Under Fishbone Clouds (63 page)

Jinyi struggled and finally forced out the words. ‘Maybe we should come back tomorrow.’

‘It won’t be any less busy then. Don’t worry, we’ll be home for lunch,’ Yuying said, using the reassuring but assertive tone of voice she had spent years practising on their children.

‘But do we really need to know the … the things … what … the …the things?’ he said.

‘The more we know, the stronger we are. If the doctors know what is wrong, they can do something about it,’ Yuying assured him.

Jinyi was not convinced. Experience seemed to teach that the more you knew, the more trouble you were likely to encounter. Far better to just get on with your own business and leave the answers to someone else.

When the tests were finished, Jinyi and Yuying retraced their steps through the tapering corridors, retreating past an old woman wailing at a vacant line of orange plastic seats, and a rabble of little boys
taking turns racing on a rusty wheelchair. It took them half an hour to find their way out, and another half hour to walk back through town, past the dingy office blocks and the nearby fast-food neons, until they could collapse in the little bunker of a house, where they did their best to stop too much of the present from creeping in. Yuying spent the rest of the day rustling up a stew from the fuzzy vegetables and ancient spices at the back of the half-empty kitchen cupboard, having spent their monthly pension on the hospital fees, while Jinyi opened his martial-arts adventure book and spent the afternoon pretending not to worry about the results.

‘I’ll make you some green tea, dear, and you’ll soon forget about the tests,’ Yuying said from the kitchen, but quickly regretted her choice of words. She dipped a spoon into the bubbling pot to retrieve some crinkly white hairs. If she did not keep her snowy bob pinned back behind her ears, she found it moulted everywhere, just like the neighbour’s yappy dog.

‘What we don’t know … is an ocean,’ Jinyi replied. His wife nodded her head, not needing to reply. And we are stranded on the ever-shrinking shore.

How do we fill the time while waiting for the rest of our lives to begin? This is not a new question, and there are no new answers. Jinyi did the same as he had done on his barefoot treks toward Fushun, in the fields back at his uncle’s house, in the steamy
restaurant
and the sweaty factory, with the lazy oxen and with his wife’s silence – he hid behind a docile smile. At least then he had something else to think about; now, there was nothing but the waiting, which he twisted into a penance for something he had forgotten, a staring contest with his own fears.

After a phone call from the hospital, Yuying left her husband, telling him that she was popping out to do some shopping. When she returned a few hours later, Jinyi did not notice the absence of bags; he was too busy flicking through the calendar, studying the appointments scribbled in the small boxes and trying to separate what had already happened from what was still to come.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him.

‘Fine. Fine,’ he replied distractedly.

It was then that Yuying decided that she would not tell him about the results of the tests – to know that the doctors predicted only slow deterioration would be of little comfort. She would go to
the hospital alone whenever she could; she would keep a daily log of his behaviour, noting any problems; she would worry for both of them, and be strong for both of them. That is what women do, she told herself.

There is more than one type of demon. They are not all fang-toothed tail-swishing child-stealers. Oh, no. Jinyi had learnt that some of them are so small that they can creep into your ear while you are sleeping and, with a tiny pair of chopsticks, froth up your brain as though they were beating eggs to scramble for dinner. And where before, when he was separated from his wife and family by war zones, by work, by the whims of politics or the weight of grief, he could turn to his memories for comfort, now it was those that were being shaken off like dandruff from the shoulders of a dark suit.

Yet, in his moments of lucidity, he realised too that love also changes shape. It was no longer slim, lithe, nervous and
sweaty-palmed
. It was no longer sleepless, heavy, a stone weighing deep inside the chest. It was now warm, slow, soft, a tatty old blanket huddled under in the dark. It was the last embers of a promise made decades before, still glowing red though the flames had
petered
down.

And so, if some mornings in the first minutes after he woke he had trouble recognising the plump old woman beside him, it was not because he had forgotten her – it was because, still blurry from drawn-out dreams, he was trying his hardest to keep hold of the memories of the young lady with the shy smile and the floating vowels and the golden slippers and the strength of dragons.

Yuying was woken by her husband twitching, his legs flailing out and kicking into hers. Her first thought was for the bruises that rose up ever more easily on her limp skin. Her body was becoming foreign to her, the parts not claimed by gravity now wrinkling and hugging her muscles for comfort. Everything bruised her now – like an autumn peach, she thought. Jinyi whimpered, flailed, turned; his body was a rickety raft caught by a tsunami. She moved tighter to him, holding fast to his shoulders and scrawny arms, trying to calm him.

‘Hey, hey,’ she soothed. ‘Wake up. Hey, what is it?’

His eyes shot open, and darted left and right. Finally he fell back, into her arms. It was a strange gift, she thought, to be belatedly granted the tenderness she had craved in the first decades of her marriage, to be given sensitivity only after she had turned hard with blisters and calluses. She stroked his thinning hair. It was matted with sweat.

She reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. ‘What was it? A nightmare? What happened? Did you see something horrible?’

‘No.’ His voice was small, hoarse.

‘Then what was it scared you?’

‘I … I was not scared. Just people.’

‘People? What people?’

‘Old.’

‘Like you and me? We’re not that old, you know.’

‘No, no, no. People. Gone.’

She stroked his arm. It was always ghosts these days. ‘Why don’t I boil some water and make us some tea? How about that Fujian black dragon we’ve been saving, hmm? We’re not going to sleep again now anyway.’

She slipped on her bobbly dressing gown and helped her husband into his. While she put some water to boil on the stove he
settled
on the crumbling futon, biting his nails. Might our dreams be the place where it is possible for the two worlds to meet, Yuying wondered: like a hole in the roof where the water leaks in? Or were dreams just a trick of the brain? When it came it down to it, she considered, was there actually a difference between these two
theories
? They reached the same conclusion – that logic is left behind at the borders of death and dreams. She slopped the water into the small clay pot and carried the tray over to Jinyi.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

He shrugged, lifting the small cup to his nose – the first cup for smell, the second for taste. Who had told him that?

‘Who did you see?’ Yuying asked between sips.

‘Everyone.’

‘Oh. I see.’ She wanted to ask, ‘Were they well? What did they say? Did anyone mention me?’ But she did not want to upset him, to give credence to the idea that his nightmares might be more than a sleight of hand of memory. ‘Do you remember when the
children were young and had bad dreams? They used to crawl into our bed, remember? Sometimes they’d all migrate across and cram in together, even though ours was much smaller than the
kang
they shared. We wouldn’t get more than half an hour’s sleep a whole night, and then work twelve hours or more. I wonder how we did it.’ She chuckled, then looked across at her silent husband.

Jinyi kept the cup held up in front of him, an offering to some invisible residue of the dream.

She led him back to the bedroom and pulled the covers tight around his shivering body, then slipped into the ancient indents her own body had left in the bed over the years.

Yuying took out her teeth and closed her eyes. This is how life works, she thought; being given what you wanted only when you have learnt not to need it. There were a hundred questions she might have asked him with this gift of honesty and dependence, when she was sixteen, twenty, thirty even; but these days she could guess what he would say before he had even opened his mouth. She told herself it was better this way. Slowly the day’s conversations at the hospital came back to her and she wondered about her husband’s dreams. If he must lose everything else, his memories, our life together, even me, then at least let him keep his dreams, she mouthed to gods whose names she could not quite remember.

Perhaps, she began to think, as she lay in the bed the two of them had shared on and off for close to fifty years, this is what love is – a wilful forgetting, remembering only the best days, the little joys and the times they felt like they were flying through their lives. There was still something of that old Jinyi left, she told herself, some part of that young man who cooked her dumplings and had walked more than a thousand
li
to find her, who always had a joke to trade for a tear.

For once, as I picked through her thoughts, I felt pretty stumped. For once, I found myself wondering whether perhaps my own life had been all the better for being kept short. At least I had never got to the point where I wondered whether love had become a
fulltime
job. And yet still it seemed that whatever was thrown at it, the heart carried on.

Jinyi, meanwhile, kept one eye open: he was on the lookout for a flicker of the blinds, a shadow from the window, anything that
might announce the return of the ghosts. The thing that scared him was not that his dream was terrible or unstoppable (though it was indeed both of these), but that it was actually comforting to see all those old faces again, that the dream made more sense to him than many of his waking hours did these days.

Both of them yawned, then pretended to snore, each trying to convince the other that they were really fast asleep.

The Jade Emperor continued to appear with gifts – a handful of fireflies; a pair of scaly wings that he imagined might fit me
perfectly
; a mirror in which it was possible to see how things would have turned out if I had avoided all the mistakes I made in life; a perfect copy of the book of death; some tracts of celestial space where planets were yet to be born; and many other trinkets. However, these only made me more certain that I was closer to winning the bet; I turned down all his bribes.

‘I am nearly done,’ I finally told him.

He did not reply.

‘Listen, can I ask you something?’

The Jade Emperor bowed his head forward, which I decided to take as a yes.

‘Living so long in the minds of people, well, it’s made me remember being human. Not much has changed since I was one. Love, of course, continues. But so do wars, dictators, tyrants, torture, disease, famine, floods, earthquakes, random acts or edicts of violence. So … I just wanted to know why you don’t do something about it?’

‘The Taoists call it
“wu wei”
: deliberately not acting. Imagine a river; it does nothing but follow the Tao, and yet it might slowly wear down hills and mountains or carry men home. I act in accordance with nature. Many of the Taoist monks may have fled or been killed or repressed, but no one has forgotten
wu wei.
Why do you think all those people never rose up, and still do not rise up against the government, against the corruption or the terror? Why go along with the Cultural Revolution or the denunciations that accompanied it?
Wu wei
means not resisting. Even I must try to follow the Tao. The only way for life to improve is for everyone to
 
be in harmony with the Tao, to let the world return to its natural course,’ he said.

‘I see. Let them get on with it down there, make their mistakes and learn from them. But they don’t seem to learn from the mistakes. They keep on making the same ones, over and over again,’ I said.

Once again the Jade Emperor bowed his head forward. ‘If I were to stop a flood today by diverting a river, others would only suffer from arid land and famine tomorrow. Humans are fickle creatures; they do not know what is best for them. Think of
happiness
. Happiness is a glimpse of water to the man in the desert, and a sight of dry land to those lost at sea. As I told you before, there is only the circle, only a journey that each person makes again and again. Take your precious heart. Life flows from heart to artery to capillary to vein and back to the heart. The same motion will continue again and again. This is the secret you have been looking for, one that I told you at the start of your quest. You will find no other answer but this – people carry on with their lives because they have no other choice. That is all you will learn from watching them.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘What about love? What about doing the right thing? What about atonement and retribution?’

However, I found myself talking to a wall. The Jade Emperor had disappeared, and I realised there was nothing I could do about it, except finish the story.