Kinder Than Solitude (33 page)

Boyang looked sternly at Moran. “Then why are you hostile to her these days?”

“Am I?”

“Maybe others can’t tell, but you know you’re treating her a little differently from before,” Boyang said. “Is it because of what I said to you last Saturday?”

Perhaps love allows perceptions that one does not possess otherwise. Like many boys his age, Boyang had not been observant. That boy has a mind like a sieve, his grandmother used to remark about his inattentiveness.

“Is it true that I’m hostile?” Moran asked. “How can you tell?”

“There’s really not anything that we don’t know about each other.”

Is there, Moran wondered, or should there be? “Do you think Ruyu feels that way, too?”

“That you’re being unfriendly? I hope not, though even if she feels it, she won’t say anything,” Boyang said. “You know how she is. She has grown up holding everything in.”

Moran sighed. “I’ve been trying to be a good friend to her.”

“Have you really?” Boyang asked. There was an unfamiliar edge to his voice, which made Moran’s heart ache.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I think you are jealous of her.”

Moran felt grateful that they were in the dark, and even the bright moonlight would not reveal the coloring of her face, which was burning with shame and anger and a helpless despair. The line between innocent and heartless, if indeed there is one, must be so subtle that only those most experienced with human nature can perceive it. Moran, herself having not outgrown the age when innocence and heartlessness often go hand in hand, felt herself shrinking in front of Boyang. To appease him and to defend herself were equally impossible. There are moments in life when to speak at all is to speak wrongly.

“If you’d met someone special I would be very happy for you,” Boyang said. “I don’t understand why you’re not happy for me.”

“But I am happy for you!”

“You know you’re not, and I know why you feel that way,” Boyang said. “You’re like a sister to me, and I thought you and I had the purest friendship.”

Was there ever a pure relationship between two people? Moran wished she could tell Boyang about the chemical Ruyu had taken from his mother’s lab, but the right moment of telling—if there had been one—had passed. “Let’s go back,” Moran said, feeling a sickness in her stomach.

A door opened, and Uncle, stepping out of the house, looked up at the moon for a long moment before trying to discern the figures in the shadow of the grape trellis. “Is that you two?” he asked. “Hurry before the Tang turns cold.”

The next morning Moran woke up with a high fever. “Must be an early flu,” she overheard Boyang’s grandmother saying when her mother told Boyang and Ruyu to go to school without Moran.

She spent the day in bed, sleeping on and off, welcoming the physical illness because she was now exempted from thinking. Her mother had moved the radio from the living room to a chair next to her bed, and had left a kettle of hot water underneath the chair. She would ask Boyang’s grandmother to check on Moran at lunchtime, her mother said, but Moran said she had better not; if she did have the flu she would rather not have anyone come near her, she said.

Ever so sluggishly time moved forward. Moran had forgotten to wind her wristwatch the night before, so it had stopped sometime before daybreak. She watched the slanting angle of the sunlight entering the window, leaving a path of floating particles in midair. In her Chinese textbook there was the poem about a lifetime passing like a white horse leaping across the narrowest crevice; the ancients had not been wrong if a thousand years had passed easily between their writing and her reading the poem, but had they also felt the weight of a never-ending movement when they had written those lines?

The radio, kept on at a low volume, proceeded from the morning news to the weather forecast and later the preschool children’s sing-along program, though they all sounded unreal in her feverish half dreams. Moran thought about the people who would be listening to the radio on a morning like this: pensioners, shop owners sitting behind counters and waiting for the first customer of the day, a bicycle repairman at a roadside shed pulling out a punctured inner tube, someone outside the
system
like Shaoai, having no place to be.

Toward the end of the day Moran heard people come back from work. Her fever had not broken, which gave her the excuse to stay isolated. Later, Moran heard Boyang’s voice from the living room, and her mother explaining to him that he had better stay away. Could he just say hi, he asked, and Moran’s mother said she would check to see if Moran was awake. Moran closed her eyes, and when she heard Boyang leave, she wept quietly.

It took Moran a week to recover, and except for the weekend
when Boyang went to his parents’ apartment, he came over every evening to chat with her, and once Ruyu came with him, too. When Moran was feeling less sick, she would prop herself up with a pillow, and he would sit astride a chair placed at the entrance of the bedroom. They had been polite with each other at first, but soon Boyang returned to his usual self. Several other classmates had caught the flu, too, he said, but he and Ruyu had been lucky not to have it; the midterm was in two weeks, but there was no need for Moran to worry about the missed classes, as he would go over everything with her once she felt well enough; in biology lab the next day they would be dissecting frogs, which he knew she would not like to do, so she might as well stay sick and skip it; and, by the way, did she know that Sister Shaoai was also sick, so when everybody was at work or at school she and Shaoai could keep each other company.

“What happened to Sister Shaoai?” Moran said, surprised that her parents had not told her about it.

Boyang said it was probably the same virus. Remember when they had the measles together, he asked, and she said of course she did. In third grade Moran and Boyang had been caught by a measles epidemic, and his grandmother had set up her house for the two to be quarantined from the rest of the quadrangle; every morning and evening she would feed them dark, bitter liquid brewed from herbs, but otherwise they had been left alone with a chess set and a radio. Moran was a terrible chess player. Every time she was about to lose Boyang would switch sides with her, and it amazed her that however badly she opened her game he was able to change it for the better; sometimes they would switch sides several times in a game, until she would lose almost all the pieces for both red and black, and there was nothing to do but to call it a draw.

Those had been the happiest days, she thought, but did not say so to Boyang, for whom happier days were to come.

Unlike Moran, who was recovering by day, Shaoai deteriorated. By the time Moran was allowed to go back to school, little was on her
mind but Shaoai’s illness—she had gone into a coma a few days before. The doctors were baffled, as the flu-like symptoms had quickly given way to other, more serious problems: hair loss, vomiting, seizures, and loss of much of her brain functions; all the tests run had offered few clues.

Before Boyang left for his parents’ home for the weekend, he told Moran to call him if there was any news about Shaoai. Every day Aunt and Uncle took turns being at the ICU with Shaoai; neighbors had offered to take a few shifts so the couple could rest, but they had declined, saying it was best if they could be there before the doctors could give a definite diagnosis.

After lunch on Sunday, Moran went to Shaoai’s house and looked for Ruyu. Earlier in the morning they had studied for midterms together. Uncle was taking a nap, and Ruyu was feeding Grandpa some rice mush. These days Ruyu spent much of her free time taking care of Grandpa, who alone was spared the worries that had shrouded the quadrangle like a dark fog. For each day Shaoai stayed in coma, it seemed one more person started to lose heart. At breakfast that day, Moran’s mother had wondered aloud if they should hope now for a different scenario: “For sure Shaoai cannot recover as a normal healthy person again—sometimes you don’t know if it’d be easier for everyone if her parents let her go.”

In the small cube of Grandpa’s bedroom Ruyu looked pensive. After she fed Grandpa and cleaned his face and neck with a towel, she told Moran in a low voice that she would be sitting here with Grandpa until he fell asleep. I’ll sit with you, Moran whispered back. Ruyu glanced at Moran, and she knew that Ruyu did not welcome her company. Still, Moran could not help but feel less uneasy if she could keep an eye on Ruyu; during the weekdays Boyang was always around, but on a Sunday like this, when everyone’s attention was elsewhere, Moran was particularly unwilling to leave Ruyu alone.

Neither spoke. Grandpa looked exhausted, and dozed off soon. The only window high on the wall was open, and Moran watched the
blue sky beyond, and listened to a few sparrows pecking on the roof. Autumn would soon be over, and when winter came the peddlers would set oil drums aflame on the street corners and later roast sweet yams and chestnuts in the hot ashes. In the past winters, Moran and Boyang used to stop by one of the oil drums and pick up the biggest yam, its purple or brown skin charred and wrinkled. Easily she could see, in her mind’s eye, Ruyu and Boyang divide a yam into halves, smiling at each other through the steam rising from the golden inside of the yam.

Moran stopped herself from pursuing the thought, ashamed that she was so selfish as to dwell upon her minor pain while Shaoai’s life was in danger. Moran did not believe Shaoai would die, and these days before her recovery reminded Moran of the time when she had fainted in a municipal bathhouse as a child. The air, hot with thick steam, had been oppressive, and grownups, comfortable in their nakedness, gossiped loudly; their voices, mixed with the running of showers and the splashing of the bathwater, had sounded as though they had come from far away; when Moran’s legs turned cottony, the last thought on her mind had been to hold on tight to the bath soap because fragrant soap was not cheap.

Any day now, any moment, Aunt or Uncle would come back with some good news—a diagnosis, or better, a retreat of the virus, and Moran would breathe freely again, as she had found herself awake in the cold air of the locker room, though the soap had slipped away, and had never been recovered. One day the neighbors in the quadrangle would refer to this time as the days when Shaoai had been mysteriously sick, as they would speak of the May afternoon when an army tank was overthrown and burned down at a nearby crossroads, or the day in June when Teacher Pang’s cousin pedaled three bodies on his flatbed tricycle from the Square to the hospital. Perhaps Moran would even think of these days as the beginning of a love story between Boyang and Ruyu. Life, in retrospect, can be as simple as a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotally we live on, trading our youthful
belief in happiness—and at that age happiness almost always means being good, being right, and being loved—for the belief in feeling less, suffering little.

The gate to the courtyard opened, and it was clear from the neighbors’ gathering that Aunt had come back. Moran looked at her wristwatch—it was two o’clock, not yet time for Uncle to change shifts with Aunt. At once Moran felt hope arising—for sure by now the doctors would have found out how to treat Shaoai, though that hope was dashed when she heard Aunt’s voice.

“No, she’s the same,” Aunt said to the querying neighbors. “But one doctor asked me if she had been in contact with any chemicals recently. I told him that she was an international trades and relations major, but he said her symptoms more and more reminded him of a poisoning case he had seen in the seventies.”

“Poisoning?” several neighbors gasped. “But how could it be?”

“I don’t know,” Aunt said. “We don’t know how she’s been spending her time these days, or what kind of people she has met. I was coming back earlier because I thought we might find the phone numbers of her old classmates and ask them.”

Moran turned to look at Ruyu. The latter was watching Grandpa’s shallow breathing as though she found it mesmerizing. Moran hesitated and then grabbed Ruyu’s elbow. “Come,” Moran said. “I need to talk to you.”

Ruyu did not resist, and led the way to her bedroom. She sat down on the bedside and looked up, her eyes lucid. Moran pulled over the chair and sat down, feeling as though she herself had committed a crime and had to enlist Ruyu in a cover-up. “Where is the chemical you took from the lab?” Moran asked.

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know,” Ruyu said. “I put the test tube in my drawer, but it was gone.”

“Since when?”

“I’m not sure. A few days now,” Ruyu said, and looked irritated. “I’m not like you, Moran, and this is not my home. Nothing I have really belongs to me. If someone takes something from me, what can I do but shrug and say, suit yourself?”

Taken aback, Moran did not know what to say.

“You think I poisoned Sister Shaoai?” Ruyu said, looking into Moran’s eyes with a taunting half smile. “Are you interrogating me now?”

“No! But did you hear what Aunt just said? The doctors thought it might be some chemical poison.”

“The doctors said it was meningitis earlier. And they may say something else tomorrow.”

“But why didn’t you say anything when Sister Shaoai got sick?”

“About what? Everyone got the flu last week. And then they were talking about bacterial infection.”

“Do you think it was Shaoai who took the chemical?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she ask you about it?”

“You think people will ask your permission when they take something from you?”

Moran felt an urge to shake Ruyu. There was a life they had to save before it was too late. “What did you take from the lab, do you remember?”

Ruyu shook her head. “I never did say I took anything.”

“Do you understand that this is a serious matter? Can you come with me to tell Aunt and Uncle what happened? We need to call Boyang and his mother.”

“Do you think,” Ruyu said, raising her eyes, “that Sister Shaoai would like it if indeed it was her intention to commit suicide?”

“But we can’t sit here, doing nothing.”

“Why? What’s wrong with doing nothing? The world would be a much better place if people did less,” Ruyu said. “Why do you all think you have the right to change someone’s life only because you want to?”