Two Lives

by A. Yi

  – How old are you now?

  – Didn’t I tell you twenty-five?

  – Twenty-five, so your mom was thirty-six when she had you.

  – Gotta have kids, being thirty-six with no kids isn’t right.

  Ba Like looked out the door, sad and terrified. The shopkeeper stood up, said to a passerby out of sight: Come later, still have two customers. Ba Like said: How about I take you to a teahouse?

  – Don’t go too far. Say it all here, say it all and we’re done.

  – All right.

  – Do you know how scared I was before? The moment I saw the crazy lady coming back from the supply and marketing co-op branch, I ran from the entrance to home, then from home to the base of the mountain out back, found a root cellar there, lifted up the board, squeezed down. The root cellar had a rotten smell. Mice saw me come in, didn’t know where to run to. I got scared, started to cry, but I didn’t dare cry out loud. I hid in the pitch-black root cellar, counting time second by second, counting to 1,000, 10,000, counting till I figured the crazy lady had left, then dared to come out. I was afraid she would pinch me, beat me. I had to wait until my dad came back from the fields, then I could go back home gripping his clothes.

  – She beat you often?

  – She always stood in the supply and marketing co-op branch thinking crazy. When she thought I was the cause of her problems, she ran back looking for me. Always like that. I really didn’t want to learn Mandarin from her, really didn’t care she was a city person before. I just hoped she would die soon. Speaking of her death, we looked for two days and two nights, looked everywhere, just didn’t think of the mountaintop. We should have thought of it long before, because she always blabbed about how you two once ran off to the mountain peak, played cello to the mountains. Played some Bach song. She said when she played, the red leaves, grass, and branches started to dance like waves of wheat rolling past. She said you stole a big drum from the tree farm, drilled two holes in the middle of the drum, then looked everywhere for string and thread, slowly put the cello together. She said you tuned it for a month. She said there couldn’t be anyone else like you in the world, using such simple materials to make such a precise cello. She stood behind the counter looking at it, came back home holding it, sometimes fell asleep holding it. She held it, saying, Little Ke will come back, he made such a good cello.

  As the shopkeeper went back to the kitchen, he glanced sideways at Ba Like, who had tears swirling in his eyes. The shopkeeper glanced again.

  – When she died my first thought was to throw the cello away. But my dad stopped me, said after all it’s your mom’s. I let my dad handle it. Now the cello’s still lying next to the pee bucket.

  – Sorry.

  – So tell me, shouldn’t you be responsible for this? The crazy lady said every day, she shouldn’t have come, she followed you here. You shouldn’t have gone back to the city, but you went back. Tell me, since you brought her there, why didn’t you take her with you?

  – Because there was only one quota back then.

  – She said, she shouldn’t have come, in 69 you graduated, had to go to the countryside. It wasn’t her turn yet, but because she couldn’t leave you, she voluntarily applied to go with you. She was a woman too, was fooled by you. You men are all shit.

  – Sorry.

  – What’s the point of saying sorry?

  – Sorry.

  Ba Like started to bang his forehead on the table again and again, the shopkeeper couldn’t look on any longer, walked up, and said, What’s wrong? what’s wrong? But Ba Like cried louder and louder, completely unable to stop.

  – Sorry, he tried to say to Girl.

  At that moment, there seemed to be something like pity brushing Girl’s pale face, but in the end her thin lips pressed downward.

  – Sorry for what? she said.

  – I’m sorry for you and your mother.

  – Hah, you can be sorry for her, nothing to be sorry for me about. I’m not your child. If I were your child, you could be sorry for me, but I’m not your child. Forget it, can’t fix it, thank you for paying the bill.

  Girl sneered, stood up, slung the bag over her shoulder, and walked away without looking back. The shopkeeper behind said loudly, Lili, come back soon. Ba Like turned his head, looked despondent. He saw the descendant of Guangming Village who carried the last traces of Qin Huimin in black shorts as she disappeared. The knock of her heels stomped his heart knock after knock.

  Her father was more generous than her but kept him from crying. Her father didn’t say anything to him, didn’t blame him or beat him up, instead invited him to eat rabbit, wild boar, and wild chicken. Afterward he took him to the grave. Her father said: Huimin, I waited for Little Ke for you, and he came. Little Ke’s still so young.

  24

  One day, three or four months later, at 5 a.m., sixty-two-year-old Ba Like left home. He was wearing black track pants and a black T-shirt and carried a backpack. In the backpack were rice balls, a tea bottle, a flashlight, a machete, letter paper, a pen, and a coat to keep out the cold.

  If he disappeared this time, very few people would look for him – just look a little then forget it. Woman and Mother would grieve awhile of course, but because of the previous experience, would be much calmer. But at 8 p.m., just when the temperature switch of the rice cooker automatically switched off, his key was inserted in the door. Because he turned sideways to open the door, the backpack fell to the ground, and wild hawthorn berries leaped out of it, jumping down the stairs.

  Human Scum

  Zhaoyu was a younger guy in my town. Of all the young people living on the market street in our town, he was the buffest. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to describe him as an iron man with the back of a tiger and waist of a bear. He liked playing basketball. When he made a drive to the basket, his shoulders heaved up and down like a calf’s, knocking over everyone in his way. Sometimes the water would stop running, so he’d go to the water supply station a kilometer off and carry back two large barrels of water without breaking a sweat, like he was on a stroll. When knitting together the neighbors asked his mom, Aunt Wu of Nanyi, how she raised a son so strong, even though nobody was richer than anybody else. “There was no trick to it,” she said. “I just fed him eggs, milk, and apples every day. I bought as much as he could eat and let him eat it.”

  Once when I was back in town, Aunt Wu came to me, telling me that Zhaoyu was going to Beijing, so I was, of course, expected to keep an eye on the little guy. That was the reason for our ceremonial meeting a few months later at a bar near Workers’ Gymnasium. Inside some sappy songs played (a woman sounding nonchalant like she was being forced to sing: Today you are already lovers. . . Love can’t be split in two. . . Can’t love and can’t hate. . .). Some of the others really made you cry.

  During the meeting, despite his best efforts, Zhaoyu couldn’t help pick his iPhone up from the table, look down, and play with it. He was so experienced, so fluid with it, sometimes even showing the scorn belonging only to longtime users. But I bet it wasn’t until the day before that he had a smartphone like that. As soon as he got to Beijing he must have immediately bought that new model with the money Aunt Wu had given him, forgetting about her repeated warnings to spend it slowly, and thrown his father’s Nokia 8210 in the trash.

  There he was sitting in front of me, legs spread, pants stretched tight around his bulging quads. His upper body was clothed only in a white suit jacket, unbuttoned, his pecs and nipples appearing and disappearing, his abs and belly button always exposed. I could hardly look away.

  Zhaoyu’s eyes that day were very bright, and his face didn’t show the slightest creases. He was brimming with vitality as if he’d just had a long, deep sleep. The whole afternoon at the bar he talked to me in a grown-up voice and seemed eager to try anything I suggested. I understood his feelings about the first breakaway from pare
ntal control. I had been like that, like a bird just released from its cage setting out for the city with a feeling of liberation. I remember when I had just arrived I ceremonially stretched out my arms and shouted, “Ahhh.” In Balzac’s Old Goriot the provincial Rastignac says with the same fire, “Paris, now let us fight.”

  That day the nineteen-year-old Zhaoyu leaped to his feet. On the terrace, facing all of Beijing, he raised his arms and shouted in English, “Come on, come on.” After coming down, as if answering my doubts and expressing his determination, he said: “Got no skills but still have two balls, right?”

  I also remember I asked him about his nutrition at that meeting. I asked how much he could eat in a day. He said if just apples he could eat half of one of those plastic fertilizer bags. Some years later – ah yes, time flew – because I couldn’t register with Union Medical’s outpatient department, I paid out of pocket to see a doctor at its international medical department. I never thought I’d see my old acquaintance Zhaoyu on the entrance ramp. He was dressed in a hospital gown, carefully moving step by step on an after-meal stroll.

  I recalled that Zhaoyu had a frame as stocky as a weightlifter’s. Whatever he wore was supposed to stretch tightly on him, but when I saw him that day his clothes seemed unusually loose. The ruddiness on his cheeks was gone for good. His face was pale white with some black around his eyes, purple on his lips. Strangest of all, his eyebrows glistened with frost. “I always think the air conditioners are on inside, but they aren’t,” he said, shivering.

  I couldn’t hide my shock one bit, so after we sat in one of the rows of chairs in the lounge I asked, “What happened? You look awful.”

  “I knew you’d say that, just like everyone else,” I heard him respond angrily. “If you can’t give me a hand, don’t put me down. Do I really need you to tell me I look awful, like you’re the only one who can see? Do I really need you to break that news? I guess you’d also like to tell me I look like I’m dying, huh? I’m begging all of you, if you don’t know what to say, don’t talk. You know what, I got up this morning, feeling I couldn’t possibly get worse, completely wrecked. Do you know how long it took me to convince myself that feeling was wrong, unfounded? Then you come and tell me it wasn’t wrong at all, it’s the truth. So what should I think, huh? Tell me. You completely ruined my day.”

  I think my dear readers can certainly imagine the shock I felt then. I sat stiff, face scorching hot. When I heard him say sorry, I said sorry too, multiple times. I saw it was a lesson for me. I said: “Then what should I say?”

  “You should have said, ‘Wow, you look amazing today’,” he said. Then he told me he got his bed because the man ahead of him died earlier than projected. At the time the man’s doctor, leafing through his test report, gently said, “How’d it get so bad, wow.” After the doctor spoke, the patient was finished.

  This meeting of ours hadn’t gone on long before it was ended by a rushing woman in green. She walked up to Zhaoyu, took off her sunglasses, kneeled, hugged his legs, and, eyes shut, pressed her ear on his knee. “Oh, baby, baby, my poor little baby.” I heard her confide a wave of emotions in a hoarse voice, hugging his legs closer.

  When she’d had enough she finally asked: “Drink the milk and the ginseng water? Get the nutrient injection?” The woman’s age was an enigma to me. Her face was completely frozen like she was wearing a Halloween mask. When she stood up to leave I caught sight of a bunch of silver mixed in her hair.

  More years passed, and I had my last meeting with Zhaoyu while he was alive. The location was a small apartment of only a few dozen square meters on Dawang Road. The walls, ceiling, window frames, and floors were all painted scarlet. The bedsheets, duvet cover, and pillowcases on the mattress and the tablecloth covering the rectangular dining table were off-white. There was nothing else. It made you feel like the apartment was only for lovers, a warm cave.

  Zhaoyu sucked oxygen, lying in bed, breath still in his lungs. The oxygen machine made a burbling sound. “You’re so stupid, so stupid.” Aunt Wu futilely rubbed snake oil on her son’s body (where he was lying a layer of dry skin like oatmeal had fallen off) as she spoke. Then she said to me: “Look, he’s like a ghost now.” Then one of Zhaoyu’s eyes was already blind, starkly exposed, bloodshot, terrifying. The other one wasn’t much better, could only faintly detect light. His hair and eyebrows had fallen out completely. There was no sign that hair had ever grown on his brow. His upper lip was covered in ulcers. A few remaining teeth stood like dilapidated gravestones, barely erect in his gums.

  He was as scrawny as a human being could possibly be. When Aunt Wu lifted his top I only saw skin wrapping a protruding skeleton. “That detestable, hateful, horrible woman ran away after paying the rent for the month, leaving my son here alone. She just ran away to avoid punishment,” Aunt Wu said. She went on: “And you. You’re like a brother. I asked you to take care of this little guy. Is this how you take care of someone?”

  Her blame was reasonable. I knew nothing about what Zhaoyu had done over the years in Beijing. To that day his hand still rested on a textbook, so I knew he hadn’t stopped classes at his private university. Other than that, I guessed he probably provided sexual services to rich women in his spare time. But later, from his fragmented accounts, I learned that wasn’t the case. And it was from his accounts that I got a glimpse into how much the world had changed.

  When Aunt Wu and I turned over his body, I found a wound the size of a ventilation tube on his waist. That was how modern women and men had physical relations, not through the sex organs but through a round wound. Vitality departs from the young man’s wound and travels all the way through a tube to the aging woman, rejuvenating the latter.

  Several weeks later in a plastic surgery hospital in Bawangfen I soon got a look at the Speed King 206 Anti-Aging Machine. There was nothing mysterious about it. The main part (including a motor and a filter) was about as grand as a cement mixer. On either side was a 560-millimiter-wide transparent brown rubber tube. One tube was inserted into the donor (Tube A) and the other into the recipient (Tube B). During the transmission, the filter mainly functioned to remove stale gases, stale liquids, stale blood, pus, and other bodily waste. Thus, when the machine was in operation Tube A became murky while Tube B remained transparent throughout.

  “There is nothing to hide or to be ashamed of. The surgery is not only scientifically proven (it is theoretically based on three articles the Wei Fuli team of Singapore published in The New England Journal of Medicine), but also completely legal,” said Dr. Wu Jialin, a graduate of Tongji Medical School. “It actually reflects the very essence of a liberal market economy. That is, everything can be traded as long as it is traded voluntarily – everything, including human health and organs. To comply with the conditions in our country – not just in our country but almost the whole world – we currently only accept voluntary donations. Our hospital will perform surgery only after the donor and the recipient have given written consent. Whether there is any monetary exchange between them in private is their own business.”

  “How damaging can surgery be to the donor?” I asked.

  “Not very. Say, if the value of a person’s vitality is 100, one surgery could lead to a loss of 10 per cent, with 90 still left. And it’s not impossible to recover the lost 10 per cent with sufficient nutrition and exercise,” he said.

  Dr Wu’s statements lined up with what Zhaoyu had told me. There was no discernable damage after the first surgery. The following day he went to Dongdan to play basketball. But because of the wound he just practiced by himself, not daring to compete full on. The second and third surgeries showed no signs of damage. But as the transmissions accumulated and hit a certain threshold, he found that if he just gave his pecs a gentle poke it made a dent like an iron sheet that didn’t go back. And even walking a few hundred meters exhausted him.

  That was when he started to panic. “Because she begged me, time afte
r time. You saw that yourself. She’d fall to her knees and shuffle over on her knees to hug my legs, crying and begging. If I didn’t say yes, she’d get hysterical, tearing off pillowcases, pulling out the feathers, scattering them everywhere. She’d smash the TV, then the glasses. And get on the windowsill and threaten to jump off the building.” This was his answer when I asked him why he didn’t reject her cruel demands. “I didn’t ask for it,” the young man added.

  “If she was paying it would have made sense to do it so many times. Not a penny,” Aunt Wu said.

  Then that mummy of a body let out a sigh, which sounded full of disapproval for his rural-born mother. He was sighing to say to me, “Look at her. She doesn’t understand anything.”

  “Why then?” I asked.

  “Love,” he said.

  “How much older than you is she?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” he said.

  “Even older than me. I think she’s more than 10 years older than me,” Aunt Wu said, stomping.

  “She doesn’t look that old,” he said.

  Later when Aunt Wu was out buying food, Zhaoyu burst into tears. He said he’d seen her (her real name was Chen Lixia) scoop up hair dye like mud and spread it on her privates. So he figured even her pubic hair was white. “Once a surgery was over, she’d stand up and snatch the mirror they were always too slow in handing her to examine herself. Then, it’s hard to believe, but in the time of a class period she became a completely different person. Her skin which had been as rough as old tree bark, shone, oozing fragrant sweat. Her white hair turned lush black. Her droopy eyelids got taut, eyes big and bright. Her waist got thinner, legs more slender. She looked 18.”