Everywhere people were standing on seats, shoving their luggage into the overhead racks, or else edging their way around each other carrying steaming cartons of instant noodles.
I waited for them to settle and walked down the corridor towards the three last rows of empty seats. In the middle of the carriage I passed a poor farmer, his brow covered in sweat, his hands shaking. His clothes were wet, as if he’d just washed them, and he leaned on his side, groaning. A young girl tried to give him a bottle of patchouli oil, but he grimaced and shook his head. He was probably dying. I sat down in the last row.
But the train didn’t leave. The conductor retreated into her cubbyhole and locked herself in.
I wanted to go over to her and say, ‘I was on time. What about you guys? Do you know how serious a delay like this is?’
After a while, the train began moving away noiselessly. Or at least I felt a breeze. But then I looked out and saw the train beside ours leave the station. An optical illusion. It felt like a knife twisting in my chest. Any second now, I was going to explode. Trapped. Like a man stubbornly pushing his cart through the mud as it rained.
The platform outside my window was empty, silent. If the police came to take me away, I decided, I’d shout,
‘Thank you. Thank you railway department and thank you train!’
Kong Jie’s mother must have contacted the police by now. School gets out at 5.00 and it was 6.00. The police would be able to trace Kong Jie to my place using satellites. I wish I’d never done it. I could have taken her mobile with me, dumped it somewhere. Why did I have to let the signal go cold at my house?
I tried to sit myself down and make myself believe, just as Kong Jie’s mother would still be clinging to the picture of her daughter’s upcoming graduation, that it didn’t mean anything. She was probably out of battery or spending time with friends. ‘That daughter of mine has just forgotten to call. But I’ll give her a good talking-to when she gets home.’
I started counting. By the time I get to two hundred the train will have left, I said to myself. Six hundred. We were still at the same platform. Just as I had decided to get up and ask the steward if she could let me off the train, a long whistle broke the silence. I froze. Then pure joy, as if in that moment I’d become another person. The sun had nearly disappeared and the sky was turning a dark blue. Branches were retreating, houses receding, the moon was trailing behind us. The world was finally on the fucking move.
But suddenly I felt alarmed. I wasn’t leaving, I was
cutting myself off. A forever goodbye.
So began my life on the run.
I
fell asleep amid the train’s clanging.
I’m walking towards the security check with dread like a stone in my stomach. The old policeman pats me down and tells me to go, impatience in his voice. I want to raise my arms and hoot, but I sense one of the other officers looking up at me. A pair of young eyes filled with a frightening sense of duty. Sweeping searchlights. They come to a stop on my back – ten more steps to safety – and I keep walking under the heat of his suspicion.
Until: ‘You there! You’re bleeding.’
Sirens start and I’m running and, with legs made of springs, I leap up and over the roof. I’m flying through the air. I’ve escaped, I think. I look back, but they’re right behind me. They’re not giving up that easily. I escape into an old building by the side of the road.
I wake to the sound of thumping. Shit. The train is starting to move. Shit, shit. Only as the faces of the strangers around me come into focus do I return to reality. I go to the toilet, but it’s locked, so I walk down the corridor and smoke a cigarette. The train is like a fish gliding through dark waters. I’m having a bit of a poetic moment.
I go back to my seat. Then I see them, two police officers standing at the other end of the carriage. They are carrying card machines to check everyone’s IDs. All these innocents, happily rooting around in their bags. I couldn’t tell if this was routine or they were looking for something in particular. But I didn’t have time to think. I turned and went back to the toilet. I could feel them looking at me. I bent over, held my stomach and started banging on the door.
‘Hold on,’ came the voice from inside.
I pretended to go looking for the toilet in the next carriage, but realised halfway that this was the last one. I sat in an empty seat and stared blankly ahead. Maybe I could hide under the seat. No, that was a stupid idea. After a while someone came staggering towards me. The farmer again. His shoulder kept banging against the seats and the walls of the carriage. He was looking for somewhere to be sick. He pulled at the toilet door and then continued onwards.
‘Get back,’ I hissed.
He looked at me. The corners of his mouth twitched.
‘Go back. I mean it.’ I was guarding my territory.
He seemed to think of something and stumbled in the direction from which he’d come.
Just then I heard the sound of the door unlocking. I rushed over and pushed past the young woman who
was emerging, fastening her belt. We got caught in a bit of a tussle before I made it inside. I nudged the door shut with my shoulder and locked it three times to be sure. I’d wait for a half an hour until they’d passed on and left the train, but I could hear the sound of scuffling and hushed talking. The police had found me out. I’d made myself a trap, I realised. The lower half of the window was fastened shut. The top was open, revealing a crack of black sky. But try as I might, I couldn’t pull it further open.
Furious knocking at the door. I didn’t answer. Kicking.
‘Get the fuck out.’ It was an unmistakable order.
Something pounded inside me, wanting to burst out. It needed me to run, but I couldn’t. I was going crazy. The yelling and cursing were getting louder. My breaking point came as he shouted about my mother’s flabby pussy. This isn’t how it is supposed to go, I thought. I killed someone, sure, but you don’t know that. Why do you need to insult my ma? Say whatever you like about me, but what right do you have to insult my ma?
I wrenched at the lock and pulled open the door. He grabbed me by the collar. I tried to push him off, but he was stronger. He picked me up as if I was no more than a little bird and moved me aside. He then charged in and, without closing the door, pulled down
his trousers and started shitting.
Out in the corridor I heard only the hum of the air-conditioning. I’d never smelt anything like it.
No one came to speak to me. I drew myself up, feeling somewhat disappointed, as if I’d left matters half finished. The other passengers were talking about the farmer; in his rush, he’d knocked one of the police officers to the floor.
The older officer punched him to the ground, held him down with his elbow and growled, ‘I knew there was something not quite right about you.’
I understood. My heart was thumping, but my face was stiff like dead wood. I struggled to hold back the laughter. I needed to pee. Despite being in there all that time, I hadn’t gone and now I was about to wet my pants.
Holding it in, I knocked on the door. No answer. I went over to the washbasins. There was no one around, so I started pissing. Once the stream started it wouldn’t stop, two minutes, ten minutes. Still going. It was goddamn embarrassing.
T
he train drew in to the first stop and I, along with a stream of other passengers, disembarked. I crouched in the shade of a nearby planter. We waited ages before one of the railway staff came to announce that the train would be leaving soon. The stallholders packed up and left, the platform gates were locked shut and I went down onto the tracks. I walked through the inky night, my feet soon covered in shit, which was pretty humiliating. Luckily I only had to walk ten minutes before I came to some lights.
I was walking fast. It felt familiar, but as I approached and saw the street lights, the houses and signs and even the shadows, everything seemed to be made of sharp knives thrusting at me. A few young guys stopped their game of pool and stared at me, puzzled as to my sudden appearance in the darkness. An old man sat beside them, fanning himself. He smiled, his mouth empty of teeth (they’re going to kill me, I thought, and he’ll watch them, clapping). Moments later, I was surrounded by motorbikes. They spoke quickly in the local dialect and I saw a fierceness in their eyes that was impossible to misinterpret. They weren’t waiting for my answer. I was
pulled onto one of the bikes, driven around the town and relieved of fifty
yuan
along the way.
I walked into Benefit the People Guest House, bag in one hand. The place had originally been someone’s private home and there was still an altar burning incense in the front room-turned-lobby. Bars blocked all the windows street level, the tiles on the floor were slippery and the blanket smelt foul. I wanted a room on the first floor. They noted down my fake ID, saw I was from Beijing and felt flattered. But when I wanted them to change the black and white TV, they slammed the door shut in my face. The screen was capable of broadcasting one white thread only. The curtains were ragged, the sheets were sallow, the pillows black and without pillowcases. A pair of flip-flops sat sadly on the bathroom floor, one of them broken.
I snapped the bolt shut across the door and walked over to the window. I looked out on an empty courtyard and an endless sky. I had no idea why I was here, of all places.
For the next few days I didn’t leave the room, except to go downstairs to eat. The kitchen was in the courtyard surrounded by a low wall. One time, after I’d finished dinner, I smashed the shards of glass pressed into it. Then I positioned a ladder I found lying around under my window. I might have been taking precautions.
Or maybe I was just bored.
I took to sleeping. Excessive sleep and masturbation. I could recite the contents of the police poster on the wall by heart. Eighty-five characters in total, including three exclamation marks. At one point I detected the stench of dead rat. I went looking for it and discovered a smelly sock soaking in washing detergent in the bathroom. I was like a noble animal disgusted by its own excrement and the loneliness I had myself created. I started weaving together what remained of my life. I splashed the floor with water, mopped it, knelt down and went over it again with a cloth. Then I took a bottle of shoe polish and shined my shoes, wrung out the cloth and buffed until I could see my own reflection by the moonlight in the leather.
I had found happiness in labour, but the feeling passed just as quickly as I had found it. My body was telling me something, giving me an order: go outside.
Outside exploded with fireworks like a never-ending festival, like there was still love out there for an adventurer. But as I drew close, all I saw was one breeze block after another, one electrical pole after another, one street after another, one face after another, at once familiar and utterly unrecognisable. Never a car accident, never a fight, not even the gentlest of arguments. I saw an internet café, but it wouldn’t be easy to use my
fake ID and I didn’t want to risk using my real one. A sign flashed
CINEMA
, but as I approached all I saw was a heap of rubble and a small market of people selling scraps for a few cents. A nearby kiosk carried no recent newspapers, so I bought two yellowing copies of
Sports Weekly
and
Former News Weekly
and went back to the guest house to read them. It took me seven hours to read every single character contained within their pages.
The second time I went out my hopeful mood was extinguished even faster. Before long, the order came again: go back. At that moment I understood like no one else in this world the torture that was old Mr He’s existence. In winter he dreams of summer, in summer he misses winter; when he’s out he wants to be back home, when home all he can think about is going out. But it’s all the same, everywhere. That’s why the old widower subjected himself to such a demanding regimen, as a distraction from his pathetic life.
We’re both the lowest forms of trash, me and him, a fate from which we can’t escape. Every day we long for the planes in the sky to throw out a rope and pull us up, to take us away somewhere more fulfilling. Even if where they take us affords us no freedom. But there are no such things as miracles, so instead we must endure this aching passage of time.
The second time I went out I bought a pair of
binoculars. I sat on the roof and looked out on the town. I saw people washing dishes in their kitchens, someone sitting on their bed mending the soles of their shoes, the final scenes before the curtains were drawn and the lights turned off. I went back to my fetid room and scrabbled around for my mobile phone, the last thing that could give away my whereabouts, the whore that had been seducing me ever since I went on the run.
I stopped myself.
I didn’t switch it on.
I made for People’s Park the next day. It has a mound like a golf course, dotted with groves of trees and the gravestones of martyrs. They’d carved out a lake in front of the hill and a pavilion had been put in the middle, connected to the square on the other side by a white marble bridge. Water spat like the strings of a harp. Medicinal herbs had been left to dry on the stones and a farmer’s truck was parked in the distance, its back tyres missing, resting on a pile of planks. I was the only person in sight.
I approached the steps leading to the martyrs’ graveyard, replaced the battery in my mobile and turned it on. The reception was crap and it took until I reached the top before ‘new message’ pinged on the screen. I felt a flash of hope and opened it.
Dear Sir/Madam, My name is Zhang Bing of Happiness
Boulevard Real Estate. Please feel free to contact me with all your real estate needs. Thank you!
Not a chirrup. No rustle of leaves. Rays of sunlight poked through the trees and laid themselves out, motionless, across the gravel path.
I remembered a short story I once read: the author, desolate and lonely, walked through a cemetery. Just as they were about to cover a coffin, he stopped to listen. What if someone was calling him? But there was only silence. That’s how I felt at that moment. I wanted to sit and wait for the police. I was going to be executed and I had nothing left to say. Nothing to explain. But I ran away, crying. I chucked the battery, fled down the steps of the martyrs’ graveyard and chased down a threewheeled cart.