23.
A dark red sky—already it has the luster of velvet. Beloved brothers, beloved sisters: we are defeated, and the whole world knows it.
After Saining came back from Japan, he didn’t fall back into his old slacker ways. Instead he moved his book-and-record store from Beijing to Shanghai. The store was full of his paintings and the records he’d collected, and customers could come to the store to read, drink tea, and listen to music. Although the store didn’t make any money, it didn’t lose money either. But arranging for licenses and moving around like that did burn up a lot of cash. He couldn’t just pick up and go whenever he pleased anymore. He had to watch his money.
It’s
1999
, and we still share a bed every night, and we share a headset as we drift off to sleep. Occasionally he masturbates in the morning, while looking at a cartoon drawing of a Japanese middle school girl. He calls her his girlfriend. This is what he tells me, anyway. I’ve never actually seen it.
My writing has placed me in an extremely messy and confusing situation. I’m hot right now, but not because of my writing. All I did was write about a bunch of kids from a socialist country who took a lot of drugs, but God only knows what was really in the stuff they took, because they didn’t get off at all. Instead they were totally fucked up. Our idiotic drug experiences were completely determined by our education. Our minds were empty, but drugs couldn’t give us imagination. We didn’t know what it was to feel pleasure, so all we had was our collective destruction. I am the one who has written these stories, but everything that is to come will seem like an even more pointless ritual. A lot of crazy things have happened. This world is full of con artists and charlatans. It’s a pathetic, materialistic age, and I’ve been asking myself, Why do you want to write?
I’ve begun planning all kinds of huge dance parties. I want to see a thousand lonely strangers dancing happily at my party. This feels more real to me than writing, because I think that the Chinese people need to dance—they need to open up their bodies. I want to make everyone dance, and if they won’t dance, I’ll trick them into dancing.
On weekend nights, Saining and I are a couple of “hunting buddies.” Bearing our common illusions, we always go out together on weekends. After we heard some rumors that police from the provinces were going to raid the clubs and give all the Chinese there urine tests, we were afraid to take E anymore.
But we still get fucked up every Friday and Saturday night, sleeping and not eating all day Sunday, dumbstruck on Monday, sad on Tuesday, better by Wednesday, and starting to think about Friday when Thursday rolls around. Talking a lot of bullshit to Saining after getting fucked up is a lot of fun. Sometimes we play guitar together into the tape recorder. All these random fragments you’ve just read are something Saining and I created together—that’s how they came out on the tape.
If you knew my friend Apple, please listen to some Chopin. If you liked him, please don’t use a candle to light a cigarette ever again. If you loved him, please leave the door open when you bathe, and let in some fresh air.
It doesn’t matter, but he left with a calm expression. It doesn’t matter, but soaking in the bathtub was his favorite thing. It doesn’t matter, but when he smoked those cheap, lousy cigarettes of his, he would often say, What’s the point of worrying? We all have to die sometime.
He once said, Human life is suffering, and once you understand this, you will be completely free.
He once said, If you can love with abandon, then you can relax and stop worrying.
He said, Love should be an incomparable radiance.
Once he’d come to these realizations, he left us. It doesn’t matter, but he went in his favorite bathtub. His lover was in another room, talking on the phone, and by the time the two-hour conversation was over, my friend Apple was already in another place. It doesn’t matter, but he loved his lover. We know that, and that’s enough. Apple was the person who took me to my first café, when a cup of coffee cost five
yuan
in Shanghai. That sidewalk café was called Little Brocade River. Shanghai was like his lover. He took me to so many streets and boulevards. He said that Shanghai’s four seasons were so distinct, and that this had always kept his senses sharp. He said, Especially in the winter. In the winter I feel a strange kind of excitement when I’m wandering through the little alleys and lanes. He’d always wanted a comfortable bathtub; the one he had now was his first. The bathroom was too small, but he insisted on putting a child’s bathtub in there. The bathroom really was much too small, and there was no ventilation. He didn’t die because of fate; he died because of an accident, and he died because of his standard of living. He died in the cold and cloudy Shanghai winter. It’s not important, but he was beautiful, and he always had been beautiful. He knew more than any of us about how to enjoy life, and he would walk for hours just to get a good price on some high-quality goods—that’s how he was. He died in the first bathtub he’d ever owned. It doesn’t matter, but he’d already possessed countless bathtubs—in the magazines he saved, and in his mind. The world is so big, but he never even went to Hong Kong. He always said, I really just want to go abroad to see what it’s like. He didn’t even have a computer, but it didn’t matter, because he had been everywhere and seen everything in his mind, through information he’d come by in every way imaginable, and through his eyes.
I held Apple. His body was full of water. His expression was so peaceful, but I suddenly felt overwhelmed by countless regrets. I felt I hadn’t really understood him. The air always carries the scent of souls, a scent that is always sweet, but where do our spirits go in the end? We don’t understand death, nor do we understand ourselves. Nor do we understand even our lovers, or our friends of many years—no matter how close we might become, we can never really grasp the truth about one another. We are condemned to solitude, doomed to live in confusion, and nothing we’ve done so far has been able to resolve our yearning.
Apple once said to me, We should go to Thailand together and go sit at that temple, where we can keep vigil over the body of an eighteen-year-old. We’ll watch over his beauty, his youth, and his decay, until finally there is nothing left of him.
Apple once said to me, Life is like a bridge that connects what’s gone before with what is to come. Everything will become more pure and precious and ultimately clearer in its own time.
Apple once said to me, As long as there is chaos, there will always be hope for Truth and Beauty. And what’s kept us from attaining these things is our bodies.
It doesn’t matter, because some people can never really be separated.
There’s just one thing, though. What about all of the clothing he picked out with such care, all of the shoes and the jewelry—didn’t he want them anymore?
Whenever I think of him, I listen to Chopin. Not that I know whether or not Apple liked Chopin. We never discussed it.
Death gave my friend Apple the wings of an angel, and he’ll wear them to all of his friends’ banquets.
I didn’t go to Apple’s funeral. I took him a note instead: “No one can ever take your place, spending time with me, sharing all of my toys with me!”
Apple, we didn’t wear black armbands, because wearing black armbands is too conventional, and you’d like us to look pretty.
Apple, I’m glad that I knew you.
I sleep in the ruins, in splinters and ash.
What died was your beauty.
That window on your soul
Changed, became earnestly transparent.
You will never return.
You will never return.
But who says?
— MIAN MIAN
I felt black eyes boring into the back of my head through a part in hair blown about wildly by the wind, and then there was his breathing, rendered harsh by his illness. When I turned around, his last footfall settled like ash before my eyes. Kiwi was wearing a long black leather kilt. It dragged on the floor, looking like a big black fan, the dark fan of the night.
I caught a whiff of Kiwi’s cologne, and I touched him, as if my sorrow had lost its strength.
I said, Our Apple is gone! The moon looks like a child’s face!
He embraced me, and we went somewhere. I wanted to talk, but he couldn’t wait to screw my ass again, and this time the pain touched my heart.
We didn’t talk on the phone anymore.
Once, I had wanted to pass all of my craziness and confusion on to this man, which was why I’d desperately wanted to be controlled. Once, I had wanted to be on handbills all over Shanghai with this man. Once, I had yearned for a love that could release me from my weaknesses.
But someone had put a curse in our drinks. We were broken, and we needed surgeons to fix us.
Saining went out to the suburbs of Beijing with a pair of scissors and cut a large quantity of marijuana and brought it back here. We sat around every day with our milk shakes while he used a big wicker sieve to pick out the seeds. I’d sit beside him rolling. I would work awhile, smoke a joint, and drink some milk shake. And then I’d work a little more and smoke another joint, and after that, we’d sleep some more. There isn’t any nice scenery in this city, but we have music.
Today, Saining made some kind of soup with all kinds of Chinese medicinal herbs in it. After we’d finished our soup, I said, Saining, let’s play dueling DJs, OK? I’ll put something on upstairs, and you can put something on downstairs. First you play something, and then I’ll go, and we can just take it from there. How ’bout it?
And we started to play records. We played records for five hours straight, not stopping for even one minute.
Afterward I went and took a bath. After my bath, I saw that Saining was chatting with someone on the Internet. Can I join you? I asked. Saining introduced me to the other person, and then he said he was going to go take a bath. I waited until he’d come out of the bathroom to say, I don’t feel like playing anymore. Saining said, Why? Didn’t we agree that we’d talk together? I said, I don’t want to play this game. I want to watch a DVD.
Saining came downstairs at once and sat down beside me. I knew from his expression that he was angry, so I turned off the computer and looked at him.
He said, Why do you think this is a game? Don’t you realize there’s another human being on the other end?
I said, Don’t be so serious. I don’t think it’s a game, either. I was just saying that. I don’t want to play this way, because I’m not used to not being able to hear or see the person I’m interacting with.
Saining said, So why do you still use the word
play?
I said, It was just something I said. I didn’t mean anything by it.
Saining said, I don’t believe for a second that you just say things, and that’s all there is to it.
I said, I apologize. I am truly sorry.
Saining said, I don’t need your apology, but I do think that you need to think carefully about what you say.
Saining used to be a beautiful young man—even his anger used to be beautiful in the old days. But nowadays, for some reason, when he got angry I found it hard to take, and it made me sick at heart.
He stayed angry at me for the rest of the evening, and at bedtime I said, Saining, don’t be angry. Haven’t you always said that I brought you to life in my stories? I’m promising you right now that I’m going to write a book for you. I already know that writing it is going to make me cry, and this isn’t something that I just decided to do today. I decided to do this a while ago, and if it doesn’t make me cry, I won’t publish it, OK? Is that all right with you?
Saining said, Is it about me?
It’s about how all the good children will have candy to eat.
Just promise me you won’t try to make any money from it.
What do you mean by that?
What I mean is, don’t use me to puff yourself up.
Is that all you get out of my writing? Then I’ve failed.
You
are
a failure. Because you don’t tell the truth.
Writing fiction isn’t about telling the truth.
Then you’re not a writer.
Don’t be cruel, Saining. I have to have been wounded before I can commit something to paper. I’m just trying to express myself, and the truth is that nobody is obligated to read the product of other people’s self-expression. Writing is simply the thing that gives me the strength to keep on living. It’s an exercise that’s full of feeling, it’s a kind of love, and it’s one of the easiest things in the world—and easy things can be liberating. We all live such meager lives, and we may still love people who don’t deserve our love. Writing is just something a person might do. There is no absolute truth or falseness, and writing can’t guarantee my safety. It’s like music is for you, and I can’t prove my honesty by going back and inserting some. The difference between you and me is that I’ve published my books, while you haven’t published your music. That’s the only difference between us.
That’s only the biggest difference. I don’t have any ambitions for my music. I’m not looking for an audience, and I don’t expect to get anything back. My music is simply the shape of my spirit. That’s all I want. There’s nothing else I could want, because that other stuff isn’t me.
Fine! As far as I’m concerned, you’re the only person who has the right to talk to me this way, because I understand you. But you’re the only one. I do want an audience, because I’m more passionate than you are, and I like people more than you do. But I don’t expect to get anything back either, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
Let’s have a baby! Maybe it could teach us what love is.
Don’t even suggest it! Why would I want to have a child with you?
We’re both the products of totally stupid ideas, but our child could be a revolution.
You’re dreaming. Have a child with you? You’re making me nervous. How long has it been since we last saw each other? Are you even fit to be a father? Our child could easily find itself without a roof over its head or clothes on its back.