(no subject)
in the stillness of expired time
kris/lay/lu han, pg-13, 4060ⓦ
warning: character death
Note: Never Let Me Go AU - in which people are cloned to harvest their vital organs. Poem by Charles Bukowski; other notes footnoted (click to move back and forth).
If I never see you again
I will always carry you
inside
outside
on my fingertips
and at brain edges
and in centers
centers
of what I am of
what remains.
Yixing looks small, lying in the hospital bed, so pale that Lu Han can almost imagine the layers beneath the skin: the web of nerves, the blood, the muscle, the bone. The words on his file are clinical - first donation completed (kidney), bp low but stable - and they don't describe the bruises under Yixing's eyes, like inky thumbprints, or his wrists, thin as a reed, the bone jutting out above the donor bracelet; the sharp, cutting line of his cheekbones, always in bas-relief when he'd known him.
The moment their eyes meet, Lu Han realises that he hadn't thought it through - hadn't thought of what he would do next, what he would say to him, only seen Yixing’s name and gone blindly to him. Yixing's voice is hoarse but achingly familiar on the inflections of Lu Han's name. He closes his eyes, again, and Lu Han almost thinks he's drifted back to sleep when he speaks again. "I'm glad it's you."
I'm glad it's you. The fear, the trepidation dissolves so rapidly that Lu Han almost laughs in relief, throat tight, and he looks away. The top of Yixing's bureau is tidy: a glass of water, medicine, and the cassette. He picks it up, turning it over. The case is scratched so that the plastic is no longer clear in some places, a hairline crack on the back where Yixing must have dropped it once, and the front still frames the worn, red paper, slightly yellowed with age, that says, best of Peking opera, 1981-1989.
They all had something: for Lu Han, it was a photograph of Maggie Cheung in a red qipao, that he'd kept in a tin for egg rolls. He'd gotten them both in the Sales, the same place where Yixing got his cassette, borrowing half of Yifan's tokens to buy it. At the next Sale, he'd given all of his tokens - most of them earned through good behaviour and the music teacher's subtle favouritism - to Yifan to buy an alpaca toy, saying, "There's nothing I want."
It was the same year that Lu Han developed a fear of heights. That year, their last at Nanjiang 1, was spent like the others: lessons in Mandarin, mathematics, science, and so on. It was that year, in history, that their teacher said, "No one wants to be the one to tell you this, but you can't leave here not knowing what you are." Shortly afterward, Guo Jing killed himself, calmly stepping out of his sixth floor dormitory window after neatly arranging his possessions and making his bed, as a sign of his unimpaired sanity: they hadn’t heard of suicide notes, then. His body fell without resistance, without any sound, as if the heavens, too, had accepted his fate; or, perhaps, as a sign of his insignificance, the half-life he had lived and, in the only gesture of autonomy he could think of, extinguished. Lu Han bolted his window shut the same day, fingers stubborn and red on the metal lock as he pushed it as far as it would go, and kept pushing, until Yifan came and took his hands away.
It was the year he saw Yifan and Yixing hold hands, watched Yixing's fingertips brush the splay of Yifan's large hands, made to hold. His embarrassment at witnessing it lasted only as long as it took him to realise that they had kept secrets from him, and then he had been angry. The anger had been what had lasted, in a coolness toward Yifan's fumbling attempts at conversation, savage pleasure at Yixing's hurt over every closed-off expression, until they received their assignments. Only then did the relief of still having them overwhelm their betrayal.
The role of a carer is simple: to stay by a donor's side until they complete. It is a way of keeping their spirits up, to maximise the number of donations made before completion. They often assign Lu Han Nanjiang students, stating that having common ground with patients would help foster a bond, ultimately make the relationship more fruitful. It would, he supposes: they could swap stories about pranks they'd played on the matron, talk about how uncomfortable the seats in the auditorium were, compare honed and vetted imitations of the headmaster's nasal tone. He doesn't know because he never talks about Nanjiang to his patients.
In response to Lu Han's question, Yixing's carer says, both resigned and matter-of-fact, "You know the kind - he'll probably complete after the second donation." She makes a slight moue as she hands him Yixing's file, and Lu Han could tell she was thinking the same thing he was, at that moment: the average donor made at least three. He nods and takes the file.
Between carers, switching patients happened often, generally with difficult cases, and sometimes with personal ones. His last patient had completed several days ago, and he hadn't been reassigned yet. In his head, the facts knock against each other like driftwood, bulky, refusing coherency. When he doesn't open the file, still looking at her, she looks at him properly, considering him for a moment. "If you want him," she says, and Lu Han interrupts, "Yes-sorry, yes," rushed, before she can actually offer.
The drive to Youjing 2 was long, drawing them close to the outskirts of Beijing, and Yixing sat in the middle, between them, until Yifan, cramped by a recent growth spurt and Yixing's elbow, which dug into his side at every left turn, moved to the passenger seat during a pit stop. When the temperature dropped near nightfall, Lu Han traced his name on a corner of the window, finger smudging the finer strokes. "Write mine, too," Yixing whispered, turning his face into Lu Han's shoulder to watch him exhale on the glass, and in the end he wrote all three of their names, watching the fog recede and take them with it, vanishing: you must understand, none of you have a future.
In his mind the time they spent at Youjing was clearly divided into two periods: before Huang Zitao, and after Huang Zitao. The first period, before Zitao arrived, was the longer one, but it seemed to expire like an ellipsis, short and insignificant. Within a month of their arrival, the previous tenants, already whittled down to three, all took their leave, starting with Han Geng, who was given notice after two weeks; Zhou Mi and Song Qian, halfway through their carer training, departed shortly afterward. In their wake, they covered the house over with their footprints, until slowly it lost the feeling of emptiness and became theirs, mahjong tiles (Yifan) and longyan pits (Lu Han) and brittle peanut shells (Yixing) littered across the house like debris washing up with the tide.
When Zitao came, they had a hushed argument, shut up in Yixing's room, about what it meant, if one of them was about to be given notice. "Open your eyes, Zhang Yixing, don't be a fool," Lu Han snapped, and when Yixing flinched, Yifan tried to stop him, putting a hand on Lu Han's arm. Lu Han had jerked away from the touch, whirling on him in turn. "Just because you want control-" He could see it in both of their eyes, the two of them clearly thinking that Lu Han, as the oldest, would be the first to go.
For days, he saw impermanence wherever he looked: the living room table, knocked crooked from when he and Yifan had scuffled, laughing as they tumbled to the floor; the stove, blackened from the time Yixing had started to make noodles and forgotten about them; the flickering light in the bathroom next to Zitao’s room. All the signs of life, so easily erased, as if written in sand.
The tension was slow to ease, each of them waiting for the letter to arrive, and Zitao sat quietly amidst them, until one day he spoke up, without looking at any of them. "I'm sorry if I-" His throat worked, for a moment. "If you don't want me," he finished, voice thick. The tear that splashed involuntarily onto the table seemed repugnant to him, his face screwed up as he pushed his chair back with a loud scrape, and vanished into his room. Yifan got up first, following Zitao without looking at either of them, and when Yixing looked up at Lu Han, across the table, Lu Han's mouth formed the beginning of a sorry, the words stuck in his throat. Yixing saved him from finishing by nodding, me too.
"I'm sorry," Lu Han says, abruptly, and Yixing, in the middle of taking his medicine, looks at him over the rim of his cup. He doesn't look entirely taken aback, and it's worse than anything he could say or do.
"You could have been angry," Lu Han mumbles, not looking at him. His face feels hot, and he blinks to keep from crying. He hasn't cried in a long time, always dry-eyed as he watched his patients go under, knowing instinctively when they were going to complete, always anticipating it so that it couldn't take him by surprise. "You could have hated me, and I just-" He can't bring himself to say it. I went because I thought letting go was easier than waiting to be left behind. He's always been selfish, overtly so; self-preservation was his strongest suit, his best defence mechanism. Yixing, by contrast, didn't think about himself at all, always giving too much, opening himself up to the kind of hurt that Lu Han was best at inflicting on others, in equal proportion to his love of them. It was the easiest to hurt Yixing, and it also felt the worst. And Yifan-
"Hey," Yixing says, softly, as if his silence was easier to understand than his words. His tone says, stop thinking. When his hand covers Lu Han's, he has to resist the urge to flinch. Yixing had let him go, once. "I said I was glad you were here."
He couldn't change the past; he could only make a different choice here, now. Here, it meant staying; letting the fear grow roots in him. It meant watching Yixing tear away from him, slowly, so that the pain would always stay fresh. It meant letting Yixing steal into the cage of his ribs and break what was left there.
Yixing has always known this, he realises. Maybe he was the one who hadn't: had grown thorns, forgotten about the waterways, threaded through his body, knotted like a fist around his heart. This Yixing, older, like the soft, sweet flesh of a longyan that hoarded a stone - this Yixing, that looks at him and says, I love you; that says, with the same mouth, let me break you.
The summer months: Yifan learnt to drive a car, and Lu Han made tray after tray of ice cubes, feeding them one by one to Zitao, who laid on the floor, sweating. At night Yixing would watch Lu Han's collection of Wong Kar-Wai films with him, the stand fan slowly winnowing in a wide arc while, on screen, Tony Leung sat in Goldfinch and ate in tiny, neat mouthfuls. In each of their trips to the city he would spend an hour poring over shelves in a resale shop, slowly fingering the spine of each DVD case, mouthing the titles he was looking for to himself, until he would emerge with Chungking Express or Happy Together, waving it at Yixing, exuberant with triumph.
There was an ice cream parlour they frequented together, heads crowded over the glass so that their breath fanned across it, while Yifan hovered above them like a prefect and listened to them debate over flavours. They were both indecisive: Lu Han was determined to try them all, and Yixing's eye always wandered, but in the end, he always chose the same one, calling softly to the owner, whom they called yéye, grandfather, the words as sweet on their tongues as the ice cream.
Afterward, they would follow Yifan as he window-shopped, trying on clothes and examining himself in the mirror before putting them all back, fingers reverent as he shrugged the cloth back onto the hanger. "This one," Lu Han would say, holding out a jacket or a pair of shoes. He knew Yifan's measurements better than he did, looking appraisingly over the racks and pushing the right sizes into his hands. When Yifan put them on, he would just nod, good, because it didn't matter what Yifan wore; Yifan just thought it did.
On each trip, Zitao always vanished; to take walks on the beach, he said, even though they were plainly inland, and Yifan always dissuaded Lu Han from attempting to spy on him. The mystery was only solved when Zitao confided to Yifan one night, after they’d returned from a trip, that he might have seen his own possible. He wanted all of them to go with him, wanted to see if they thought he looked similar too. Yifan was hesitant, but in the end they went, buoyed as much by their own hope as Zitao's, their old childish pastime of looking through magazines and advertisements, scrutinising faces and looking for their own, trying to guess who each other's models were, if they were famous or important or rich.
They’d given it up at the same time that they realised that, walking down the street, no one recognised their faces, or even gave them a second glance. But the place Zitao led them to was a tattoo parlour, and from across the street they stared at the man at the end of Zitao's pointed finger, watching him lounge on the sidewalk, talking on his cell phone. It was too hard to see properly, and when the man disappeared, heading back inside, Lu Han was silent, feeling Yixing fidget next to him. "It could be, Taozi," Yifan said finally, speaking for all of them, and Zitao was content.
"Zitao cried when you left," Yixing says.
It makes Lu Han smile, a little fond, a little rueful. "I thought he might." The measurement of Zitao's growth was oddly figured: he was shrewd, introspective, and half of the things he said either sounded like a Confucian saying or was. At the same time, he was hopelessly young: he spoke in outbursts, was deceptively easy to hurt and just as easy to tease, and was quick to revert to childishness, pouting and whining even though it didn't suit him - tall and toned, with sharp features - but it was probably that disparity that made it so effective.
"I thought about being a carer," Yixing says, and for a moment it seems like another one of his non sequiturs, before he continues: "I thought I could be good at it, too. But seeing Taozi like that…"
"You promised him," Lu Han finishes for him, and the words sound ugly in his mouth, voice wavering. Zhang Yixing, you idiot, he wants to say, but he doesn't have any right. It was true that not everyone was inclined - or qualified - to be a carer, but most people, unlike Lu Han, wanted to be one for the same reason: it meant pushing back donations by several years. It meant that the only thing he wanted for Yixing was time, and he'd given it up.
Yixing shrugs, a one-shouldered movement. "Yifan was gone. And you-" His fingers curl in the blankets, a little. Staring in front of him, away from Lu Han, he looks briefly defiant. Yixing, after all, wasn't the kind of person to have regrets. A few years ago, Lu Han would have cut him off, voice shrill: forgive me or don't, just decide. Now, Lu Han waits, silent as he lets it hit home: "I’d stopped thinking about you."
Winter blended together for him, more night than day, his gaze lingering on Yixing's fingers on a fishbone, sucking each spine clean. Imagining the shape of Yixing's mouth, Yifan's long fingers pressed into flesh, as he listens to them, skin to skin, in next room. The heaviness of Zitao's head on his shoulder as the four of them sat together and listened to Yixing's cassette, Zitao's unabashed gaze as he watched Yifan and Yixing steal a kiss.
Later, Zitao always claimed to have seen the warning signs, the little fissures that led to the fracture of Yifan and Yixing's relationship. "There was always something between them," he said, and hesitated, looking at Lu Han, and then away. It ended as quietly as it started, so that Lu Han could never pinpoint exactly when the boundaries began reestablishing themselves, if it happened at all, the act of navigation, trying to learn the reconstruction of space.
Even later, Yifan would say, "Maybe we just aren't capable of love." Lu Han had said something like, you think we weren't built that way? To be able to? Yifan had hesitated before he said, slowly, "I don't know. You can't feel everything with the same mildness, and expect to love with intensity." Lu Han lifted his head, about to speak, when he realised that Yifan was talking about Yixing. Yifan, who had protected Yixing so quietly and naturally that he never noticed; who had watched over a Lu Han who’d refused to need looking after; who had done it so well that the only thing that hurt them would be each other.
It was at Youjing that he started thinking of his body as a vessel, remembering the headmaster carefully intoning: each of you is precious. The image of Zitao, smoking a contraband cigarette, viciously delighted at hurting the body that was and wasn't his; Yifan, by contrast, nursing his body into perfect health. He was walking in the garden when he started thinking about the sadness of bearing fruit: the joy of bringing them to ripeness, heavy and round with splendour, only to have them be plucked from you. He cried about it exactly once, and it was then, hot tears spilling down his cheeks, wetting the soft, brown earth that drank them, indifferent to the source, until Yixing found him and held him. That was it: none of them were meant to rescue each other.
"I dreamt that we went to the Great Wall," Yixing says. His voice runs like a fever, rambling and discontent, and lying side by side, they are close enough that his breath is still warm when it washes over Lu Han, like reaching the opposite shore. It makes the air feel thinner when he inhales, but he doesn't pull away. "We met Yifan in the middle, walking from the other end."
Lu Han inhales sharply. It doesn't work that way, he wants to say. You can't do that. He reaches for Yixing, instead, and when Lu Han touches his face, Yixing closes his eyes. Yixing's body feels like a lesson in geography, learning what has already been mapped out, nothing left to discover. He touches him with the ghost of Yifan's fingers, finding places that make Yixing arch up, cry out, places Yifan has already been, marked; places lost, places he has left for Lu Han to find. When Yixing's body opens up for him, it's Yifan who comes alive.
Yifan started reading self-help books, just before he was given notice. When the letter arrived, he read it calmly and then excused himself, taking it with him so that none of them could read it, but they knew what it was. Lu Han, suffocated by the sudden lack of air in the room, went back to his room and found Yifan in it, still holding the letter. He didn't take his eyes away from it when he said, hands shaking, "I always wanted-" He started when Lu Han took his hands in his, and the letter fell to the floor. Stepping closer, Lu Han deliberately put his foot on it, feeling it crumple and give way. He never knew who leaned in first, only that there was a kiss.
He wanted, desperately, to be angry: shout at him, you aren't supposed to leave me. To be angry at Yixing who had brought Yifan into his life, angry at Yixing for what he hadn't even done yet. But he looked at Zitao and could only feel guilt for what each of them, in turn, would do to him. He spent an afternoon staring at each of them instead, cataloguing every characteristic so that he could conjure them up in his mind, perfectly formed: every gesture, every habit, every sound.
The next day, he applied to be a carer without telling anyone, voice clear and firm as he turned in the forms and said, "I want to start immediately." In his head, he kept seeing Yifan's face, carrying the same expression it had had when Yixing had gotten lost on one of their first trips into the city: scared and refusing to be, at the same time. I kept thinking of it in terms of physics, expecting an equal but opposite reaction, Yifan had said, sounding hollow, mechanical. I couldn't understand why Yixing didn't change anything I felt for you, or why you didn't change anything I felt for Yixing. He realised, then, that he was the one hearing the past tense in Yifan's words 3, and he lifted Yifan's arm and draped it over himself, face pressed against Yifan's bare chest, as if the cage of his arms would keep him safe, stop the floodwaters from rising.
When he returned, Yixing let him put his head on his shoulder, and he said in a low voice only Lu Han could hear, "What did you do?" Lu Han shook his head and didn't reply, and when Yifan came to sit beside them, Lu Han held his hand. He could tell the exact moment that Yixing noticed, suddenly stilling beside him, but none of them said anything. A few days later, his carer training began.
At the hospital he was sent to, news trickled in of Yifan being admitted to a hospital in central Beijing, making his first, second donation, recovering quickly after each one. He found himself thinking, Yifan was always brave - for others, if not himself. His last words to Lu Han were maybe next time, without a trace of facetiousness. On the third donation, he completed. By then, it had been almost a year since Lu Han left Youjing, afraid of what he had there, of being loved and left behind. "Zhang Yixing," Lu Han still asked, every time someone approached him with news of Nanjiang students. "Did you hear about anyone named Zhang Yixing?"
Lu Han is sitting by the window when Yixing wakes up. His slow shuffle into his hospital slippers makes Lu Han look up, and he holds out a hand to Yixing. When Yixing reaches him, Lu Han leans his head against him, and they watch the patients walking with their carers in the pavilion, the sunlight streaming across the courtyard. Somewhere, the bell of a clock tower begins to toll, and Lu Han speaks without looking up. "Do you miss him?"
It takes Yixing a while to answer, watching the people mill about outside as he searches for the right words. "With the same part of me that loves you," he says, finally. He looks down at Lu Han, who nods, resting his chin on his knees as he looks back outside.
In the time they had left, they had only come upon the verge of understanding; it was only in experiencing the incomplete that they had come to understand the whole, in degrees, like the dark that defined the light, the chiaroscuro of it. By then, Lu Han had left, in the closest thing he ever said to I love you, each of them learning love only through loss. Startled by the depth of his own feelings, Lu Han had let the water close over his head. He sunk, only to realise that he was looking at two faces of the same object and traversing the line in between, over and over again. That in his palm, his heart line splintered into two perfect halves.
Slowly, he curled his fingers inward, tucking his hands in between his chest and his knees, and let the thought drift: maybe next time.
前世五百次的回眸，才贏得今世的擦肩而過 4
five hundred backward glances in our past reincarnations,
in exchange for walking by each other once in this life
-----
1 南江男與科學校, Nanjiang Preparatory School for Boys.
2 幽靜候獻院, Youjing Donation Waiting Centre.
3 Verbs in Mandarin do not inherently have tense, and Yifan's words are (can be) ambiguous.
4 Source
kris/lay/lu han, pg-13, 4060ⓦ
warning: character death
Note: Never Let Me Go AU - in which people are cloned to harvest their vital organs. Poem by Charles Bukowski; other notes footnoted (click to move back and forth).
If I never see you again
I will always carry you
inside
outside
on my fingertips
and at brain edges
and in centers
centers
of what I am of
what remains.
Yixing looks small, lying in the hospital bed, so pale that Lu Han can almost imagine the layers beneath the skin: the web of nerves, the blood, the muscle, the bone. The words on his file are clinical - first donation completed (kidney), bp low but stable - and they don't describe the bruises under Yixing's eyes, like inky thumbprints, or his wrists, thin as a reed, the bone jutting out above the donor bracelet; the sharp, cutting line of his cheekbones, always in bas-relief when he'd known him.
The moment their eyes meet, Lu Han realises that he hadn't thought it through - hadn't thought of what he would do next, what he would say to him, only seen Yixing’s name and gone blindly to him. Yixing's voice is hoarse but achingly familiar on the inflections of Lu Han's name. He closes his eyes, again, and Lu Han almost thinks he's drifted back to sleep when he speaks again. "I'm glad it's you."
I'm glad it's you. The fear, the trepidation dissolves so rapidly that Lu Han almost laughs in relief, throat tight, and he looks away. The top of Yixing's bureau is tidy: a glass of water, medicine, and the cassette. He picks it up, turning it over. The case is scratched so that the plastic is no longer clear in some places, a hairline crack on the back where Yixing must have dropped it once, and the front still frames the worn, red paper, slightly yellowed with age, that says, best of Peking opera, 1981-1989.
They all had something: for Lu Han, it was a photograph of Maggie Cheung in a red qipao, that he'd kept in a tin for egg rolls. He'd gotten them both in the Sales, the same place where Yixing got his cassette, borrowing half of Yifan's tokens to buy it. At the next Sale, he'd given all of his tokens - most of them earned through good behaviour and the music teacher's subtle favouritism - to Yifan to buy an alpaca toy, saying, "There's nothing I want."
It was the same year that Lu Han developed a fear of heights. That year, their last at Nanjiang 1, was spent like the others: lessons in Mandarin, mathematics, science, and so on. It was that year, in history, that their teacher said, "No one wants to be the one to tell you this, but you can't leave here not knowing what you are." Shortly afterward, Guo Jing killed himself, calmly stepping out of his sixth floor dormitory window after neatly arranging his possessions and making his bed, as a sign of his unimpaired sanity: they hadn’t heard of suicide notes, then. His body fell without resistance, without any sound, as if the heavens, too, had accepted his fate; or, perhaps, as a sign of his insignificance, the half-life he had lived and, in the only gesture of autonomy he could think of, extinguished. Lu Han bolted his window shut the same day, fingers stubborn and red on the metal lock as he pushed it as far as it would go, and kept pushing, until Yifan came and took his hands away.
It was the year he saw Yifan and Yixing hold hands, watched Yixing's fingertips brush the splay of Yifan's large hands, made to hold. His embarrassment at witnessing it lasted only as long as it took him to realise that they had kept secrets from him, and then he had been angry. The anger had been what had lasted, in a coolness toward Yifan's fumbling attempts at conversation, savage pleasure at Yixing's hurt over every closed-off expression, until they received their assignments. Only then did the relief of still having them overwhelm their betrayal.
The role of a carer is simple: to stay by a donor's side until they complete. It is a way of keeping their spirits up, to maximise the number of donations made before completion. They often assign Lu Han Nanjiang students, stating that having common ground with patients would help foster a bond, ultimately make the relationship more fruitful. It would, he supposes: they could swap stories about pranks they'd played on the matron, talk about how uncomfortable the seats in the auditorium were, compare honed and vetted imitations of the headmaster's nasal tone. He doesn't know because he never talks about Nanjiang to his patients.
In response to Lu Han's question, Yixing's carer says, both resigned and matter-of-fact, "You know the kind - he'll probably complete after the second donation." She makes a slight moue as she hands him Yixing's file, and Lu Han could tell she was thinking the same thing he was, at that moment: the average donor made at least three. He nods and takes the file.
Between carers, switching patients happened often, generally with difficult cases, and sometimes with personal ones. His last patient had completed several days ago, and he hadn't been reassigned yet. In his head, the facts knock against each other like driftwood, bulky, refusing coherency. When he doesn't open the file, still looking at her, she looks at him properly, considering him for a moment. "If you want him," she says, and Lu Han interrupts, "Yes-sorry, yes," rushed, before she can actually offer.
The drive to Youjing 2 was long, drawing them close to the outskirts of Beijing, and Yixing sat in the middle, between them, until Yifan, cramped by a recent growth spurt and Yixing's elbow, which dug into his side at every left turn, moved to the passenger seat during a pit stop. When the temperature dropped near nightfall, Lu Han traced his name on a corner of the window, finger smudging the finer strokes. "Write mine, too," Yixing whispered, turning his face into Lu Han's shoulder to watch him exhale on the glass, and in the end he wrote all three of their names, watching the fog recede and take them with it, vanishing: you must understand, none of you have a future.
In his mind the time they spent at Youjing was clearly divided into two periods: before Huang Zitao, and after Huang Zitao. The first period, before Zitao arrived, was the longer one, but it seemed to expire like an ellipsis, short and insignificant. Within a month of their arrival, the previous tenants, already whittled down to three, all took their leave, starting with Han Geng, who was given notice after two weeks; Zhou Mi and Song Qian, halfway through their carer training, departed shortly afterward. In their wake, they covered the house over with their footprints, until slowly it lost the feeling of emptiness and became theirs, mahjong tiles (Yifan) and longyan pits (Lu Han) and brittle peanut shells (Yixing) littered across the house like debris washing up with the tide.
When Zitao came, they had a hushed argument, shut up in Yixing's room, about what it meant, if one of them was about to be given notice. "Open your eyes, Zhang Yixing, don't be a fool," Lu Han snapped, and when Yixing flinched, Yifan tried to stop him, putting a hand on Lu Han's arm. Lu Han had jerked away from the touch, whirling on him in turn. "Just because you want control-" He could see it in both of their eyes, the two of them clearly thinking that Lu Han, as the oldest, would be the first to go.
For days, he saw impermanence wherever he looked: the living room table, knocked crooked from when he and Yifan had scuffled, laughing as they tumbled to the floor; the stove, blackened from the time Yixing had started to make noodles and forgotten about them; the flickering light in the bathroom next to Zitao’s room. All the signs of life, so easily erased, as if written in sand.
The tension was slow to ease, each of them waiting for the letter to arrive, and Zitao sat quietly amidst them, until one day he spoke up, without looking at any of them. "I'm sorry if I-" His throat worked, for a moment. "If you don't want me," he finished, voice thick. The tear that splashed involuntarily onto the table seemed repugnant to him, his face screwed up as he pushed his chair back with a loud scrape, and vanished into his room. Yifan got up first, following Zitao without looking at either of them, and when Yixing looked up at Lu Han, across the table, Lu Han's mouth formed the beginning of a sorry, the words stuck in his throat. Yixing saved him from finishing by nodding, me too.
"I'm sorry," Lu Han says, abruptly, and Yixing, in the middle of taking his medicine, looks at him over the rim of his cup. He doesn't look entirely taken aback, and it's worse than anything he could say or do.
"You could have been angry," Lu Han mumbles, not looking at him. His face feels hot, and he blinks to keep from crying. He hasn't cried in a long time, always dry-eyed as he watched his patients go under, knowing instinctively when they were going to complete, always anticipating it so that it couldn't take him by surprise. "You could have hated me, and I just-" He can't bring himself to say it. I went because I thought letting go was easier than waiting to be left behind. He's always been selfish, overtly so; self-preservation was his strongest suit, his best defence mechanism. Yixing, by contrast, didn't think about himself at all, always giving too much, opening himself up to the kind of hurt that Lu Han was best at inflicting on others, in equal proportion to his love of them. It was the easiest to hurt Yixing, and it also felt the worst. And Yifan-
"Hey," Yixing says, softly, as if his silence was easier to understand than his words. His tone says, stop thinking. When his hand covers Lu Han's, he has to resist the urge to flinch. Yixing had let him go, once. "I said I was glad you were here."
He couldn't change the past; he could only make a different choice here, now. Here, it meant staying; letting the fear grow roots in him. It meant watching Yixing tear away from him, slowly, so that the pain would always stay fresh. It meant letting Yixing steal into the cage of his ribs and break what was left there.
Yixing has always known this, he realises. Maybe he was the one who hadn't: had grown thorns, forgotten about the waterways, threaded through his body, knotted like a fist around his heart. This Yixing, older, like the soft, sweet flesh of a longyan that hoarded a stone - this Yixing, that looks at him and says, I love you; that says, with the same mouth, let me break you.
The summer months: Yifan learnt to drive a car, and Lu Han made tray after tray of ice cubes, feeding them one by one to Zitao, who laid on the floor, sweating. At night Yixing would watch Lu Han's collection of Wong Kar-Wai films with him, the stand fan slowly winnowing in a wide arc while, on screen, Tony Leung sat in Goldfinch and ate in tiny, neat mouthfuls. In each of their trips to the city he would spend an hour poring over shelves in a resale shop, slowly fingering the spine of each DVD case, mouthing the titles he was looking for to himself, until he would emerge with Chungking Express or Happy Together, waving it at Yixing, exuberant with triumph.
There was an ice cream parlour they frequented together, heads crowded over the glass so that their breath fanned across it, while Yifan hovered above them like a prefect and listened to them debate over flavours. They were both indecisive: Lu Han was determined to try them all, and Yixing's eye always wandered, but in the end, he always chose the same one, calling softly to the owner, whom they called yéye, grandfather, the words as sweet on their tongues as the ice cream.
Afterward, they would follow Yifan as he window-shopped, trying on clothes and examining himself in the mirror before putting them all back, fingers reverent as he shrugged the cloth back onto the hanger. "This one," Lu Han would say, holding out a jacket or a pair of shoes. He knew Yifan's measurements better than he did, looking appraisingly over the racks and pushing the right sizes into his hands. When Yifan put them on, he would just nod, good, because it didn't matter what Yifan wore; Yifan just thought it did.
On each trip, Zitao always vanished; to take walks on the beach, he said, even though they were plainly inland, and Yifan always dissuaded Lu Han from attempting to spy on him. The mystery was only solved when Zitao confided to Yifan one night, after they’d returned from a trip, that he might have seen his own possible. He wanted all of them to go with him, wanted to see if they thought he looked similar too. Yifan was hesitant, but in the end they went, buoyed as much by their own hope as Zitao's, their old childish pastime of looking through magazines and advertisements, scrutinising faces and looking for their own, trying to guess who each other's models were, if they were famous or important or rich.
They’d given it up at the same time that they realised that, walking down the street, no one recognised their faces, or even gave them a second glance. But the place Zitao led them to was a tattoo parlour, and from across the street they stared at the man at the end of Zitao's pointed finger, watching him lounge on the sidewalk, talking on his cell phone. It was too hard to see properly, and when the man disappeared, heading back inside, Lu Han was silent, feeling Yixing fidget next to him. "It could be, Taozi," Yifan said finally, speaking for all of them, and Zitao was content.
"Zitao cried when you left," Yixing says.
It makes Lu Han smile, a little fond, a little rueful. "I thought he might." The measurement of Zitao's growth was oddly figured: he was shrewd, introspective, and half of the things he said either sounded like a Confucian saying or was. At the same time, he was hopelessly young: he spoke in outbursts, was deceptively easy to hurt and just as easy to tease, and was quick to revert to childishness, pouting and whining even though it didn't suit him - tall and toned, with sharp features - but it was probably that disparity that made it so effective.
"I thought about being a carer," Yixing says, and for a moment it seems like another one of his non sequiturs, before he continues: "I thought I could be good at it, too. But seeing Taozi like that…"
"You promised him," Lu Han finishes for him, and the words sound ugly in his mouth, voice wavering. Zhang Yixing, you idiot, he wants to say, but he doesn't have any right. It was true that not everyone was inclined - or qualified - to be a carer, but most people, unlike Lu Han, wanted to be one for the same reason: it meant pushing back donations by several years. It meant that the only thing he wanted for Yixing was time, and he'd given it up.
Yixing shrugs, a one-shouldered movement. "Yifan was gone. And you-" His fingers curl in the blankets, a little. Staring in front of him, away from Lu Han, he looks briefly defiant. Yixing, after all, wasn't the kind of person to have regrets. A few years ago, Lu Han would have cut him off, voice shrill: forgive me or don't, just decide. Now, Lu Han waits, silent as he lets it hit home: "I’d stopped thinking about you."
Winter blended together for him, more night than day, his gaze lingering on Yixing's fingers on a fishbone, sucking each spine clean. Imagining the shape of Yixing's mouth, Yifan's long fingers pressed into flesh, as he listens to them, skin to skin, in next room. The heaviness of Zitao's head on his shoulder as the four of them sat together and listened to Yixing's cassette, Zitao's unabashed gaze as he watched Yifan and Yixing steal a kiss.
Later, Zitao always claimed to have seen the warning signs, the little fissures that led to the fracture of Yifan and Yixing's relationship. "There was always something between them," he said, and hesitated, looking at Lu Han, and then away. It ended as quietly as it started, so that Lu Han could never pinpoint exactly when the boundaries began reestablishing themselves, if it happened at all, the act of navigation, trying to learn the reconstruction of space.
Even later, Yifan would say, "Maybe we just aren't capable of love." Lu Han had said something like, you think we weren't built that way? To be able to? Yifan had hesitated before he said, slowly, "I don't know. You can't feel everything with the same mildness, and expect to love with intensity." Lu Han lifted his head, about to speak, when he realised that Yifan was talking about Yixing. Yifan, who had protected Yixing so quietly and naturally that he never noticed; who had watched over a Lu Han who’d refused to need looking after; who had done it so well that the only thing that hurt them would be each other.
It was at Youjing that he started thinking of his body as a vessel, remembering the headmaster carefully intoning: each of you is precious. The image of Zitao, smoking a contraband cigarette, viciously delighted at hurting the body that was and wasn't his; Yifan, by contrast, nursing his body into perfect health. He was walking in the garden when he started thinking about the sadness of bearing fruit: the joy of bringing them to ripeness, heavy and round with splendour, only to have them be plucked from you. He cried about it exactly once, and it was then, hot tears spilling down his cheeks, wetting the soft, brown earth that drank them, indifferent to the source, until Yixing found him and held him. That was it: none of them were meant to rescue each other.
"I dreamt that we went to the Great Wall," Yixing says. His voice runs like a fever, rambling and discontent, and lying side by side, they are close enough that his breath is still warm when it washes over Lu Han, like reaching the opposite shore. It makes the air feel thinner when he inhales, but he doesn't pull away. "We met Yifan in the middle, walking from the other end."
Lu Han inhales sharply. It doesn't work that way, he wants to say. You can't do that. He reaches for Yixing, instead, and when Lu Han touches his face, Yixing closes his eyes. Yixing's body feels like a lesson in geography, learning what has already been mapped out, nothing left to discover. He touches him with the ghost of Yifan's fingers, finding places that make Yixing arch up, cry out, places Yifan has already been, marked; places lost, places he has left for Lu Han to find. When Yixing's body opens up for him, it's Yifan who comes alive.
Yifan started reading self-help books, just before he was given notice. When the letter arrived, he read it calmly and then excused himself, taking it with him so that none of them could read it, but they knew what it was. Lu Han, suffocated by the sudden lack of air in the room, went back to his room and found Yifan in it, still holding the letter. He didn't take his eyes away from it when he said, hands shaking, "I always wanted-" He started when Lu Han took his hands in his, and the letter fell to the floor. Stepping closer, Lu Han deliberately put his foot on it, feeling it crumple and give way. He never knew who leaned in first, only that there was a kiss.
He wanted, desperately, to be angry: shout at him, you aren't supposed to leave me. To be angry at Yixing who had brought Yifan into his life, angry at Yixing for what he hadn't even done yet. But he looked at Zitao and could only feel guilt for what each of them, in turn, would do to him. He spent an afternoon staring at each of them instead, cataloguing every characteristic so that he could conjure them up in his mind, perfectly formed: every gesture, every habit, every sound.
The next day, he applied to be a carer without telling anyone, voice clear and firm as he turned in the forms and said, "I want to start immediately." In his head, he kept seeing Yifan's face, carrying the same expression it had had when Yixing had gotten lost on one of their first trips into the city: scared and refusing to be, at the same time. I kept thinking of it in terms of physics, expecting an equal but opposite reaction, Yifan had said, sounding hollow, mechanical. I couldn't understand why Yixing didn't change anything I felt for you, or why you didn't change anything I felt for Yixing. He realised, then, that he was the one hearing the past tense in Yifan's words 3, and he lifted Yifan's arm and draped it over himself, face pressed against Yifan's bare chest, as if the cage of his arms would keep him safe, stop the floodwaters from rising.
When he returned, Yixing let him put his head on his shoulder, and he said in a low voice only Lu Han could hear, "What did you do?" Lu Han shook his head and didn't reply, and when Yifan came to sit beside them, Lu Han held his hand. He could tell the exact moment that Yixing noticed, suddenly stilling beside him, but none of them said anything. A few days later, his carer training began.
At the hospital he was sent to, news trickled in of Yifan being admitted to a hospital in central Beijing, making his first, second donation, recovering quickly after each one. He found himself thinking, Yifan was always brave - for others, if not himself. His last words to Lu Han were maybe next time, without a trace of facetiousness. On the third donation, he completed. By then, it had been almost a year since Lu Han left Youjing, afraid of what he had there, of being loved and left behind. "Zhang Yixing," Lu Han still asked, every time someone approached him with news of Nanjiang students. "Did you hear about anyone named Zhang Yixing?"
Lu Han is sitting by the window when Yixing wakes up. His slow shuffle into his hospital slippers makes Lu Han look up, and he holds out a hand to Yixing. When Yixing reaches him, Lu Han leans his head against him, and they watch the patients walking with their carers in the pavilion, the sunlight streaming across the courtyard. Somewhere, the bell of a clock tower begins to toll, and Lu Han speaks without looking up. "Do you miss him?"
It takes Yixing a while to answer, watching the people mill about outside as he searches for the right words. "With the same part of me that loves you," he says, finally. He looks down at Lu Han, who nods, resting his chin on his knees as he looks back outside.
In the time they had left, they had only come upon the verge of understanding; it was only in experiencing the incomplete that they had come to understand the whole, in degrees, like the dark that defined the light, the chiaroscuro of it. By then, Lu Han had left, in the closest thing he ever said to I love you, each of them learning love only through loss. Startled by the depth of his own feelings, Lu Han had let the water close over his head. He sunk, only to realise that he was looking at two faces of the same object and traversing the line in between, over and over again. That in his palm, his heart line splintered into two perfect halves.
Slowly, he curled his fingers inward, tucking his hands in between his chest and his knees, and let the thought drift: maybe next time.
前世五百次的回眸，才贏得今世的擦肩而過 4
five hundred backward glances in our past reincarnations,
in exchange for walking by each other once in this life
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1 南江男與科學校, Nanjiang Preparatory School for Boys.
2 幽靜候獻院, Youjing Donation Waiting Centre.
3 Verbs in Mandarin do not inherently have tense, and Yifan's words are (can be) ambiguous.
4 Source