Cocoon, page 10
Dad might have been a good professor, but he was a terrible businessman. When the university squeezed him out, he exiled himself and entered a different profession, only to find himself ostracized there too. He was a born outsider. He dealt with disappointment by walking out, and so his life was one departure after another. Sometimes I thought if he’d just stayed put, and decided not to make any decisions, his life might have gone much smoother.
The K3 train still runs today, leaving Beijing each Wednesday, arriving in Moscow the following Tuesday. Passing Mohe on day two, Lake Baikal on the Saturday, and the Yenisei River the day after. Not many people are willing to spend six days on the journey nowadays, and so there aren’t as many passengers as before.
Every time I pass Beijing Station, I think to myself I’ll ride the K3 someday. Really, though, I’m waiting for the service to vanish from the timetables. While it exists, it’s a threat to my fantasy.
Cheng Gong
I remember very clearly the day you transferred into our elementary school. It was spring, and the vendors had started selling silkworm snacks at the school gates.
The teacher brought you in during second period. You stood by the door, tall and thin, a beam of sunlight whittling the left side of your face. Like a figure in an overexposed photograph, your features were hard to discern, making you solemn and mysterious.
You hardly said anything to introduce yourself. Everyone stared for a moment before applauding.
The only empty seat was in the back row, next to mine. The teacher ushered you there—just for now, she assured you, as if these were dangerous conditions. You seemed unbothered.
I turned to look at you during class. Your hair, parted on one side, hid most of your face, and I could only see your protruding nose. Your nostrils trembled faintly, agitating the air. You kept pressing down on your sky-blue mechanical pencil, stabbing the lead into the paper till it snapped. Then you reached into your pencil case, inserted a couple more lengths, and kept going. Your desk was covered with bits of shattered lead, like an ant colony. You didn’t open your textbook once all morning.
After school, Li Peixuan appeared in the doorway. You scooped up the bits of lead, put away your pencil case, and followed her out. Peixuan was the year above us, but we all knew who she was—the only city-level triple-good student in the whole school (remember “triple-good”? Good morals, good grades, good health).
We soon learned that she was your cousin, which meant your grandfather was the famous professor Li Jisheng. Everyone at the Medical University knew him. Before long, all the girls in class were asking you to jump rope with them and inviting you on weekend excursions to the countryside—but you didn’t seem interested in these offers.
By then, I was no longer lonely, but had formed a little gang with Dabin and Zifeng. Our teacher used to say the classroom was a small society, and indeed, we had divisions of social class too. The three of us were on the lowest rung. This pecking order was decided by our parents’ professions. My dad used to be a driver for the university, working alongside Zifeng’s dad. Then he decided it was too tiring and stopped doing it, but no one dared to fire him, so he was technically still a university employee. Zifeng’s dad now drove ambulances instead of goods trucks, and no longer had to do overtime. Dabin’s dad was a cook at our cafeteria, and stood each day stirring a pot the size of a bathtub. All manual laborers, in other words. Only parents who worked with their brains were respected. The elite of our class were the offspring of university administrators and professors. In the middle were the children of regular teachers, and at the bottom, us. The upper tier quickly formed a little circle, which the middle group tried hard to ingratiate themselves into while strenuously avoiding us. When I realized this was happening, I decided to unite those of us at the bottom of the heap.
Dabin was frightened of everything: rodents, insects, even blood—if anyone in the class had a nosebleed, he’d look like he was about to faint. Worse, he was way too emotional. When the class went to see Mama Love Me One More Time, he sobbed the most fiercely and it took him several days to recover. He cried at Liu Hulan too, and kept asking why they couldn’t have spared Liu Hulan’s life. At least he was generous—the sort of person who, if he only had one eraser, would break it in half to share it with you.
Zifeng was the opposite—he felt nothing at all, and couldn’t understand why people wept while watching a movie. I heard he didn’t even shed a tear when his beloved grandma died. His own parents thought he was cold-blooded. But I’m not, he told us more than once, I just don’t know how to react—could you tell me when I ought to cry? I said, If your mom suddenly abandoned you, you’d know it was time to cry. She wouldn’t do that, he said, not even when my dad hits her. Well then, I said frostily, I guess you’ll never find out. Zifeng sighed dejectedly.
To be honest, I’d never have chosen these people as my friends, but you’re always better off having friends around than not. I needed allies.
Our little group frequently got together. They sought me out between classes and talked earnestly about boring things. I noticed you glaring at us—probably our classmates had warned you to keep your distance.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised you didn’t say a word to me that first week—I thought that’s how things would be between us. Then one afternoon the following week, Dabin came by between classes to invite me to his house after school—his dog had just had puppies. After he left, you abruptly said, “What kind of dog?”
“Wolfhound,” I said, startled, then hastily added, “I’m sure the puppies are cute, though.”
You nodded, then just before our final class of the day, you asked if you could come see the puppies. You still looked unfriendly, and turned away immediately after you’d spoken. I actually wondered if I’d hallucinated it.
That evening, you patted Dabin’s growling dog, and kissed the puppies. Then, like the rest of us, you scooped puffed rice snacks into your mouth with grubby hands.
Dabin and Zifeng took to you right away, but your friendliness felt forced to me, like you were performing. From then on, you often hung out with us after school. It wasn’t till later that I realized you were trying to avoid going home, and so you chose to join us, kids who could also stay out late.
You enjoyed games that involved running—tag or throwing sandbags—as well as climbing walls and trees. Only when you were sweating and covered in dirt did you seem to feel you’d had fun. Sometimes, without warning, you’d let out a shriek, not drawing breath, until your voice gave out. Then you’d look smugly at us, as if you’d torn a hole in the sky. I learned to spot the signs, and would hold your mouth shut. Your teeth felt slimy against my palm.
Soon, you were dictating how we played our games, constantly changing the rules—sandbags could only be thrown with one hand, you had to turn around before throwing.
One time, during hide and seek, I ran to the bamboo grove behind the library and sidled in. It was early summer and the leaves were growing thickly. Just as I was feeling pleased with myself for finding the perfect spot, you squirmed in from the other direction. We stood side by side, pressed against the wall. It had rained the day before, and the air was still damp. Shadows from the bamboo leaves swayed across your face. All of a sudden, your hand shot out and a crooked finger slipped into my armpit. I twisted away, rustling the bamboo, and when you giggled, I clamped your mouth shut. We tussled in silence until we heard Dabin’s footsteps. We held our breath, but a long stick reached in toward us. Standing in the gloom, waiting for the bamboo to part, you took my hand. Your palms were damp, like mushrooms after the rain.
“Do you know,” Dabin said to me many years later. “It felt like I’d caught you in flagrante.” He should know. He was married to a TV presenter who’d had several extracurricular encounters, and had trained himself to sniff out her incipient infidelities like a hunting dog.
“I think you already liked Jiaqi back then,” he said.
I shook my head and said I didn’t know. My feelings were complicated. Sometimes your face took on the weariness of a much older person as you studied your surroundings impatiently. I felt uneasy with your early maturity, as if you were running far in front of me. A faint sense of competition pushed us apart. In a few years, as our desires matured, that competitiveness might have turned to a desire for conquest, and I might have fallen hard for you. But at the time, there was no outlet for these emotions, and I didn’t know how to handle them.
After a month, the teacher moved you to a different desk, but it was too late—we were friends, and our classmates looked at you with pity. Some of the well-meaning girls tried to talk you out of your fallen state, but you refused to repent.
Naively, we assumed you played with us because we were more fun than other people. Actually, what amused you was the dramatic gulf between us, the granddaughter of a famous professor and some lowborn brats.
Everyone could see you were rebelling against your family and disliked your grandparents, though you never said so. You never mentioned them at all. And you hated Peixuan, their emissary. You wanted to be the opposite of her, a disappointment—the only way you could hurt them.
Peixuan quickly learned about our friendship, and took it upon herself to urge you back to the path of righteousness. Each day we’d see her waiting for you outside the school, like a parent. After she’d dragged you home a couple of times, we began leaving school before the last period, looking for secluded areas where we could play. Unfortunately, we lived on a college campus, and all the secluded areas contained undergraduates making out. We kept having to retreat as pimply boys yelled at us. Where could we go? Then we thought of Dead Man’s Tower.
Everyone knew it. The Germans had built it as a water tower when they occupied Jinan, then it stood abandoned for several years before becoming storage for the cadavers and spare organs used in dissection classes and experiments—at our university and two nearby ones too.
As a driver, Zifeng’s dad sometimes had the task of hauling fresh corpses here from the execution grounds. Zifeng told us each time he went out—who’d have thought so many people got sentenced to death? We finally believed that criminals actually did face the firing squad, then their bodies would get taken here and cut into pieces for medical students in their coke-bottle glasses to prod at. Dead Man’s Tower purified your spirit—anyone who came here would be afraid to commit any crimes, especially capital ones. I came up with the hazy notion that it wasn’t easy to squander your life and not leave behind anything of value—they could always come and gouge it out of your remains.
A rumor had gone round the school about older students sneaking in there one night and subsequently coming down with a mysterious illness.
Dead Man’s Tower was in the south-western corner of campus, surrounded by tall brick walls. The only entrance was a metal gate on the west side, so low a grown man would have to bend over—probably because most people would be carried in horizontally. There were no trees anywhere around it, and even the grass was sparse. A bald patch in an otherwise lush campus, as if someone had wrenched a chunk of hair off a scalp. Auntie told me the undergrads had paid special attention to this area during one of the annual Tree Planting Days, but all the saplings had died, apparently because the soil was permeated with formaldehyde.
It was deathly silent when we came here in the evenings. A row of houses stood near the gate against the western wall, dilapidated from long abandonment. Broken glass dangled from a high window, quivering as if it might fall at the first breath of wind. Us boys piled rocks and bricks against the house till we could climb up to the window sill, and from there reached for the roof tiles to haul ourselves up. You followed.
From the rooftop, we could finally see what lay within the walls. On one side of the yard was a mound of bodies—more accurately, body parts. There were faces cut in half, decapitated heads with their eyes shut tight. I noticed a corpse with moldy nipples. The other side was a lake of formaldehyde in which scattered limbs were soaking. Mottled green skin with strange bronze patterns. You shrieked—not from fear, but exhilaration. I eyed Dabin, worried he would faint, but though his face went pale for a few minutes, he soon recovered. Progress, I thought. Later, I would find out he was still terrified of bugs. Corpses weren’t living things, he explained, so there was no reason to fear them.
Our adventure couldn’t end on the rooftop, but there was no way down except to jump. Zifeng had the longest legs so we shoved him off the edge. Staggering, he found some wooden crates to stack. They rattled as he moved them. He pulled a lid off to reveal they were full of skulls, some so dainty they must have been children’s, perhaps younger than us. Did anyone that young get sentenced to death? We looked at each other, shuddering.
The tower’s wooden door was locked, so we couldn’t get any further. On another expedition, though, we found it standing ajar, with the padlock on the ground nearby. We stood listening for a long time until we were sure there was no one inside. Someone had forgotten to lock up. Inside, we climbed the narrow wooden stairs, avoiding the skeletons that littered each landing. On the second floor were wooden shelves on which brownish jars of various sizes were laid out, various human organs preserved in liquid. It was hard to believe they’d come from warm bodies like our own.
A jar the color of tea held a child so minuscule it must have died before being born. Bent over, trying to hug itself, a picture of loneliness. Its head was large, its tiny fingers and toes finely molded.
“A baby,” you murmured.
“Fetus,” I corrected you.
“What’s the difference?”
“A fetus lives in the water, a baby has crawled up onto land. Same as tadpoles and frogs.”
You were fascinated by a half-brain, pale and rigid as a tinned monkey-head mushroom. You brought the jar over to the window, turning it to study it from different angles.
“It’s badly damaged.” Crinkling your brow as though you were a pathologist, you pointed out some cracks and a hole the size of a bug’s eye. Why preserve a broken brain?
“Because it contains this person’s memories.”
“Do you mean,” you looked at me, “the day will come when we’ll be able to look at this chunk of brain and know what happened to this person as a kid?”
“Maybe.”
You thought about it and said earnestly, “Then I’ll let them dissect me when I’m dead, so my memories can live on too.” You nodded firmly, sealing the deal.
I had no idea why you’d want your memories to live on, but it felt like a high-minded notion. Before you’d said it, I’d never thought of such a thing. Once again, you were ahead of me. Dejected, I said icily, “What makes you think people in the future will even care about your memories? Bet they aren’t interested.”
“Doesn’t matter, they can just live here,” you said. “Someone will care, eventually.”
A cloud drifted aside, allowing sunlight to shine through the thick brown glass and onto the pale brain. Just like that, it was almost transparent. I squinted and thought I could see something throbbing beneath the murky surface.
Light hit those sealed memories. They snuffled, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
The next time we went back, the door was locked again so we played in the yard. Blind man’s buff. Only you could have thought of that. Someone had a red scarf tied over their eyes and had to hunt down the rest, which meant the blindfolded person might end up grabbing a severed arm or half-torso.
The yard was too small and cluttered for our games, and we eventually just sat on the rooftop enjoying the scenery. Four of us in a row, legs dangling. The lack of trees made the tower stark, tall and slender like a monk in grey robes. The world suddenly felt much older.
The setting sun scorched the western sky red. Dusk settled over us.
“They’ll never eat again,” I said, gazing at the cadavers.
“Look on the bright side,” said Dabin. “They won’t get hungry either.”
Did sitting so high up make us look to the future? Our conversation drifted that way. Dabin wanted to be a cop with a gun. Zifeng wanted to be an author, to probe people’s rich inner lives. As for me, I wanted to be accomplished, to gain people’s respect. You spread your arms wide and proclaimed, “I want lots and lots of love.”
We were making wishes. But why here? Maybe the presence of the dead connected us to a supernatural realm, though the dead hadn’t even been able to keep their own limbs connected to their bodies, so who knows?
As the semester drew to a close and exams loomed, Peixuan showed up. She seemed startled to see us up on the roof. After searching everywhere for you, she’d finally gone down that deserted path, but hadn’t thought we’d be atop the wall around Dead Man’s Tower. She stopped a few meters away.
“Go home and start revising,” she said, head tilted up to you. “I don’t want to see you get held back a grade.”
You invited her to join us. There were so many cool things to see in the yard: corpses with staring eyes, severed hands and feet, children’s tongues. Peixuan grimaced.
“Enough nonsense,” she muttered.
“Come see for yourself!” You swung your legs with gusto.
“We’re going home. Now.”
“See? She doesn’t dare!” you crowed.
“The flag-raising girl is a scaredy cat,” I said.
Our laughter was like a basin of filthy water we’d flung down onto her. She stood perfectly still, seeming to shrink, her gleaming dignity tarnished. I felt a glimmer of glee, as if I’d smashed a beautiful porcelain vase, or spat into a sparkling clear brook.
As she turned to go, you called after her, “Don’t be a tattletale, now!”
