Why else would they be called ‘tribute’? He finished the cigarette, feeling like an emperor, though to be honest, it had been a so-so smoke. But no matter how little it impressed him, Zhang Yiguang had had a taste of being an emperor. Was it really that easy? Yes, I guess so.
After crumpling the cigarette pack and tossing it into the street, he bought a train ticket to Nanjing, the old capital, where emperors had lived, a land of prosperity and decadence. On the train he was raring to go; even his fingers seemed to sparkle like bright seeing eyes, giving him the feeling that they were hungering for the life he’d longed for.
After receiving his first month’s salary in Nanjing, he groped his way into one of those special hair salons – a brothel, that is. He wanted to be an emperor, spending his hard-earned cash on a woman, any one who struck his fancy. Almost immediately he was hooked on whoring, but he didn’t see it that way. To him he was just doing what an emperor used to do, flipping cards to find the concubine he wanted.
‘My beloved consort! My dear, sweet consort!’
The girl would laugh, joined by the others. They never expected a blind man like him to be so entertaining. He was an emperor. Didn’t they hear him when he paid up? ‘A reward!’ he would say.
He went to a hair salon every few days. After several visits, he sensed a major change inside; he was no longer stifled, not a ‘man-show’ any more; in fact he was livelier and more outgoing than when he’d worked in the mine. He could still recall how stifling it had been for him as a miner; all he could think about back then was going to ‘that place’, but he’d never made it, not once. It cost money that he could not bear to spend, because his parents no longer worked and he had two school-age children. He’d suppressed his urge till he began to have wet dreams, a shameful act that embarrassed him and turned him into the butt of his co-workers’ jokes. When they saw his sticky sheets, they gave him a malicious nickname – land-to-air missile – which was shortened as land-to-air. When he thought back to those days, he had to agree with them; he’d been a pig. To his wife he was a castrated pig. To the owner of the mine, he was not castrated, but was sold, skin and all, when he was done shooting blanks. The compensation was nothing but the final payment for his flesh.
He was lucky to have lost his sight. When he could see, he had noticed nothing, but once he was blind, Zhang Yiguang, a man from the countryside, saw everything. He was not land-to-air; he was an emperor.
What incredible luck! When the gas exploded, the flying rocks took only his sight, not his family jewels. If he’d lost them, would he ever be an emperor? Of course not.
He worked doubly hard at the tuina centre for one reason only; that is, the harder he worked, the more he earned and the more prostitutes he could visit. Likewise, he worked doubly hard at the hair salon for the simple reason that he had set a strict goal for himself; he must sleep with eighty-one women. He had once read that an emperor had one woman in each of his three palaces, one in each of his six courts, plus seventy-two consorts, a total of eighty-one. Once Zhang had slept with eighty-one whores, he would be an emperor, an amateur one at least.
‘My beloved consort! My dear, sweet consort!’
For the most part, Zhang Yiguang had conquered his fear of the mine. But when he was working, in the dark, a sensation of being in the mine returned. He could never completely free himself of the feeling that he was down there with his buddies. Because of this, his relationships with the other therapists were unique. To him they were all his brothers, at least he wanted them to be. But they did not consider him one of their own. In part that was age-related, but mainly it was due to his background.
He had been able to see for thirty-five years, and when he lost his sight, he retained the mentality and habits of a sighted person. Without a blind man’s history, schooling experience and the standard apprenticeship in the trade, he was new to the life, and could never be accepted as one of them. Or to put it differently, he had left ‘that world’ but had failed to enter ‘this world’; he had forced his way in, and was an intruder, destined to be a loner.
Being a loner can be awkward, which was why he was temperamental and moody. By nature, he was outgoing, if a bit on the flighty side, unlike born-blind therapists, who tend to be more grounded, calmer. As they had to interact with each other, his outgoing approach inevitably clashed with their understated reactions; as an older man trying to befriend the younger therapists, he felt underappreciated. When he was down, he lacked the fortitude of someone born blind, making conflicts unavoidable. In the end, he clashed with the others too easily, and then felt bad afterwards. He would try to repair the damage, which required him to condescend to the younger ones. And he felt aggrieved. Back at the mine, he had clashed with other miners, but those conflicts were easy to deal with. Even if they got into a physical fight, a round of drinks and a slap on the shoulder smoothed everything over, for his buddies never bore a grudge. But not the blind therapists; they bore grudges, a deeply rooted character trait, and the source of Zhang’s difficulty. It didn’t take him long to antagonise everyone at the centre and, lacking a single close friend, he felt lonely and isolated.
Loners don’t just feel awkward, they also tend to meddle in other people’s affairs. Zhang Yiguang liked to meddle. Meddlers share the characteristic of shifty eyes. Zhang did not have shifty eyes, but his ears learned to turn this way and that. His antennae revealed a problem – Xiao Ma was in love with Xiao Kong.
Enthralled in his one-sided romance, Xiao Ma lived in a mixture of sweet happiness and pain, an unstoppable longing. Zhang saw everything and felt sorry for Ma, who would suffer greatly in the end, even if he did not yet know it. He would be destroyed. Xiao Ma not only imagined himself to be Xiao Kong’s love interest, but also considered himself clever, blithely convinced that no one had noticed anything as he fixated on her with his ears and nose, often for as long as half an hour. His mouth hung open. A blind man’s ears and nose are his eyes. If a sighted man stares at a woman, the secret in his eyes will sooner or later be detected by other
eyes; likewise, the secrets of ears and nose will sooner or later be detected by other ears and noses. How could you fancy her, Xiao Ma? You can’t. How would you keep your job at the centre if you were found out? Wang Daifu hasn’t said anything, but that doesn’t mean he can’t tell. Xiao Ma, you’ll ruin yourself and take others along with you. Zhang decided that Xiao Ma’s fanciful thoughts were like gas, as if he was enshrouded in odourless gas. Gas you can’t smell is the most dangerous of all. One careless action can lead to an explosion, causing a major collapse.
He must save Xiao Ma, his lost little buddy.
Zhang thought long and hard, but could find no good solution, so he decided to take drastic action. For a young ‘rooster’ like Xiao Ma, the cause of his trouble could be traced to his reservoir of sperm. Like he himself back at the mine. He’d come off work so exhausted he didn’t even have the strength to take a shower, but once he lay in bed his body was energised, and he couldn’t stop thinking about his wife. It was, in fact, just his sperm gnawing at him. They were tiny, but there were so many of them, tens of millions of unstoppable soldiers that can vanquish a six-foot man, like hordes of ants shaking a tree. The fundamental solution was to coax them out, after which everything would be fine; he’d sigh and fall asleep as soon as he shut his eyes.
In the end, Xiao Ma was tricked into going to the hair salon with Zhang Yiguang. Unsure what it was all about, the younger man went anyway. Zhang had been so meticulous in making the arrangements that it was too late for Ma by the time everything became clear to him. Zhang sent Xiaoman, Zhang’s own favourite consort and the consort he’d favoured many times recently, to Ma. She was good in bed, so sweet she could talk a dead man alive. Truth be told, Zhang was reluctant to give her up and had to talk himself into parting with her so that Xiao Ma could have some pleasure and would get hooked on the hair salon. Once he’d expelled his sperm over and over, he would come to his senses and lose interest in Sao-zi.
