The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘The one with the story,’ Wang says. ‘I know you didn’t write it yourself. Where did you steal it from?’

  ‘Story?’

  ‘The one about the slaves.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Driver Wang.’

  ‘Why are you lying?’

  ‘No. Honestly. I don’t.’

  Wang’s phone beeps in his jacket, on the coat hook on the door.

  ‘What time is it?’ Wang asks.

  ‘Eight o’clock,’ says Zeng.

  ‘Shit. I have to go,’ Wang says.

  But he lacks the strength to get up from the bed. The mattress, though deceptively firm, has the undertow of quicksand.

  ‘Happy birthday, by the way,’ says Zeng.

  ‘You remembered my birthday?’

  ‘April fourth, isn’t it? Your thirty-second.’

  ‘I’m an old-timer now,’ says Wang. ‘Not long for the crematorium . . .’

  Zeng, who turned thirty-two a month earlier, laughs.

  ‘Thirty-two is the best age there is,’ he says. ‘Wait and see, Driver Wang. Your life has only just begun . . .’

  The wave of remorse hits Wang as he walks through the door. Half past eight and the apartment is full of the aromas of his thirty-second-birthday banquet, simmering under various pot lids on the stove. On TV an auditorium of dark-suited Communist Party officials are gathered for some event. As the camera pans out for a wide-angled shot, the officials look as identical as laboratory-made genetic clones.

  ‘Ba! We’ve been waiting two hours!’ shouts Echo. ‘We’re starving to death!’

  Yida stands at the gas stove, yet to acknowledge her husband’s late homecoming. In the kitchen doorway, Wang pleads his case. He had to drive a fare twenty kilometres to the Fragrant Hills. Got caught in a traffic jam on the way back, then the credit ran out on his phone. Yida is dishing up in an efficient manner, with none of her characteristic domestic languor. A warning to Wang that she is unconvinced. She pours a boiling saucepan of longevity noodles – handmade that afternoon from her mother’s Anhui recipe – into a colander. Geysers of steam rush up from the cold aluminium kitchen sink, pinkening her skin. Tendrils of damp curls fall across her eyes and she pushes them back with her forearm. At last, she looks at her husband and remarks, ‘Another haircut, Wang? Getting vain in your old age.’

  ‘I’m starved!’ yells Echo. ‘Can we eat now? Before I die?’

  The dishes are arranged on the table: phoenix-tailed prawns, spicy chicken wings, and Tianjin cabbage with chilli peppers. A bottle of lime-coloured fizzy drink which Yida pours out into paper party cups (to be rinsed after dinner and stacked in the cupboard for reuse). Later there will be pink-iced sponge cake, chosen by Echo from the Good Fortune Bakery. There will be candles and a round of ‘Happy Birthday to You’.

  Hungry, they commence eating without fanfare. Yida watches Wang as he attempts to slurp up each noodle in its entirety (a superstition from childhood, to ensure a catastrophe-free year ahead) and, noticing her contempt, Wang bites. He is nostalgic for his twenty-second birthday, when his young wife’s only gift to him was her teasing laughter and her lovely slender body, which he had dragged by the ankles across their bed. He thinks of the way he rested his weary head on Zeng’s shoulder. The way he felt when Zeng had held him; as though it was the only place that he truly belonged.

  After dinner Wang unwraps his presents. An air-freshener for his taxi. A bootleg DVD of a Hollywood action movie. A comic book that Echo has made for him, called ‘The Beijing Taxi Driver’. The comic is eight pages long, each page divided into four strips. The main character is a cartoon version of Wang: a superhero taxi driver who fights racoon-masked criminals. (‘I’ll rid this city of corruption if it’s the last thing I do!’ his alter ego shouts.) Echo is anxious and expectant as he turns the stapled pages, and Wang smiles to reassure her.

  ‘Very impressive, Echo! When you are a world-famous artist, this comic will become a collector’s item, worth millions of yuan!’

  Each panel is painstakingly illustrated, and Wang is proud and touched by the effort she has made. He reads aloud from ‘The Beijing Taxi Driver’, and Echo interrupts to expand on plot lines and the good or evil nature of the characters. But as Wang listens to her chattering and praises her hard work, Zeng and the narcotic undertow of the back room seeps into his mind. And he smiles and nods, struggling not to seem too distracted as the simple, uncomplicated joy he derives from Echo’s company begins to fade.

  At ten o’clock that evening the phone rings. The landline rings infrequently, and Yida answers in a surprised tone of voice. She passes the receiver to Wang. ‘Lin Hong,’ she mouths.

  Wasting no time with greetings, Lin Hong tells Wang that his father wishes to see him. That he would like to wish him happy birthday.

  ‘Now? Isn’t it past his bedtime?’

  ‘I am just the messenger. Whether you come or not is your own concern.’

  Lin Hong does not wish Wang happy birthday herself or even enquire how he is.

  Wang puts on his coat and walks to his father’s apartment. He walks at a brisk pace down Nongzhanguan North Road and Chaoyang Park East Road. When he arrives at his father’s his heart is pumping and his cheeks bright. Lin Hong opens the door, unsmiling in a herb-infused muslin facial mask, showing a glimpse of lacy negligee beneath her cherry-blossom kimono robe. She juts her chin in the direction of the living room, billowing Japanese silk as she turns on her heel back to her mandarin-dubbed Korean soap opera and pillow-arrayed queen-sized bed.

  The east wall of the living room is made entirely of glass. The view of Beijing from the tenth floor is of thousands of lights in many wattages of brightness and car headlights gliding up and down the Fourth ring road, shining through the dark. Looking out at the cityscape, Wang senses the electricity surging through the grid and being consumed by the district of Chaoyang. The living-room lights are out, and the night-time view is so mesmerizing that Wang does not immediately see his father, the dark hump of him parked in the shadows. When he does, he starts and turns on a lamp. His father blinks, and Wang wonders if this once-intimidating man, who once commanded the attention of a room, is sad to have gone unseen.

  ‘Ba,’ says Wang, ‘you wanted to see me?’

  His father smiles at him, slumped in his blue-striped pyjamas, his chin resting on his collar bone. A fleecy blanket is tucked over his lap and his hair is neatly combed and parted on the left. Wang knows that if he were to lean down and hug his wheelchair-bound father (though they are not and were never on hugging terms), he would smell toothpaste and soap. He’d smell aftershave and the talcum powder sprinkled on him when his incontinence pad is changed. Lin Hong is irreproachable in matters of grooming, and Wang’s father would pass the most rigorous of hygiene inspections, at any time of night or day. But Wang isn’t fooled. Her attention to cleanliness is just an excuse for the many petty indignities she visits upon him in his debilitated state.

  Wang stands there expectantly. ‘Ba? Is everything okay?’

  Across the night sky aeroplane tail lights blink in arcs of descent. Wang’s father’s mouth comes ajar and a strand of saliva threads his lips. He has a book on his lap. He holds it out and Wang takes it. It is a hardback edition of the The Book of Odes, red and pocket-sized. The spine creaks as Wang opens it and turns the brittle yellow pages of traditional script in faded ink. Second edition, 1908. The book is a century old. Why has his father, who is not a reader, given him a gift of poetry? Wang thanks his father, uncertainly.

  ‘Your mother,’ says his father. ‘It was hers.’

  In the nineteen years since her death, he has only ever mentioned Li Shuxiang in passing, to make sneering comparisons: Like mother, like son. Wang stares at his father, sees the shimmer of regret in his eyes and is disgusted. What a cliché, Wang thinks, that the crippled old man is getting sentimental in his old age. Why didn’t he feel the sting of conscience back when it mattere
d, when she was alive? Wang is not convinced. Restore the strength to his legs, and the motor function to his left side, and he’ll be back to his ways of cruelty, philandering and excess at once. Wang puts the book in his jacket pocket. He thinks back to when he was a child, to the stacks of books around his mother’s bed. He can’t remember ever seeing The Book of Odes.

  He thanks his father. Out of politeness, he stays for another ten minutes, before apologizing for keeping him up past his bedtime and seeing himself out the front door.

  After midnight Wang arrives home for the second time that day. Echo and Yida are asleep in their beds. Slouched in the bedroom doorway, fists rammed in his jacket pockets, he watches over them like an intruder in his own home. His father’s mawkishness has left him with a bitter aftertaste. But who is he to cast moral judgements? Like father, like son. There and then, in the bedroom doorway, he resolves to be a loyal husband and father, no matter what. But, for all his good intentions, he can’t get Zeng’s voice out of his head.

  ‘Thirty-two is the best age there is. Wait and see, Driver Wang. Your life has only just begun . . .’

  15

  Sleeping Pills

  SIX O’CLOCK, BELLS ring. Time for breakfast at quarter past. Bowls of rice porridge, cups of tea. On Sundays, an egg. Eight o’clock, exercises in the yard. Cassette tape in the battery-operated stereo, they jogged on the spot. Eight thirty, they queued for medication. Tongues poked out for inspection by the nurses, supervising the swallowing of pills. Eight thirty-five, a woman from Ward C dived to the floor, dodging bullets. ‘They are cracking down again! They are shooting at us! Get down or be killed!’ she yelled, grabbing at the legs of other patients until the doctors rushed over with a hypodermic syringe.

  Summer in the hospital, and there was no escape from the heat. Most of the patients became lethargic, as though tranquillized. They stripped to damp vests and sagging underpants and lay on the cement floor, limbs stretched out in a plea for mercy. The heat was an amphetamine to others, who paced the ward, hyperactive and loud, and it was mescaline to those who shrieked of scorpions, shaking out bedclothes and banging shoe heels on the walls. The heat intensified paranoia in the minds of some, who accused the doctors and nurses of poisoning the drinking water and the other patients of stealing their clothes.

  Caged fans whirred but barely moved the suffocating air, and the breeze wasn’t tempted through the open windows into the wards. Wang couldn’t escape his own sweat and was slippery night and day. Showers brought relief but, as soon as he turned off the spray, dampness seeped up again through his pores. The whorls of his fingers marked everything he touched. When he ran his tongue over his upper lip he tasted brine.

  Reality slowed in the heat, but Zeng Yan was perpetually on the move, shuffling cards, rattling mah-jong tiles, chasing ping-pong balls in the yard and never breaking into a sweat. ‘I’m a southerner,’ he said, explaining why the heat didn’t knock him out. ‘This is winter in Guangzhou.’ Every day, Zeng looked for Wang, and they talked for hours. Wang watched Zeng’s sharp cheekbones and sensual mouth as he talked, and saw how he could oscillate between genders; how a few strokes of make-up would transform him into an exquisite drag queen. Zeng was blasé about what he did for a living. When talking about his profession to Wang, he was matter of fact.

  ‘Get in, make money, get out,’ he said. ‘Better than working in a factory. Better than doing the job of a machine. Everyone sells something about themselves, and I sell my body. But only while I am young and good-looking. Those older men in their thirties are pathetic. They make a pittance! Who wants to fuck those ageing losers? I’ll quit long before then. By the time I’m thirty I’ll be the boss of my own company.’

  When Zeng spoke of his experiences, Wang listened, rapt. Zeng the hustler, in parks and bars. Zeng the houseboy, a domesticated pet for wealthy men. Zeng on his knees for a policeman in the public toilets near Tiananmen Square. Zeng in a steamy sauna with a group of Hong Kong CEOs. He had been raped and beaten, but he spoke of this with detachment.

  ‘One bastard made me take pills, to get me high. Then back at his place a gang of his friends were waiting . . . Bastards. They threw me out on to the street afterwards. Crippled and bleeding . . .’ Zeng shook his head, wincing at the memory. ‘Some won’t pay afterwards. Complain the service was poor after shooting a wad in your mouth. That’s why I have this story about my mother having breast cancer, and needing money for hospital fees. Cheat or be cheated. That’s how it goes.’

  Zeng wanted to know about Wang too. He asked about his past lovers, and Wang reeled them out. There was the girl he dated in his first year, who wrote bad poetry and had long centre-parted hair. A sly exhibitionist, the girl had liked to serenade the drunken dregs of parties with folk songs strummed on her guitar. She liked to gush about her emotional depth, and Wang’s reticence frustrated her. ‘The more time I spend with you, the less I know you,’ she complained, then dumped him for a bassist in a rock band. The girlfriend in Wang’s second year had wanted Communist Party membership and a stable ‘iron rice bowl’ job. She had said so on their first date. She had pressured Wang into arranging work experience for her in his father’s department and he had broken up with her in disgust. Wang rarely thought of these girls any more, or the awkward dorm-room fumblings with bra clasps and condoms, the rushed and unsatisfactory sex. Shuxiang is the woman who dominates his past.

  ‘What was she like?’ Zeng asked.

  ‘Strange. One in a billion.’

  ‘Tell me about her,’ Zeng said. ‘Go on.’

  Wang remembers how her eyes shone black and how cigarette smoke seeped from her mouth. Shuxiang had a round and motherly face, but she was not like other mothers.

  ‘Ignore what the teachers say,’ she said, when she picked her son up from school. ‘Forget what they teach you in those lessons. They teach nothing but nationalist lies. They are training you to be sheep.’ Looking around the playground at the other children, she said under her breath, ‘Little emperors, constantly demanding sweets and toys. As bad as babies, screaming at you to wipe their faeces and feed them milk, night and day.’ Then she glanced at her solemn young son, and had to concede, ‘But you are better than most, Little Jun. You are one of the very best six-year-olds there are . . .’

  Sometimes they went to the market, riding there on the bus. Little Jun would run amongst the stalls, sniffing at the fish guts and spilt chicken’s blood and dough sticks frying in oil. ‘Don’t touch,’ Shuxiang warned. But he touched everything. At the rice seller’s he slipped his six-year-old hands into the barrels, sifting the grains through his fingers. At the stall where spices were weighed out on old-fashioned scales, he dipped a finger in the chilli powder and licked, tearing up as his sinuses burned.

  ‘Like fire ants, eh?’ laughed the spice seller. ‘Fire ants up your nose.’

  One day at the market he decided to run away and become one of the street kids who begged for a living. He wouldn’t have to go back to school and not fit in. He wouldn’t have to go back to the shadowy apartment and the strange, bitter things his mother said. They had been about to leave the market, and Shuxiang was paying for a jin of tofu when Little Jun crawled under the noodle stall. The noodle-maker was kneading and slamming dough and the table wobbled. He did not have to wait long before he heard his mother say, ‘You seen my son?’

  Under the table, Wang saw her feet, strapped in her sandals. His heart skipped with the thrill of concealment.

  ‘No, not today,’ the noodle-maker said.

  His mother walked her feet away. Wang peeped out. She was asking the butcher, his cleaver suspended over bloody cuts of meat, if he had seen her boy. The butcher said no. Shuxiang turned away and Little Jun saw the furrow of worry on her brow. In his hiding place, Wang was pleased by her pain. Proof she must love him as much as he loves her.

  Round and round the market she went, calling for him and accidentally bumping into other market-goers. ‘Seen my son?’ she asked the shoe-mender. ‘See
n my son?’ A lump grew and stopped up Little Jun’s throat. The filth under the stall, the vegetable rot and flies, was nauseating. The time to come out had long passed, but now he was too scared.

  Then she saw him, under the table. They locked eyes, mother and son, the boy’s eyes trembling, the mother’s turning to stone.

  ‘Still looking for your little boy?’ the tofu seller asked.

  ‘No,’ said Shuxiang.

  Then she turned and walked out of the market.

  It was dark when a neighbour brought him back to Maizidian. She was a Ministry of Agriculture wife and, out of loyalty to his mother, Wang had refused to take her hand. The neighbour was Shuxiang’s age and had recognized Little Jun because she was the kind of woman who took notice of small children. She had fumed out loud, ‘Fate is unkind to give a child to a woman like Li Shuxiang, and to me none.’

  She knocked three times, loud and angry, at the door of Apartment 404. Shuxiang opened it, and the boy darted in like a cat streaking out of the rain. The woman opened her mouth to tell Shuxiang off, but Shuxiang, without thanking her, let the door slam shut.

  ‘Don’t look so scared,’ she said, turning to her son. ‘I won’t smack you.’

  A bowl of soup and a steamed bun were put on the table in front of him. She told him to eat, and she sat at the table too. Hungry, he chewed mouthfuls of bread and slurped out of the bowl. Mentholated smoke leaked from the edges of Shuxiang’s mouth and the cigarette in her hand.