[shiritori]
by justwolf
Children at a Hundred
I am someone, Le Ping thought, who only knows what day it is by whether or not the laundry is collected. He lay in bed, listening. Most people were already up. He had drifted in and out of sleep and wakefulness as doors had slammed, and the youngest Go pros had run up and down the corridor, and showers had hummed against his walls, and now it was quiet again. He lay still, listening. He had never really spoken to the woman who picked up the laundry, but he knew her by sight, and he knew her better by her tread, the brisk footsteps outside his door. He hadn't got around to leaving a bag by his door today; he rarely did. When his clothes got too bad he usually swished them around the sink, and let them drip into the shower.
He lay still, and listened. She came every second day. If he didn't hear her, it was a Tuesday. If he did, it was a Wednesday. He hoped it was a Wednesday.
He had been in bed for so long he didn't even feel like dozing any more, but he couldn't get up, either. He felt like he'd been glued to the bed. Tuesday. Wednesday. Either way, Instructor Lee was going to shout at him. When he was a little kid, new at the institute, he'd found it hard to stay in bed until half past seven like he was supposed to. Now he let himself sleep for too long.
Footsteps. He didn't move, but felt himself stiffening as he listened. Was it her tread? No, it was too slow. There was a lazy, almost shuffling quality to it. It stopped, and his door creaked open.
“Le Ping, you lump, are you still here?”
“Yang Hai,” Le Ping said. He sat up, and kicked the bed covers down to the end of mattress.
“Instructor Lee is looking for you,” Yang Hai said. “I could hear him shouting as I went passed.”
“He only does it out of love,” Le Ping said. “Besides, If I didn't give him a chance to shout and yell he would get unfit.”
“As long as you keep winning he can't complain too much,” Yang Hai said. “You should get your own flat, though, like the big boys.” He'd been leaning against the door frame, and now he stepped further into the room, though he left the door ajar behind him. It was dim in here, the light from the corridor only illuminating the outlines of objects.
“What day is it?” Le Ping asked.
“It's the twelfth,” Yang Hai replied.
“No, I mean what day of the week is it?”
“You don't know what day of the week it is? What goes in on your head, Le Ping?”
Then he heard new, rapid footsteps. “Wednesday,” he said.
“Good guess,” said Yang Hai, not knowing it wasn't a guess, or that Le Ping hadn't been able to bring himself to get up without this information in his head.
“She's late today,” Le Ping said
“Who is? You're getting weirder every day,” Yang Hai said. “I just came to remind you that Zhao is getting back today.”
“Yes.” Le Ping tried to settle his hair by rubbing it with the back of his wrists.
“One of us should pick him up from the airport. You know how he is. Do you want to do it?”
His flight was getting in at 16.05. Le Ping had had it memorized for weeks. 16.05 on Wednesday. He hadn't been sure what Wednesday. This Wednesday. Le Ping thought about standing at the arrivals gate. He thought about searching for Zhao's face in the crowd, the familiar walk, the battered suitcase, the rush of emotion and energy he would feel when he finally spotted him.
“You should go. I have a match. Besides, Zhao should be able to figure it out by himself now.”
“He doesn't want to,” Yang Hai said. “Some people cling to their childhood any way they can.” He kept talking, not letting this statement sink in. He said, “All right, then. I'll bring him back here. You really should get a flat though, Le Ping.”
“Don't nag,” Le Ping said. Yang Hai reached out and ruffled his hair out of place again, the hair he had almost succeeded in smoothing down.
Why would I ever leave, Le Ping thought, when Zhao is here, and I have Go and shouting matches just downstairs?
*
If anyone had asked him when he'd stopped being a child, Le Ping might have said the moment he was picked to come to the Go institute. He hadn't worked especially hard then, but somehow his hands had known what to do. The stones made the right shapes, and he won game after game after game, until he was noticed, and chosen. Go was better than school. He had been glad to leave, to find his way to the Go institute, to the smooth boards and the clean stones. But still, winning that match had meant leaving behind the world he had once known; had meant hours of silence and speaking to adults and giving up as many things as he gained.
If he'd asked himself the same question he might have said he'd stopped being a child when he realised he loved Zhao. That was not one specific moment, it was not seeing Zhao at the top of the stairs, the sunlight in his hair one Sunday; it was not waking up in a Japanese hotel and seeing him sleeping, his face not quite calm; it was not replaying the move Zhao had made to win a match against a much more experience pro over and over again on his board: it was all these things, and more. It was a slowly dawning realisation that rose in Le Ping over months, and years, until he knew it was true. And knowing it, he knew also there was nothing to be done with the knowledge, other than become the kind of person who couldn't get out of bed until there was no one else left in their rooms; the kind of person who only knows what day it is by whether or not the laundry is collected.
(Though, if he had been honest with himself, he might have said that nothing made him feel like he was no longer a child. He was still a child at eighteen, and thought he would probably still be a child at eighty.)
When it was about the time Zhao should be getting in, Le Ping made sure he was settled in front of a Go board in Guan's room, playing 10-second Go with various younger pros. He couldn't become engrossed in the board, and though he kept up with the play, he found himself loosing more often than he should. He listened for Yang Hai's voice, knowing he would never hear Zhao's in this loud room, and glanced too often at the half-open door and the small space of corridor he could see beyond.
“Le Ping's weak today,” Guan said as he lost another game.
“Guan's weak every day,” he responded, slamming another stone on the board.
Though his strategy on the board was weak that night, he was successful in missing Zhao's arrival. By the time he got to Zhao's room, Zhao had already been congratulated by half the pros on his series of wins against Japan, though no one had lingered long in his room. Zhao was talking with an older pro at his doorway when Le Ping arrived. He stood at the top of the stairs, watching them, watching Zhao. Zhao looked tired, and very neat. Le Ping wondered how Zhao managed to look so well-presented when he could barely find a clean t-shirt.
He thought, often, that other people could see it in his face. The strength of what he felt when saw Zhao. It made him feel too exposed, and strangely grateful that they did not mention it, though he knew rationally that no one really saw it. However that was not why he had been avoiding Zhao: that was something he could not quite name, nor describe to himself.
He greeted the other pro briefly as he walked past, and then went to stand in front of Zhao. “You're back,” he said.
“Yes. Come in,” Zhao said. He shut the door behind them. Le Ping was warmed by that. He did not think Zhao would have closed the door for anyone else.
“Didn't do too badly, then,” Le Ping said.
“I think most people would consider five wins, two looses a success, yes,” Zhao said.
Le Ping smiled. “Get home all right?”
“Yes. Yang Hai picked me up. It was kind of him.”
“Beat him in the match next week to say thank you.” Le Ping watched him as he sat down on his chair in front of the Go board, not quite looking at it. “You really do look tired,” he said.
“Hmm. I suppose so.”
Zhao looked more than tired. He looked defeated, somehow, though he had been the victor. “Hey,” Le Ping said. “You want to go bowling?”
Zhao looked at him properly. He looked, and then he laughed. It was a short laugh, but it was better than nothing. “We haven't done that in years.”
“I got sick of it because I wasn't very good,” Le Ping said.
“Ah. That makes sense,” Zhao said. “Was I any good?”
“You don't remember? We were about even, I think,” Le Ping said. “I probably would have kept playing if I had beaten you more consistently.”
“I suppose we're old enough to go out and do what we like, now,” Zhao said.
Le Ping was surprised by this. “Yes,” he said. “But we don't.”
Zhao nodded. “We play Go,” he said, looking at the board. Then he turned away from it, and looked at the room instead, at the ceiling, at his bed, but not at Le Ping.
Le Ping remembered the afternoons in the bowling alley, the afternoons spent wandering from street to street and trying to loose the feel of Go stones under his hands. Zhao was always stiff with concentration and worry, and though Le Ping laughed and shook him and dragged him from place to place, he never quite lost that stiffness.
“Tell me about Japan then,” Le Ping said. He went and sat on the end of Zhao's bed, though he did not quite want to sit, and once he had he wasn't sure what to do with his hands. “Did you see Isumi?”
“Yes, I saw him,” Zhao replied. “I played him.”
“Is he old and wrinkled now?”
“Of course not. Yang Hai is older than him, you know.”
“And Yang Hai shuffles like an old man,” Le Ping said. “Is he handsome and dashing, then?”
“He is calm,” Zhao said. “I lost to him. But he took me out and bought me dinner, anyway.”
“How thoughtful,” Le Ping said, feeling a dash of irritation towards calm Isumi. “What on earth did you do at dinner?”
“He speaks a little Chinese; I've learnt a little Japanese. We got by,” Zhao said. “His friend Waya does look like you.”
“Yes, I know,” Le Ping said. “I suppose it can't be helped.”
Zhao looked at Le Ping for too long, and then he looked away, and then he wet his lips like he was going to speak, and then he said nothing. He looked very uncomfortable, and Le Ping tried desperately to think of something to calm him down.
“It's funny, isn't it,” Zhao said at last. “Playing Go. We get so close to one another, and we don't see other people. I don't think we know how to talk to other people. And do we even want it to be different?”
“I don't know,” Le Ping said. I am someone who doesn't know what day it is, he thought. I am someone who isn't connected to anything other than some stones on a piece of wood.
“I don't, either. I think we stay like children; we don't move on from the games of childhood. When we are children we seem like adults because we work so hard, when we are adults we seem like children because we only know how to play games,” Zhao said. He looked at Le Ping, and his face was strangely anxious, and somehow too open, like he was giving too much of himself to this conversation.
“I think Isumi... I think he loves Waya,” Zhao said.
“Loves Waya?” Le Ping repeated, the words tight in his throat.
“They live together. I think they're in a relationship,” Zhao said.
“A relationship,” Le Ping said.
“It's so silly,” Zhao said. “It's like being children forever. Never looking beyond your childhood friends.”
“Is that silly?” Le Ping's mouth was dry, and he suddenly felt too big for his skin.
“Don't you think so?” Zhao said. “And Isumi is so good at Go.” He sighed, and stood up. He looked so terribly tired, Le Ping thought.
“Perhaps they're happy,” Le Ping said slowly.
Zhao thought about this. “Perhaps. I wouldn't be.” He brushed his hair back from his face. “We should both move out, Le Ping. We're too old to live here now. I'm going to ask Yang Hai about getting a place. You should, too. Living here makes you lazy.”
Lazy. Le Ping supposed it did. It let him wait in hallways looking for Zhao's face, it let him get up ten minutes before matches began, it let him stand in windows, looking at moonlight and thinking grey, unformed thoughts. It gave him space to love Zhao, to name that feeling and to know what it meant.
“Yes,” Le Ping said. “Yang Hai. Flats.”
“Yes,” Zhao said. He laughed. “We'll be all right, Le Ping.”
*
When Le Ping was almost fourteen, and probably should have known better, he lay in the sunlight in a hotel room in Japan, watching Zhao sleeping. It was early, and the room was warm, and Le Ping always had trouble sleeping, especially when he was somewhere unfamiliar.
Zhao kicked in his sleep, and made a little breathy, questioning sound. Le Ping watched him, and then thought he had let him sleep enough.
“Zhao,” he said. “Hey. It's time to wake up.”
Zhao groaned, and opened one eye. “No it isn't,” he said.
“Yes it is.”
“No,” Zhao said slowly. “It isn't.”
He rolled onto his back, and Le Ping sat in his pool of sunlight, looking at Zhao in the shaded bed. He said, “It's too hot here.”
Zhao groaned. Le Ping kicked his bed covers off, and crawled across the floor to Zhao's futon. Once he was there, so close to Zhao's sleeping face, to the soft hair falling over Zhao's forehead, the realisation that he was a boy and he wasn't supposed to do this came over him powerfully. He paused, and looked carefully at Zhao. It was fine, he decided. It was just Zhao and him.
He lifted the corner of the bed clothes and wriggled into the space behind Zhao. It was warm here, much warmer than his own bed, but this heat belonged to Zhao, and that made it good.
“Why are you in my bed?” Zhao said sleepily.
“Mine's in the sun,” Le Ping said. “It's keeping me awake.”
“Nearly time to get up, anyway,” Zhao said without opening his eyes. Unconsciously, Le Ping supposed, he rolled closer to him, his warm body pressing against Le Ping's own. Le Ping looked at his face against the white pillow, the shape his profile made. He pressed back, against Zhao's limbs, enjoying his own drowsiness, the smell of their bodies.
There would be more of this, he promised himself, as he lay there. This would not be the only time he would lie next to Zhao in the morning light.
Children at a Hundred
I am someone, Le Ping thought, who only knows what day it is by whether or not the laundry is collected. He lay in bed, listening. Most people were already up. He had drifted in and out of sleep and wakefulness as doors had slammed, and the youngest Go pros had run up and down the corridor, and showers had hummed against his walls, and now it was quiet again. He lay still, listening. He had never really spoken to the woman who picked up the laundry, but he knew her by sight, and he knew her better by her tread, the brisk footsteps outside his door. He hadn't got around to leaving a bag by his door today; he rarely did. When his clothes got too bad he usually swished them around the sink, and let them drip into the shower.
He lay still, and listened. She came every second day. If he didn't hear her, it was a Tuesday. If he did, it was a Wednesday. He hoped it was a Wednesday.
He had been in bed for so long he didn't even feel like dozing any more, but he couldn't get up, either. He felt like he'd been glued to the bed. Tuesday. Wednesday. Either way, Instructor Lee was going to shout at him. When he was a little kid, new at the institute, he'd found it hard to stay in bed until half past seven like he was supposed to. Now he let himself sleep for too long.
Footsteps. He didn't move, but felt himself stiffening as he listened. Was it her tread? No, it was too slow. There was a lazy, almost shuffling quality to it. It stopped, and his door creaked open.
“Le Ping, you lump, are you still here?”
“Yang Hai,” Le Ping said. He sat up, and kicked the bed covers down to the end of mattress.
“Instructor Lee is looking for you,” Yang Hai said. “I could hear him shouting as I went passed.”
“He only does it out of love,” Le Ping said. “Besides, If I didn't give him a chance to shout and yell he would get unfit.”
“As long as you keep winning he can't complain too much,” Yang Hai said. “You should get your own flat, though, like the big boys.” He'd been leaning against the door frame, and now he stepped further into the room, though he left the door ajar behind him. It was dim in here, the light from the corridor only illuminating the outlines of objects.
“What day is it?” Le Ping asked.
“It's the twelfth,” Yang Hai replied.
“No, I mean what day of the week is it?”
“You don't know what day of the week it is? What goes in on your head, Le Ping?”
Then he heard new, rapid footsteps. “Wednesday,” he said.
“Good guess,” said Yang Hai, not knowing it wasn't a guess, or that Le Ping hadn't been able to bring himself to get up without this information in his head.
“She's late today,” Le Ping said
“Who is? You're getting weirder every day,” Yang Hai said. “I just came to remind you that Zhao is getting back today.”
“Yes.” Le Ping tried to settle his hair by rubbing it with the back of his wrists.
“One of us should pick him up from the airport. You know how he is. Do you want to do it?”
His flight was getting in at 16.05. Le Ping had had it memorized for weeks. 16.05 on Wednesday. He hadn't been sure what Wednesday. This Wednesday. Le Ping thought about standing at the arrivals gate. He thought about searching for Zhao's face in the crowd, the familiar walk, the battered suitcase, the rush of emotion and energy he would feel when he finally spotted him.
“You should go. I have a match. Besides, Zhao should be able to figure it out by himself now.”
“He doesn't want to,” Yang Hai said. “Some people cling to their childhood any way they can.” He kept talking, not letting this statement sink in. He said, “All right, then. I'll bring him back here. You really should get a flat though, Le Ping.”
“Don't nag,” Le Ping said. Yang Hai reached out and ruffled his hair out of place again, the hair he had almost succeeded in smoothing down.
Why would I ever leave, Le Ping thought, when Zhao is here, and I have Go and shouting matches just downstairs?
*
If anyone had asked him when he'd stopped being a child, Le Ping might have said the moment he was picked to come to the Go institute. He hadn't worked especially hard then, but somehow his hands had known what to do. The stones made the right shapes, and he won game after game after game, until he was noticed, and chosen. Go was better than school. He had been glad to leave, to find his way to the Go institute, to the smooth boards and the clean stones. But still, winning that match had meant leaving behind the world he had once known; had meant hours of silence and speaking to adults and giving up as many things as he gained.
If he'd asked himself the same question he might have said he'd stopped being a child when he realised he loved Zhao. That was not one specific moment, it was not seeing Zhao at the top of the stairs, the sunlight in his hair one Sunday; it was not waking up in a Japanese hotel and seeing him sleeping, his face not quite calm; it was not replaying the move Zhao had made to win a match against a much more experience pro over and over again on his board: it was all these things, and more. It was a slowly dawning realisation that rose in Le Ping over months, and years, until he knew it was true. And knowing it, he knew also there was nothing to be done with the knowledge, other than become the kind of person who couldn't get out of bed until there was no one else left in their rooms; the kind of person who only knows what day it is by whether or not the laundry is collected.
(Though, if he had been honest with himself, he might have said that nothing made him feel like he was no longer a child. He was still a child at eighteen, and thought he would probably still be a child at eighty.)
When it was about the time Zhao should be getting in, Le Ping made sure he was settled in front of a Go board in Guan's room, playing 10-second Go with various younger pros. He couldn't become engrossed in the board, and though he kept up with the play, he found himself loosing more often than he should. He listened for Yang Hai's voice, knowing he would never hear Zhao's in this loud room, and glanced too often at the half-open door and the small space of corridor he could see beyond.
“Le Ping's weak today,” Guan said as he lost another game.
“Guan's weak every day,” he responded, slamming another stone on the board.
Though his strategy on the board was weak that night, he was successful in missing Zhao's arrival. By the time he got to Zhao's room, Zhao had already been congratulated by half the pros on his series of wins against Japan, though no one had lingered long in his room. Zhao was talking with an older pro at his doorway when Le Ping arrived. He stood at the top of the stairs, watching them, watching Zhao. Zhao looked tired, and very neat. Le Ping wondered how Zhao managed to look so well-presented when he could barely find a clean t-shirt.
He thought, often, that other people could see it in his face. The strength of what he felt when saw Zhao. It made him feel too exposed, and strangely grateful that they did not mention it, though he knew rationally that no one really saw it. However that was not why he had been avoiding Zhao: that was something he could not quite name, nor describe to himself.
He greeted the other pro briefly as he walked past, and then went to stand in front of Zhao. “You're back,” he said.
“Yes. Come in,” Zhao said. He shut the door behind them. Le Ping was warmed by that. He did not think Zhao would have closed the door for anyone else.
“Didn't do too badly, then,” Le Ping said.
“I think most people would consider five wins, two looses a success, yes,” Zhao said.
Le Ping smiled. “Get home all right?”
“Yes. Yang Hai picked me up. It was kind of him.”
“Beat him in the match next week to say thank you.” Le Ping watched him as he sat down on his chair in front of the Go board, not quite looking at it. “You really do look tired,” he said.
“Hmm. I suppose so.”
Zhao looked more than tired. He looked defeated, somehow, though he had been the victor. “Hey,” Le Ping said. “You want to go bowling?”
Zhao looked at him properly. He looked, and then he laughed. It was a short laugh, but it was better than nothing. “We haven't done that in years.”
“I got sick of it because I wasn't very good,” Le Ping said.
“Ah. That makes sense,” Zhao said. “Was I any good?”
“You don't remember? We were about even, I think,” Le Ping said. “I probably would have kept playing if I had beaten you more consistently.”
“I suppose we're old enough to go out and do what we like, now,” Zhao said.
Le Ping was surprised by this. “Yes,” he said. “But we don't.”
Zhao nodded. “We play Go,” he said, looking at the board. Then he turned away from it, and looked at the room instead, at the ceiling, at his bed, but not at Le Ping.
Le Ping remembered the afternoons in the bowling alley, the afternoons spent wandering from street to street and trying to loose the feel of Go stones under his hands. Zhao was always stiff with concentration and worry, and though Le Ping laughed and shook him and dragged him from place to place, he never quite lost that stiffness.
“Tell me about Japan then,” Le Ping said. He went and sat on the end of Zhao's bed, though he did not quite want to sit, and once he had he wasn't sure what to do with his hands. “Did you see Isumi?”
“Yes, I saw him,” Zhao replied. “I played him.”
“Is he old and wrinkled now?”
“Of course not. Yang Hai is older than him, you know.”
“And Yang Hai shuffles like an old man,” Le Ping said. “Is he handsome and dashing, then?”
“He is calm,” Zhao said. “I lost to him. But he took me out and bought me dinner, anyway.”
“How thoughtful,” Le Ping said, feeling a dash of irritation towards calm Isumi. “What on earth did you do at dinner?”
“He speaks a little Chinese; I've learnt a little Japanese. We got by,” Zhao said. “His friend Waya does look like you.”
“Yes, I know,” Le Ping said. “I suppose it can't be helped.”
Zhao looked at Le Ping for too long, and then he looked away, and then he wet his lips like he was going to speak, and then he said nothing. He looked very uncomfortable, and Le Ping tried desperately to think of something to calm him down.
“It's funny, isn't it,” Zhao said at last. “Playing Go. We get so close to one another, and we don't see other people. I don't think we know how to talk to other people. And do we even want it to be different?”
“I don't know,” Le Ping said. I am someone who doesn't know what day it is, he thought. I am someone who isn't connected to anything other than some stones on a piece of wood.
“I don't, either. I think we stay like children; we don't move on from the games of childhood. When we are children we seem like adults because we work so hard, when we are adults we seem like children because we only know how to play games,” Zhao said. He looked at Le Ping, and his face was strangely anxious, and somehow too open, like he was giving too much of himself to this conversation.
“I think Isumi... I think he loves Waya,” Zhao said.
“Loves Waya?” Le Ping repeated, the words tight in his throat.
“They live together. I think they're in a relationship,” Zhao said.
“A relationship,” Le Ping said.
“It's so silly,” Zhao said. “It's like being children forever. Never looking beyond your childhood friends.”
“Is that silly?” Le Ping's mouth was dry, and he suddenly felt too big for his skin.
“Don't you think so?” Zhao said. “And Isumi is so good at Go.” He sighed, and stood up. He looked so terribly tired, Le Ping thought.
“Perhaps they're happy,” Le Ping said slowly.
Zhao thought about this. “Perhaps. I wouldn't be.” He brushed his hair back from his face. “We should both move out, Le Ping. We're too old to live here now. I'm going to ask Yang Hai about getting a place. You should, too. Living here makes you lazy.”
Lazy. Le Ping supposed it did. It let him wait in hallways looking for Zhao's face, it let him get up ten minutes before matches began, it let him stand in windows, looking at moonlight and thinking grey, unformed thoughts. It gave him space to love Zhao, to name that feeling and to know what it meant.
“Yes,” Le Ping said. “Yang Hai. Flats.”
“Yes,” Zhao said. He laughed. “We'll be all right, Le Ping.”
*
When Le Ping was almost fourteen, and probably should have known better, he lay in the sunlight in a hotel room in Japan, watching Zhao sleeping. It was early, and the room was warm, and Le Ping always had trouble sleeping, especially when he was somewhere unfamiliar.
Zhao kicked in his sleep, and made a little breathy, questioning sound. Le Ping watched him, and then thought he had let him sleep enough.
“Zhao,” he said. “Hey. It's time to wake up.”
Zhao groaned, and opened one eye. “No it isn't,” he said.
“Yes it is.”
“No,” Zhao said slowly. “It isn't.”
He rolled onto his back, and Le Ping sat in his pool of sunlight, looking at Zhao in the shaded bed. He said, “It's too hot here.”
Zhao groaned. Le Ping kicked his bed covers off, and crawled across the floor to Zhao's futon. Once he was there, so close to Zhao's sleeping face, to the soft hair falling over Zhao's forehead, the realisation that he was a boy and he wasn't supposed to do this came over him powerfully. He paused, and looked carefully at Zhao. It was fine, he decided. It was just Zhao and him.
He lifted the corner of the bed clothes and wriggled into the space behind Zhao. It was warm here, much warmer than his own bed, but this heat belonged to Zhao, and that made it good.
“Why are you in my bed?” Zhao said sleepily.
“Mine's in the sun,” Le Ping said. “It's keeping me awake.”
“Nearly time to get up, anyway,” Zhao said without opening his eyes. Unconsciously, Le Ping supposed, he rolled closer to him, his warm body pressing against Le Ping's own. Le Ping looked at his face against the white pillow, the shape his profile made. He pressed back, against Zhao's limbs, enjoying his own drowsiness, the smell of their bodies.
There would be more of this, he promised himself, as he lay there. This would not be the only time he would lie next to Zhao in the morning light.