Candy

by Mian Mian

  There came a point in the performance when Saining suddenly grew calm. Sitting down on the stage, he picked up a maroon acoustic guitar, and this last song that he sang sent icy waves through my entire body, making me feel so cold I couldn’t even weep. The chill crept into me, filling me with foreboding.

  — I have the key—Get married Allen don’t take drugs —

  Saining’s acoustic guitar had a clear and unadorned sound that hit you in the face like a whiff of heroin and turned the whole world cold. He had set the fragment of the poem I’d written on our blackboard to music and turned it into a song.

  The key is in the sunlight at the window, I have the key, Get married Allen, don’t take drugs. The key is in the window, in the sunlight at the window, Get married Allen, don’t take drugs, I have the key, Get married, Allen, don’t take drugs, don’t take drugs, get married get married get married, don’t take drugs, don’t take drugs.

  After that night, Saining and I spent a lot of time together. He’d quit singing for a living, and we often sat with Sanmao, talking through the night, and it was just like the early days when we’d first met. After what had seemed like an eternity, there we were again, sitting down together and talking about our problems, about drugs and music, about fear and free will. But we never arrived at any conclusions. We always seemed to abandon our discussions halfway because it was much more fun just listening to music. And together the three of us listened to every kind of music there was.

  Saining’s mother came back to China to visit us, and when she and Saining looked at each other, the expressions in their eyes made me extremely jealous. I sensed that Saining’s mother didn’t like me, but she gave me a ring and told me, Saining loves you very much; be good to each other.

  I moved back in with him. We went to bed early that first night, and we did nothing but gaze at each other, slow tears rolling down my cheeks as he looked at me tenderly. Such beautiful eyes, such a beautiful mouth, such a beautiful dream. He fascinated me, he was so intriguing, and there was some deep truth hidden in his face. I trusted that face, believed in it simply because I believed in it.

  We made the decision to free ourselves from drugs and alcohol. Saining said he was quitting heroin for me and his mother. I said I was going to stop drinking because it was expensive, and bad for my skin, and my skin and our lives were equally fucked up.

  Sanmao brought Saining some methadone, which we knew was approved by international drug rehabilitation organizations as a good medicine.

  I stopped drinking.

  We were both in low spirits, sleeping, arguing, drinking water, and throwing up all day long.

  14.

  Saining quit his heroin habit without any apparent effort. However, he soon realized that he had become addicted to methadone. Our town, Shenzhen, was full of places to buy this drug, something that would hardly have been possible in Shanghai. Just about anywhere you went around here, there were all kinds of “cures” for sale, but these were usually drugs meant for mental patients, or for people with terminal bone cancer. Some were antidepressants, or maybe just very powerful sleeping pills. All of these “medicines” meant to wean people from their dependence on drugs were nothing more than drugs themselves. He took one drug to help him get off of another drug, and then a third drug to help him quit the second drug, and so on. His health began to decline seriously.

  Sanmao blamed me for not keeping track of what Saining took and how much he took. I told Sanmao that I was overwhelmed, that the shops downstairs on the street sold anything and everything, and that I was powerless to stop Saining.

  I tried to convince Saining to go back into rehab, but he said that the clinic had a rule: If you went in for a second time, they would lock you up for a very long time, and he didn’t want to go back to that terrible place again.

  Saining ended up going back to heroin. He said it kept him on an even keel, that heroin was his destiny. But heroin itself no longer existed as a separate entity; it had become one with his breathing. It had pushed him into adulthood.

  You’re too weak, I said.

  Why should I be strong?

  Are you afraid of being alone?

  The only thing I’m afraid of is not having enough smack.

  It was Christmas night 1993, and I hadn’t seen Saining all day. I gathered up all of his things and threw them outside. When he came home, I spoke to him from behind the locked and bolted door: Go to Hell, I said. You’re through. And those were the only words I spoke to him that night.

  Saining spent the night sitting outside our door and singing, and his singing was half mumbled, but every verse had Merry Christmas in it. That night I quickly drank myself to sleep.

  When I awoke the next day and opened the front door, Saining was gone, but all of his things were still there. By this time my drinking was out of control, and I stumbled around all day in a stupor, my temper flaring.

  In love, it was language that had hurt me. With alcohol and drugs, it was money that had brought Saining and me to harm. If we hadn’t been able to get our hands on all that money, would we have found other ways to grow up?

  We hadn’t made love in an entire year. Sometimes I would tentatively touch myself, but the sensation did nothing to arouse me. Occasionally we would kiss, but neither of us felt like making love. Neither of us knew what love was anymore. Our love was more like familial affection, something for our earthbound bodies to lean on, and when this realization hit me, I thought that I had finally grown up. But adulthood left me feeling enervated and wondering how our love could have slipped away. I couldn’t understand what had happened.

  Die in the prime of youth, and leave a beautiful corpse: what an intensely beautiful dream that was, but we couldn’t manage to pull it off. We had neither energy nor passion nor love. We had nothing to burn except time.

  One day you took a red cloth

  Covered my eyes, blocked out the sky

  And you asked me what I saw

  And I said I saw happiness

  It was a good feeling

  It made me forget I had nowhere to go

  You asked me where I’d want to go anyway

  And I said I would follow you

  I can’t see you or the road

  You grip my hands tight

  You ask me what I’m thinking

  And I say the decision is yours

  I feel, though you aren’t made of iron,

  That you’re just as strong and fierce

  I feel the blood that’s in your body

  Because your hands are so warm

  And it feels good

  It makes me forget I have nowhere to go

  You asked me where I would want to go anyway

  And I said I would follow you

  It doesn’t feel like a wilderness

  Though it’s true I can’t see the cracks in the parched earth

  I feel it, and I need water, need to drink

  But you cover my mouth with yours

  I cannot walk, I cannot cry

  Because my body has gone dry

  I will follow you forever

  Because I know your pain better than anyone

  — CUI JIAN, “RED CLOTH”

  Saining had been gone for a week, and I started to worry. Sanmao and I looked for him everywhere. We even contacted his parents, both of whom were living abroad.

  I eventually discovered that his passport was missing from his overcoat pocket, and I found a note he’d written sometime before in the red case of his Fender guitar: “My love, if you find this letter it means that I am gone, that I’ve left this town. It’s September 1993, and right now you are sleeping in my arms, drunk again. I love you! No matter who you are or what you become. But what is love, anyway? There is something that terrifies me. Honestly. So I have to go away. I’m waiting for a good time to leave. We’ve been together too long. We’re both a little mixed up, so I need to go. It will be hard for me to get used to being away, and I’ll miss you, but I have to leave. Othe
rwise things will never get better.”

  I came across Saining’s cash card and a slip of paper, and his password was written on the slip of paper, but he knew that I knew his password already. I discovered that the card still had a lot of cash on it. He was just as arrogant as his mother!

  What was “We’ve been together too long” supposed to mean?

  That was all we had. We didn’t have anything else!

  I started to shriek. And then, with terror, I realized that I was having an asthma attack.

  I remembered all of the sweet times I’d had with Saining. It was all coming back, and I couldn’t bear it.

  There was nothing Sanmao could do, although he did convince me to go do a gig in another province. He wanted to see me become a professional singer. Drinking too much was making my asthma progressively worse. Performances became all but impossible. I wanted to sing, but I couldn’t because of the wheezing. My final concert was a nightmare for me and the booking agency. Because of the terms of my contract, I ended up owing them money.

  I’d been jeered at by a bunch of idiots, and I swore I’d never sing again. I discovered that the idea that you had to suffer in life was just a self-fulfilling prophecy that was out of step with the times.

  I didn’t want to inflict myself on the world any longer.

  During the Spring Festival of 1994, I had a foreboding that my Saining was never going to come back. This hardened my resolve. With scarcely any hesitation, I chose heroin, having been brought to that drug by Saining’s long affair with it. I said to myself, You might as well be dead; you’re finished anyway.

  My asthma became increasingly serious, often landing me in the hospital emergency room. I could have an attack at any time, almost without warning, so I always had to have an oxygen bag on hand. Each day’s first suck of heroin threw me into a fit of shaking that never lasted less than fifteen minutes, but I didn’t dare lie down to sleep. Every day, as soon as I awoke, I went looking for my stash. Every day as I awoke I was transfixed by the sight of my own sweat dripping down on my quilt.

  The world was vanishing right in front of me. All the better. The best thing about heroin was that it let me drift without end into a dizzying void. I was empty from the inside out. Time sped up, and life and death seemed to dangle high above my head, like two palaces, and there I was, trapped and vacillating in the space between.

  Saining had often said he used heroin to help him find a “hallucinatory tranquillity.” I didn’t know what other amazing sensations he got from it, but there was nothing beautiful about my life with heroin. Heroin was a petty thief, stealing everything there was to steal until I found myself with an absolute lack, a lack I had never before experienced. This emptiness gave me a sense of balance. The only meaning in my life was that my life was meaningless. I had never been free before, because until now I hadn’t genuinely understood myself, my life, my body, my loves. Heroin and its frigid world had become the only freedom I could have.

  Sanmao couldn’t help me, and in the end he called my parents, who sent me to a rehab clinic in Shanghai.

  After being discharged from the clinic, I flew straight back to the South and right back to heroin. Heroin had become as natural to me as breathing. What else was there for me to do except use smack? My first glimpse of my parents had frightened me. They were too normal. I couldn’t be around normal people. They would never be able to understand the emptiness of using heroin or the terror that comes from quitting it. The days without heroin were a blank expanse. If I didn’t have heroin, it didn’t seem as if I could go on living. Life had no content, but I didn’t really want to kill myself either.

  I was blind to the light, deaf to sound. I didn’t want to speak to anyone; I was hypersensitive, indolent, messy, and disorganized. My periods stopped, and I lost my appetite. Every night I watched the old black-and-white Cantonese movies they ran at midnight on TV—just the picture, with the sound turned off.

  One day I realized that I had lost my voice. I would never be able to sing again for pleasure, just because I felt like it, and once again I told myself, You’re finished; you might as well be dead! And I never sang again, not even in the shower.

  Ultimately, heroin brought me strength of a kind: it freed me from my need for music. When I saw that this had happened, I knew for certain that I was completely fucked up.

  Blindness guides our blood, from the beginning to the end. Losing control is like a series of conflagrations. The only thing I understand is that I do not understand why our lives are destined to slip out of control.

  My good friend Dalong fell in love with a prostitute, and she fell in love with him. The girl used heroin, and Dalong tried to help her quit, but eventually he started using heroin himself. Sometime after that, the girl’s father accused Dalong of kidnapping a minor, and Dalong became a fugitive. He no longer came and set up his shish kebab stall, and he stopped dropping by my place to hang out. Later I heard that Dalong had turned up dead, from some illness, somewhere on the outskirts of town. But I never believed these stories, not even for a minute.

  Kitten became a legend. Carrying her packet of white powder, she lured men in and then drugged them, stealing their money. She sought them out in order to destroy them. And after each encounter, she would go home and count the money, tear up their phone numbers, and get high on heroin. The last I heard, she had been locked up in the Women’s Reeducation Center but had escaped. The center was on top of a mountain, and the authorities had closed the pass for three days while they searched for her. Discovered by a local, she’d attempted to bribe him with the five hundred Hong Kong dollars that she still had. He took the money, then took her home and raped her. He raped her all night long and then took her back to the Women’s Reeducation Center, but she didn’t tell the instructors there what had happened. After that, she jumped off a building and injured her back, and she was released for medical reasons. But she never came and looked me up, although I really hoped she would.

  All news of Kitten had come to me through Dalong, and after he disappeared, I didn’t hear about her again. None of my old friends came by to see me. I kept thinking I would see them again, and I kept hoping because the street I lived on was still there. Who could have guessed that I would never see any of them again?

  The most shocking thing was that Sanmao, who had never given up trying to get me off heroin, started using it himself. Sanmao’s wife told me that he had actually started using after Saining had gone away. We love our men, she said. But our men don’t love us, so they feel bored, and when you’re bored, what else is there to do but take drugs?

  Sanmao’s wife asked me not to have anything to do with him for a while.

  I often thought that if Saining, Sanmao, Dalong, Kitten, and I could all get together and do heroin once, all together, it would be wonderful, and it might make heroin a little more interesting, or meaningful. Or it might make it even more meaningless—who knows?

  I didn’t see any of my friends anymore. I didn’t sing anymore. I was twenty-two years old and dead on the vine.

  What else was there to do but take drugs? My life was skidding into darkness at high speed, and I couldn’t stop it, no matter how hard I tried. You could buy needles at any of the little shops in the street below, at any time of day or night. Each and every one of us who lived on that street had been absolutely convinced that we could never become junkies. But we all succumbed in the end. We could never be sure if the heroin we were taking every day was really heroin or not. But our lives had been completely transformed, until we were living like vampires.

  E

  1.

  Little Xi’an, that was his name. At twenty-one, he was working as a bouncer at a nightclub in the South and had blocked a knife meant for a patron. That cut had changed his life. He was transferred to an illegal gambling den, where he served as the watchman. Born into hardship, he could now wear the best blue jeans, visit prostitutes, and eat red apples every day. He could also send money back home. He considered
himself lucky. His job was to monitor the doorbell. When the bell rang, he had to look through the peephole to see who was there, and if it was someone who belonged, he would let them in. But if it was an outsider, he had to question them at length while at the same time signaling the people inside. Each day, huge sums of money traded hands as people’s faces told the ever-changing story of their wins and losses. He took home lots of tips, and sometimes a guest would toss him a whole stack of bills.

  One day he was inspecting his knives. He kept them in drawers at the club, five knives in five different drawers. He’d never had to use them, but every day before the gambling den opened, he would check his knives. On this particular day, he opened one of the drawers and found that it was filled with money. The money had been wrapped in newspapers, and he knew that this was the cash they used to open up the gambling house. They’d always kept it in the safe; what was it doing here today? He made a rough count of the bundles and counted forty, give or take, and each bundle must have held ten thousand yuan.

  All in all, from the moment he discovered the money, packed it into a duffel, stepped into the elevator, rode down, stepped outside, and got into a taxi, roughly fifteen minutes elapsed. As he later told Little Shanghai, he did all of this without a moment’s thought, because people in the gambling den were fond of saying that money wasn’t something you earned, it was something you got for yourself. All of the people with money that Little Xi’an knew said the same thing, so Little Xi’an believed it.

  He took the cab all the way to Guangzhou, or maybe it was Zhuhai, and he checked into the best hotel in town. He thought he ought to shed his old identity completely; he thought he needed a companion, a woman. After some consideration, he made a phone call. He called at least four girls, but each one of them had some excuse or other and turned him down.