‘You’re not from Beijing, are you?’ Wang says, hoping to strike up a conversation. ‘Where’s your hometown?’
‘I know who you are,’ mutters the boy, not looking up from his sweeping. ‘I know what you did to Zeng Yan in the hospital.’
Wang lurches inside at the mention of the hospital.
‘Whatever happened to him in the hospital was his own doing.’
The boy slams the broom upright, leans towards Wang and says, ‘You must have a hole where your conscience should be! He went through hell because of you. Why have you come back into his life, harassing him again? What do you want?’
Outside, sheets of rain are crashing down, dissolving the city in polluted waters. Wang shakes his head at him. No, he thinks, you have it wrong. Zeng is harassing me, not the other way round. But Wang won’t argue with the boy. He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with.
‘Look,’ Wang says. ‘All I want is to talk to Zeng Yan. I am not here to harass him. I want to speak to him, then I’ll go, and I won’t come back. You have my word. .’
‘Come back,’ the boy says, ‘and I’ll tell your wife.’
Wang is angry enough to hit him. He opens his mouth to tell him how sorry he’ll be if he goes anywhere near Yida, when the door swings wide. Zeng is out of breath and soaked by the downpour. Beads of water drip from his wet hair and glide down his cheeks.
‘Wang.’ Zeng smiles. ‘Good to see you.’
Wang can’t smile back. Though Zeng is casual, the longing that drove him to Apartment 404 last night shows through his eyes. Zeng looks between Wang and the boy and sees at once what’s been going on.
‘Wu Fei, we need shampoo,’ he says. ‘Go to Jingkelong and buy three bottles of the stuff we bought last week. And gel spray too.’
Zeng peels a 100-RMB note from his wallet and hands it to Wu Fei. The boy throws down the broom and storms out into the rain without a jacket or umbrella. He is drenched in seconds.
‘Please understand,’ says Zeng, ‘he has no family in Beijing. No friends. I’m all he has. He’s protective of me.’
Out in the alley, Wu Fei turns his head and shoots one last hostile look at Wang through the rain. Wang shakes his head. I am not your enemy, he thinks. You are your own worst enemy, boy.
The back room is dark and stuffy, and the bedsheets, though pulled straight, bear the residual stains and odours of men who have come and gone. In the low-wattage light Zeng reaches for Wang’s cheek and leans in. Wang pushes him back, his fingers in Zeng’s dripping-wet hair. ‘That’s not what I am here for,’ he says, though part of him, the weak, libidinous part, wants to give in, the way he had before.
Zeng doesn’t pressure him. He nods in acknowledgement of the changing rules and steps back. He pulls out his cigarettes and offers one to Wang, who refuses, wanting to make a habit of saying no. All day Wang has been unnerved by Zeng and his stalking. But now Zeng is in front of him he sees there’s nothing ominous or menacing about this slight and angular man offering him a cigarette.
Mattress springs creak as Zeng sits down. He pats the bed besides him, but Wang shakes his head and remains standing. Zeng shivers in his soaking T-shirt and flicks the cog of his faulty lighter over and over, trying to spark a flame.
‘Why did you come to my home last night?’ Wang asks.
‘Huh?’
Zeng’s cigarette remains unlit in his fingers as he looks up.
‘Last night, why did you come to my home?’
‘I was nowhere near your home last night. I don’t even know where you live.’
‘Bullshit. I saw you with my own eyes.’
Not exactly true. But Wang wants him to know there is nowhere to hide.
‘Then you were mistaken. I was here last night, Wang Jun. Sleeping in this bed. Ask Wu Fei. .’
‘I’ve come to warn you not to come near my home again,’ Wang says, ‘because next time I will go to the police. I will show them the letters too.’
‘Letters? What letters?’
‘The letters you have been leaving in my taxi.’
‘I don’t know about any letters. .’
Wang clenches his jaw. ‘Where do you steal the stories from?’ he asks.
‘What stories?’
‘The past-life stories. Where do they come from? Books? The internet? I know you don’t write them yourself.’
‘Past-life stories?’ Zeng widens his eyes. ‘You’re scaring me, Wang Jun.’
Zeng does look shaken, but Wang warns himself not to be taken in.
‘You forget how well I know you, Zeng Yan,’ Wang says. ‘The letters, the stalking, this is your way of getting me back for the stuff that happened in the hospital, isn’t it? I know you well, Zeng. I know how your mind works. You need help.’
Zeng flicks the cog of his lighter again, and it finally shoots out a flame. The cigarette shakes in his hand as he lights up.
‘I don’t need help,’ he says. ‘I’m not the same person you knew back in the hospital. That was ten years ago. I’ve changed.’ He takes another drag. Smoke drifts out of his nostrils and his eyebrows hunch over dark, troubled eyes. ‘I haven’t been stalking you. And I never wrote you any letters, because I can’t write. Not with a pen and paper. Not on a computer. I can’t even fill out a form. Wu Fei has to do it for me. What they did to me in that other hospital, the one I went to after the overdose, messed up my brain for good.’
Zeng expels smoke from his lungs. ‘They never cured my “abnormality”, but they left me illiterate, and with killer migraines and blackouts too. .’
For a moment Wang aches with pity for Zeng. Then doubt kicks in. When he was younger, working in Guangzhou, Zeng used to pretend that his mother had cancer, to trick men into donating money for ‘hospital fees’. ‘Cheat or be cheated,’ that was once his motto in life.
‘You are lying,’ Wang says. ‘You are making this up.’
‘I’m not lying,’ Zeng says. ‘I don’t know where you live. I have never written you any letters. And I would never harass you or your family. I care for you too much, Wang Jun. I care for you now as much as I did back in the hospital. .’
And Wang knows the last part of what Zeng says is true. That Zeng is just as obsessed with him as when they were twenty-two.
‘You know what I want you to do?’ Wang says.
Zeng looks at him miserably.
‘I want you to leave me alone. No more letters. No more stalking. Come near my family again and I will go to the police, and they will arrest you and put you back in the mental hospital where you belong.’
Zeng slumps on the bed, looking too dejected to speak. But he nods at Wang and says, ‘Okay.’
17. The Fifth Letter
DID YOU KNOW Yida is a reincarnate too? In her first life she was a flea who lived in the fur of a stray dog. She guzzled the dog’s blood and used her hind legs to leap out of harm’s way when the mongrel’s claws scratched at the itch of her. In Yida’s second life she was a tapeworm, hooked on to the intestinal wall of a cow. She grew to two metres in length on the cow’s ingested grass and caused a gut-ache so severe the beast lowed in constant pain.
Though human in her third life, Yida is still a parasite. She saps your energy as you sleep, Driver Wang, so you wake exhausted, feeling as though another decade has been dumped on you in the night. She weakens your immune system, which is why your lungs are losing the battle against the carcinogenic air. Yida has a degenerative effect on her customers at Dragonfly Massage too. They lie on the massage table and she kneads her hatred and malcontent into their backs. She pummels their muscles and they become knotted, misshapen and wrought. Under her fingers, cells fissure and spilt. Benign lumps of tissue turn malignant. Blood pressure rises and the blood thickens with thrombosis clots. Yida’s customers hobble out of Dragonfly Massage bent out of shape, but they think that the stiffness and aching is part of the healing process. Unaware of the damage Yida is doing, they return to her week after week, caught in a deteriorating cycle of pain.