I registered at the front desk of No. 3 Hospital then sat down with Lan Yu to wait. The emergency room was much more crowded than I had expected. A steady stream of nurses wearing surgical masks rolled patients here and there, while in the adjacent corridor a middle-aged woman made a scene at the prescription window. “It’s his liver!” she screamed at the pharmacist, who stood on the other side of the counter staring at her skeptically. On the other side of the waiting room, a foreigner—a Russian, perhaps, though it was hard to tell—sat on a wooden bench, gazing into space, a heavy anxiety carved into the deep, dark pockets of his eyes.
Despite the bustle of activity, we didn’t have to wait long, and soon enough a young, petite nursing intern wearing glasses brought Lan Yu to the inspection room.
“Why did you wait this long to bring him in?” she asked. She was soft spoken but stern. This long? She made it sound like there was no hope.
The young intern put Lan Yu into bed then popped a thermometer into his mouth and pulled the bedsheet up to the middle of his chest. I hovered over him, sweeping my eyes across his face and searching for signs of life. His eyes were sealed shut, lips parched and split. My stomach felt queasy. I desperately wanted to hold his hand, to find some way of showing him that I was there for him, but I was also frightened of what the medical staff would think. Finally, unable to control myself any longer, I grabbed his hand. My eyes welled up with tears.
The intern looked at me with a strange expression on her face, leaving me no choice but to fabricate an explanation.
“This is my little brother!” I told her in despair. “If he dies, how am I going to tell our parents?”
The intern nodded sympathetically then took me by the elbow and ushered me out of the room. In the hallway, she tenderly explained that a severe tonsil infection had caused Lan Yu to fall into a coma. She also said that he had a high temperature and was dangerously dehydrated. She gazed into the room as she spoke, her words pulsing with genuine concern for her feeble patient who lay in the hospital bed, his still-handsome face plagued by the thin, haggard air of sickness.
I remained at Lan Yu’s side throughout the night, rubbing him down with alcohol to break the fever and bring his temperature down. For hours I watched the IV as it dripped, standing over him to study his expression in meticulous detail. By four in the morning, his breathing had changed. This alarmed me at first: it was so quick and uneven. But I also realized this could mean he was regaining consciousness.
The intern was a miracle worker. From the moment we arrived until five in the morning, she took Lan Yu’s temperature every half hour until at last she removed the thermometer for the last time and announced with a smile that he was down to thirty-eight degrees Celsius. Lan Yu was going to be fine. The young nursing intern left the room and shut the door behind her, leaving me alone to bury my face in my hands, close to tears, breathing deeply, and wondering whether I was going to pass out from exhaustion.
It was a testament to Lan Yu’s youthful resilience that on his second day of treatment, he sat up in his hospital bed, stretched his arms, and said he was hungry. A big smile broke out on my face when I heard this. That afternoon I took him home.
When we got back to Ephemeros, I turned down the air conditioner, poured a big glass of water, and quickly put him under the covers. Propped up with a pillow, Lan Yu sat in bed, quietly observing me as I flitted about the apartment.
“You know, you are too much!” I called from the living room. “Here you are, almost eighteen years old and you still have no idea how to take care of yourself. You had a fever for a week and you didn’t even go to the doctor!” My paternal instinct had been goading me to say this ever since Lan Yu had regained consciousness, but I had held off until now.
“What are you talking about?” Lan Yu retorted cheerfully. “I did go to the doctor—he gave me a huge pile of medicine. When I got back to campus I took almost all of it!”
“I thought you were going to die!” I said, returning to the bedroom. Lowering myself to one knee, I scanned his face for leftover signs of illness. Lan Yu closed his eyes and leaned back into the pillow with a pensive look. “What are you thinking about?” I asked with concern.
“Oh, it’s just that—you know, when I was a kid, the one good thing about getting sick was you didn’t have to go to school. My mom would sit with me all day. She always made my favorite dishes.” He smiled weakly.
“Look at you!” I laughed. “You probably weren’t even really sick. Deceiving your poor old mom like that!” I kissed his forehead and ran my hand across the top of his head. Pulling the blanket up tightly under his chin, I instructed him to get some rest, reminding him that he could still have traces of fever. With his hand in mine, I sat in a chair beside the bed and began to leaf through a stack of paperwork that one of my assistants had dropped off. It was a preliminary agreement for the sale of the imported cars—the hard-earned product of the intense round of negotiations that had taken place the night before. I knew it was going to be a major battle, but hadn’t participated because Lan Yu needed me.
After I put him to bed, Lan Yu lay quietly on his back for a few minutes. Then he got into the fetal position, eyes poking out of the blanket to watch me as I read. Pretty soon he disappeared under the blankets completely. But no sooner had this happened when a hand popped out from the side and began squeezing my leg. I swatted at it lightly while doing my best to hide my smile, but before I could reprimand him for his bad behavior, he rolled onto his stomach and dangled his right leg off the bed. I looked down. A single black-socked foot loitered shamelessly near my calf.
“Don’t do that! Go to sleep!” I said with feigned exasperation as I returned the offending limb to the bed.
Not only did he fail to stop, he stepped up the harassment by reaching for my crotch. I looked up from my document to find half a face peering out of the blankets. Lan Yu was trying—not very hard—to hide his smile.
“Excuse me, sir, but are you engaging in hooliganism?” I laughed.
By way of an answer, Lan Yu rubbed even more at the bulge in my trousers, which was now just as hard as the thermometer the girl intern had been poking into his mouth.
Fuck it! I thought, jumping on top of him and grabbing his wrists more roughly than I meant to. I raised his arms, pinning them one by one above his head. He was totally overpowered by me. In this position, I thought excitedly, it was almost like I was raping him.
“You’re really asking for it.” I stared into his eyes menacingly. “You brought this on yourself, you know, so don’t blame me if I get rough!” Lan Yu squirmed beneath me as if trying to escape, but his inviting smile told me he loved it. Before I could escalate the assault, however, he abruptly stopped moving around and looked up at me with an absurd tough-guy look on his face.
“So I brought this on myself, huh? What are you gonna do about it?” he sneered, trying to sound manly and threatening, as though he were picking a fight.
“I’m gonna fuck you is what I’m gonna do!” I replied, pinning his arms down harder and bending down to kiss him aggressively.
I wasn’t really planning to fuck him, at least not at first. We were only playing and, besides, I thought he would still be too weak for sex. But the more I kissed him the more I wanted him. I hadn’t seen Lan Yu in a couple of weeks. I missed him. I missed his lips, his body, his scent. He must have missed me, too, because when I finally released his hands he immediately moved them to my face, kissing my lips and wrapping his legs around me. He had never been particularly verbal during sex, but at that moment his silence carried a special kind of intensity. The quiet serenity emanating from his person was broken only by the sound of his breathing: short, frantic, rapid. Was it sexual arousal or was he not yet fully recovered?
Lan Yu opened his mouth and stuck his tongue out slightly to meet my lips as I pushed them against his. Our tongues met, entwined, teeth bumping together carelessly. I kissed his face, then his neck. He had a scar on his upper arm, a large ci
rcular dent from a childhood inoculation. I kissed the scar then lifted his arm to kiss his armpit, nipples, chest, stomach, navel. When I got to his waist, I buried my face in his pubic hair then kissed his cock. I didn’t suck it, just gently kissed it while looking up at him. His eyes were shut but his mouth was open, and the glowing rays of sunlight cast by the setting sun created a halo around him. For a moment he looked unfamiliar, almost unreal, like a gold-plated mannequin shimmering in the sun.
I opened his legs roughly and buried my face between his thighs. He gasped loudly, gripping the back of my head and tugging at my hair as if to pull me closer. I loved how that felt: pleasure and pain. When I moved back up to kiss him again, I ground my pelvis into him, cradling his lower back with one hand to pull him into me, while my other hand gently grabbed a fistful of hair and slowly pulled his head back, giving me full access to his neck, which I dove into with a series of bites and kisses while he clutched at my shoulders and gasped. I held him there, arms and legs wrapped around me, pinned to the bed as securely as if he had been handcuffed. Rays of light filtered through the window and into the bedroom, shedding a blanket of warmth across a bed set ablaze by the fire of two men making love.
Without any warning I sat up on my knees and made a twirling motion with my hand. This, he knew, meant I wanted him on his side, the only position he liked getting fucked in because, I figured, it was the only one that didn’t hurt. When we first started having sex I didn’t like that position, but grew to love it over time. It made his ass stick out lewdly, giving me an invitation to pull up beside him, lift his leg, and enter him.
I wrapped my arms around Lan Yu’s chest. He grabbed my forearms with both hands, pulling me into him tighter. He ran his tongue against my skin. It crossed my mind that perhaps I shouldn’t penetrate him while he was recuperating, but I couldn’t control myself. Desire flooded out reason—and, besides, the way he pushed back into my hand while I played with his ass told me he wanted it. I spit into my hand, and slowly entered him. Before long, he was banging against each thrust with a moan. “Don’t come,” I whispered in his ear. “You don’t have the energy.”
“Oh . . .,” he moaned, then turned back to look at me. He placed an arm around the back of my head and pulled me closer until his pouting lips pressed against mine. I cupped my hand around one of his pecs, so thick and hard now compared to when we first met, and fucked him hard and steady while our tongues became tangled in each other’s mouths. The last moan to fall from his lips was the satisfying sound of him collapsing next to me. In the past I wanted only to take pleasure. Now I wanted to give it to him.
Between his body’s struggle to heal and the sex we’d just had, Lan Yu was completely worn out. He lay on the bed beside me covered in blankets, breathing heavily and gazing at the ceiling with a look of contentment. Then he turned to give me a big, beautiful, happy smile. I got out of bed to draw him a bath and quickly jumped back into bed to cuddle with him while we listened to the water filling the tub. When his bath was ready, I put him in the tub and gently washed him. That’s when we started talking about his stay at the hospital.
“Did you see the way the nurse was looking at you?” I teased. “She was totally into you.”
“No, she wasn’t! She was so old,” he protested. He paused for a moment, then added, “You know, right before we left, she told me that when I was in the coma my big brother was so upset he almost started crying.” Lan Yu looked greatly satisfied as he told me this, but it wasn’t smug satisfaction. It was, rather, the kind of excitement a child has when he tells you something he’s proud of and can’t wait to see your response.
I averted my eyes and gave a self-deprecating laugh. Lan Yu’s words touched me, but they also provoked a vague feeling of guilt. He was so easy to satisfy, so easy to make happy. The reality was, he wanted very little from me. But the one thing I increasingly felt he wanted, that one precious yet utterly elusive thing . . . it was this that I was most afraid to give.
After Lan Yu’s illness, our relationship entered a new stage. A better stage. The summer came to an end, and he was going to be starting his second year of university in a little over a week. My situation with the Volkswagens wasn’t improving—the potential buyer backed out at the last minute—but I always made an effort to spend as much time with Lan Yu as I could. In this respect, I had changed for the better.
He changed in some ways, too. For one thing, he finally stopped talking about paying me back. He even began accepting my money and my gifts much more willingly than before. Still, there was a part of me that wondered whether he was only doing these things to make me happy.
We never talked about the time I broke up with him and kicked him out of the house. It was a dark chapter in our history. I knew it left him with scars, but we never talked about it.
Six months later, I finally found a sucker—a vague acquaintance of mine—who swallowed the bait and bought the entire wretched lot of cars from me. I wasn’t normally in the habit of taking advantage of personal acquaintances, but in the business world, I rationalized, you have to do what you have to do. One evening when Lan Yu and I were chatting in bed, I made the mistake of sharing this information with him. He came back with the simple, yet cutting reply: “Money can make people crazy.”
On February 5 Lan Yu and I spent New Year’s Eve reveling in the joy of the bed we shared. When the clock struck midnight and the Year of the Snake arrived, I looked into his eyes and kissed his lips, promising myself that from this moment on, it was only going to be the two of us. Me and him, nobody else. But I wasn’t able to keep that promise, at least not then.
Nineteen eighty-nine turned out to be an extraordinary year—for me, for us, and for the entire nation.
Nine
One morning in mid-February my youngest sister called. She still lived at home.
“Big brother!” her sobs crackled through the phone. “Come home! It’s Dad—he’s really bad!”
“What? What happened?” I stammered out. Just two days earlier I had endured a twenty-minute lecture from the old man, who felt the need to berate me about some expectation of his that I had apparently failed to live up to.
“He was fine last night!” Jingdong cried even more loudly, as if the sound of my voice had somehow exacerbated her grief. “But then at around two or three in the morning Ma woke up and saw there was something . . . I don’t know . . . something was wrong with him . . .” Her voice trailed off, replaced by the sound of crying.
Forty-eight hours later my dad died of a brain hemorrhage. His departure left me, the legitimate son of his lawfully wedded wife, with no other choice but to dive without delay into arrangements.
There was no time to mourn. My father was a powerful man with a vast network of social and political connections. The phone calls, the telegrams, the endless condolences, and the visits from neighbors—one after another they poured in. Then there was the funeral itself with all the arrangements this entailed. In addition to contacting the local funeral committee, we had to procure the casket, the black armbands, the flowers, and all the other things used in the ceremony. The whole thing was exhausting, not just for me, but especially for my poor mother, who was twenty years younger than my father but who aged very quickly in just a few days. She had loved my dad very much, and the large banner with the words “Let Us Deeply Mourn Comrade Chen Fumao” hanging over his portrait in the mourning hall was devastating for her to see. There was nothing for me to do but go home and help her get through the difficult period.
On the second Saturday of my visit, Lan Yu called to find out when I’d be coming back to Ephemeros. I had been with my mother and sisters for twelve days at that point. Surely, I thought, that was enough time to fulfill my filial duty. By the time Lan Yu called, I was ready to say goodbye to the gloomy environment and get back to my normal life, so I told him I’d come back to Ephemeros that evening.
I didn’t realize how happy I would be turning the key to my own front door. There was Lan Yu,
curled up on the couch with a book. When he saw me enter, he jumped up and gave me a kiss. “Is our Ma doing better these last couple of days?” he asked with concern.
When Lan Yu first met my mother, he called her Auntie, but then I told him that in Beijing, guys always referred to each other’s mothers as “our Ma.”
“She’s getting by,” I said listlessly before suddenly brightening up. “Come on, let’s go grab a bite to eat!”
“How about staying in?” he asked, gently brushing my hair back from my forehead. “I didn’t think you’d feel like going out, so I picked up some takeout.”
I looked over Lan Yu’s shoulder and peered into the kitchen, where a stack of paper bags was piled up high on the table. On the floor next to the table there was a case of Yanjing beer. It occurred to me how incredibly thoughtful this guy was.
“A case of beer on the floor!” I laughed, walking into the kitchen to grab a couple of bottles and two glasses. “That’s how we did it in college.”
“Well,” he said with a laugh, “I guess tonight is like college, too!”
We moved into the living room and rapidly devoured the takeout meal he had picked up. He knew I loved Shanghai cuisine, and the mouthwatering assembly of drunken chicken, simmered fish halves, and stir-fried eel with chives was the best homecoming surprise I could have asked for.
When we were done eating, I scooped everything up from the living room table and threw it on the kitchen countertop. I collapsed back onto the couch and Lan Yu snuggled into my arms, which I wrapped tightly around his shoulders and chest. I thought back to eighteen months earlier, when I had first met him. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Before I had time to think too much about the strange fate Lan Yu and I shared, however, the alcohol kicked in and my mind turned to recent events. I just couldn’t believe how sudden my dad’s death had been.
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