Lan Yu tossed and turned a few times, then finally sat up and stared blankly at the TV screen. To me, he paid no attention whatsoever.
“The problem with you,” I said, “is you’re too young. You can’t even keep up with this old comrade.” I put the cigarette out. “Keep rejecting me like this and my dick is gonna fall off!”
Lan Yu yawned, then gave a sleepy laugh. I leaned over and kissed him, fully expecting him to resist me, but he surprised me by slowly wrapping his arms around my neck and gently biting at my lips, nose, and chin.
When I had woken him up a few minutes earlier, it was mostly just to be an annoying brat. But now that he was awake, I was getting turned on again for real. I pulled him closer and made him lean against me so we could watch the TV together. He started to get hard and I put my hand down the front of his pajamas, thinking about how unlikely it would be for a girl to have sex with you if you woke her up like this. I was turned on by the idea of waking someone up in the middle of the night, having hot and frantic sex, then going back to sleep.
I turned him around so we were both facing the TV and my dick pressed into him. I returned my gaze to the TV, where the bisexual three-way had evolved into an even hotter scene. The girl was on her back, legs spread wide, getting fucked by the first guy while the second guy kneeled beside them, playing with her tits and muttering a string of obscenities. I spit into my hand and smeared the saliva on Lan Yu’s hole while wrapping my other hand gently around his throat. I came soon after entering him, but stayed inside afterward, kissing his neck as he jerked himself off. Just before he came, he twisted his torso around until his lips met mine and his hand reached behind my neck to pull me closer. “Oh . . .,” he moaned, moving his tongue across my lips and chin as he came.
Neither of us was able to fall asleep after that. Lan Yu took a shower, then lay back down on the bed and looked out the window.
“How can it still be so dark out?” he asked.
“It’s only three. Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time to get up.”
“You fucker!” he laughed. “You told me it was seven!” Lan Yu never would have said “fucker” when I first met him. But he’d been in Beijing for almost a year now, more than enough time to master the local vernacular, which was so legendarily vulgar it had its own title: Beijing Bitching.
We stayed up talking and laughing and watching TV until five in the morning, when we finally snuggled up and went to sleep. Just two short hours later, however, the alarm went off and Lan Yu headed to the bathroom to get ready for work. He shut the door, perhaps because he was afraid of waking me up, but I could still hear the quiet sound of him washing his hands and face, getting dressed, and quietly slipping out the door.
Ever since the night at the Imperial when we first met, there had been periods of days, weeks, even months, when Lan Yu and I didn’t see each other. But what happened the following day was the first time we formalized our separation by breaking up.
He didn’t get home from the construction site until eleven thirty that night. His face, once so handsome, was dark and emaciated. I was sitting up in bed reading when he got home. He threw his bag on the bedroom floor, then told me he had fallen asleep on the bus and didn’t wake up until it pulled into the terminus. The bus driver had to nudge his shoulder to wake him up. By the time he was standing in the parking lot of the terminal, the bus lines had stopped running and he had no choice but to take a taxi home. It had also started raining, not heavily, but just enough to leave him with a clammy dampness from head to toe. I remained in bed, trying to act cool but cringing at every word he said. I didn’t even know he had been taking the bus to work. I had always assumed he took a taxi with the money I gave him. I loathed his obstinacy.
Lan Yu peeled off his clothes and collapsed onto the bed, covered in dirt and sweat. A feeling of revulsion rose in me.
“Oh, come on!” I said. “Get up, Lan Yu. What are you, some kind of migrant worker? Go take a shower.” I pushed his shoulder a few times.
Dutifully, he got up and went to the bathroom, half-asleep and muttering something I couldn’t make out. No more than five minutes later, he came out of the bathroom and plopped back down, head first, onto the bed. Beads of water clung to his forehead, but his hair was dry and clumped together with a white material that looked like plaster or maybe paint. Staring at the back of his head while he slept, I seethed with anger and my veins pulsed with a sadistic desire for revenge. That’s when it happened.
“Lan Yu.” I poked his shoulder again, this time much harder. He woke up, startled and confused, evidently puzzled by my unwillingness to back off after his compliance with my request.
“This is getting old,” I said. “Let’s just end it. You can focus on your studies and live a normal life. Go find a girlfriend at your school and . . . and that’s it.”
He looked at me but showed no reaction. Everything about him was numb.
“If you need money, talk to Liu Zheng. He’ll get you some.”
I wanted to provoke him, to piss him off as much as I could. And yet, what his expression revealed was not the devastation I’d hoped for, but perplexity. He sat up in bed, but didn’t say a word.
“I told you a long time ago. When I mess around with this kind of stuff, it’s usually for a year, max. You and I have been together long enough. I’m sick of this. Sick of you.”
How gratifying it would have been if he had responded like a woman, bursting into tears or arguing with me hysterically. But he was silent.
“I’m going out tonight. Tomorrow you can just get all your stuff out of here and don’t come back. Just go to your dorm or whatever.” I had the weird feeling I was about to laugh. I couldn’t even look at him.
By the time I finished my speech, I was already out of bed, fully dressed, standing at the foot of the bed with my back to him. I pushed open the door and walked out.
The muggy summer air felt good compared with the air-conditioned nightmare of my bedroom. I was enormously pleased with myself. All my resentment against Lan Yu—his tedious world of construction-site materials and extended work hours—had finally come out.
I got into my car and drove aimlessly. Turning onto Third Ring Road, I passed an international hotel I had been to on more than a few occasions. For some reason, I had never noticed that its rooftop was trimmed with long rows of bright, shimmering lights, a riot of color and twinkling stars. On the other side of the street, a crew of street cleaners in dark, drab clothing traveled briskly in the opposite direction. Riding three-wheeled pedal carts that looked like miniature tractors, they paused periodically to collect trash from off the street. They talked and laughed as they worked, and for a brief moment I found solace in this simple, unaffected scene. But the longer I drove, the worse I felt.
The next morning, I asked Liu Zheng to stop by Lan Yu’s construction site to find out whether or not Lan Yu had gone to work that day.
“Yep,” he reported when he returned to the office. “He’s there at the construction site.”
“What the fuck?” I sulked. “He acts like nothing’s happened!”
“Listen, Handong, I could understand you being upset if he were a woman, but he’s not, okay? Don’t waste your emotions on him.” I had never told Liu Zheng anything about my feelings for Lan Yu, but he was a smart guy. He could figure things out on his own.
“I’m not wasting anything,” I said, shifting into a light and cavalier tone. “It’s just that I don’t know what to do with him. He’s not exactly prone to being controlled, you know!”
“You want to control him? First give him a car, then take him on a big vacation to the US. If that doesn’t work, go hire a thug to knock him to the ground. Then you’ll see how prone he is!” Liu Zheng laughed, greatly amused by his own pun.
With Lan Yu gone, I didn’t want to stay at Ephemeros, nor was I especially keen to go to Country Brothers, so I decided to camp out at my parents’ place for a few days. On my first night there, my father went
out drinking with his old army buddies and my youngest sister had a date. My other sister was married by then and lived with her husband and his parents. It was just my mother and I alone in the house.
I sat at the dining room table, munching on a plate of stir-fried cucumbers, my mother’s specialty. She could tell there was something wrong.
“Little Dong, what made you want to come home right now?” she asked, pouring me a cup of tea.
“Nothing special. I guess I missed you and Dad,” I said facetiously.
Ever since reaching adulthood I had always joked around with my mother. I couldn’t stand that formal way of speaking to parents typical of most Chinese children. My mother enjoyed my playful irreverence. It gave her a laugh.
“Did you break up with your girlfriend?” She sat down at the table and looked at me.
“Believe me, I’m trying, but she won’t let me!”
She laughed again. She knew her handsome, well-heeled son had no trouble finding women.
“Little Zheng told me your girlfriend—oh, what’s her name—Hao Ming? Anyway, he says she’s real nice. When am I going to meet her?” “Little Zheng” was what my mother called Liu Zheng.
“Yeah, she’s great, Ma. She’s like a boa constrictor squeezing me to death. Anyway, I can’t promise you’ll meet her since I’m doing my best to dump her.”
“Well,” my mother said, standing up to inspect a dishcloth hanging on the clothesline, “if that is true, then I must inform you that your father’s associate Xu Haihong came by again yesterday to ask about you. He still wants to introduce you to his daughter. She seems real nice, Handong. And her father is getting a promotion this year—he’s in foreign trade! I’m sure the Xu girl would just love it if you asked her out on a date. If you want, I can talk to her dad again and set it up for you.”
“Come on, Ma!” I pleaded. “Can we please just drop the subject? I’m not going to prostitute myself to a dog like her just because her daddy’s getting a promotion. There are lots of other girls out there, you know.”
In a flash my mother went from cheerful to annoyed. She poured me another cup of tea with a petulant look on her face, then plunked the ceramic pot on the table, put her hand on her hip, and looked right at me.
“Well, at this point, anyone will do, Handong. Just don’t put it off any longer. You need to focus on finding somebody and settling down.” Having gotten this out of her system, she went back to her normal, gentle voice. “Just look at Little Zheng. Isn’t it wonderful how he has his own family? And a son!”
With that, my mother turned on her heel and walked into the kitchen to ask the maid to do something. I remained at the table, silently repeating the words she had just said. Anyone will do. If that “anyone” was Lan Yu, she’d be beside herself with anger.
For the rest of the night I sat in the bedroom my mother still kept for me at the family house, obsessing. Again and again, I considered the ways in which Lan Yu and I being together was absurd, abnormal, and ultimately impossible. I even thought of a ridiculous word: love.
I put a cassette in the tape player, hoping to get my mind off of it. It was some Chinese rock group that had just put out a new recording. One of Lan Yu’s classmates had told him about it excitedly, so I’d picked it up in the university district, the only area of Beijing where one could find such things. The jarring guitar rhythms irritated me. I turned it off.
I am not, I reasoned, going to get sucked into this so deeply that I fall in love with a man! I knew I was normal. I just liked a good adventure, not to mention the fact that I was way too horny for my own good. Anyway, it didn’t matter. I had already ended things with Lan Yu before they spiraled out of control. I had made sure it wasn’t too late for either of us to return to a normal life. Breaking up was good for him, and it was good for me.
And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
I threw the tape into the trash, then pulled it back out. Maybe Lan Yu would like it.
Eight
Predictably enough, my visit to my parents’ became stifling after a few days, so I packed up my things and went back to Ephemeros. Just before getting in the car, my mother and I had yet another conflict about “the Xu girl.” I had made it more than clear that I wasn’t interested, and yet she wouldn’t leave it alone. The argument wasn’t that big and we even managed to laugh about it as we said goodbye, but we both demonstrated how stubborn we could be.
The fight with Lan Yu, however, weighed heavily on my mind, and I found myself worrying about our relationship more and more with each passing day. Truth be told, though, even more vexing than this was the troublesome business affair I’d recently landed in. I had created a serious dilemma by screwing up a major deal involving a batch of imported Volkswagens. Due to some petty regulation I hadn’t complied with, I had to rid myself of the cars before January, even if it meant selling them at a loss.
Late one Saturday afternoon as I was gathering my things to leave the office, Liu Zheng walked in. He told me Lan Yu’s foreman had called to report that Lan Yu hadn’t been to work in eight days.
It had been almost two weeks since we had broken up. At first I had been outraged that he kept going to work, as if my sudden disappearance ought to have made him fall apart completely. I resented his apparent ability to recover so speedily from what should have been the earth-shattering disaster of losing me. But now, learning from Liu Zheng that he had suddenly stopped going to work a full two weeks later, I was confused. And worried.
When I got home that evening I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I finally broke down and called his dorm at Huada. Nearly all of the students were gone for summer vacation and the phone rang no less than fifty times before someone finally picked it up.
“Room 815, please.”
“Okay, wait a minute.”
Ten minutes later, he returned to the phone. He said no one was in 815 and everyone had gone home for the summer.
I had plans to meet with clients that evening—a couple of guys who were interested in purchasing the Volkswagens—but called them to reschedule. I had to go to Huada.
I hadn’t been to Lan Yu’s dormitory in nearly six months, since the previous January when he wanted to change out of his work clothes after I hunted him down at Fan Haiguo’s computer shop. Parking in front of building number eight, I noticed how gutted and desolate everything appeared during the summer vacation. Everything looked exactly the same as six months earlier, apart from the snow. The memory of Lan Yu exiting the building flashed before my eyes. Bright winter sunshine bounced off his glistening hair and he wore the bluish-gray jacket with the brown lining.
I entered the building and my senses were hit by the heavy stench of urine. It was the smell of a men’s dormitory restroom, something I hadn’t been anywhere near since my own graduation. The Public Security station in the lobby was unmanned and a single lightbulb hung dimly from the ceiling—hardly enough to illuminate the hallways, which were enveloped in stygian darkness. I could barely read the numbers on the doors, and in some spots had to run a hand along the wall just to avoid bumping into it. Eventually, however, I managed to reach 815. I knocked a few times then waited. Nobody answered so I knocked again. This went on for some time until I finally accepted that Lan Yu wasn’t there. Still, I couldn’t bear the idea of giving up and walking away, so just as I was about to turn around and leave, I twisted the doorknob. It was unlocked.
Lan Yu’s room was as silent as Mao’s mausoleum, and if it hadn’t been for the moonlight shining through the window I wouldn’t have been able to see a thing. It was your typical dorm room. Eight twin beds distributed along four bunks, two bunks to the left, two to the right, with a long, narrow table in the middle. Diminutive study desks lined the walls, and chairs were scattered about the room. The deathlike silence was so engulfing that it was some time before I noticed what appeared to be a human body lying on the lower berth near the window. Panic gripped me. I was almost unable to move.
“Lan Yu!
” I called out in a loud whisper. Though I didn’t know if the person was him, I hoped he would respond. But my call was met with silence.
My heart pounded in terror. Was he dead? I stepped forward, my eyes drilling holes in the figure on the lower bunk. Only when I stood over the body was I able to make out the face. It was him! I squatted down and put my hand against his forehead. Somehow, I had expected him to feel icy cold, but it was just the opposite: he was burning up. I grabbed his hand and checked for a pulse. Faint and rapid. I moved my ear closer to his face and heard him breathing. He was alive!
I wanted to carry him out on my shoulders, but he was heavier than I expected and I couldn’t lift him. I darted into the hallway and called out to the darkness.
“Is anyone here? Somebody, help!”
Two guys popped their heads out of the room next door. “What is it?” they asked. They were the only other people on the floor.
“One of your classmates has to get to the hospital immediately. Please, come help me!”
The taller of the two helped me lift Lan Yu, and we carried him into the hallway. All I wanted was to get him into the car as quickly as possible, but the two guys started prattling on just as casually as if they’d been discussing their coursework.
“What department and year is he?” the shorter one asked.
“Architecture, 87. Name’s Lan Yu. He didn’t go home for the summer.”
“Oh, right! That guy who dresses like a Jap! I think he has relatives here in Beijing.”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t talk much. I’ve never had any contact with him.”
The tall guy turned to me, almost dropping Lan Yu in the process. “Are you a relative?” I fought back the urge to punch him in the face.
“I’m his big brother,” I replied icily.
We got outside and put Lan Yu in the passenger seat. I looked at my watch and turned the key in the ignition. It was nine o’clock. Lan Yu was seated next to me, breathing lightly and leaning against the door with his eyes closed. I stepped on the accelerator.
Beijing Comrades Page 9
