The Incarnations (20 page)

On the thirty-first day of driving around Beijing, Wang caves in. He parks the taxi and walks down the side-alley, neon-lit at dusk, past the baijiu and tobacco sellers and the prostitutes behind glass. Alone in the barber’s, Zeng beams as Wang pushes through the door. Zeng, with the fading handsome looks. Zeng, with the sinewy, wiry body of a contortionist, making Wang self-conscious of his middle-aged sag and spread.

‘Driver Wang. What can I do for you?’ he asks, and before Wang can even respond, shakes out the hairdressing cape.

Wang hands himself over to Zeng. Allows Zeng to cape him, swivel him in a chair, lather him up with shampoo, rinse him in the sink, trim and blow-dry. And then finally, wordlessly, lead him to a back room, a room of shadows and secret extramarital goings-on, messy with tissues, foil strips of condoms and pump-action dispensers of lubricant. Wang sits on the clean-sheeted, firm-mattressed bed, and Zeng sits beside him and strokes his cheek. He leans to Wang and kisses him, chastely, on the lips. ‘I have been waiting for you,’ he says. ‘I have been waiting for the past ten years.’ And Wang rests his confused and weary head on Zeng’s shoulder and closes his eyes. He does not know how long Zeng holds him for. He does not know how he ends up lying back on the bed with Zeng moving over him; his lips grazing his neck, his tongue blazing a trail of goosebumps as it roams; his hands sliding under his shirt and the waistband of his jeans. It’s as though it’s predestined, and out of his control. Later, they lie side by side, staring up at the ceiling and the halo of light cast by the lamp’s round shade as they speak in murmurs. Wang speaks of the emptiness of driving around Beijing. He speaks of feeling only half alive. ‘Except for now,’ Zeng says. He shapes cigarette smoke in his mouth and blows it out in concentric rings. Then he leans on his arm, propping his head up and gazing at Wang as though his eyes are made of electricity. Wang has to break from Zeng’s gaze. Shifting his eyes back to the ceiling, he says, ‘I liked your letter.’

‘What letter?’

‘The one with the story,’ Wang says. ‘I know you didn’t write it yourself. Where did you steal it from?’

‘Story?’

‘The one about the slaves.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Driver Wang.’

‘Why are you lying?’

‘No. Honestly. I don’t.’

Wang’s phone beeps in his jacket, on the coat hook on the door.

‘What time is it?’ Wang asks.

‘Eight o’clock,’ says Zeng.

‘Shit. I have to go,’ Wang says.

But he lacks the strength to get up from the bed. The mattress, though deceptively firm, has the undertow of quicksand.

‘Happy birthday, by the way,’ says Zeng.

‘You remembered my birthday?’

‘April fourth, isn’t it? Your thirty-second.’

‘I’m an old-timer now,’ says Wang. ‘Not long for the crematorium . . .’

Zeng, who turned thirty-two a month earlier, laughs.

‘Thirty-two is the best age there is,’ he says. ‘Wait and see, Driver Wang. Your life has only just begun . . .’

The wave of remorse hits Wang as he walks through the door. Half past eight and the apartment is full of the aromas of his thirty-second-birthday banquet, simmering under various pot lids on the stove. On TV an auditorium of dark-suited Communist Party officials are gathered for some event. As the camera pans out for a wide-angled shot, the officials look as identical as laboratory-made genetic clones.

‘Ba! We’ve been waiting two hours!’ shouts Echo. ‘We’re starving to death!’

Yida stands at the gas stove, yet to acknowledge her husband’s late homecoming. In the kitchen doorway, Wang pleads his case. He had to drive a fare twenty kilometres to the Fragrant Hills. Got caught in a traffic jam on the way back, then the credit ran out on his phone. Yida is dishing up in an efficient manner, with none of her characteristic domestic languor. A warning to Wang that she is unconvinced. She pours a boiling saucepan of longevity noodles – handmade that afternoon from her mother’s Anhui recipe – into a colander. Geysers of steam rush up from the cold aluminium kitchen sink, pinkening her skin. Tendrils of damp curls fall across her eyes and she pushes them back with her forearm. At last, she looks at her husband and remarks, ‘Another haircut, Wang? Getting vain in your old age.’

‘I’m starved!’ yells Echo. ‘Can we eat now? Before I die?’

The dishes are arranged on the table: phoenix-tailed prawns, spicy chicken wings, and Tianjin cabbage with chilli peppers. A bottle of lime-coloured fizzy drink which Yida pours out into paper party cups (to be rinsed after dinner and stacked in the cupboard for reuse). Later there will be pink-iced sponge cake, chosen by Echo from the Good Fortune Bakery. There will be candles and a round of ‘Happy Birthday to You’.

Hungry, they commence eating without fanfare. Yida watches Wang as he attempts to slurp up each noodle in its entirety (a superstition from childhood, to ensure a catastrophe-free year ahead) and, noticing her contempt, Wang bites. He is nostalgic for his twenty-second birthday, when his young wife’s only gift to him was her teasing laughter and her lovely slender body, which he had dragged by the ankles across their bed. He thinks of the way he rested his weary head on Zeng’s shoulder. The way he felt when Zeng had held him; as though it was the only place that he truly belonged.

After dinner Wang unwraps his presents. An air-freshener for his taxi. A bootleg DVD of a Hollywood action movie. A comic book that Echo has made for him, called ‘The Beijing Taxi Driver’. The comic is eight pages long, each page divided into four strips. The main character is a cartoon version of Wang: a superhero taxi driver who fights racoon-masked criminals. (‘I’ll rid this city of corruption if it’s the last thing I do!’ his alter ego shouts.) Echo is anxious and expectant as he turns the stapled pages, and Wang smiles to reassure her.

‘Very impressive, Echo! When you are a world-famous artist, this comic will become a collector’s item, worth millions of yuan!’

Each panel is painstakingly illustrated, and Wang is proud and touched by the effort she has made. He reads aloud from ‘The Beijing Taxi Driver’, and Echo interrupts to expand on plot lines and the good or evil nature of the characters. But as Wang listens to her chattering and praises her hard work, Zeng and the narcotic undertow of the back room seeps into his mind. And he smiles and nods, struggling not to seem too distracted as the simple, uncomplicated joy he derives from Echo’s company begins to fade.

At ten o’clock that evening the phone rings. The landline rings infrequently, and Yida answers in a surprised tone of voice. She passes the receiver to Wang. ‘Lin Hong,’ she mouths.

Wasting no time with greetings, Lin Hong tells Wang that his father wishes to see him. That he would like to wish him happy birthday.

‘Now? Isn’t it past his bedtime?’

‘I am just the messenger. Whether you come or not is your own concern.’

Lin Hong does not wish Wang happy birthday herself or even enquire how he is.

Wang puts on his coat and walks to his father’s apartment. He walks at a brisk pace down Nongzhanguan North Road and Chaoyang Park East Road. When he arrives at his father’s his heart is pumping and his cheeks bright. Lin Hong opens the door, unsmiling in a herb-infused muslin facial mask, showing a glimpse of lacy negligee beneath her cherry-blossom kimono robe. She juts her chin in the direction of the living room, billowing Japanese silk as she turns on her heel back to her mandarin-dubbed Korean soap opera and pillow-arrayed queen-sized bed.

The east wall of the living room is made entirely of glass. The view of Beijing from the tenth floor is of thousands of lights in many wattages of brightness and car headlights gliding up and down the Fourth ring road, shining through the dark. Looking out at the cityscape, Wang senses the electricity surging through the grid and being consumed by the district of Chaoyang. The living-room lights are out, and the night-time view is so mesmerizing that Wang does not immediately see his father, the dark hump of him parked in the shadows. When he does, he starts and turns on a lamp. His father blinks, and Wang wonders if this once-intimidating man, who once commanded the attention of a room, is sad to have gone unseen.

‘Ba,’ says Wang, ‘you wanted to see me?’

His father smiles at him, slumped in his blue-striped pyjamas, his chin resting on his collar bone. A fleecy blanket is tucked over his lap and his hair is neatly combed and parted on the left. Wang knows that if he were to lean down and hug his wheelchair-bound father (though they are not and were never on hugging terms), he would smell toothpaste and soap. He’d smell aftershave and the talcum powder sprinkled on him when his incontinence pad is changed. Lin Hong is irreproachable in matters of grooming, and Wang’s father would pass the most rigorous of hygiene inspections, at any time of night or day. But Wang isn’t fooled. Her attention to cleanliness is just an excuse for the many petty indignities she visits upon him in his debilitated state.

Wang stands there expectantly. ‘Ba? Is everything okay?’

Across the night sky aeroplane tail lights blink in arcs of descent. Wang’s father’s mouth comes ajar and a strand of saliva threads his lips. He has a book on his lap. He holds it out and Wang takes it. It is a hardback edition of the
The Book of Odes
, red and pocket-sized. The spine creaks as Wang opens it and turns the brittle yellow pages of traditional script in faded ink. Second edition, 1908. The book is a century old. Why has his father, who is not a reader, given him a gift of poetry? Wang thanks his father, uncertainly.

‘Your mother,’ says his father. ‘It was hers.’

In the nineteen years since her death, he has only ever mentioned Li Shuxiang in passing, to make sneering comparisons:
Like mother, like son
. Wang stares at his father, sees the shimmer of regret in his eyes and is disgusted. What a cliché, Wang thinks, that the crippled old man is getting sentimental in his old age. Why didn’t he feel the sting of conscience back when it mattered, when she was alive? Wang is not convinced. Restore the strength to his legs, and the motor function to his left side, and he’ll be back to his ways of cruelty, philandering and excess at once. Wang puts the book in his jacket pocket. He thinks back to when he was a child, to the stacks of books around his mother’s bed. He can’t remember ever seeing
The Book of Odes
.

He thanks his father. Out of politeness, he stays for another ten minutes, before apologizing for keeping him up past his bedtime and seeing himself out the front door.

After midnight Wang arrives home for the second time that day. Echo and Yida are asleep in their beds. Slouched in the bedroom doorway, fists rammed in his jacket pockets, he watches over them like an intruder in his own home. His father’s mawkishness has left him with a bitter aftertaste. But who is he to cast moral judgements?
Like father, like son
. There and then, in the bedroom doorway, he resolves to be a loyal husband and father, no matter what. But, for all his good intentions, he can’t get Zeng’s voice out of his head.

‘Thirty-two is the best age there is. Wait and see, Driver Wang. Your life has only just begun . . .’

SIX O’CLOCK, BELLS
ring. Time for breakfast at quarter past. Bowls of rice porridge, cups of tea. On Sundays, an egg. Eight o’clock, exercises in the yard. Cassette tape in the battery-operated stereo, they jogged on the spot. Eight thirty, they queued for medication. Tongues poked out for inspection by the nurses, supervising the swallowing of pills. Eight thirty-five, a woman from Ward C dived to the floor, dodging bullets. ‘
They are cracking down again! They are shooting at us! Get down or be killed!
’ she yelled, grabbing at the legs of other patients until the doctors rushed over with a hypodermic syringe.

Summer in the hospital, and there was no escape from the heat. Most of the patients became lethargic, as though tranquillized. They stripped to damp vests and sagging underpants and lay on the cement floor, limbs stretched out in a plea for mercy. The heat was an amphetamine to others, who paced the ward, hyperactive and loud, and it was mescaline to those who shrieked of scorpions, shaking out bedclothes and banging shoe heels on the walls. The heat intensified paranoia in the minds of some, who accused the doctors and nurses of poisoning the drinking water and the other patients of stealing their clothes.

Caged fans whirred but barely moved the suffocating air, and the breeze wasn’t tempted through the open windows into the wards. Wang couldn’t escape his own sweat and was slippery night and day. Showers brought relief but, as soon as he turned off the spray, dampness seeped up again through his pores. The whorls of his fingers marked everything he touched. When he ran his tongue over his upper lip he tasted brine.

Reality slowed in the heat, but Zeng Yan was perpetually on the move, shuffling cards, rattling mah-jong tiles, chasing ping-pong balls in the yard and never breaking into a sweat. ‘I’m a southerner,’ he said, explaining why the heat didn’t knock him out. ‘This is winter in Guangzhou.’ Every day, Zeng looked for Wang, and they talked for hours. Wang watched Zeng’s sharp cheekbones and sensual mouth as he talked, and saw how he could oscillate between genders; how a few strokes of make-up would transform him into an exquisite drag queen. Zeng was blasé about what he did for a living. When talking about his profession to Wang, he was matter of fact.

‘Get in, make money, get out,’ he said. ‘Better than working in a factory. Better than doing the job of a machine. Everyone sells something about themselves, and I sell my body. But only while I am young and good-looking. Those older men in their thirties are pathetic. They make a pittance! Who wants to fuck those ageing losers? I’ll quit long before then. By the time I’m thirty I’ll be the boss of my own company.’

When Zeng spoke of his experiences, Wang listened, rapt. Zeng the hustler, in parks and bars. Zeng the houseboy, a domesticated pet for wealthy men. Zeng on his knees for a policeman in the public toilets near Tiananmen Square. Zeng in a steamy sauna with a group of Hong Kong CEOs. He had been raped and beaten, but he spoke of this with detachment.