Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (77 page)

Siren whining, the ambulance drove up and the EMTs jumped out with their medical equipment and a gurney. But Ximen Huan lay in Kaifang’s arms, eyes closed.

Twenty minutes later Lan Kaifang had his hands, covered in the blood of Ximen Huan, clamped around the killer’s throat.

Dear reader, the death of Ximen Huan hurts me deeply, but in purely objective terms, it swept away the barriers keeping Lan Kaifang from pursuing Pang Fenghuang. That said, the curtain was raised on another, even greater, tragedy.

All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout — nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be initiated and controlled by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I’ll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

But enough about that. We need to look at Lan Kaifang. He took charge of Ximen Huan’s funeral arrangements and, after gaining approval from his father and his aunt, buried Huanhuan’s ashes behind Ximen Jinlong’s grave. Now, instead of dwelling on the older folks’ mood, we return to Lan Kaifang, who showed up every night in the train station hotel basement room rented by Pang Fenghuang. And whenever he wasn’t tied up during the day he went to the square and fell in behind Fenghuang and her monkey, wordlessly following them like a bodyguard. When grumbling among his men at the station reached the ear of the old commander, he sent for Kaifang.

“Kaifang, my young friend, there’s no lack of nice girls in town, but a girl with a trained monkey. . . the way she is . . . how do you think it looks.”

“You can remove me from my post, Commander, and if you think I’m not even qualified to be an ordinary policeman, then I’ll quit.”

This stopped the talk immediately, and as time passed, the grumbling members at the station changed the way they viewed him. Sure, Pang Fenghuang smoked and drank, dyed her hair blond, had a nose ring, and spent her time roaming the square, the antithesis of a good girl. But how bad could she be? Eventually, the cops started making friends with her, and liked to tease when they ran into her on their beats:

“Say, Golden Hair, take it easy on our deputy commander. He’s wasting away to nothing.”

“That’s right, you’re going to have to ease up sooner or later.”

Fenghuang never paid any attention to their well-intentioned taunts. The monkey snarled at them.

At first, Kaifang tried to get her to move to 1 Tianhua Lane or into the family compound, but after receiving one refusal after another, even he began to realize that if she stopped spending her nights in the train station hotel basement and roaming the square, he’d probably lose interest in working at that substation. It did not take long for the town’s hooligans and troublemakers to realize that the pretty “golden-haired, nose-pierced, monkey-trainer girl” was the favorite of the blue-faced, hard-nosed deputy commander of the train station, and they abandoned any thoughts of moving in on her. Who’d be foolish enough to try to take a drumstick out of a tiger’s mouth?

Let’s try to imagine the scene of Kaifang’s nightly visits to Fenghuang in her basement room. Originally a guesthouse, the place had been bought and turned into a hotel, and if regulations had been strictly enforced, it would have been a prime candidate for being shut down. That was why the fat face of the proprietress crinkled into an oily smile, honey dripping from her reddened lips, when Kaifang showed up

Fenghuang refused to open the door the first few nights, no matter how hard he pounded. So he’d stand there like a post and listen to her weep — sometimes laugh hysterically — inside. He also heard the monkey screech and, sometimes, scratch at the door. Sometimes he smelled cigarette smoke, sometimes liquor. But he never smelled anything illegal, at which he was secretly overjoyed. If she’d taken up drugs, she’d have been a lost cause. Would he still have loved her if that were the case? The answer was yes. Nothing could have changed that, not even if her insides had rotted away.

He never failed to bring a bouquet of flowers or a basket of fruit, and when she refused to open the door, he stood there until he had to go, leaving the flowers or fruit outside her door. With a decided absence of tact, the proprietress once said to him:

“Young man, I can get you a handful of girls. All you have to do is choose the one you want. . .”

The icy glower in his eyes and the cracking of knuckles as he clenched his fist nearly made her wet herself. She never said anything like that again.

Then one day Fenghuang opened the door. The room was dark and dank. The paint on the walls was peeling and blistery; a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling provided little light in a room heavy with the smell of mold. It was furnished with a pair of twin beds and a couple of chairs that looked as if they’d been scavenged from the local dump. Being in one was like sitting on cement. That was when he first tried to get her to move. One of the beds was for her, the other was for the monkey, who slept among some of Ximen Huan’s old clothes. There were, in addition, two vacuum bottles for hot water and a fourteen-inch black-and-white TV set, also picked up at the local dump. In those shabby, uninviting surroundings, Kaifang finally said what he’d kept bottled up for more than ten years:

“I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you from the first time I saw you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she sneered. “The first time you saw me was on your granny’s
kang
in Ximen Village. That was before you could even crawl!”

“I fell in love with you before I knew how to crawl!”

“No more of that, please.” She lit a cigarette. “For you to fall for a woman like me is like tossing a pearl down a latrine, don’t you think?”

“Don’t run yourself down,” he said. “I understand you.”

“You understand shit!” she sneered again. “I’ve been a whore, I’ve slept with thousands of men! I’ve even slept with the monkey! You, in love with me? Get out of my sight, Kaifang. Go find yourself a good woman and stay clear of the foul airs I give off.”

“Liar!” Kaifang said, covering his face with his hands and starting to sob. “You’re lying. Tell me you haven’t done any of those things.”

“What if I have? And what if I haven’t? What business is it of yours?” She sneered. “Am I your wife? Your lover? My folks have washed their hands of me, so what makes you different?”

“I love you, that’s what!” he was screaming.

“Don’t use that disgusting word with me! Get out of here, poor little Kaifang.” She waved the monkey over and said, “Dear little monkey, let’s you and me go to bed.”

The monkey sprang onto her bed.

Kaifang drew his pistol and pointed it at the monkey.

Fenghuang wrapped her arms around her monkey and said angrily:

“Shoot me first, Lan Kaifang!”

Kaifang’s passions were running high by then. He’d heard rumors that she’d been a prostitute, and he wasn’t sure if he believed them or not. But when she maliciously told him to his face that she’d slept not only with thousands of men but with her monkey, it was as if a volley of arrows had pierced his heart.

Shocked and hurt, he stumbled out of the room and ran up the stairs, out of the hotel, and onto the square, his churning mind and heart erasing all threads of thought. As he passed a bar lit up by neon signs, two heavily made-up women dragged him inside. Seated on a high bar stool, he slugged down three shots of brandy and then laid his head down on the bar as a woman with blond hair, dark circles under her eyes, bright red lips, and lots of skin, front and back, drifted up to him — he never went to see Fenghuang in uniform — to reach out and touch his blue birthmark. As a recently arrived butterfly from the countryside, she didn’t realize that he was a policeman. Almost as a conditioned reflex, he grabbed her by the wrist, drawing a shriek from her. He smiled apologetically and let go. She rubbed up against him and said flirtatiously, “Elder Brother has quite a grip!”

Kaifang waved her away, but she pressed her hot bosom up to him and sent blasts of air reeking of cigarette smoke and liquor into his face.

“Why are you so sad, Elder Brother? Did some little vixen break your heart? Women are all the same. But your little sister here can make you feel better. ...”

As pangs of loathing swept through his heart, Kaifang was thinking: I’ll get even with you, you whore!

He tumbled off the bar stool, and “little sister” led him by the hand down a dark corridor and into a will-o’-the-wisp room, where, without a word, she stripped and lay out on the bed. She still had a nice figure, with full breasts, a flat tummy, and long legs. Since this was the first time our good Kaifang had laid eyes on a naked woman’s body, it had its desired effect, although he was more nervous than anything. She, on the other hand, quickly tired of his faltering. Time, after all, is money in her profession. She sat up.

“Come on,” she said, “what are you waiting for? You can knock off the little-boy act!”

Unfortunately for her, as she sat up her blond wig slipped off and revealed a flattened head with sparse hair, which bowled Kaifang over. Pang Fenghuang’s lovely face beneath a full head of blond hair floated before his eyes. He took a hundred-yuan note out of his pocket, tossed it to the woman, and turned to leave, but not before she jumped to her feet and wrapped herself around him like an octopus.

“You no-account prick!” she cursed. “You’re not getting away that easy, not for a measly hundred yuan!”

She reached down and felt around in his pants while she was cursing, looking for money, of course, but what her hand bumped into was a hard, cold handgun. Knowing he couldn’t let her pull her hand back, he grabbed her wrist for the second time. The beginnings of a scream leaked out of her mouth before she could swallow the rest of it as Kaifang gave her a shove and sent her stumbling back onto the bed.

Kaifang emerged onto the square, where he was hit by a blast of cold air. The alcohol he’d consumed came rushing up into his throat and out onto the ground. The emptying of his stomach served to clear his head, but did nothing to ease the pain in his heart. His mood swung between teeth-clenching anger and heartwarming affection. He hated Fenghuang, and he loved her. When the hatred rose in him, it was swamped by love; when the love ascended, it was beaten back by hatred. During the two days and nights he struggled with these competing feelings, he turned his pistol on himself and contemplated pulling the trigger more than once. Don’t do it, boy! It’s not worth it! Finally, reason won out over emotion.

“She may be a whore,” he said softly to himself, “but I still want her.”

Having made up his mind, once and for all, he returned to the hotel, where he knocked on her door.

“What, you back again?” she said, sounding thoroughly fed up. But he had obviously changed over the past two days. His birthmark was darker, his face thinner, and his brows looked like a pair of caterpillars squirming above his eyes, which were blacker and brighter than before; his glare, so intense it felt as if it were scorching her, and not just her, but her monkey as well, drove the monkey into a corner, where he cowered. “Well, since you’re here,” she said, her tone softer, “you might as well sit down. We can be friends if you’d like, but don’t let me hear any more talk about love.”

“I not only want to talk about love, I want you to be my wife.” With a hard edge to his voice, he continued, “I don’t care if you’ve slept with ten thousand men, or with a monkey, or, for that matter, a tiger or an alligator, I want to marry you.”

That was met with silence. Then, with a laugh, she said:

“Calm down, little Blue Face. You can’t throw a word like love around, and that goes double for marriage.”

“I’m not throwing them around,” he said. “Over the past two days I’ve thought things out carefully. I’m going to give it up, deputy chief, my career as a policeman, everything. I’ll be your gong-beater and become a street performer with you.”

“Enough of that crazy talk. You can’t throw away your future over a woman like me.” Feeling a need to dampen his enthusiasm and lighten the atmosphere, she said, “Tell you what, I’ll marry you if you can turn your blue face white.”

As they say, “Casual words have powerful effects.” Making jokes to a man as deeply in love as he was dangerous business.

Lan Kaifang took sick leave, not caring if his superiors approved or not, and went to Qingdao, where he underwent painful skin graft surgery. When he next showed up at the hotel basement, his face swathed in bandages, Fenghuang was stunned. So was her monkey, possibly recalling the swathed face of Ximen Huan’s killer. He snarled and attacked Kaifang, who knocked him out with a single punch. Then he turned to Fenghuang and, like a man possessed, said:

“I’ve had a skin graft.”

She stood there looking at him as tears welled up in her eyes. He got down on his knees, wrapped his arms around her legs, and laid his head against her belly. She stroked his hair.

“How foolish you are,” she said, nearly sobbing. “How can you be so foolish?”

They embraced, and she gently kissed the side of his face where there was no pain. He picked her up and carried her over to the bed, where they made love.

Blood covered the sheet.

“You’re a virgin!” he said in surprised delight, his tears soaking the bandages covering half his face. “You’re a virgin, my Fenghuang, my love. Why did you say all those things?”

“Who says I’m a virgin?” she said with a pout. “Eight hundred yuan is all it costs to repair a maidenhead.”

“You’re lying again, you little whore, my Fenghuang. . . .” Mindless of the pain, he planted kisses on the body of the prettiest girl in Gaomi County — the whole world, in his eyes.

Fenghuang stroked his body, hard yet pliable, as if put together with branches of a tree, and said, sounding utterly forlorn:

“My god, there’s no way I can get away from you. . . .”

Dear reader, I’d rather not continue with my story, but since I’ve given you a beginning, I need to give you an ending. So here it comes in all its cruelty.