Two Lives

by A. Yi

  Junfeng didn’t speak any more.

  After all comers heard the incredible moist crackles (including the director of the health bureau who had graduated from the agricultural college), as if to make up for their regrets, the two professors found pen and paper, and checking with a stack of blood test slips and CT photos, started to make rough calculations. They argued in low voices now and then, scribbled on the paper (sometimes, one of them would stare long at the other, as if waiting for the other’s opinion, but was really doing his best to think). It was like they were solving a math problem we had all encountered in primary school: Suppose there is an inlet pipe inside the swimming pool, which can fill the empty pool in eight hours, and there is an outlet pipe at the bottom of the pool, which can drain a full pool of water in six hours, with the condition that half of the pool water is left, how long does it take for the water to drain completely? One hundred days, they gave the conclusion with two horizontal lines drawn underneath to the doctors of the health center, margin of error: ±2. After they were gone, the entire health center fell into unbearable loneliness – a great event that rarely happened once in fifty, even a hundred years (although the center had been founded less than five years before): the very top talents in the field, international authorities, nationally renowned doctors who had probably treated central leaders, came to visit. Then, without meals or group photos, they left (the only thing the health center could keep was the piece of paper they left behind, the paper wasn’t full of equations or coordinates as imagined, but a few lines of Russian). Now, the concrete ground is still smooth, shady, gives out the fishy smell of being mopped. The one-meter high green paint around the bottom of the walls is already old, even time is old.

  When some of the townspeople noticed Junfeng’s mom again, she was already running back. Presumably she had heard about her son’s news in the supermarket, the bike already discarded. She ran back to the health center she had just passed. She was among a bunch of raging motorcycles, electric cars, and electric trikes, like striding in deep water, laboriously running forward. Her body leaned forward, two arms raised in front of her chest, swaying left and right. We rarely saw women nearly 60 running, That day when she started running, we knew she was no better than a cripple with one leg longer and one leg shorter. Her two legs never left the ground at the same time, her whole person seemed to writhe left and right, writhe forward. Her face looked so aggrieved. “Son son son.” Near the health center, she gave sad cry after sad cry. “Son son son son son son son.” This time the son didn’t push her away, just let her throw herself at him, tear at the quilt cover. He looked blankly at the ceiling, gave sighs that could no longer be hidden. The long sighs, like balloons being pricked, brimming with blame for her, and brimming with blame for his fate.

  This pain seemed to take root in her ever since.

  Whenever people, or say, whenever she thought she was a bit more normal, the pain would, like the ferocious Monkey King with sharp nails, grip her viscera tightly. She rubbed her hair, stumbled to the wall corner, crouched there, dodged left and right – as if there was a young worker kicking her again and again from the outside. She took one from the left, took one from the right, took a kick again and again. She bared her teeth, opened her mouth, wanted to cry but no tears came out, her face contorted, as if catching a chill shivered for a long time. People were frightened by this horrible rustle, this unshakable pain. It wasn’t until 10 minutes later when she gave low calls of ohs and ahs, that it started to show signs of retreat. “If I had seen through your tricks early, you goddamned fool, this tragedy could have been avoided,” she scolded her son, announcing with an attitude of certainty, that she would be in charge of him now, but the latter looked at her with contempt. Like there was obviously a lock nobody could open, but everyone took it for granted that they and they alone could open it. All went to try. Sometimes she would stand dully before the window of the corridor, staring at the endless white smog emitted by the big chimney in the distance, saying to herself, I really should die, hearing the news late, my son is dying, but I am still alive, I really should die. Every time she went to pester the doctors and nurses at the health center – when she said to them, “Don’t look at me like I don’t have money, I do, I have two houses” – it would always bring on a new round of pain. She gripped their sleeves or pants hems, begged them to save this son, which only brought on their repeated emphasis of when they estimated he would die. Two months later, it was they, those angels who had spoken coldly but still fairly polite, and got her water from the water dispenser, pinned her down roughly on one of the health center’s front doors, and using the ceiling light, jabbed a tube thick as a finger into her throat, jabbed it straight down, let water push into her stomach. The water, from the corners of her mouth, from the mouth of the tube, from the doctor’s hands in rubber gloves, flowed down endlessly, down her body, down the worm-eaten lines and crevices in the door panel and the stairs, flowed toward the black soil burned the previous night, still lingering with some burned scent. She lay on her side on the shiny door panel, exposing her belly button and bare feet with the shoes and socks scraped off, like a boar fallen into a coma from injury, under everyone’s eyes, twitching horribly.

  “This is a hopeless thing,” they said after she begged. Suggested she’d better take her son home.

  “Can’t give any medicine?” she asked.

  “Already gave all the medicine that could be given.”

  They also wanted to say, under the present circumstance, any medicine would not only delay the patient’s recovery, but might activate hidden lesions, hormones for example. This was what the professors had said. But figuring she wouldn’t understand, they didn’t say this.

  When her thirty-one-year old daughter Dongmei and twenty-nine-year-old son Zhifeng came late, she vented all her anger at them. Of these children, she loved the strange Junfeng the most, such partiality had been open, had been voiced again and again, as if she was afraid Dongmei and Zhifeng wouldn’t remember. I just want to be good to him, just be good to him. Such unfair treatment continued from their childhood to the present. Dongmei and Zhifeng felt they were their elder brother’s slaves, helpers, and servants. They knew full well that defense was useless, but couldn’t do without mumbling a few words. One said, “Put the child in the nursery, can’t just leave him outside, and let him be, huh?” (Zhifeng’s suburban wife echoed, “Right right.”) One said with hidden bitterness, “Look, I’m really sick too, yesterday I vomited all over the floor.” Since Chen Zonghuo died of cerebral hemorrhage, Dongmei had fallen ill. The illness was real and unreal, neither what Dongmei herself exaggerated (she said the veins in her brain tangled together, tangled more and more tightly, like shoelaces being tied), nor a complete farce as other people thought (checkups showed her blood pressure was really a little too high). Dongmei is still alive today, but life is like a huge burden, oppressing her with extreme cruelty – People had never seen a person whose fear of death came so early, so deeply, so meticulously and so long-lastingly. She shook all the time. After her blood relatives died one after another, she inherited their legacy: the seed of cerebral hemorrhage, the seed of rapid weight loss and acute mental illness. The punishments that had blossomed and borne fruit in her relatives, the seemingly inescapable misfortune, were nearing her inch by inch. She had never felt so close to her relatives as she did now. She thought she would definitely, in their way, before everyone else, die extremely shamefully, die in the shit from sphincter incontinence. “My body is full of these genes,” she told neighbors. They were tired of this pleading and pestering day after day. Fundamentally speaking, she had hypochondria. In the history of her suspicion, only once was she completely right: she suspected she had hypochondria. But then she denied it: “How is it possible, what happens in my body are real reactions, I feel out of breath.” She always stopped halfway, shaking, felt the world and passersby were like islands splitting, rapidly receding under her feet – “I
am so lonely,” she started to cry – until Death, which had been riding on her neck, gripping her throat, drifted away with a ferocious see-you-later smile.

  “People your age, so many sick, everywhere in the hospital, don’t you see?” That day, Mother frightened Daughter to warn her about not coming in time. Then she said, teeth clenched: “Would be great if you had a stroke early, you don’t care about your big brother, your big brother got this fatal disease all because of your laziness and negligence.”

  As in childhood, Dongmei started crying – in Chen Zonghuo’s words, started crying very poorly, just let her cry, nobody should pay attention to her. She would stay in a corner, cry unhurriedly (like those finicky people who spend an hour or so eating a bowl of noodles in a restaurant), until the tears dried and became salt stains. She’d sit there a long time, in a trance, already forgetting why she cried, or even the fact that she had cried, then stand up, walk to her family, respond to everyone’s words, flatter everyone. Like she was still the person very important to them – But that day, crying wasn’t a cleanse, an escape, or a game she played with herself, that day, Mother’s words stomped on the roots of her life. Mother’s words swept away her last bit of hope, made the boat of her mind shake fatally: “Don’t you see, people sick like you are so many, I’m talking to you, don’t you see.”

  Faced with such harsh abuse, Zhifeng just threw his mother a glance. Is it fun to talk like this? He walked into the ward, hands behind his back.

  “Zhifeng, you came.” Junfeng tried to sit up, but due to lack of strength, slid down again.

  “Yeah, brother.” Zhifeng helped him up.

  “Sit,” Junfeng said.

  Zhifeng brushed the bed with gloves, sat down. Half raised his head, looked at the window. Before long, he took out his cell phone, quietly swiped the touch screen. You can’t say he treated his older brother coldly, deep in their hearts, there was a tacit intimacy, such intimacy didn’t have to be concretized in a hug or words of concern. And you can’t say he didn’t treat his older brother coldly either. He already had his own family, when a person has his own family, he gets a bit estranged from his original family. We all know, a person’s most intimate relation in this world is his partner. Because they can meet naked, make their genitals mesh. Their immoderation and vulgarity in words and behavior (which means boundless freedom between people) have moral approval. Besides, in the big suburban house provided by his wife’s older brother, his wife had given birth to one son and one daughter. After Junfeng was asleep, he whispered to his wife, “Look, there’s nothing going on here, better go back, go back, make something delicious, I mean –” he raised his voice so his mother could hear “– Better take Brother home, take him home, make something delicious for him.”

  Widow looked glum, full of pain, looked at the eldest son who had a moment of peace in sleep, tucked in the blanket, took the bag of photos out from under the bed. “Can you take it to find a city doctor, you’re a city person, there must be a way,” she said to Zhifeng.

  “Hard to find.”

  “Go to your wife’s two brothers, they’re capable people.”

  Zhifeng put down the phone, raised his eyelids. He had just given it an understanding smile, like he was talking face to face with his friends on the phone. “You only play on the phone, day and night playing on the phone.” She went on, “Play on the phone less, okay, you’ve only got one older brother.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t ask you to carry him to the city. I just—”

  “I know, look, we went to the Tuberculosis Institute, we went to the Municipal Hospital, the best doctors from Beijing came, everyone said no way, what else do you want me to find?”

  “Go find other doctors, maybe there are other ways.”

  “It’s already diagnosed, whoever I find it’ll still be the same.”

  “How do you know it’ll be the same, after all you’re just lazy, just don’t want to lift a finger.”

  “This isn’t about whether I’m lazy or not.”

  “You don’t even want to make the slightest effort for your older brother. Are you going to just watch him die?”

  “I’m not, I’m just saying this is hopeless, hopeless, so why keep doing it?”

  “Why’s it hopeless, haven’t tried and still say it’s hopeless, aren’t you ashamed to say that?” She started crying. “Aren’t you sorry?”

  Zhifeng shook his head hard, Mom was so stubborn, stubborn as a cow, he snatched the bag of photos, walked quickly away, coming back, the result would still be the same, you just have to make me make the useless effort. He registered with an expert at the Number One Municipal Hospital, to see the doctor three days later, the doctor examined the photos, very fascinated, took photos every two squares with his mobile phone. “This needs more research, if you can go borrow the biopsy from the Number Two Hospital, that would be great,” he said. After asking the borrowing procedure, Zhifeng said okay, went out, called his mother: “Have to nurse him carefully, they said, there’s still a glimmer of hope, depends how you nurse him.” He went to his father-in-law’s, took care of his son for a while, as Mother required, went to buy a piece of jade and a copper bell cast with the inscription Om Mani Padme Hum, then went back to the township health center (“Buy jade for what?” he said. “You’re not paying, I’ll pay,” she said). While his mother-in-law, in the very early morning, went to the temple and burned incense for Junfeng. Dongmei, meanwhile, sat gravely on the edge of the bed every day, like an intelligence agent, softly asking her older brother what reactions he had, what reactions he’d had before, what reactions he had afterward, in order to compare with the signs that had already shown in her own body. “Sometimes, I cough a little,” she said. But their mom always asked him pitifully: “Do you want to eat anything, child, whatever you want to eat I’ll go buy now.” He didn’t respond to her. He always stared at the ceiling with his eyeballs popping out. The eyeballs were like half an egg stuck in a chicken’s asshole. He could hardly move, except when a violent cough came up, which made him suddenly, almost uncontrollably sit up. Whenever this happened, Widow would rush over, slap his back with her palm to make him cough smoother. Son, cough harder, cough out the phlegm and it’ll be better. The intervals between his coughs got shorter and shorter, the time longer and longer. Sometimes the cough, like a repeating crossbow, could not be taken back once fired, sometimes it was like a whimper that made people cry, sometimes it was like the flint on the gas stove which sparked, sometimes crackled, sometimes it was like the wind whipping rapidly in a tunnel, making sand fly, stones roll, sometimes it was like a car laboring up a slope on a rainy day (the wheels spinning rapidly in the ever-deepening ruts they created, struggling in vain), sometimes it was like an iron shovel digging and scraping the concrete road where only ground gravel was left after rain erosion, sometimes it was like a section of burning intestine rolling up, sometimes it was like mercury thrashing in a sealed tube, sometimes it was like a shocking attack in the dark of night, sometimes it was like a hung body dangling in the air, sometimes it was like a solid flogging, whip after whip, sometimes it was like an animal howling (picture a dragon, its tail pinned, lifting its upper body again and again, dripping with blood as it tears itself), sometimes it was like two trains quickly scraping the wreckage of the other, sometimes it was like a flagrant murder. Each time, they felt it wouldn’t be until the victim coughed out a small earthworm, a sticky worm, a black lump, or a mouthful of blood red as a red flag that he would stop. Everyone coughed for purpose, there isn’t a cough without a purpose, just like there isn’t a revolution without a purpose, there isn’t love and hate without a purpose. Coughing was a prison you couldn’t plead to, only marbles couldn’t cough.

  “I’m dying.” After Junfeng screamed agonizingly the whole afternoon (because of fever, in the early winter, he only wore a blue vest, kept talking crazy talk), and after asking an acquaintance to fi
nd a ‘photo-reading expert’ in Number One Municipal Hospital to check the photos (he said: “Incurable”). Afterward, Widow considered it over and over, deciding to take him home. That day, everyone calmly watched tightly wrapped Junfeng being carried into the car, they had long grown used to the fact that Junfeng had a strange disease, in the way oysters contained sand, they contained this fact in their lives, regarded it as normal, their faces showed relief that things was finally pushing forward (“Care at home may get him cured.” This, instead of being a way to console Widow, was what they optimistically thought.) Only Widow was sad, unusually, that she understood clearly; from then on, her son would have one day less for each he lived. She found the vegetable field in the backyard of the health center, and facing a mound of used syringes, had a good cry.

  When the car drove to the village, she said to the women coming up to it: “I say he’s calling me, whenever he gets anxious, curses me, I know he’s calling me.” They wanted to comfort her, but didn’t know where to start. “His language and ours are just different,” she went on. As soon as her eyes closed slightly, a pool of tears poured out. The creamy-white light truck didn’t break down, the body, because of the engine’s throbbing, was purring, shaking. Zhifeng carried Junfeng down. Widow opened the door of the new house. It was a house built for Junfeng by her orders, done with tiles, aluminum alloy window frames, good paint, and western-style pendant lamps. It was being saved for when Junfeng got married, so she and Chen Zonghuo never came to stay one night, preferring to live instead in the smoky, fiery, old, old-fashioned house. Once in a while, she came to the new house to clean, kneeled on the ground, wiped carefully, as if Junfeng would come back anytime to use it. But it wasn’t until he was sick beyond recovery, that he was brought there. As light as a chicken, Zhifeng said to those who told him to be careful. Junfeng drooped his head, eyes like two short clubs moving at will in front of others’. After sitting on the sofa, he pursed his lips tightly for a while, eyelids blinking in panic, forehead breaking out in sweat (as if smeared with a layer of shiny lard), while his entire body struggled in vain. He seemed to be tied up, couldn’t move. Ah, perhaps it took a very bright mind to know, it was because he knew he was back in the village, so difficult to get away, but back again, and back forever. Zhifeng pulled out his leather belt, whipped it hard against the red seat of the folding chair, he was completely quiet. Ah, my older brother is light as a chicken now. It was like Zhifeng was introducing a new product. Almost as light as a pillow.