Students at Beida spend a lot of time in the library.’
‘Yeah? How much time did you spend in the library?’
‘Seven hours a day,’ said Wang, ‘more during exams.’
Zeng hooted. ‘No wonder you went fucking crazy!’
The bell rang for lights out, and Zeng sauntered out of the bathroom, shaking his head and laughing: ‘Seven hours a day!’ And Wang had to admit he had a point.
Wang had never had a friend like Zeng before. At university Wang’s friends were similar to him, studious and hard-working, the passing of exams the focal point of their lives. They lost control sometimes — spraining an ankle during a drunken fall or getting in trouble for sneaking a girl into the dorms. But never to the extent that it wrecked their lives, or even got in the way of their handing an essay in on time.
Zeng, in contrast, was as out of control as a car skidding on ice. He had dropped out of school at fifteen when a sleazy older boyfriend convinced him he didn’t need a high school diploma to succeed. The boyfriend then pimped Zeng out, exploiting him for over a year. When they split up, Zeng went to work as a host in a Guangzhou nightclub. He bragged to Wang of how desired and sought after he was there, and of the money and extravagant gifts his patrons had showered him with: leather jackets and stereos, gold chains and rings. A millionaire from Hong Kong had even rented a luxury apartment for Zeng to live in as his ‘second wife’ (an arrangement that ended after six weeks, when the Hong Kong millionaire came home unexpectedly to catch Zeng and his boyfriend in the jacuzzi together). Zeng boasted of his rich and powerful clientele, hoping to impress Wang. But Wang saw nothing to envy in the career of a prostitute.
Zeng told Wang he was six when he knew he was gay. ‘I was in the acupuncturist’s waiting room with my father, and there was a diagram of a man on the wall. The male body. Full-frontal, back and sides. I stared and stared at that diagram, and I have always known, since that day. .’
When he was a teenager Zeng’s mother had attempted to cure him of his effeminacy. She had crushed up herbal pills and sprinkled them into his meals behind his back. ‘I had an upset stomach and diarrhoea for months. I didn’t know what was wrong, until I caught her one day, stirring the pills into my soup. She wasn’t sorry. She said I was abnormal. She said I had too much yin and not enough yang, and the medicine would even me out. She said I had to stop being such a girly-boy, or I’d never find a wife. I told her straight. “Ma,” I said, “I will never marry.” She lost her temper and screamed that I was an unfilial son. That I would dishonour our ancestors by not continuing our family line.’ Zeng rolled his eyes. ‘I said, “Fuck our ancestors, Ma. They are dead in their graves. What do they care if I walk like a girl?”’
Before Zeng, Wang had never spoken of his past. ‘Boring,’ he said, when friends asked what his childhood was like. ‘Just a housewife,’ he said, when they asked about his mother. The past had a power over Wang, silencing him and crippling him with shame. But there was no need for censorship with Zeng. He was the first person Wang confided in about his mother’s breakdown. The first person he told about his father wrenching his shoulder out of joint. As he recounted his father’s abuse, Wang became panicky and short of breath. But then he looked up and saw Zeng, listening on the end of his bed, and the power of the past was somehow lessened. Zeng had been through this stuff too. Zeng’s mother had drunk a bottle of weedkiller when he was twelve. His father had beaten him and thrown him out on the streets when he found out he was gay. Zeng spoke of these incidents dismissively, laughing at his parents and the damage they’d done, and encouraging Wang to do the same.
‘What were you arrested for?’ Wang asked.
They were sweeping the yard on a breezy morning in March. The Secretary-General of the United Nations was on the bench in his pyjamas, waving his hands about as he chaired a summit on Third World hunger. Two young women had abandoned cleaning duty for ping pong, giggling as they missed the ball, over and over again. Zeng leant on the handle of his broom.
‘I burnt down a shed in an alley in Dongcheng.’
‘Why?’ Wang asked.
‘I saw my ex, Dragon, moving about behind the windows. So I poured lighter fluid on the door and struck a match. By the time the firemen got there the shed had burnt to the ground.’
Wang was shaken by this. ‘Was Dragon in the shed?’
‘No. He was in Shenzhen. I just imagined it.’
‘But you started the fire because you thought Dragon was there? You wanted to burn him to death?’
Zeng’s brow knotted. ‘I knew Dragon was in Shenzhen,’ he decided, ‘but he was on my mind when I started the fire. . I was mad at him, and setting fire to the shed was something to do. . like a release. . I regret it now.’
Wang was disturbed. People didn’t go about starting fires for ‘a release’. Zeng looked down at his mutilated forearm. The scars were deep and destructive, as though repeatedly slashed with a knife, and he stroked them with a masochistic pride. Though they had broken up years ago, Zeng still wrote letters to Dragon, which he bribed a dishwasher in the kitchen to smuggle out and post to the Shenzhen nightclub where he was a bartender. Two weeks ago, when they were queuing for medication, Zeng had shown one of the letters to Wang. The letter listed his ex-boyfriend’s crimes: the times he’d cheated on Zeng, the money he’d ‘borrowed’ and the lies he’d told. Then, near the letter’s end, Zeng swung from hate to love. Dragon was his soulmate. His love for Dragon, like the tattoo on his arm, would never fade.
‘Do you think he reads your letters?’ Wang had asked.
‘No,’ said Zeng. ‘He throws them away.’
‘Then why bother?’ Wang asked, baffled. ‘Why waste your time?’
And Zeng, with a pitying look in his eyes, had said, ‘The problem with you, Wang Jun, is that you’ve never been in love.’
In the yard, Zeng bent over his broom, the stiff bristles scratching concrete as he swept cigarette ends and burnt matches into a pile. Were all gay men like this when they were ‘in love’? Wang wondered. Irrational? Obsessive? Deranged? Wang knew no other homosexual men to compare Zeng to but decided this was probably the case. As though reading Wang’s mind, Zeng said, ‘Don’t think badly of me. I’ve changed. I don’t care about Dragon any more. I’m over him now.’
Zeng didn’t look up, and his head was a tangle of dark roots and peroxide as he swept.
‘Yeah?’ said Wang. ‘How come?’
‘I only think of you these days.’
Bent over his broom Zeng’s gaze was indecipherable. The women from Ward C giggled as they swung their paddles wide of the ping-pong ball. The Secretary-General of the United Nations struck the bench as he argued with the President of France and the Prime Minister of Japan. And at a loss for what to say, or even what to think, Wang Jun went back to sweeping up the cigarette butts scattered in the yard, putting what Zeng had said out of his mind.
11. The Watcher
YIDA IS WORKING nights at Dragonfly Massage. She leaves home at 4 p.m. in her clinical white uniform and flat-soled shoes and works through the hours of darkness until dawn. Her shadow moves across the walls of private rooms with the lights dimmed low as she massages body after body. Due to shyness, lack of curiosity and fatigue, Yida does not talk much with her customers. She knows the bodies of her regulars, the skin-braille of moles, the birthmarks, stretch marks and post-operative scars, but not the jobs they do or the lives they lead. She knows the flaws and frailties of the flesh, hidden under her customers’ clothes, but she doesn’t know their names.