by Ge Fei
If you had been there yourself, and heard her repeat “He is gone” in that tone, would your heart have started to pound as you wondered what the hell “gone” was supposed to fucking mean? Would you have secretly suspected, though you yourself didn’t want to believe it, that Ding Caichen, this mystery man who could pull a pistol out of his pocket as if it were a pack of cigarettes, who gave Jiang Songping shivers at the mere mention of his name, was now, definitively, motherfucking dead?
Well, you would have been right.
The woman told me that Ding Caichen had jumped off a thirty-story office building in Dongzhimen last week, a cup of coffee still in his hand.
Simple as that.
The shock of hearing this forced me to push my own concerns aside for a moment, temporarily suppressing my desire to collect my two hundred and sixty thousand yuan. I automatically picked a copy of the Beijing News from the coffee table, spread it out on a sofa cushion, and sat down.
The offhand way in which the woman described the circumstances of Ding Caichen’s death deepened my apprehensiveness toward her. Still, I tacitly reminded myself that asking about her relationship to Ding Caichen might be a little too abrupt for the moment. But my excessive caution, caught as I was in a dizzying state between agitation and fear, led me inadvertently to commit an even bigger error. I breathed in sharply and asked her, “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t ask you this, but why is your face wrapped up?”
She paused, then replied, “I don’t like it this way either. If you’re not squeamish, I’ll take it off now. But you need to be sure.”
Honestly, I didn’t understand what she meant. My brain extended so far into the absurd that I even imagined her to be Ding Caichen himself, feigning a woman’s voice and appearance, covering his face just to play some kind of sick joke on me.
I can’t remember how I responded. What I do remember is her turning around to take off the brown silk scarf, and then, with a jerk, swinging back to face me again.
I stared at a violently disfigured face.
If you’re ever fortunate enough to see her face, I’m sure you’ll recognize as I did that the damage wasn’t caused by acid or some other corrosive liquid, but by a metal blade. Innumerable slashes in every direction had healed into a cross-hatched web of raised and uneven scars. I’m not sure how to describe her face as a whole, except that each slash silently replayed the sequence of its own mutilation.
If you’ve ever seen someone who has suffered severe cowpox, you know how flesh looks that’s been gouged and then scarred over. At the top of her cheekbone beneath her left eye I could make out a triangular hole, which, despite evidence of reconstructive surgery, still looked prominent and deep. A long scar along her right jawline stretched in a diagonal curve to the base of her ear; you could see the dot-and-dash marks left by the stitches. At first glance, it resembled a scorpion waving his tail. One of her nostrils was no more than a ragged hole.
Later I learned that a knife hadn’t caused the injury to her nostril; her nose had been partly chewed off by human teeth. The missing bit of flesh hadn’t been found, either, suggesting that her tormentor had simply swallowed it. A piece of her lip had also been mutilated the same way, so that her two front teeth remained exposed when she closed her mouth. The sheer, revolting ugliness of her face contrasted sharply with her fair, long neck, reminding me of a withered camellia—stem and leaves still bright green and vigorous, the flower wasted away and black.
“You said you were here about the sound system, sir?” she asked. “Did he not pay you?”
“He paid me a portion—a hundred thirty thousand.” I gave her an awkward smile.
“Well, what was the total price?”
“Three hundred and ninety.”
“I see. That’s why you’ve come.”
I didn’t know whether to look at her or look away. Staring straight at her certainly wouldn’t have been very polite; but for me to fix my gaze elsewhere and purposefully avoid looking at her would be rude, too. Thankfully, she turned away again, this time to gaze out the window.
The rain continued to pound on the roof and the wind picked up.
After several minutes of silence, she said, “How about this: if you return the hundred and thirty thousand, you can just take back the sound system.”
I told her that her suggestion seemed perfectly fair, but my current situation simply couldn’t handle it. Put yourself in my shoes for a second: I had already spent my entire savings just to buy the Linn 12 from the seller in Tongzhou. If I were to take her offer . . . even putting aside the fact that the courtyard I wanted so badly would go up in smoke, and that shithead Chang Baoguo’s deadline was almost upon me . . . forget about all that . . . if I agreed to her plan and returned the hundred and thirty thousand in exchange for my own sound system, wouldn’t it not only mean that I had finished two months of work for no profit, but also that I had spent sixty-eight thousand yuan on a Linn 12 I would never use myself? If you had been me, would you have agreed to it?
It seemed necessary to tell her the whole story of my sister and the forced move, so as to give her a clear understanding of the big picture, while also maybe triggering a little sympathy in the process. When I finished, I thought I had explained everything as plainly as possible, but the woman seemed confused, or unconvinced. Of course I couldn’t expect a person of her economic status to be able to empathize with a poor bastard like me.
“If you’d like to leave it here, that would be great for me. He knew I loved music, which is why he ordered it from you before he killed himself. I’m definitely no audiophile! I used to listen to music on ordinary computer speakers. But the first time I tried your sound system, I fell totally in love with it. It just has . . . I don’t know. . . its voice has such colorful resonance. So it would be hard for me to let it go. What about this: The money you don’t have to worry about. Though his company accounts were frozen after he died, it’s only a temporary situation. The company needs to pay off his debts, then his remaining assets need to be audited. I don’t have enough money to pay you back right now, but I can guarantee that as soon as the auditing is completed, I’ll pay you in full. I can even calculate a little interest to add to it. You have the initial hundred thirty thousand, right? Why not rent a place and move in there for the time being?”
It looked like my best option, and truth be told, I had considered the possibility before. But could I actually find another apartment within three days? It seemed unlikely. After I voiced this concern, she turned back to me and smiled (if you can call the mechanical movement of her lips a smile): “I have another idea. If you’re really stuck and don’t think you’ll be able to find a place, you can always live here for a while. I’m on my own, and this house is too big for me alone.”
Obviously she must be kidding, I thought to myself.
And if not, I didn’t think I could bear living with that face. As she spoke, another idea popped into my head that soothed my mood considerably. I recalled I still had in my possession a golden ticket: a promise that my old friend Jiang Songping had once made to me.
•
Before I left her house, I asked her a nagging question that I hadn’t dared to bring up yet: What could’ve made Ding Caichen so distraught he would decide to end his own life?
“Oh, he wasn’t distraught.” She corrected me in the same matter-of-fact tone, as if talking about a total stranger. “If you ask me, I think he jumped because he finally figured it out. He should’ve jumped a long time ago.”
“What I meant was, I find it hard to believe that someone like Ding Caichen would commit suicide. . . .”
“Even the South Korean president committed suicide, what’s so hard to believe?” She opened the front door for me. As she watched me put on my shoes, something seemed to dawn on her.
“I’m sorry, but do you know where I could find Gustav Leonhardt’s recordings? Specifically, his harpsichord performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.”
The questio
n astonished me. Not exactly the most popular album. I’d say only a precious few, a handful of audiophiles, in China had ever heard it.
“I doubt you can find it on the open market. But I happen to have a copy at home. If you write down your address, I can have a courier bring it to you tomorrow.”
She thanked me, found a pen and paper, and wrote down her address. She also called my cell phone, so we could get in touch more easily.
•
Before I met up with my dear old friend again, I had put a growing measure of hope upon his shoulders. I planned to pose my request for help as a choice: First, to ask him for a two hundred thousand yuan loan. If it worked, that amount plus Ding Caichen’s hundred and thirty thousand would be enough for me to move into the courtyard house today or tomorrow. Or second, to persuade him to buy the entire sound system himself. Not until six or seven years after Mou Qishan’s estate auction did he find out about the bargain I had finagled. Once he did, he told me with a palpable envy that if it hadn’t been for his diarrhea, those Autograph speakers would be his. Once, he even offered to buy them from me for three times the price I had paid.
Whichever option he chose would fix my dilemma perfectly. My confidence brimmed, too, because of something Songping said to me twenty-five years ago.
It was the winter of 1984, during my time as an apprentice at Red Capital Apparel. Jiang Songping accidentally impregnated the prettiest lass at the Telecommunications College. He ran over to the ready-made apparel department, yanked me into a corner by the men’s room, and pleaded with me, stamping his feet and clenching his hands, to help him figure out what to do.
At the time, getting a woman pregnant out of wedlock crossed my moral bottom line, to say nothing of the fact that she wasn’t even the steady girlfriend he had been bringing around to show off to me. He put me in a tough spot. But I knew very well what the college would do to him if they found out, being, as he was, a probationary member of the Communist Party. I had no choice but to put aside my own exalted morals. I decided to take the two of them secretly to Yancheng, and ask my uncle there to help her get an abortion.
In order to solidify the ruse, Jiang Songping asked me to do something so outlandish I could hardly believe it: he wanted me to pretend to be the “it” girl’s boyfriend. As I was a nobody, he argued, not subordinate to any organization or institution, if the news ever got out it wouldn’t have any major “political consequences.”
His concerns, in the end, seemed justified. I decided true altruism didn’t quit halfway, and I went along with his crazy idea.
With my uncle’s help, the “it” girl underwent a D&C procedure without complications. My animated aunt cooked her chicken soup every day until she recovered, while my uncle spent the equivalent of two months’ salary to buy her an expensive wool coat. Songping accepted the coat without hesitation, commenting, “Those in crisis don’t quibble over details”; the “it” girl even tried it on, sashaying in front of a mirror.
Still a student, Songping didn’t have much cash on hand; I basically covered all their expenses, including train tickets, food, and admission tickets for a few tourist attractions in Yangzhou.
On the train home to Beijing, with his arm around his dozing girlfriend, Songping made me a slow and solemn promise.
“Brother, I am truly in debt to you. Remember, if there ever comes a day when you have to move a mountain, just ask me, and I’ll lay down my life to move it for you.”
•
The next day I called him seven or eight times, but he never picked up. I finally tracked him down that afternoon in the executive conference room of Textile Tower on Minzhuang Road.
He stepped out of a meeting with his Board of Directors to come talk to me. A retailer in Tianjin had just sent back a shipment due to quality issues, putting him in a frenzied state. With understandable annoyance, he glared at me, ordering me to “Spit it out!” in a voice that boiled over with impatience.
This wasn’t the Songping I knew. I was caught completely off-guard.
With a darkened face, Songping controlled himself long enough to hear my explanation, before berating me in a way I had never seen before:
“Are you not finished being a pain in my ass? Are you retarded, or just fucking clueless? What business did you have telling that woman about the initial payment? Ding Caichen’s fucking dead, there’s no paper trail, how could she know if you hadn’t told her? If you had just shown up and carted the machinery home, you could’ve kept the money and rented a place anywhere you like. But now look at you, running to me for money while I’m pulling strings to beg the bank for a loan! I don’t have any money, but even if I fucking did, I couldn’t give you any! Let me ask you a question: are we brothers or not?”
Stunned, I didn’t say a word. Shouldn’t I have been the one asking that question? I swallowed my anger and nodded.
“That’s more like it. Now how can brothers bring up money so carelessly? ‘Men have kin, gold has none,’ that’s the law! Don’t you understand the law? It’s supposed to be something you just know without talking about, but you’re forcing me to explain it—I hope you’re happy.”
“Well, but I . . . I mean I’m now at . . . at the end of the road!” My mind went blank; I lost hope of him ever remembering what he had said to me that day on the train.
“Could you at least try to think before you open your mouth? You’re at the end of the road, what does that have to do with me?! Unbelievable. Am I the one making you move? Why don’t you go looking for that crazy fucking sister of yours?”
“Fine. Well, sir, I won’t keep you from your meeting.” His loathsome little speech had angered me so much I involuntarily slipped into formal address, my words spilling out haphazardly, unrestrained. “Fine, go ahead and return to your business. Goodbye. And after today, I guess we’ll say that your life is your life, and mine is mine, just as if . . .”
“Excuse me? What did you say? Say that again to my face!” Jiang Songping’s expression turned vicious and contorted; the condescension hissing between his teeth frightened me. “So now you’re threatening me? Who are you? Who the fuck do you think you are? You want to end this friendship, is that it? You think I care? What did I ever do to you? How many clients have I sent your way? Every fucking red cent you ever made I earned for you, you know that? Don’t forget that I even gave you that fucking shirt you’re wearing right now! And you don’t even give a shit! Fucking hell!”
The shouting and profanity must have disturbed the executives inside the conference room, for a couple of assistants scurried out and proceeded to drag him back in before he could finish. They urged him not to “bring yourself down to his level” and shot me looks of disgust before shutting the door.
•
Back home, I collapsed into bed with my clothes on, as if I had been hit with the flu. Images of Jiang Songping flooded over me when I closed my eyes. I saw him as a child, holding up those patched cotton trousers of his with one hand as he rolled that iron hoop through the shade down Mahogany Street, round and round again, the hoop heading silently toward me. They say the devil lives in our impulses; you can imagine how, as I lay there, filled with regret, I hated myself for my own recklessness. The world suddenly felt vast and hopeless. I knew that things were beyond fixing between us. And yet, for so many years, he had been the only friend I really cared about.
I drifted off to the rhythmic hammering of a pile driver at the construction site next door, falling into a murky sleep. One voice in my head questioned if I should rip off the Tommy Hilfiger shirt I was wearing and burn it. Another louder, more insistent, voice questioned if I should drive over to Songping’s house, apologize, and ask for his forgiveness.
•
By the time the ringing of my cell phone woke me up, it was already past ten at night.
“Mr. Cui, I just wanted to tell you not to worry about sending me that recording. I found Leonhardt’s albums online and downloaded them. I’m listening to one now,” she said. “Can
you hear it?”
Only after a long pause did I realize through the fuzziness of my brain that the call came from Sleeping Dragon Valley. The faint twanging of Leonhardt’s harpsichord sounded unreal, as if echoing from a far-off world. I listened for a few more seconds, then mumbled that if she had no other business, I was going to hang up.
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“Nothing.” I couldn’t bother to be civil. I caught sight of a shirt I had hung on the radiator to dry—also a gift from Jiang Songping. My chest tightened up.
“Oh, what I wanted to ask is if you can see the night sky from where you are.”
“What are you talking about?” I clambered out of bed, still holding my cell phone, and padded out onto the balcony.
“Can you see it?” she asked.
“See what?”
“Look up at the sky.”
The rain had ceased long ago, and the northwest wind, which had been raging through the day, had also calmed. To the southwest, over the tops of the naked trees, you could see thick fingers of altocumulus, like cotton candy, or cauliflower. The deep, singular blue of the night sky brought the clouds into delicate relief, the scene evoking an air of mystery. I noticed among the brightest stars a glittering bowl with a handle—the legendary Big Dipper.
So did she want me to look at the clouds or the Dipper? I couldn’t be sure, and didn’t care enough to ask. Her ill-timed romantic insinuations irritated me immensely.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she asked me. Unable to think of an inspired response, I played along and said, “Yes, it’s beautiful,” then lit a cigarette.
She asked me again about my living situation.
She said if I could find a nice apartment in the next few days that would be great, but if I couldn’t, and needed to be out of my place before the year ended, I was welcome to stay with her for a while. I could tell she wasn’t joking this time. She said she hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since Ding Caichen died. She had covered all the mirrors in the house. She started to suffer from hallucinations due to long-term sleep deprivation—whenever she looked in a mirror, she saw the fleeing shadow of Ding Caichen. Then the light would change, and the figure would be gone. Yet parts of him lingered behind, like a pair of underwear, or his old loafers. It felt like he had neither died nor left the house; she simply couldn’t see him.
