‘What are you doing!’
Zeng said nothing, but stared back at Wang with a certainty that scythed through him. Then, with the same quiet confidence, he got up and walked into one of the toilet stalls. Wang sat and stared at the stall’s open door for a while, with Zeng waiting inside. Then, awkward, messed up and sick with desire, he followed him in.
Three times they were nearly caught. Twice by other patients, stumbling in on night visits to the toilets. They froze in the stall, breathing suspended for as long as it took for the intruder to empty his bladder and leave. Once Nightwarden Guo came in and knocked on the door. ‘Who’s in there?’ Wang’s mind had gone blank with fear, but Zeng, no stranger to these predicaments, flattened himself against the back wall and gestured that Wang go out alone. Wang squeaked open the door, slipped out. ‘What were you doing?’ the nightwarden asked. ‘Using the toilet,’ said Wang. His heart was beating so wildly he thought he would throw it up. ‘Liar,’ said Nightwarden Guo, ‘you were beating the aeroplane. I heard you.’ A head-shake of disgust. ‘Go back to bed, pervert. They should lock you in your room.’
‘This can’t go on much longer. When I leave here, I want to be normal. I don’t want this.’
He swept out his hand, to stand in for what he could not say.
‘I understand,’ said Zeng. ‘Tell me when you want to stop, and we’ll stop.’
‘I’m not like you.’
‘I know.’
‘This hospital has messed me up. When I get out of here I want to get better.’
‘I understand.’
But Wang looked at Zeng and saw he didn’t understand. That he thought it was only a matter of time.
‘Pass the remote, faggot.’
Wang was slouched in a chair in the common room, watching the news. Heat flushed his cheeks, and his ears and scalp tingled. ‘What did you call me?’
‘You heard,’ said Liu Xiaoliang. ‘Everyone knows what you are up to with Zeng Yan.’
The other TV watchers smirked and looked at Wang. Zeng Yan, who was playing poker with Old Chen, said nothing. Wang snapped, ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Everyone’s seen you both sneaking about in the night,’ said Liu Xiaoliang. ‘It’s no secret.’
‘What do you know about anything?’ said Wang. ‘You think you fought the Japanese.’
Liu Xiaoliang, who suffered recurring flashbacks of the Japanese occupation (though he was born in 1970, and his traumatic ‘memories’ came from dramas on TV), took offence.
‘Faggot,’ he said.
Wei Hong pointed at Wang and said, ‘Homosexuality is a crime against the people and homosexual diseases are highly contagious. I want him out of our room. I don’t want to catch anything.’
Old Chen looked up from his playing cards, and said, ‘You can’t catch AIDs from sharing a room, Wei Hong. You only get it from blood transfusions and sex.’
‘I’m with Wei Hong,’ said Gao Ling, perched on his chair on his toes. ‘Wang Jun can’t sleep in our room. We’ve got to ask the doctors to remove him.’
No one was watching TV any more. They were staring at Wang and Zeng, who was studying his fanned-out playing cards.
‘Go fuck yourselves. I’ll sleep where I like.’
Wang glowered at them. What did it matter what these mental patients, cast out from society, thought of him? They hadn’t half a functioning brain between them. Wang got up and walked out of the common room. When he heard footsteps chasing him down the hall, he knew they were Zeng’s, but didn’t stop.
‘Wait!’ called Zeng. ‘Why are you letting them get to you?’
‘Leave me alone,’ Wang said, without looking over his shoulder.
Zeng didn’t catch him up.
It had to stop. So Wang cut Zeng dead, shunning him with his eyes when they passed in the hall, swept the yard or queued for medication. In the canteen, when Zeng sat near him, Wang moved with his rice bowl and chopsticks to another table. The message was clear.
Evading Zeng in the hospital could be done with coldness and determination, but Wang couldn’t evade Zeng in his dreams, where he reappeared night after night. Wang woke in arousal and tenderness from dreams of Zeng in the darkness of the stall; the smoothness of his skin and scent of hormones and sweat. He woke from dreams of the time Zeng clasped his wrist as they lay together on the floor, the heat and pulse of his grip reminding him of the muscle of Zeng’s heart, banging away in his chest. Wang woke from these dreams aching with a loss he hadn’t known since Shuxiang died, and he’d lain grieving every night on cold, damp dormitory sheets.
The hospital was lonely without Zeng. But this could be endured. He had lived with loneliness for twenty-two years before he met Zeng, and he could go back to it. What he couldn’t live with was the shame. What he couldn’t live with was the guilt and disgust.
A shadow descended on the copy of Tang Dynasty poems Wang was reading on the bed. He didn’t look up.
‘You think you can just ignore me?’
Wang ignored him and turned a page. He read the first verse of a poem over and over, not comprehending a word. Zeng broke the silence again.
‘Say something. I won’t go away until you do.’
And, knowing that Zeng would stand over him until he spoke, Wang responded without lifting his eyes, ‘You’re blocking the light.’
‘What happened, Wang Jun? Why have you changed?’
‘You promised me that when I wanted to stop, we would stop.’
‘But why stop being friends? Why stop speaking to me?’
‘I just can’t any more.’
Wang turned another page. He could sense Zeng searching for the words and reasoning to show him the error of his ways.
‘You know what I think, Wang Jun?’ he said. ‘I think you are lying to yourself. You are scared of who you really are.’
Wang’s head snapped up in agitation and he started to see how pale and enervated Zeng had become. But his suffering wasn’t enough to shift the anger in Wang. Zeng’s suffering was his own fault.
‘What you think is wrong,’ Wang said. ‘I know who I am, and I’m not like you. When I get out of here I want a normal life. I told you before.’
‘In my work I meet lots of normal men like you,’ said Zeng. ‘They come to me because they are miserable with their normal lives. They come to me to feel alive.’ He paused to let this sink in. Then he continued in a gentler tone, ‘Stick with me when we get out of here, and that won’t happen to you.’
Wang slammed his book shut and stood up. It had been a mistake to talk to Zeng. It had been a mistake to think anything but silence would work.
‘When I get out of here,’ Wang said, ‘I want to forget I ever knew you. And while I am still here, I want nothing to do with you. Don’t speak to me. Don’t come near me. Don’t even look at me. Got that?’
Wang watched Zeng’s face slacken in dismay then tighten with rage.
‘You know what you are?’ spat Zeng. ‘You are a eunuch. A eunuch who has castrated himself. You are so frightened of what other people will think you cut off your own genitals.’
Laughter and the sounds of ping pong in the yard drifted through the window. Nervous of Zeng making a hysterical scene and attracting a crowd, Wang took his book of poetry and went out the door.
‘Go then, Wang Jun,’ Zeng called after him. ‘Go and live like a eunuch then. You’ll regret it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ muttered Wang.
‘You will,’ said Zeng. ‘You will.’
Old Chen shook him awake the next morning. ‘He’s overdosed,’ he said.
‘What?’ Wang yawned as he sat up, rubbing his bleary eyes.
He could hear the shriek of trolley wheels out in the hall and the nurses shouting at patients, ‘Go back into your rooms! Go back into your rooms!’