Cocoon, page 8
“She’s my professor’s daughter,” he’d tell his friends, as if this was the most distinctive thing about his new girlfriend.
“A classic romance,” said a friend.
“Our Yachen is a nostalgic soul,” said another. Everyone nodded.
Alcohol has a magic power—it makes everything sound sincere and even the most boring moments sparkle. As if nothing exists but this night. Every word is moving, and ought to be remembered forever. The gravity of existence fills everyone with life, taking away their weariness. When Yachen got drunk his face took on an expression of pure decadence, beaming and swaying his head, the way I remembered Dad. Or perhaps it was because I was drinking too that I perceived this in him. I began to love alcohol. The drinking gene, long dormant in my blood, was suddenly aroused. Whenever we went out for dinner, I’d return more than a little tipsy.
I was very fond of the journey home, the night’s excitement still blazing in the air. Yachen and I in the back seat, arms entwined, those moments spent passionately yet noiselessly kissing. The cramped, sealed space made this feel illicit. Alcohol turned my tongue into a snake. As the car sped down the wideness of Chang’an Road, I counted twelve magnolia blossoms on every streetlight.
Through all this, I had enough restraint not to get completely drunk. I didn’t know what would happen if I let myself go that far, but instinct told me not to try. Unfortunately, telling myself not to do something only made it more alluring, and I succumbed at Yachen’s college reunion.
He’d arranged the reunion because my reappearance had made him wistful for that period of his life. I was looking forward to seeing so many of Dad’s former students. Yachen’s plan was not to tell them who I was at first, then when everyone was sufficiently merry, to lead me to the stage and announce that I was the professor’s daughter. Before that point in the evening, though, I’d already had far too much. Without waiting for him to take my hand, I ran up on stage by myself and grabbed the microphone.
No one had encouraged me to drink. I’d done it all myself, hoping to lose myself in alcohol. The atmosphere wasn’t what I’d imagined. Everyone was grumbling about property prices, sharing stock market tips, and comparing notes on which country would be best to emigrate to. Some of the women huddled together discussing their children’s education and which anti-aging skincare products worked best. People kept coming over for a toast with Yachen, clapping an arm across his shoulders, speaking in tones of pure flattery. This felt like a regular dinner party. No one was thinking of the past, and no one mentioned Dad. No one, no one at all. I drank glass after glass as everyone around me praised Yachen’s success. Even so, I swear I hadn’t planned on rushing the stage. Feeling too hot, I’d decided to step outside for a breath of fresh air. As I passed by the stage, someone was thanking Yachen for the opportunity to reconnect, saying she hoped his business would continue growing, and maybe they could do this again next year, say at a beach resort like Sanya ... Her face was warped, or maybe the floorboards were tilting, anyway something was off and I had to stop it. I marched up on stage and snatched the mic from her. That’s where my memory cut out. I awoke in Yachen’s guest room, darkness spread across the window like sealing wax. I went into his room and sat on the edge of the bed. His back was to me, but I knew he wasn’t asleep.
“I was drunk,” I said. After a moment’s thought, I added, “I’m sorry.”
He rolled over to stare at the ceiling.
“It must be hard for you, being with someone like me.”
“I truly was drunk, maybe I said something I oughtn’t have …”
“Maybe?” he thundered. “Calling me uncultured in front of all those people? Vulgar? An empty soulless husk?”
“I said all that?”
“Didn’t your parents teach you how to behave? Oh, I forgot, your father died before he had the chance.” He turned to face me. “If he could see you now, he’d look away in shame. You’re an embarrassment. I only took you in because I felt sorry for you.”
“Like one of your charitable works.”
“Yes, like those children I support. Not one of them is as ungrateful as you.”
We stared at each other. Finally, he shut his eyes wearily, and said like a plea, “You should leave tomorrow.”
I woke again just before noon. Maybe because I was about to go, I’d slept extraordinarily well, with no dreams at all. After I’d packed my things, I let myself into the second-floor storeroom and went up to the still-wrapped sculpture. I’d brought a box cutter with me, and started slicing open the plastic sheeting. The door crashed open and Xiaohui walked in.
“I thought I’d find you here,” she snapped. “Now I’ve caught you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know very well what I mean. Go if you’re going. But you wanted to help yourself to a little something on your way out.”
I glared at her and kept cutting.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
I ripped through the last layer, and the plastic fell to the ground. The statue stood exposed in the darkened room. The girl was still leaning forward, her face tilted up, eyes shut, smiling with intoxication, as if inhaling the scent of this strange environment. I flung down the knife and walked out.
Cheng Gong
Whenever I start drinking, I feel the need to get drunk. Soberness is a barrier that exists to be smashed. Being drunk is infinite joy and sorrow, a precious experience I hope to share with you sometime.
I think I’ve drunk enough to talk about Granddad. The farther he gets from me in time, the more it feels like there’s a desert island in the middle of my memory where I can put anything to do with him—the most visible location, but also completely cut off. Now I need to plunge into the icy water and hold my breath as I swim across.
I didn’t know he existed till I was six. Auntie was working at the hospital, and she brought me along one day. As we went through the gates, she asked if I remembered being here before, then said I’d been born here. I thought about it and regretfully informed her I couldn’t remember being born. She laughed and said, You came here after that too, silly, to visit your granddad. He lives on the third floor of this hospital, she said, pointing out the window. Did I remember him? I didn’t, but I was curious, and asked if we could see him.
We walked down a long corridor. The doors on either side were open, and when I peeped into the rooms as we went past, I saw a man’s plaster-cast leg being hoisted up to the ceiling, then a scrawny man with his head wrapped in so many layers of bandages he looked like a cotton swab. There were between four and six patients in each room, along with a howling infant, a groaning old person, and various family members squabbling with the nurses.
Granddad was at the end of the corridor, a little apart from the other rooms. On his door was the number 317 in bright red, clearly painted by hand as an afterthought, the numerals smaller than for the other rooms. I would later find out that this had been a nurses’ office, but they’d converted it when they needed somewhere to put Granddad.
It was very quiet inside. The room wasn’t very large, but because it only contained a single bed it felt cavernous. The person in the bed must be Granddad. I went over and studied his large, pale face, his eyes like raisins. Though his eyeballs moved, his gaze only went from one part of the ceiling to another, never to us.
“Granddad.” The word felt insubstantial in my mouth, hollow as an empty bean pod.
The last time I said that word I’d probably only just learned to speak. Auntie said when they brought me here before, Mom pointed at the man in the bed and told me that was my granddad, and, as if I’d been given a new toy, I’d shouted excitedly, “Grand—dad!”
“Stop that!” Dad had said. “He can’t hear you.”
Auntie explained that Granddad was in a vegetative state. “That means he can’t speak or move. Just like those.” She pointed at the withered orchids on the window sill.
I went back to the hospital alone the next day. Grabbing a water bottle, I clambered up onto the bed and poured its contents over Granddad from head to foot, then waited to see what color flowers he would sprout.
Eventually, a nurse came in and grumpily changed his soaked bedclothes. Next, she put a long pipe down his throat and poured in a brown slurry. So that was how Granddad got his nutrients.
For a long time after this, I snuck into Granddad’s room almost every day. When I stood by his bed, he looked at me, and when I blinked, he did too. I winked, and after a while, he blinked again. I tried with the other eye, but he just stared at me. No reaction. At three, the nurse came in and shooed me out—she didn’t want me to see him piss and shit, a process I could only imagine.
Grandpa seemed like a sort of plant that had been placed in someone else’s home, and I felt I had a duty to visit him. I hoped I’d be able to train him to do something: squint, raise his eyebrows, even smile. After two weeks with no result, I gave up.
Sometime later, a hedgehog stole my affection. I was buying some steamed buns for Granny when I saw a hedgehog by the side of the road. I crept over, scooped it up in the steamed bun bag, and ran home. Granny wouldn’t let it into the house, so I had to keep it in the back yard in a cracked pickle jar with a stone slab across the top. Each day I fed it tomato peel and cucumber stems, and carefully stroked it with my gloves on. Now I had a pet, I quickly forgot about Granddad. Then one Sunday, Auntie and I were on our way to visit one of her coworkers when it began to storm. I ran all the way home, but the jar was already overflowing and the hedgehog was floating belly up, spikes limp from their soaking.
I was sad for a few days, then I remembered Granddad. No one ever went to see him or even mentioned him, I realized. They’d forgotten he existed, which must be the saddest thing about being in a vegetative state. Would the nurses forget him too? I felt guilty. What if he’d quietly died and we hadn’t noticed? The hedgehog’s death had made me realize life was unpredictable. Finally, I confessed my worries to Granny and Auntie.
“Let him die,” said Granny, rolling her eyes. “That’s the only thing left for him to do.”
“The nurses will remember to feed him every day,” said Auntie.
I persuaded Auntie to let me go to the hospital after lunch, and promised Granny I’d get all my chores done by then. Auntie put a rug on the floor of Granddad’s room, and I would have my afternoon naps there. It was dingy in the summer, when the lone window got choked with ivy. The damp made paint peel off the walls, like giant moths. The bed was shedding too, white paint flaking off the metal frame.
On these long afternoons, I sat on the rug and played with my only toy, a set of faded building blocks, or colored in the line drawings in my Journey to the West comic book. Otherwise I picked bobbles of brown yarn off the rug, examined the ants scurrying by with their bounty of crumbs, and scribbled my red crayon over a scrap of gauze I’d scrounged from Auntie then tied round my head to scare the nurses. When I got really bored, I’d slump on the window sill and watch the black heads bobbing in and out of the gate, counting them till I fell asleep.
I started elementary school in September. At first I was excited to have more playmates, but it only took me two days to realize this place wasn’t for me. The classes lasted too long, and the silence as the teacher wrote on the blackboard made me want to scream.
Finally, the weekend came and I could go back to the hospital. I charged gleefully into the room, only to find a man sitting cross-legged on my rug, shoveling the contents of a packed lunch into his mouth. It was my dad.
“You scared me, you little devil.” He swatted the back of my head. “But what a good son. I guess you came as soon as you heard I was here?”
My dad owed money to loan sharks, and had to find a new hiding place every few days. Then he’d had a brainwave: they’d never think to look for him in Granddad’s hospital room! And Auntie could deliver meals to him here.
“I was in need, and the old man’s spirit protected me!” he said. “You’re always better off having a dad around than not.”
I blinked. This wasn’t a sentiment I could agree with.
As far back as I could remember, Dad had always been in debt—as if “debtor” was his profession. When I was two or three, a couple of thugs barged into our house and scoured the whole place. When they didn’t find Dad or any valuables they could swipe, they flung a chair through our TV set. I was watching a cartoon about a little mole when the screen suddenly went dark and caved in. The men stormed out. I sat staring at the chasm for a long time, but the mole didn’t return.
Now Dad had taken over Room 317. He’d brought a radio from home, and kept it on all day long, lazing on the rug as he listened to book reviews and ball games. When the isolation was too much for him to bear, he’d wait till dark and sneak out for a few rounds of mahjong. The nurse kept reminding him that visitors weren’t supposed to stay overnight, but he pretended not to hear her, and a couple of times even looked like he was going to hit her. Then she found out more about our family’s past, and closed one eye to his presence.
I brought dinner each evening. He’d snatch the food, and crouch down by the wall to gobble it. When he was done, I emptied the scraps into the trash can and put the greasy container back into my bag. He ate fast, but even those ten minutes or so felt like an eternity to me. I couldn’t look away from the rug he sat on, the magic carpet where I’d had so many strange dreams. Now it was spattered with food, and a cigarette had burned a hole in one corner. He’d destroyed it.
I began to loathe these visits. One time, I swung the bag so hard it tore and two steamed buns rolled out. The corridor had just been cleaned, and a sheen of disinfectant still glistened on the floor. When I picked up the buns, they had a faint chemical smell. I put them back in the container anyway. That night, I dreamed Dad was bleeding from every orifice after eating the buns, while I stood nearby watching calmly, plotting how to dispose of his corpse.
Dad finally paid off his debts that winter, but unfortunately he’d gotten the money by swindling a restaurant owner who reported him to the police. He got six years. He’d been in and out of lockup these last few years and we’d always known he’d be put away for real sooner or later. Now it had happened, we let out a sigh of relief, counting ourselves lucky he hadn’t done anything worse.
On the coldest day of the year, Granny, Auntie, and I went to see him at the prison on the outskirts of the city. Tiny flakes of snow drifted across the sky. We brought two sweaters Auntie had knitted for him: navy blue, brioche stitch. Dad was clean-shaven, and I’d never seen his hair so short. When he looked down, I could see his scalp, which had an inch-long scar. He was more cheerful and less agitated than I’d expected, and Granny was surprisingly cordial. Don’t worry about anything while you’re inside, she said, I’ll take care of Cheng Gong, and I’ll keep track of what he costs me—you can pay me back when you get out. Six years will pass in no time. The mention of “six years” made Dad’s face twitch, and Auntie hastily reminded him it would be less, he’d get time off for good behavior. Sounding sad, Dad said, Tell Yajuan to wait for me—she hasn’t come to visit me, not once. Yajuan was the widow he’d been seeing. I’d heard she was bucktoothed and unattractive, but Dad seemed besotted, and went to be with her in Hangzhou when he got out. She and a friend had set up a garment business there, with a little factory of their own. Dad looked after their warehouse. She didn’t seem to like his family, and told him not to get in touch with us too often. That’s why we never heard from him except when he sent a little money and called us on festive occasions. He never offered to pay for my living expenses, which of course Granny objected to, but at least she no longer had to worry if he was okay, which must have been a relief.
Peace returned to Room 317. I could have resumed my visits, but I’d gotten interested in chess, and would go to the hutong by Southern Courtyard every afternoon to watch the players there. Granddad and Room 317 were relegated to the back of my mind. Little did I know Granddad would always find a way of coming back to life and reinserting himself into my existence every few years.
His next resuscitation began with school. Remember when you started coming to the elementary school and were shocked at how shabby it was? Just a two-story building and a row of rooms around a tiny courtyard with a basketball hoop fixed to one wall, our lone piece of athletic equipment. The pupils were mostly children of the Medical University staff and faculty, and our teachers were mostly their family members, many of them female—like our homeroom teacher Mrs. Yang. She’d gotten herself transferred to this compound so she could be in the same place as her husband, and teaching was the only job they could find for her. Other teachers had just arrived and still had thick country accents, which we gleefully imitated. As for those students who were the offspring of teachers, we all gave way to them as if they were armed with magic swords.
The school may not have been impressive, but it was the first community I belonged to. I was excited to have so many classmates instead of being all alone. Then I realized how stuck-up they were—they often didn’t answer when I talked to them, and would shriek at small things like seeing a gecko on the classroom wall. Even so, I tried to make them like me, until I understood that they never would, no matter what I did. Because our parents either worked at the university or the teaching hospital, we knew all about one another’s families—which meant they’d heard the stories about Dad. One boy had lived next door to Granny, and said that his dad had given mine a loan. When Dad vanished, the other man hadn’t dared to demand that Granny repay the debt—but when this boy saw me in the corridor, he’d yell that I owed him money. Another girl’s mom worked in the management department, and had had to issue Granny a warning when she put up a structure that blocked all the light to her neighbor’s house. As a result, Granny began tormenting her—pouring leftover food into her bicycle basket, flinging soda bottles at their house till the yard was covered in broken glass. This girl said her mom had become a nervous wreck, often bursting into tears. The persecution only stopped when they moved. This girl and her friends were always huddling together after class, whispering then falling silent when I appeared. Soon, everyone was avoiding me. Even the teachers began looking at me warily, as if I might cause trouble.
