Love Only Surfaces Now and Then

1.

I was sixteen in my third year of middle school. Now I am almost thirty. On a whim one day, I called my old classmate Li Jiacheng.

When he answered, he asked warily, ‘What do you want?’

‘I just wondered how you were. Wu Chengxian and Jiang Ying got married recently. The class monitor, the study representative and I all came back for the wedding, but you didn’t. We haven’t spoken since middle school.’

After a pause, his voice relaxed. ‘I was too busy. I would have gone if I could, but their wedding fell right in the accounting firm’s busiest season.’

‘You knew about it?’

‘Yes. I saw the photographs somewhere, though I don’t remember where.’

‘You’re an accountant now?’

‘More precisely,’ he paused, ‘I audit the finances of listed companies for an accounting firm.’

‘Why that? Did you study accounting?’

‘I studied civil engineering. The industry was still growing then, but by the time I graduated it had begun to decline. I worked in surveying and was always out on building sites in the wind and sun. I didn’t like it, so I spent a year at home preparing for the accounting exams. I passed all six at once and ranked third in the province. That made finding work easy. Looking back, it was an extraordinarily good decision.’ He spoke quickly and scarcely paused once he got going—perhaps a habit from work.

To change the subject, I asked what he did outside work. He asked whether I knew the difference between a fiddle-waist shoe and an ordinary leather shoe. A bespoke shoe narrows through the waist; its sole follows the wearer’s arch, reinforced with wood so it will not break, and resembles a little violin. Mass-market shoes, made broad and blunt to fit everyone, had no beauty at all. He now collected well-made objects. There was a sixteen-rib umbrella that opened into a perfect circle instead of the usual pentagon or hexagon. Easterners like completeness, he said; on a rainy day, merely thinking of carrying it improved his mood.

‘That all sounds expensive. Have you become very particular about how you live?’

‘Strictly speaking, I like beautiful things that have been carefully worked. It is something like craftsmanship: design and usefulness brought together. Such things are usually both handsome and durable. Most products manage only one; achieving both takes time and labour, so naturally they cost more.’

‘Are you seeing anyone?’

‘No. Isn’t life always like this? We pursue things better than ourselves. I liked someone, but once I really knew her, I understood we were not suited. While I looked at her, she was looking somewhere higher than me.’

‘How is your leg?’

‘Walking is fine; hard exercise isn’t. I never liked sport anyway. But I jog slowly by the lake every morning to stay healthy.’

After a silence, I asked, ‘Do you still have our graduation photograph?’

‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t think I ever had one.’

‘You weren’t there when we took it.’

He thought. ‘Honestly, I don’t remember. Perhaps I simply ignored the notice and thought the time would be better spent studying at home.’

‘You often did that. After graduation we invited you out several times and you never came.’

‘I am still like that. Deep down I may simply prefer being alone; perhaps my feelings are rather thin. I rarely bring other people into my life. I’m friendly with colleagues at work, but when they suggest dinner afterwards, I usually decline.’

‘Do you still read science fiction?’ ‘Not really—not for years. Apart from books I need for work, I mostly read logic now.’

‘Do you remember when I wanted to kill myself? I called and told you to take all my books. You tried hard to talk me out of it.’

‘Vaguely. To tell the truth, I never understood why you were suffering then. To me, you and Wu Chengxian were idealists—rather innocent. I was a thorough realist. At school I was more solitary than you and less accepted, practically at the bottom of the food chain, but it did not affect me much. When there is a problem, I think about solving it as quickly as possible. You have to keep moving forward. Every problem has a corresponding solution.’

That was enough, I thought. Li Jiacheng had his own life now and had travelled a long way into it.

Finally I asked, ‘Do you remember the abandoned pumping station on the road by the river? The three of us used to skip class and read there. There was a shaft we climbed down into, and Chengxian wrote many poems on its walls.’

‘Now that you mention it, I remember the place. I no longer remember what we did there.’

‘I won’t keep you. Come and see us when you have time. We really miss you.’ I did not know whether I meant it or merely wanted to say goodbye politely.

‘Do you?’ he said, his voice loosening yet uncertain. ‘Am I the only one missing?’

2.

On 4 June 2008, we waited in the classroom to see the Olympic torch.

Xia Yi craned his neck like a weasel on watch and went to the window every few minutes. We all knew his father was responsible for security along the relay route. From our fifth-floor classroom, beyond three enormous camphor trees with glossy leaves, we could see the river and the glass-scaled towers opposite. The heat warped the air. The swelling crowd drew nearer like a gigantic caterpillar. Someone asked what would happen if a person tried to seize the torch. Xia Yi finally delivered the line he had been saving: ‘With my dad there, who would dare?’

Wu Chengxian had been asleep on his desk. When the relay appeared and the room erupted, he woke with the expression of someone not yet willing to face the day, a red watch-mark across his forehead. ‘The Beijing Olympics are really here,’ he told me. ‘When we first started middle school and heard they were coming, it felt as if this day never would. Everything has been a dream.’

Detailed formulae covered the blackboard. Wang Hua, our mathematics teacher and homeroom teacher, was revising functions with us. Homework—geography, physics and politics—was listed in one corner; a last-minute notice about tomorrow’s English mock exam filled another. The chemistry representative called several weak students to the office, though for some reason not me. One teacher after another was giving up on me, until I seemed a pale shadow in the air. Once the young, lively physics teacher said without explanation, ‘Don’t tell anyone you were my student.’

That night Wang Hua telephoned my mother, a university linguistics lecturer. My mother murmured assent, her face showing the injury of wounded pride.

Wang Hua had planted informers throughout the class. They reported early romances, skipped lessons, internet cafés, cigarettes, phones, cheating, fights and snacks. She recorded everything in a black notebook and periodically surveyed us with a severe gaze. Some offences she never revealed, leaving them like swords above our heads. Perhaps on judgement day we hardened sinners would be crucified and all the consequences pour over us like rain. The atmosphere was suffocating. One morning I arrived early and wrote on the board, ‘This is our 1984.’ The student on duty erased it. No one cared.

Wu Chengxian had transferred from a rocket-launching centre in the northwest. Whenever a rocket went up, his old school closed; only after moving here did he learn that most schools did not offer so many holidays. He liked novels in which lovers died of terminal illness, such as The Lady of the Camellias, and I once saw him weep until his bedding was wet. Li Jiacheng loved manga, especially mainstream Japanese series, and bought Weekly Shonen Jump every month. All three of us loved science fiction. I preferred Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke; Li liked Ted Chiang and Heinlein; Wu liked anything tinged with romance. His favourite book, however, was Cry Me a Sad River, something I could never understand.

After reading 2001: A Space Odyssey, I announced excitedly that I had found the finest science-fiction novel in the world. They thought I was making a fuss. Li told me the matter had long been settled: the greatest was Solaris, written by a Pole. I still have not read it. Poland appeared to me as a distant, indistinct figure, and I could not believe so slight and remote a presence could have produced anything beyond 2001.

3.

Li Jiacheng and Wu Chengxian both had naturally wavy hair, but Li’s was oily while Wu’s was fine and dry. Li’s gaze was dim and vacant until an argument made it suddenly sharp; Wu always looked bright, especially when describing something. Li was very thin, with thick catfish lips and an acne-covered face. Wu was pale and handsome, with a high nose and square face. Once I asked Jiang Ying which of us three was best-looking. Embarrassed, she named Wu. I had expected it, yet still found the fact difficult to accept.

Jiang Ying was a small, short-haired girl, our class hygiene monitor. She drew comic-book princesses and dressed like one outside school. She cried easily. The boys, led by Xia Yi, teased her just far enough to watch the princess weep. Perhaps Wu imagined himself the knight fighting her dragon. While the rest of us still found girls delicate and troublesome, he had learned to value that sensitivity. Quietly, he and Jiang began dating in the final term. They promised to stay together for senior school, and both their grades improved. Wang Hua eventually chose to overlook it; we had always known they were blessed. During evening study they walked hand in hand through the alley beside school and the cool, ambiguous night.

At the same time, Li and I spent each evening preparing for the physical examination. His left leg had been hit by a car and fixed with two steel pins. Rolled trousers revealed it to be much thinner than the right, and he could never run 1,500 metres within the passing time. Together we ran laps, squatted and jumped stairs. The ancient camphor leaves drifted down in the wind and moonlight whitened the road. Li leaned to one side as he ran. When I was half a lap ahead, I looked back and found him walking. I stopped to ask what was wrong. He said, with no interest at all, that everything was meaningless.

4.

The pumping station had been built by Soviet specialists. Before the city had tap water, it pumped from the river and remained in use until 2007. Then a gas station was planned and the equipment was removed. Some windows were only frames. Graffiti covered the grey-white concrete walls. Above the great circular roof sat a smaller ventilating roof, ringed with long arched windows. A red character meaning ‘demolish’ had been sprayed outside, but year after year the building remained while experts argued that it should be preserved as a historic site.

Inside was emptiness; even the staircase had gone. Half a rusted pipe rose from the floor. A maintenance shaft by the wall could be entered using iron rungs. Its bottom was dry, dusty and littered with food wrappers. After two visits we cleaned it and made it our base. I can no longer feel why the place enthralled us. Perhaps its foreignness offered an escape from school’s oppression. Nor can I understand how, as a child, I spent afternoons watching ants move house or clouds pass. Time has altered our inner lives irreversibly.

Later Li found an aluminium ladder so we could reach the upper floor, a circular gallery around an open centre. From the windows we watched the river and the road, buses swinging dangerously through an unmonitored junction, people flying kites on the bank. Blurred, dirty clouds drifted like soaked cotton through a rose-red evening; the air smelled of rain. Looking out, I suddenly felt far from every source of pain, as though I possessed a power beyond the rational world and could be free and happy. Human needs were simple—clean air, water and food—and knowing this made everything forgivable. The coldness of teachers, family and classmates was only part of the universe’s cycle. Love surfaces only now and then. Expecting everyone to possess it is like expecting every ant to learn to march in step.

A week before the exam, Li’s mother came to see him. Her dyed yellow hair made her look streetwise. They had not met for a long time, and she invited him to eat outside the school gates. To avoid embarrassment, he brought me.

At the time I spent my lunch money on novels and had developed stomach trouble, so I accepted any invitation to eat. Bent over stir-fried pork and tofu, I listened as his mother, nervous and rusty in a role she had not played for years, repeatedly asked about school and dormitory life, then ran out of words. Before leaving, she gave Li a bottle of apple vinegar. He said it was good for the stomach and handed it to me. Frowning for a long time, he said, ‘Doesn’t she know I hate sour things?’

His parents had divorced early. As a child he lived with his mother and was often beaten, seemingly as punishment for his father. By middle school he was living with an uncle and scarcely saw either parent.

When a monthly Chinese exam allowed us to write fiction, Li wrote of a refugee spacecraft searching for a new home after Earth’s destruction. Its fuel ran out beside a dead planet unfit for humans, and the story stopped there. The premise seemed conventional, but the ending surprised me and I wanted more. He refused: ‘I don’t have the talent. I’ll never write another. Read Ted Chiang instead.’

5.

As the entrance exam approached, everyone became anxious, each person a walking flame barely able to protect itself and liable to start a larger fire. To keep our anxieties from combining, we instinctively separated, hurrying past friends with revision notes and no words. Wang Hua concentrated on the strongest pupils, while I received basic worksheets and was treated as air. Oddly, surrender made me happy. I began to watch the rain, air and clouds beyond the window and think the boundless thoughts I have since forgotten.

One evening I asked Jiang Ying what she wanted after the exam. ‘An easy life,’ she said.

At weekends she took a bus across the river to an expensive tutoring class. Fifteen days before the exam, she told us a high-school boy on that route had been harassing her. She had pressed herself against the window and cried. Wu and I skipped the afternoon. He bought a gleaming three-section baton at an army-surplus shop, and we waited at her bus stop on stools borrowed from a restaurant. Wu found cigarettes somewhere and smoked in the cold, watchful and grim as a hunting animal. Two hours later, while I bought spicy soup, I heard him shout ‘Stop!’ and threw my bowl into the street. The boy was tall, with a mushroom haircut, a royal-blue Adidas bag and drooping eyes. By the time I reached them, Wu had leapt to the height of his neck, kicked him down and brought the baton flashing onto his head. ‘Stop hitting me,’ the boy cried. ‘Take my phone and wallet.’

Rage rushed into my head. I hauled him up by the collar and shook him, too furious to form a complete sentence.

The bus home was empty and raced along with wind pouring through the windows. In the back seat, still unable to settle, we felt like gangsters and strangely exhilarated. Wu called Jiang and said decisively, ‘It was him. We got the right one.’ To sound fiercer he added, ‘We should have broken his hand.’

6.

After days of stifling heat, heavy rain shook the night and strong winds tore nests from the campus trees. Several grey days followed. When the sky finally cleared, Wang Hua called us to the school gate for the graduation photograph.

It should have been a holiday. I overslept and arrived to find everyone arranged in three rows on the steps, Wang Hua seated at the centre and a young man in a checked shirt directing us through a camera. I slipped past quietly, but she still glared at me.

Our tall, handsome class monitor was also the sports and study representative. His qualifications seemed so perfect that every other monitor was merely a poor stand-in. I squeezed in beside him. ‘Isn’t Li Jiacheng with you?’ he asked.

Five minutes later Wang Hua stood and told the photographer, ‘We are not waiting. If he cannot care about the graduation photograph, he clearly does not consider himself part of this class.’

I folded down my upturned collar and smiled. The weather changed as soon as the photograph was taken. Fine rain began and everyone rushed back to clear their desks. The entrance exam was three days away.

The classroom was sticky and hot. I opened a window and cool air blew rain inside. As people left, Li’s things remained untouched. Certain he would return, I sat down to wait and resolved to finish Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life.

This rain was different. A thunderstorm usually weakened within an hour, but this one grew heavier as the sky darkened. Purple, jewelled branches of lightning formed inside the clouds, followed by terrifying white light that erased their shape. Thunder rolled from the distance to crush the eardrum. I began to worry: even if Li left now, he would not reach school safely.

Someone had left a blue-black checked umbrella behind the door, its tip unusually sharp. I carried it to the gate, then retreated before the rain. The campus had vanished into dense, dark mist. Leaves were beaten from the trembling camphors; thunder struck nearby. I sat in the classroom, unable to read the passages on linguistics in Ted Chiang. As I wondered whether to run home, the lights went out like candles in a gale. Every building darkened at once. Perhaps lightning had tripped the power, but I had no idea where the switch was. At last I took the umbrella and plunged into the rain.

Water surged from the drains and flooded the low roads. By the river it had reached the pavement; half the parked cars stood submerged. No bus came. The street had become a filthy river and the rain would not stop. It was as if Noah’s flood were beginning.

After waiting at the stop, I began walking home. It was not far, but meant wading through water, and I remembered news of pedestrians electrocuted by fallen power lines during storms.

Passing the pumping station, I decided to wait inside and climbed the fence. The building stood below the surrounding ground; water had reached its door and poured through the open windows into the maintenance shaft. I felt like Robinson Crusoe on his island. Had Friday appeared, I would have held him and wept. For some reason he wore Li Jiacheng’s face. A faint white light glowed beneath the water in the shaft. Outside, night had fallen and there was no hope of returning to the cold, cutting rain. I removed my soaked clothes and dived in.

I drew the air from my lungs through my nose and into my skull, easing the pressure in my ears. I imagined deep-sea fish, their gills and luminous organs, and as I descended my body became faint and transparent. What had seemed the bottom was an opening into a boundless space. I swam towards the distant light, at moments weightless, at others unable to breathe. A thought told me to turn back, but ahead was a naked figure. One leg was thick, the other thin; he listed like a frog tugged by a fishing line. I found my balance and caught him. His oily hair spread in the water, and his spine moved beneath nearly transparent skin. We swam on. Light surged towards us until my eyes held nothing but white.

8 December 2021