Massage

by Bi Feiyu

  He swallowed hard. ‘Have you,’ he stammered, ‘made up your mind?’

  Xiao Kong turned to face him. Before she opened her mouth to speak she habitually cocked her head as a sign that she’d made up her mind. Still clutching the edge of the massage bed, she said, ‘Yes, I have. Have you?’

  He didn’t answer right away. He smiled briefly, off and on, his smile here for a moment and then gone, three or four times, until he finally said, ‘You know that you’re the important one, not me.’

  He drew out that simple comment, long and slow, as Xiao Kong waited patiently, scraping the leatherette bedcover with her finger the whole time, making a scratchy sound. She heard every word and savoured his meaning. It sounded so much better than ‘I’ve made up my mind.’ Breathing hard, she was almost burning up, and suddenly sensed that her body had undergone a subtle yet profound change, as if it might collapse on its own. She stepped down off the tuina bed and went up to him. He stood up, and they reached out at the same moment to touch one another’s face, then their eyes. And when that happened, they both began to cry. There had been no sign that something like that would happen, and neither was prepared for it. They let their gaze flow into the other’s fingers. Tears always have the power to move people, and presage what is to follow. They kissed – badly, bumping noses – and quickly pulled back. Xiao Kong cleverly turned her face to the side, but Wang, no one’s fool, detected the breath from her nose and sought out her mouth. When their lips actually met it was their first kiss, the first in their lives, and it lacked passion, even carried a measure of fear. It was that fear that pulled their lips apart, while their bodies moved closer and all but came together. The ‘kiss’ of their bodies pleased them more than the coming together of their lips; it meant more to them because they now had someone to lean on. What a wonderful feeling that was – someone to lean on. Safety, relief, dependability. The key to survival. He pulled her into his arms, almost brutally. She was ready for a second kiss, but Wang Daifu was too excited.

  ‘I’m going back to Nanjing, and I’ll take you with me. I’ll open a clinic, my clinic! And you’ll be the boss’s wife, the woman in charge!’

  He was nearly incoherent.

  ‘Kiss me!’ Xiao Kong stood on her tiptoes. ‘Kiss me!’

  This kiss lasted much longer, all the way into the next century. Afterwards, Xiao Kong, being an attentive woman, was reminded of something and, taking out her sound-activated watch, she pressed the button.

  ‘The current Beijing time is twenty-three minutes after midnight,’ it reported. Placing the watch in his hand, she cried in a loud sobbing voice, ‘It’s the new year! The new century!’

  The new year, a new century, and Wang Daifu was in love. For him, being in love gave him a goal. His life gained instant clarity: work hard, save up, go back home to open a clinic as soon as possible, and let Xiao Kong, his beloved, be the boss’s wife, the woman in charge. He was confident that so long as he didn’t loaf on the job, one day his goal would be realised. And he had good reason to be confident. He had faith in his own skills. His physical attributes had a lot to do with that. All you needed to do was to feel his hands: large and broad, a pair of capacious, thickset hands. All his clients knew that when he relaxed them it happened not in the neck, but in the buttocks. He would grab hold of both buttocks and give them a powerful jerk, with the immediate effect of loosening the skeleton. Naturally, the bones stayed in place, but it didn’t feel that way, and in the best cases it seemed as if an electric current had shot through the body. Wang was born to be a tuina therapist, whether or not he was blind. Needless to say, big, meaty hands are of no use without the requisite strength. Wang was a big, powerful man whose fingers were more than equal to the task. This concept was critical, since it epitomised the qualities of that strength: evenly distributed, gentle and penetrating, without painful pokes. Therapists whose fingers lack the requisite power instead use exertion, which can cause pain and, at its worst, can damage bones and muscles alike. Tuina requires powerful thrusts, so that the result is deep, solid, vigorous penetration into the muscles. It hurts, to be sure, and is accompanied by an aching tingle and distension. But words cannot describe the sense of comfort it brings. And that’s the desired effect. Wang had plenty of strength in his thick fingers and meaty palms, and when he applied his hands to a client, he flawlessly pressed on the precise acupuncture points, seemingly without effort; and with that he grabbed you. No matter how much pain this grab produced, you submitted to it willingly. Given Wang Daifu’s skills with his hands, his regular and VIP clients were numerous. Most came for hourly treatments, but many stayed for the night, which translated into considerable earnings from tips alone, far more than most. Wang’s co-practitioners were the first to admit that he was a tycoon of massage therapists, a man who had enough money to play the stock market; indeed, he invested in both the Shanghai and the Shenzhen indexes.

  Wang was in trouble, and it was all because of the stock market. He had a bit of money, but, after some simple calculations, he realised he would have to settle for a less than ideal set-up if he opened a clinic in Nanjing with what he had. To make it respectable, finding a partner was the practical alternative. But he didn’t want that. What good was a partnership? And, in a partnership, which boss’s wife would Xiao Kong be? She wouldn’t be happy being that kind of boss’s wife. And he would rather wait than make her unhappy. He was dead set on the issue of ‘boss’s wife’. Personally he didn’t mind not being the boss, but he would not have Xiao Kong settle for second best. It hadn’t been easy to give herself to him, and he was insistent upon making her the boss’s wife in return for her devotion. If she sat in his clinic drinking water and cracking melon seeds, it would all be worthwhile, even if he had to work himself to death.

  Why had he decided to put his money into stocks? Because he was in love. But what, after all, is love? Now that he had experienced it, he understood that it meant to cherish someone. And he cherished her; or to be more precise, he cherished her hands.

  They were both working in Shenzhen, but not at the same place. That made it hard to see one another. When they finally had some time together, it was so limited that all they could manage was a few kisses, her favourite activity, although the kisses never lasted long enough for her. As their situation improved they enjoyed a bit of leisure and some idle pleasures beyond kissing. They would, for instance, smooth each other’s hair, or study each other’s fingers. Her hands were tiny, soft with pointed fingertips, which must be the type referred to as ‘spring onions.’ But they had a flaw: small fleshy bumps grew on the knuckles of her thumbs and her index and middle fingers. It was a common, virtually unavoidable consequence of prolonged tuina therapy, but Wang quickly sensed that something wasn’t quite right with her hands. The bones of her fingers did not form a straight line; instead, they turned sideways at the second knuckle. He could straighten them out by pulling on them, but they returned to their original shape once he let go. Xiao Kong’s hands were so seriously malformed they barely resembled human hands. You call those hands? She knew and, embarrassed, wanted to pull them back from his grasp, but he wouldn’t let go. As he held her hands, he was lost in thought.

  Xiao Kong was petite and slim, not well suited to tuina therapy. There were all kinds of clients; you could tickle and easily cause pain in some by barely touching them. But others seemed born with leather skin, beef-like flesh, and a high threshold for pain, and if you worked on them with a light touch, they felt they weren’t getting their money’s worth and would snidely remind you, ‘Harder. Give it more pressure.’ Wang had run into plenty of people like that; a typical case was a strapping young man from Africa who spoke poor Chinese, but had mastered the word for ‘harder’. After an hour, even a tough young man like Wang began to sweat from the hard work. Xiao Kong’s fingers must have been deformed by repeated work of that nature. With her modest strength and fingers like that, how could she manage fourteen or fifteen hours a day, day after day?

  �
��Harder. Do it harder.’

  As he held her wrist and touched her fingers, Wang felt his heart break. Then, without warning, he swung her hand into his face, giving himself a loud slap. Xiao Kong was too stunned to realise what had happened, and when she did, it was too late; he was about to slap himself again as if he enjoyed it. She held his hand and pulled his head to her breast.

  ‘What are you doing? What does this have to do with you?’ She was sobbing.

  Investing in the stock market had been a gamble. While he’d been hesitant at first, when he was reminded of her hands he felt an insane urge to get rich quick. Money had gone crazy, but he only had two hands. After nearly a year he’d been struck by a thought: invest in the stock market. However crazed money had become, it had been only on a small scale; the true madness wasn’t in money, it was in shares of stock, in investment. When stocks went crazy, they didn’t just perform handstands and somersaults; no, they rose up high, like onions pulled out of dry soil. He often heard his clients talk about the stock market, and that had left a strange impression in his mind. It felt familiar and yet sinister and demonic, inescapable yet incredulous. An apt description of the market was: ‘Money soars in the sky, so don’t let it pass you by; money crawls on the ground and demands to be found; if you grasp it in your hand, it slips away like sand.’ Why not give it a try? Why not indeed? If the next day’s market was the legendary flying monkey, then the morning after that he should be able to fly straight to Nanjing with Xiao Kong. With a twist of his neck, he had arched his eyebrows and turned his face skywards. Then, gathering all his savings, he’d thrust himself into the stock market.

  Wang’s timing could not have been worse. The market had been performing well for some time, but soured as soon as he got in. He had the opportunity to get out, of course, and if he had, he would not have lost too much. But he refused to do that. He simply could not accept losses, not a penny. It was more than money to him; it meant the pea-sized fleshy knuckle bumps. It meant malformed bones; one all-nighter after another; the client demanding ‘harder, harder’; switching to the index fingers when the thumbs got tired; changing to the middle fingers when the index fingers could work no longer; using the elbow when the middle fingers were worn out; going back to using the index fingers when the elbow gave in. It meant his blood and sweat, and he could not bear to suffer any losses. So he sweated it out. No longer hoping to get rich, he needed to hold on to what he’d invested, and that idea eventually dragged him down into a bottomless pit. A bodiless, voiceless madman he would never actually meet grabbed hold of him in his most vulnerable spot.

  The stock market did not do a somersault; it lay flat on the ground. It raised hell, it tumbled, it convulsed, it rolled its eyes, it foamed at the mouth – it did everything but stand. You fucking bear. Damn you. How had the stock market gone crazy in that way, and who had made it do that? Wang cocked his head and hugged his radio whenever he had a moment, and that was where he learned about ‘the invisible hand’. Looking at it now, the invisible hand had been tricked into madness by someone. There had to be another hand behind that one, equally invisible but bigger, more powerful, and crazier. Wang also had invisible hands, a pair he couldn’t see, but his were insignificant and powerless when compared to the other pair of invisible hands. He was an ant. The other two invisible hands were like heaven and earth, and when they clapped together they could send him from Shenzhen all the way to Uruguay. He did not clap; he could only crack his knuckles. The thumb made two loud pops, while the other knuckles made three, altogether twenty-eight times – pop, pop, pop – like a string of firecrackers.

  Money had indeed gone crazy. It went wild and he was rich; it went wild again and he was poor.

  ‘I was a worn-out suitcase that came back empty’ – this was a line from an old song he had learned to sing as a child. At the end of 2001, Wang returned to Nanjing with that line playing in his ear. He was dejected, but, on a different level, he was also full of joy – Xiao Kong had come with him. Instead of returning to Bangfu, she had come to Nanjing without telling her parents, with unmistakable implications. His mother was beside herself with joy. Her son had done well! Really well! After making her and her husband’s bedroom available for the young couple, she took her son into the kitchen, where she whispered to him, ‘Sleep with her. You must take her to bed. She will have no place to go after that.’ He turned his head in anger, upset and disgusted at his mother’s vulgarity, her philistine nature of which she could not rid herself. He raised his brow and pulled a long face. Some matters were like that; you could do them but not talk about them.

  He and Xiao Kong stayed with his parents till the Lantern Festival, the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, during which time she was looking better by the day. His mother could not stop praising her, saying, ‘Xiao Kong is so pretty. Xiao Kong has wonderful skin. Nanjing’s environment is so much better than Shenzhen, and is good for you. Our Xiao Kong looks different each day.’ In order to prove that to Xiao Kong, Wang’s mother took Xiao Kong’s hand and rubbed it against her own face. ‘Am I right? Now tell me, am I right?’

  She was. Xiao Kong could feel it; her skin had indeed softened. Her face was now smooth. But she was a woman, after all, and she quickly realised what had caused the change. She was so embarrassed she began to panic, but instead of being visibly agitated, she froze. Her upper body went taut and stiff, while she balled the fist of her free hand, clamping her fingers down hard on her thumb. The visually impaired all suffer from the same predicament; as they cannot see, when they have a secret they suspect that everyone can see through them, that they cannot keep it to themselves. That is what happened to Xiao Kong; she assumed that her thrillingly happy time was in plain view for all to see.

  Wang wasted no time at this opportune moment. One day, while his parents were out, he deftly brought up the subject.

  ‘Why don’t we stay here? What do you think?’

  All she said in response was, ‘What about the suitcases we left behind?’

  He considered her question. ‘We could take a trip back,’ he said. Then he added, ‘But that way we’d have to buy two more train tickets, wouldn’t we?’

  She thought for a moment and agreed, but wasn’t willing to leave them there. ‘I can go by myself.’

  He groped for her hands and fell silent for a moment. ‘Don’t go,’ he said as he held her hands.

  ‘I’ll just be a few days,’ Xiao Kong replied.

  Another pause. Then he said, ‘I don’t want you to be away from me for even a single day. If you’re gone, I’ll feel as if I’d been blinded again.’ He sounded so heavy-hearted. Wang was someone who knew where he stood in life, so when he told the truth it always sounded heavy-hearted. Xiao Kong did not know what to say, and as she tried to come up with a response, she felt a sense of happiness rise up from somewhere, up into the heavens and then back down to earth, as the blood rushed to her face. She sighed silently. With blood rushing to her face, how could she not look rosy-cheeked? Holding his hands, she thought with a sense of pride of how radiant she must be at that moment. Her pride, however, quickly vanished and was replaced by a profound sense of regret – he couldn’t see her rosy cheeks, or her good looks, not ever. How pleased would he be if he could? Yet her regret did not last long. Don’t be greedy, she told herself. Everything is going well, so you mustn’t be greedy. Whatever way she looked at it, she was a woman in love.

  So she stayed. The issue was no sooner resolved than another concern arose for Wang. He had planned to take her back to Nanjing to be the boss’s wife, but where was his therapy clinic? Where? Late at night, when he listened to her even breathing, he touched her fingers one by one – the eight crooked spaces between her fingers – and could not go back to sleep. His insomnia too was crooked, as were his dreams.

  After a few days of indecision, he finally placed a call to Sha Fuming’s mobile phone. Sha and he went way back; they had been classmates from their elementary school days all the way through college
, where they had both studied Chinese medicine and tuina therapy. The only diversion in their paths was that after graduation Wang had gone to Shenzhen and Sha to Shanghai. Now they were both back in Nanjing, but with different outcomes. Sha Fuming had a business of his own, while Wang still had to work for others. By now the fleshy bumps on Boss Sha’s fingers must have disappeared.

  It was a painful phone call to make. When was it, last year or the year before? It must have been the year before when Sha’s tuina centre opened. In a hurry to hire good therapists, Sha had called him in Shenzhen, asking him to return to Nanjing. Sha knew that Wang was good at his work and, with him around, he would have his pillar of support, which meant the centre would be a sort of brand, business would be good, and he would build a reputation. In order to bring Wang back, Sha offered impossibly high percentages and plenty of face. Wang could practically keep everything he earned or they could be partners. Sha was clear about his intention, which was to have Wang lend grandeur to the place. But Wang had turned him down; money was easy in Shenzhen, so why move? Of course Wang was well aware that money was not the real issue. The real problem was emotional. He didn’t want to work for an old schoolmate. Two old friends becoming boss and employee would be too awkward.

  As the saying goes, when you’re given a toast, you should drink – don’t wait until you’re forced to drink. Wang had declined Sha’s earlier invitation, and now he had to go to Sha to ask for work. On the surface he would just be taking a job, but there was a difference. Wang didn’t have to ask Sha for work, since Nanjing was overrun with tuina centres. What difference did it make who he worked for? Yet he was determined to work for Sha Fuming, for Xiao Kong’s sake.