Little Gods

by Meng Jin

  She became an insomniac. Often I woke before dawn and saw a bar of light beneath her door. From the terrace window I glimpsed her at the desk with her legs propped on the bed, working by lamplight beside her husband’s sleeping form, and knew that she had not yet gone to sleep.

  Su Lan’s husband was planning a trip to Beijing for a medical conference. The conference would require him to leave Shanghai for at least three days, though probably he’d be gone as long as a week. It was mid-May. The swallows were finishing their nest. Su Lan was unhappy, though the conference, scheduled months ago, had originally been her idea.

  It’s my fault, she admitted. It was she who had encouraged him to be more than just a physician, to try his hand at medical research, she who had stoked his scientific mind and creativity, who, when he at first resisted, goaded him by insulting his intelligence and courage, calling him a mere practitioner who was good for memorizing medical textbooks and nothing else. At an introductory dinner with his boss, the chair of the oncology department, she had declared her husband’s ambition (as yet unknown to him) of going abroad to study new technologies and practices to bring back to China. She impressed the old doctor very much with her charm and intelligence. I didn’t doubt it—she could put on her charm like an expensive coat. After this dinner the chair selected her husband to assist in a new study, concerning the efficacy of radiation versus chemotherapy on late-stage liver cancer, and this was why he had begun to work later, why he was so stressed and distracted of late. Su Lan hadn’t minded—in fact, when it first began, she’d said he did it for her. He was talented at languages; with his English skills and a strong research background, they might one day have the chance to go abroad.

  I should have heard it then, in Su Lan’s praise of her husband’s English, how desperately she wanted to leave China. Later, when she was gone, I would remember how she’d spoken of China in their political arguments like a place she had already left. There was something in her voice, bitter and quiet, similar to the low murmur that appeared in my own voice whenever I was forced to explain my limp. It was self-loathing, it was shame.

  It was a big deal for someone so young to be invited to attend these conferences, Su Lan had said when her husband first received the invitation. They were usually reserved for hospital directors and the leading innovators in the field. At the time, her husband had been overwhelmed by the honor, and had spoken admiringly of how Su Lan inspired him to strive harder, how she pushed him to be more ambitious, how most of all she lit up his mind and made it more expansive and capable and hungry. He said he owed all his achievements to her.

  Now she was eight months pregnant, her body exhausted and huge. She had stopped going in to the university altogether. At home she dozed with books open in her lap, snapped awake for moments to tap her pencil on blank sheets of paper. The early summer sun brought some heat to the longtang. Su Lan abandoned her wardrobe and wore the same loose housedress every day, walking around the filthy building barefoot. Her room was a mess, clothes and papers everywhere. Flies landed on her sweaty skin and she did not bother to swat them away.

  She had changed, he had changed—the inspiration she’d kindled had become an excuse to stay away from her—and the environment had changed too, Beijing was a huge mess. She no longer wanted him to go.

  Surprisingly, the conference hadn’t been canceled or rescheduled or relocated despite the continuing protests in the capital. Su Lan suspected that in fact it had been, and her husband was pretending for an excuse to go to Beijing.

  You know why he wants to go, she said. He wants to be in the action. He’s feeling cooped up here playing my husband. He wants to play at making revolution instead.

  The protests had become a fact of daily life. The students occupied Tiananmen Square as if they had been stationed there. I wondered why they kept at it, if it had become a habit or if they still believed in their causes. Perhaps things had gone on for so long that a stupid stubbornness had settled in—if these children backed down now, with nothing new to show for all their energy and protestations, they would reveal themselves as cowardly, or worse, hypocritical, and would have to contend with the fact of wasted time and passion.

  Su Lan’s husband packed for Beijing.

  Did you know, Su Lan said, that he pursued me for years? I made an art of saying no.

  She paced the length of my room. She spoke of her many other suitors. She had met her husband in high school. He had been a brilliant student, admired and loved by all, but she had thought him arrogant, self-absorbed, careless in his ambition.

  I was right, she said, he is all those things. He’s never questioned his ability to succeed, and this makes him easy to hate. There’s something about hating someone so intensely that effortlessly turns into love.

  Was this perverse?

  I didn’t know. Su Lan was in a strange, dazed state, without her usual focus, as if someone had spun her in circles.

  My husband and I had met once before we married. We learned to live together, then time made us dependent on each other. Dependency turned into affection which turned into love. Perhaps there were times when I had resented his blindness, not because it made him less in any way, but because of what it said about me, because when people found out I was the wife of a blind man, it made sense to them. And when he was ill and dying, when I cleaned his shit and fed him porridge spoon by spoon, I had wished he would hurry up and die. But I had never seen him as a choice, so I did not consider these hatreds specific to him; rather, they were enveloped in that banal hatred of one’s own life and therefore tolerated.

  Su Lan raved on. He’s become that arrogant boy again, she said. He’s acting like he’s seventeen, like he’s one of those kids standing up in the square with megaphones shouting bullshit patriotic polemics. Have you seen these children? If you watch them for even a second you can see they just love the attention, they love hearing the sound of their own voices followed by thunderous clapping, they love hearing their words repeated and chanted by the mob, and that’s my husband too. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m in love with such a shallow man.

  She swallowed and shook her head. She let out a slow breath. When she spoke next she seemed not to see me, though I was standing right there. She stared at me and forgot I was someone else.

  Sometimes I ask myself why I married him. She shook her head. But the answer is clear in his face, in the way he walks and talks, the way he breathes. Whatever his flaws, he was always and will always be a person born as he was, on a ground that is solid and whole. I envy him so much for this quality. She touched her stomach: Perhaps our child will be like him. You see, ahpo, unlike my husband I am covered all over in cracks, they’re so fine you can’t see them unless you’re looking. Remember the first time I came to the longtang?

  You came to paint the room.

  No, that was the second time.

  Oh?

  I’d visited a week or so before, with the Fudan housing director. He was very excited about this vacancy—there was a long waiting list, you see, and he had done quite a bit of digging and rearranging to find this room for us. It was only my third time in Shanghai. I was still so enthralled by the city, how you could feel the money in the air; even though the glory days were long gone and people lived modestly now, there was still the memory of wealth, of extravagance: just being in the city made me feel like I had that memory too. I remember when we got off the bus and turned into the longtang, the first thing I thought was, I’ll live in a house made of bricks. I was like a girl in a wonderland, practically blind. It wasn’t until I was standing in the room with the housing director that the spell broke. Somewhere along the way, while I was dreaming of my new life, his excitement had turned into embarrassment, and as we stood in the room he began to extol its virtues, but with a newly apologetic tone, muttering about how a fresh coat of paint would cover those cracks, which I hadn’t even noticed, how a good cleaning and it’d be like new, how the neighborhood had a long history, was centra
lly located, in the heart of the old city, and with history came some charm. I blinked and began to see the place with his eyes—my husband’s eyes. As we left, the director spoke endlessly of the waiting list, of newlyweds who’d had to dorm for months before a room opened up, of one couple who lived separately for two years waiting for the perfect placement, by which time the husband had started having an affair with her best friend. I got the message.

  She looked out the window.

  So your husband, I said, he’s like that fresh coat of paint, but for you.

  She blinked. She snapped out of herself. For less than a moment, before she forced a laugh and pulled on her charm, she looked horrified.

  She threw up her hands and declared she had to get back to work.

  The marriages of the past were better, I thought as she left my room. Modern courtship was silly, whimsical, almost certain to yield disappointment. It was simpler to treat a spouse as you did your own body: something given. If you were lucky you could learn to love it. If you could not, you lived with it.

  The week before Su Lan’s husband was scheduled to leave for Beijing, the couple argued many times a day. Su Lan no longer bothered to lower her voice. She spoke to match the unabashed timbre of the protests outside.

  The news blasted from their television whenever her husband was at home. In Beijing there were developments within the movement. Li Peng had granted the student leaders a televised audience, which had resulted in absolutely nothing. The Russian leader Gorbachev’s welcome ceremony was moved from the square to the runway of the airport where he arrived. Foreign journalists had descended upon the city for the historic diplomatic event. Martial law was declared. Zhao Ziyang spoke out in favor of the movement, and then he disappeared amid rumors that he would be deposed. With each development, whether a step forward or back, the protests seemed to grow, as if news itself had the power of biological contagion. Thousands of workers and young people streamed into Beijing from the countryside.

  Democracy fever, Su Lan called it, mingzhu bing. She hated that her husband had caught it. She did not believe he actually understood the issues or even cared. She accused him of using political fervor as an excuse to look away from a weakness inside himself.

  On the eve of his departure, I was sitting on the terrace catching the cool air when I heard my neighbor shouting mingzhu through the closed door. For a moment Su Lan’s voice merged with the chanting on the streets, and it sounded like she was shouting out the window in solidarity. But her voice broke from the others: Tell me, she said, what do you know about democracy? Do you even know what the word means?

  You’re missing the point, her husband said. These are basic and fundamental ideas.

  Basic and fundamental to what?

  Human liberty!

  And nothing less.

  Su Lan’s laugh was loud and full of disdain. I wonder, she continued, what this human liberty looks like. Can you draw me a picture? What color is it? How does it taste? How will life be different after all this parading in the streets? And if the Party steps down as you demand, what will you put up in its place? What are your policy proposals? Your electoral plans?

  Her husband’s response was drowned out by a surge of singing from outside. Then the crowd quieted, became almost silent, except for one voice that reverberated distantly, moving away, and Su Lan’s voice emerged in the sudden still, sharp and shaking.

  You know what you are? A phony intellectual. You’ve always been a phony, taking on ideas to feel important and intelligent without understanding their actual substance. Run off to Beijing, go attend to your national affairs, pretend it’s harder to shout empty slogans about abstract concepts than to take individual responsibility for the result of your own actions—here came the sound of a wet slap, as she struck her stomach—but don’t think I don’t see right through you. Don’t think everybody can’t see right through you.

  There was a crash. The sound of things falling, her husband’s voice speaking, stern and passionless as the pair suddenly switched roles, and another crash, and the door flung open. Su Lan emerged, fists full of men’s clothes, which she flung down the stairs, shouting Fake, coward, go to Beijing and die there. She returned to the landing with an armful of his shoes and books. They thudded down the stairs. The old walls shook. Her words became indistinct sounds, some language or dialect I could not understand, and her voice became sharp and substantial, so substantial it could plow a person down. I sat on the terrace without moving. I did not want to go inside. But someone had to hold Su Lan’s arms to her sides; someone had to restrain her until she came back to herself.

  Finally I grabbed my cane and stepped inside.

  She stopped shouting. Her face gleamed, patchy and red. Her chest heaved above her belly and she clutched her lower back. She smiled, suddenly serene. In a voice that made me want to scrub my body with hot water and soap, she said:

  I’ve disturbed you, ahpo. I’m afraid I didn’t realize how late it was.

  I went to my room. As I passed her open door, I saw that the floor of Su Lan’s room was covered in black shards. The television was smashed on the ground, and littered amid the shards were the torn pages of what looked like an anatomy textbook, pages filled with images of the skinned human body, its ropes of muscle and bulging round eyes. Su Lan’s husband sat at the table and stared blankly at the drawings as if they had always been there. The next morning, the mess was gone. Your mother acted as if nothing had happened. Two days later, when her husband left for Beijing, she carried her own suitcase down the stairs and went with him.

  Your mother said I looked like someone she’d always known. She said this quietly, the first time we met, as she was disappearing down the stairs. I never heard her repeat the sentiment, but it came back to me often, a refrain spoken in a small place in my mind. By the time she left I was sure this was in fact what she had murmured; I was sure because I finally understood what she meant.

  Strange world. Unlike Su Lan, you have always known me, I am the second person you met, second to your mother, the second person most intimate with the fact of your fragile body. And yet you look at me like you never imagined I could exist.

  I was surprised to find her door open. It was the morning after you appeared, after a night of sounds behind a closed door. I had slept alone, fitfully, Tao Kun had not come, and when I went out onto the landing and saw the outline of your body through the door I nearly called out Su Lan’s name again. You had changed your clothes and put on one of her dresses—the pale yellow one she was wearing in the picture on my altar—and you stood facing the wall bare-legged, without a coat or even a sweater, though it was still winter and the room, without sunlight or a gas stove, was more frigid than the outdoors.

  You were looking at your parents’ wedding portrait. At him, I saw. Not at her.

  What had Su Lan told you about this man? It was possible, I suddenly realized, that she had said nothing.

  On the table where Su Lan and her husband had taken their meals I saw something that had not been in this room before, which you must have brought, a small wooden box. I moved toward it. The wood was light and unpolished, as if it had just been cut. I opened the lid. Inside was a plastic bag of gray matter. I don’t know what made my fingers reach into the bag and pinch. The contents were soft, almost silken, once you rubbed past the softness there were tiny granules—

  I stepped back. The lid shut with a sharp bang. You turned and drove me out with your eyes.

  My heart was racing. Suddenly I saw my deathbed: I had always imagined Su Lan there. What a discomfiting feeling to know for certain she would not be, a stone plummeting in my gut. Su Lan would not see me die, not because she had forgotten me, not because the return journey to Shanghai would be too long and expensive and arduous, not because I could not find a way to tell her, but because she had gone first, she now existed only as a bag of ashes inside a wooden box.

  How?

  I did want to ask you.

  When my husband die
d I sat next to him and watched his body change. It relaxed then sagged then stiffened again, his skin shrinking, his eyelids pulling back. Blood drained from his cheeks and stained his palms, which lay flat against the bed. His skin turned pale and waxy and gray.

  It seemed to me that Tao Kun had not died, but rather was slowly being replaced by his body, until he was nothing more than a thing. It was true that his body, losing him, was decaying. It smelled, and the smell surprised me, though I had been near dead bodies before, my mother’s, my father’s, Tao Kun’s parents, many others specific and vague. It did not seem right that death should smell, because death was only passing into nothingness, and nothing should not smell like anything. Later I learned, from Su Lan or from her doctor husband, that in fact I had been correct. The odor emitted by the dead was caused by living microorganisms—think of them as tiny bugs, Su Lan had said—feasting on the abandoned body and turning it inside out. It was not death that stank but rather life continuing on over it, devouring it.

  I had not attended to any of the rituals. I sat and watched my neighbors fuss. Someone called the coroner. Someone fetched Tao Kun’s little sister, who cleaned the body and dressed it. Someone scolded me and dressed me in proper mourning clothes. Someone took my money and paid for the cremation. Someone gave me the box of ashes and said they were his bones. Bones? I had never thought of Tao Kun as having bones. They had been so well hidden inside him.

  Su Lan’s first days of motherhood were days of panic and deep exhaustion. It was not just you—it was not clearly you. The circumstances were extraordinary. She had gone to Beijing and witnessed horrible, frightening things, and in the middle of it, her husband, with whom she had not been on the best of terms, had disappeared, had possibly—probably—been killed. Who knew what circumstances like that could do to a person like her, whose mind was always pulling away to unimaginable places. And yet she was a mother, she had become a mother, and was faced now with the responsibility she’d previously sworn she did not want. You, her swollen breasts, her broken body. The reality of motherhood pulled her away from her mind.