Candy (11 page)

I don’t know whether or not he slept with her, Sanmao concluded. But I do know that she used heroin.

After his return, Sanmao lived with Saining, and people said that they were inseparable, that they were like each other’s shadows. Saining and I talked on the phone every day, each checking in to see how the other was doing, but he was still using heroin and I was still drinking. One day I called him up and just started crying. Then he started crying too, and both of us were bawling on the telephone. We didn’t say more than a few words. He’d say, I’m so sad; and I’d say, I’m sad too.

One afternoon, I went out and bought some treats for our little dog, Dangdang. I brought them by the apartment, which had become a complete wreck. Saining and Sanmao were both sleeping, and Dangdang kept licking me. He wanted me to take him outside to play. I picked him up and wrote a few lines from Allen Ginsberg’s poem for his mother on our little blackboard.

Sanmao called up to invite me to a party. He used the Chinese word
wanhui,
just like everybody did back then. The English word
party
hadn’t become popular yet.

That was where I saw Saining, and he was the Saining I knew again. He wore a snowy white shirt and a clean pair of blue jeans, and he was standing on the stage looking uneasy, embarrassed even. In his music he was confident, expressing his dreams and ideals without ambiguity, unafraid of being mocked.

I had never thought of Saining as angry, just high-strung. He was too fragile to be angry. He knew he was fragile, and he used his vulnerability to plumb that vulnerability further. His music was a kind of prayer.

If rainy days are a sort of nostalgia

Could I take you

And engrave you on my heart?

If dissonance is pent-up grief

Would you take me

And place me in the night’s embrace?

And if I couldn’t stop sneezing

Would you say to me

You are a child of the earth

Don’t worry, it’s just a little mist . . .

Saining was like a child who had been bullied so much that he had given up on the adult world. He was born talented, gentle, and neurotic. He had his own private logic, and he used Chinese and Western instruments in his own way. His music had a naturally caustic quality, his guitar playing was echoey and tremulous, and his singing voice had a chilly kind of sweetness, but the most beautiful thing of all was his melodies. They were decadent and eerily beautiful. They were what set him apart from all of the other Chinese rockers.

Saining did not have a very good feel for the Chinese language, but he insisted on writing his songs in Chinese anyway. We used to write songs together, usually starting with his strumming a little tune, and then he’d tell me what he wanted the words to express. Most of his lyrics touched on fragmentary stories. He would write them out in English, and my job was to come up with Chinese words that made sense. I always felt happy whenever I watched Saining singing these songs up onstage. I felt as though he had granted me a special privilege, the privilege of being bathed with him in the bright halo of his music. I was enthralled by the extended trance of this music, and it was only then, when Saining was onstage and I was in the audience, that I understood his secret. Only then did I achieve a genuine sense of well-being.

I hadn’t been to a gathering like this in a long time. In the past I’d followed Saining around from one noisy concert to another. We’d been each other’s biggest, most loyal fans, and he’d been my guitar player too. We used the most basic setups and equipment and played for all kinds of audiences. Saining liked to watch me onstage with my long hair and short skirts, and I liked to stare at my legs swaying back and forth to the music of my own thin voice as I sang, my hair whipping around to cover my breasts or hide my cheeks, something that I thought accentuated the three-dimensionality of my features. And I foolishly thought that this helped me create an aura of mystery. In those days, performing was mostly a pretext for me to have a good time, a pleasure that was enhanced by the fact that I had an audience. Saining had a habit of buying me little silk kerchiefs; I have a large head and I wasn’t meant to wear a kerchief, but he kept on giving me kerchiefs all the same. Accessories are very important, he would tell me. Whenever I performed, I always picked out one of those little scarves and tied it around the microphone stand. I couldn’t write songs, so I sang Doors songs that I’d translated, and they lit up my hazy prayers with a power that was at once comforting and inspiring. Saining was one of the few people who understood and encouraged my strange passion for the Doors.

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. Otherwise 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.