Leave Me Alone (24 page)

The third day after I returned from Neijiang, Bighead called my cellphone and asked me to hurry to his office straight away. I’d been asleep and looking at my watch I saw it was 3 a.m. Furious, I told him to fuck off. Just as I was about to hang up, he said, ‘It’s Li Liang. Quick! He’s in trouble.’

I’d asked Li Liang before where he got his gear. He always dodged this question, and if I asked again, his eyes would flare dangerously.

‘Why do you want to know? Are you going to turn me in?’

I reluctantly let it drop, denouncing Li Liang’s inability to tell when someone was doing him a favour.

Even if he didn’t tell me, I could guess: the two main centres for heroin dealing in Chengdu were Wannianchang in the east and Sima Bridge in the north. Most Chengdu powder brothers went to Sima Bridge to score. Recently the police had busted a lot of dealers there. After my brother-in-law published the news, he repeatedly asked me to urge Li Liang to be careful.

‘It’s too dangerous,’ he said. ‘He should quit.’

When I told Li Liang, he just looked at me coldly in the way that triad gangsters look at chopper fodder.

I reached the station to find him crouched trembling in a corner. He was barefoot with his hands cuffed behind his back, and his face was blue and green with bruises. There was blood at the corners of his mouth. His shirt was ripped to shreds, his pale scrawny chest exposed When he saw me, he turned away quickly, his shoulders shaking. He seemed ashamed. I felt sad for him, and draped my jacket over his shoulders.

‘Don’t worry, Bighead and I are here,’ I said. ‘You’ll be OK.’

Bighead said that Li Liang had been unlucky because he’d just scored when the police arrived and threw him to the ground. He might have suffered a blow to the head. Struggling to free himself, he’d apparently seized hold of the arresting officer’s balls. By the time he let go, the cop’s face had turned purple. In fact he was still lying in a room next door crying. Bighead said that if he hadn’t arrived, Li Liang
would have been severely beaten. I asked what we should do. Bighead shrugged.

‘What else can we do? We have to spend some money. We need to get him out of here tonight. It’ll be too difficult tomorrow.’

I asked how much and he sighed and extended four plump fingers and a thumb. I took a deep breath. ‘That much?’

His expression became serious. ‘Fifty thousand may not be enough. Do you know how much stuff Li Liang had on him? One hundred grams. That’s ten years at least!’

I nearly fainted.

‘It’s so late. Where can we go to get that kind of money?’ I said.

Bighead looked around, then shut the door and said in a low voice, ‘We have a few days to get the money. I already talked this through with the chief. For the moment, we just need Li Liang to write a cheque.’

At that moment, I noticed that Bighead Wang was dressed unusually formally. The badges on his hat and shoulder were shiny, the creases of his trousers sharp. It was was different from his usual butt-cleavage image and for some reason I was suspicious. I smoked a cigarette as I studied him. My scrutiny obviously made Bighead uncomfortable and he took off his hat and slapped it on the desk.

‘If I’m getting one fucking cent from Li Liang, I’m a son of bitch,’ he swore.

I didn’t believe in vows. Bighead Wang’s words failed to satisfy me but they reminded me of an incident that had
happened while we were at university.

In the second semester of our sophomore year, Big Brother and Bighead Wang fought over a 30 yuan gambling debt. Bighead brandished a mop, Big Brother wielded a chair: both were heavyweight contestants and they fought at close quarters until the dormitory was nearly destroyed. My basin, bowl, mirror and bookstand were totally wrecked in that battle. After the physical fight, there was a battle of words. Separated by a desk, the two cursed each other furiously. Bighead Wang said that someone who didn’t pay their debts should be fucked by donkeys and Big Brother almost went insane. He thrashed about, saying that he wanted to kill Bighead. Chen Chao and I had to use all our strength to restrain them and I guessed our arms were stretched several centimetres during the process. When Big Brother realised that he couldn’t escape us despite his struggles, he cursed Bighead venomously: ‘Fuck you! You would sell your own dad for one cent!’

After carrying Li Liang up to the third floor of his home, I was out of breath. I lay on his couch and couldn’t get up. I hadn’t realised it in the police station, but when I got him home I discovered he was quite badly hurt. His legs were bloody and his wrists were extremely swollen. He kept coughing.

I turned over every box and basket in the kitchen until finally I found some ointment. I rubbed it into his skin and at the same time shared my suspicions.

‘Firstly, I haven’t seen any other cops dealing with this case, and it was only Bighead who was talking about the
money. Secondly, Bighead rarely wears a uniform, so how come he was dressed so formally tonight? Thirdly, he could have dealt with you himself. Why did he call me? What did he want me to witness?’

Li Liang took a deep breath and winced, as if he was in great pain. Just as I was getting really worried, he pushed me away and said to the door: ‘Come on in, Bighead. What are you standing out there for?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Bighead Wang was quite impressed with the way I laid into him that day on the banks of the Funan River. Afterwards, he called me repeatedly, but every time I hung up without listening. Once he waited for me on my way home from work; he had a fawning smile. But by now I knew that concepts like ‘friends’ and ‘brothers’ were bullshit. The truth was, my value to Bighead was that I could help him make money.

I didn’t believe that Bighead had deliberately set out to trap Li Liang, but perhaps he was taking advantage of Li Liang’s misfortune to try and make himself a little profit. Joining the cops was the perfect way to corrupt a guy. Usually it took less than two years for a cop to become a poisonous bastard who would take a bite out of even their own father.

At high school I had a friend by the name of Liu
Chunpeng. He used to steal watermelons from markets, and once we punctured a teacher’s tyre together. When we both failed our university entrance exams, we stood in Hejiang Pavilion and together lamented that heaven had turned a blind eye to us. Finally we wept on each other’s shoulders. After high school graduation, he got a job as a cop on the railway station district beat; a few years later he’d become evil and mean. A friend of mine drove into some railings near the north train station; he was caught and told that his licence would be withdrawn. My friend asked me to plead for him. Liu Chunpeng said, ‘OK, OK, your problem is my problem.’

Later however, he still fined my friend and took some points from his licence, which caused me to lose face. Another time I personally witnessed the guy beating a migrant worker until he knelt bloody-faced and begged for mercy. It was all because the migrant worker had stepped on Liu Chunpeng’s foot. After the beating, he was still mad and he kicked the worker’s bag high into the air. A cup inscribed with the motto ‘Serve the people’ fell out, rolling and clattering down the street.

‘You may trust Bighead, but you shouldn’t trust any cop,’ I told Li Liang.

‘I already handed over the money,’ Li Liang replied, ‘so what’s the point of talking about this?’

I continued to slander the cops, calling them beasts with badges. Li Liang listened for a while, then said, ‘You know what your problem is? You don’t take seriously the things you’re supposed to take seriously, and you’re way too serious about the things you should be relaxed about.’

Bighead’s expression that day at Li Liang’s place was ugly. He puffed out his cheeks and glared at me and so I was sure he’d heard what I’d said. I was uncomfortable; in fact, it was highly embarrassing. Just as I was about to explain though, Li Liang went berserk. He dived into the bedroom and started to turn everything upside down, making a terrible noise. Bighead and I hurried after him and saw chests and drawers already ransacked. He was out of breath and a strange sound came from his mouth.

‘What are you looking for?’ Bighead said. ‘Don’t worry, Chen Zhong and I will help you.’

Without looking at us, Li Liang said, ‘There’s one more packet! I still have one more. One more!’ His voice was hoarse and grating, like a wolf howling in the wasteland.

Perhaps Li Liang had remembered wrong. We turned the house upside down but didn’t find the packet. By then his fits were getting more and more frightening. At one point he grabbed an empty needle and tried to stab it in his arm. Bighead and I threw ourselves on him and wrested back the needle, both of us sweating with the effort. Li Liang rolled and crawled on the floor, twisting his body in strange contortions like a worm. This was the first time I’d witnessed such a scene. I was shocked and uneasy, afraid that he’d have a heart attack and die.

Bighead fought with him for a while, then wheezed out an order.

‘Go and get a rope to tie him up!’

As I went to leave, Li Liang clung pathetically to my leg.

‘Chen Zhong, I’m begging you! Go out and score for me!’

With a great effort I shook him off. He hit the ground, his face covered with snot and tears, his lips blue and green. His pupils were dilated, like a corpse with open eyes.

We had to carry him downstairs on our shoulders. The sky was still dark and the whole city was deserted, except for a few people who had stayed up all night and floated past with ghostly expressions. When we stuffed Li Liang into the car, he shrieked loudly. The sound was as sharp as a knife, piercing my soul, making my guts shudder.

After a fifteen-day compulsory detox treatment, Li Liang had put on weight. The day he came out of the clinic his manner was a bit weird. His strange smile suggested that he was happy and disappointed at the same time. His facial muscles were twitching, so I guessed that maybe he was having withdrawal symptoms.

On the way home we stopped for a meal at Liangjia Alley. Li Liang ate like a robot, chewing his rice expressionlessly and not saying a word.

I couldn’t bear it any more and begged him, ‘Bro, say something, OK? You’re really scary like this.’

He prodded the slices of boiled pork in the bowl with his chopsticks, then said thoughtfully, ‘Fuck, the restaurants outside the college gates had better food than this.’

Two days after, he disappeared, I dialled his cellphone repeatedly but he didn’t answer. I went round to his place and
almost hammered his door down, but there was no response. I felt an unnamable fear. After hesitating a while, I summoned the courage to call Ye Mei. She asked me what I wanted.

‘Go to your home and take a look,’ I said. ‘Li Liang might have killed himself.’

Li Liang’s idol had always been Hai Zi, the poet. In 1989 Hai Zi committed suicide by lying on the railway tracks near Shanhaiguan. Li Liang claimed to have read all of his poetry. He’d come to the conclusion that Hai Zi’s death made him a hero, and that those who clung to life should feel shamed by his example. Later, this became one of Li Liang’s articles of faith. The second semester of our senior year, the literature society held a creative writing seminar where we pretentiously contemplated the future direction of Chinese literature. A group of pretentious young prats got so excited they had nosebleeds. When the meeting was about to end, Li Liang asked me, ‘Chen Zhong, what do we live for?’

The students stared at me. I thought for a while and said, ‘For happiness.’

Li Lian paced excitably denouncing my view.

‘Wrong! Life has only one goal!’

Li Liang was twenty-one. He was wearing a red striped T-shirt that he’d bought for 5 yuan at a small stand outside the campus. He didn’t say what he thought the point of life was, but I knew anyway. It was death.

By the time Ye Mei dashed panting up the stairs, I’d lit my third cigarette. She didn’t say a thing, just opened the door. Without removing my shoes I rushed in.

Li Liang wasn’t there. His luxury apartment by the Funan River was as empty as a ransacked tomb. The window was wide open, the wind carrying in the smell of rotten fish. A baby bird flew by and perched on a branch from which yellow leaves were falling. Autumn was here, and the bird was returning home.

After searching the whole house, I had to concede that Li Liang’s corpse wasn’t concealed inside the wardrobe, under the bed or down the toilet. I’d even prodded the mattress all over, suspecting that he might have stitched himself inside. The whole time Ye Mei just stood there watching me race back and forth like a madman. Her eyes expressed contempt, as if the sight of me might pollute her.

After I’d finished my search, she said coldly, ‘I didn’t know you were such a good friend of his.’

I was a bit worked up and answered emotionally: ‘Li Liang is my best friend in the world. He always will be! I would even…’

Ye Mei folded her arms and she had a look of complete disdain as she waited for me to finish. I mustered up my
courage and said confidently, ‘I would even die for him!’

She snorted and with a peculiarly savage expression said, ‘Li Liang didn’t really regard you as his friend. That 32,000 yuan you owe him — he’s never forgotten about that.’

This was Ye Mei, a woman I was familiar with yet who was a stranger to me. In other words, what I was familiar with was just parts of her body. I’d never cared about her mind. That time when Li Liang had told me gloomily, she only listens to you now, I’d fled.

As a master in whoring, I could vaguely sense how Ye Mei had felt about me that night in Leshan when she’d lain on top of my body letting out heart-rending cries. And when she’d thrown that glass of wine over me. What had confused me was her behaviour afterwards. From the day of her wedding up until today we’d met only six times and each time it was as if she’d just emerged from the fridge. She gave me goose bumps.

After my divorce from Zhao Yue, she’d called me one morning at five o’clock. Confused, I asked who it was.

She said it was her.

Immediately I asked what was up.

She didn’t reply and rubbing my eyes, I heard loud music coming down the phone line. After nearly a whole minute she suddenly said, ‘Forget it. I dialled the wrong number, OK.’

Without another sound she hung up.

The sky was already a little light, a thread of dawn penetrating through the window into my sleepy eyes. I cradled the phone as I sat there stupidly, my mind empty. Later, I
slept again and didn’t wake until it was fully light. When I woke I felt a sense of loss, and wasn’t sure whether it had been a dream.

I knew that what she said was true. Li Liang was totally different from me. I was careless and never knew how much money I had, let alone how much of that belonged to me and how much to others. I was the type of person who thought, there’s ten yuan in my wallet, so I’ll spend nine yuan on a pack of cigarettes. Li Liang was very meticulous: he remembered every favour he received and gave. But seeing as he remembered that I owed him 32,000, he should remember what he owed me.

In our final semester at university, Li Liang was constantly broke. All his money was lost at the mahjong table. He never won, but his addiction trumped that. Anytime someone shouted in the corridor, ‘we’ve got three but we’re short one,’ he’d be the first to dash out and sign up.

That semester I’d brought 2,300 yuan with me, but blew it all within three months. At least half went on paying off Li Liang’s gambling debt. He didn’t even have enough money to buy his train ticket home to Chengdu, and depended on me for everything. He had nowhere to stay when he got back to Chengdu, and so once again it was me who gave him a free room and board at my place. He smoked my father’s Red Pagoda cigarettes, and my mother washed his socks.

Yes, that was my point. The value of friends lay in using each other. Those friendships where you’d die for each other might exist; on the other hand, they might just be fantasy.

So that afternoon, as the autumn leaves drifted in the
dusty air, I continued to look for my drug-ruined friend Li Liang. A white plastic bag sank slowly into the Funan River’s grey and stinking water. I stood on the bank thinking, ‘life and death’ friendships? Don’t make me laugh.