Bro | Chapter 34

Wei Qian called back, and true to his word, he returned a week later.

Only, he did not walk back on his own. Lao Xiong had no idea where he found a car, but he had it driven all the way to the foot of their building.

It was a blazing summer afternoon. San Pang was home alone, eating a belated lunch, a bowl of instant noodles.

The local TV station was airing a few harmless bits of news, for instance: a warehouse custodian violated regulations by getting drunk and wandering into a cold storage room, then the coworker on the next shift locked up as usual and accidentally locked the custodian inside, causing his death.

Xiao Bao, who had been forced by Wei Zhiyuan to do her summer homework herself, was scratching at her head with a pained expression. Every now and then she drifted off, and after catching that bit of news, she could not help asking, “What’s a cold storage room?”

Without even raising his head, Wei Zhiyuan said, “A giant refrigerator.”

Song Xiaobao asked again, “Then whose fault was it?”

A cold smile appeared on Wei Zhiyuan’s face. “They locked up on schedule. He himself entered the cold storage room after hours, so of course it was his own responsibility for violating operating rules.”

Unable to understand, Song Xiaobao said, “Then why did he go into that… uh… giant refrigerator after hours?”

With a double meaning in his words, Wei Zhiyuan said, “Who knows. Maybe he was sick.”

Song Xiaobao thought for a moment, then commented, “Sigh, this is the first time I’ve heard of someone freezing to death. Couldn’t he just keep hopping around so he wouldn’t be cold?”

At last, Wei Zhiyuan looked up at her once, then used the remote to turn off the television.

Xiao Bao stuck out her tongue and lowered her head with tragic indignation, continuing her homework.

Wei Zhiyuan sized her up for a moment and thought in utter disbelief, She and da-ge actually came from the same mother?

It was also at that moment that Mr. Xiong Yingjun, tanned into a glossy black sheep-dropping, got out of the car and stopped downstairs beneath Wei Qian’s building. First he bent over and tidied his collar and hairstyle in the car window, then straightened up and shouted toward upstairs, “Is Mr. Tan in? Is Mr. Tan Yu in?”

The car window beside him rolled down, and Wei Qian’s voice came from inside. The respect he had once had for his future “road to riches” had long since been ground away by several months of absurdly unreliable travels. Wei Qian said bluntly, “What are you calling him for? Would it kill you to help me out for a second, dumbass?”

Comrade Lao Xiong replied in a slow, gentle tone, “I accept your suggestion that I exercise more in the future, but with my current physical strength, I’m afraid I couldn’t even carry a gas canister upstairs, let alone Your Elderly Self.”

Wei Qian choked on his anger. After quite a while, he said weakly, “Don’t call him by his full name. Be careful or he’ll get pissed at you.”

Lao Xiong asked with proper courtesy, “Oh? Then may I ask how I should address him?”

Wei Qian said, “…San Pang.”

Lao Xiong nodded, straightened up, and called upstairs with impeccable politeness, “May I ask if Mr. San is in?”

Inside the car, Wei Qian silently turned his head away.

Luckily, San Pang was gifted in strange ways. While eating lunch at home, he heard those few faint cries of “Mr. San,” and somehow grasped the spirit of it well enough to throw down his chopsticks and stick his head out the window. “Calling me?”

Weakly, Wei Qian pushed open the car door and waved at him from downstairs. “San-ge, come down and give me a hand.”

San Pang narrowed his already tiny eyes and stared intently for quite a while. Then he cried out in shock, “Mother of God! Brother! Qian’er! Didn’t you say you went off with some ‘fathead fish who’s dumb and loaded’ to hustle medicine? Why do you look like you went off with Maimaiti to sell lamb skewers? How’d you turn that color?”

The “fathead fish who’s dumb and loaded” stood silently to one side and listened.

The third-floor window was suddenly shoved open by someone. The person opening it used too much force, and with a bang, the window slammed against the wall and bounced back.

Wei Zhiyuan called, “Ge!”

The teenage boy’s voice, right in the middle of changing, nearly cracked. Wei Qian lifted his eyelids and swept him a glance. “Why are you howling like you’re summoning a ghost?”

He was not much better off than Lao Xiong. There were only two white places on his whole face, his teeth and the whites of his eyes. But in Wei Zhiyuan’s eyes, the appearance of this charcoal-headed figure was like an Aladdin’s lamp, instantly lighting up his entire life… of course, because of that bizarre nightmare, there was now a small shadow beneath that magic lamp.

Grandma Song was not home during the day. Wei Zhiyuan, Xiao Bao, and San Pang hurried downstairs, and only then did they understand why Wei Qian had been sitting there without moving. One of his legs was in a cast.

The moment San Pang saw it, his eyes went round. “Th-this won’t affect school starting, right? Is it serious?”

Before Wei Qian had time to speak, fathead-fish Lao Xiong began intoning faintly like a monk chanting scripture, “It won’t. It takes a hundred days to recover from injury to bone and sinew. He’s probably only got about fifty days left. Considering how rough-skinned and thick-fleshed he is, he should be able to take it off next month.”

Using San Pang’s hand for support, Wei Qian stood up on one leg and waved at Lao Xiong. “All right, you can get lost now, countdown sign.”

Lao Xiong said shyly and coyly, “For the sake of us having gone through life and death together, take me in for a few days and let me catch my breath.”

Wei Qian said, “Did your house have a localized earthquake?”

Lao Xiong grew even more shy and coy. “You’ll laugh, but I have a lioness of the east river at home. I haven’t called my wife this whole time, and your foolish elder brother is honestly a little afraid she’ll bite me.”

The moment San Pang heard that, he laughed. “Big brother, you can dodge the first day of the month but not the fifteenth. A true warrior dares to face bleak life head-on. You should go back and kneel on the washboard before your leader!”

Smiling, Lao Xiong said to him, “I’m not a true warrior. I’m just a ‘fathead fish who’s dumb and loaded.’”

San Pang said, “…”

Wei Qian said, “…”

San Pang came to his senses, and his face turned green. He gave a dry cough and shot Wei Qian a fierce glare, this brat had not even given him a warning.

He sank his qi into his dantian, bent his legs, and dropped into a horse stance. Patting his own shoulder, he said to Wei Qian, “You… sigh, get on.”

San Pang carried Wei Qian on his back, still feeling aggrieved and cursing under his breath. “These broad shoulders of mine are still untouched virgin land, saved for my future wife, and now I’m wasting them on you, you little bastard… sigh.”

As he spoke, he lowered his head and glanced at Wei Qian’s arm, trying to find a little superiority in that painted-on skin color, so he mocked him, “San-ge’s asking you this, if you go wash up later, will the color come off?”

“Why wouldn’t it?” Wei Qian said coolly. “It’ll even shrink.”

He actually still had the mood to joke. San Pang’s heart finally settled completely back into his stomach. That meant the injury was not too serious after all. There had been danger, but no real disaster.

In the end, this coward Lao Xiong still did not dare go home.

But Wei Qian’s house truly had no space. Besides, Wei Qian thought that perhaps because Wei Zhiyuan’s childhood psychological shadow had been too heavy, he had always been a little “wary of strangers.” For example, the way he looked at Lao Xiong seemed to carry a certain hostility.

So in the end Lao Xiong went to stay at San Pang’s place. San Pang’s parents had gone out to purchase stock and would not be coming back that night.

The two great con men hit it off at once and conned their way together, like two sharply contrasting black-and-white pigs. Amicably shoulder to shoulder, they went upstairs to conduct a meeting of minds.

Wei Qian did not eat a single bite of food. He tossed down his luggage and collapsed into a sleep so deep it turned the world upside down. He really did not move at all, not even turning over.

At dinner that night, Grandma Song thought it over for a long time before deciding to wake him and have him eat a couple of bites before sleeping again. Wei Qian had reached that level of exhaustion where he knew someone was calling him, but no matter what he could not wake up. In the end, relying on the sheer force of will that had kept him alive through enduring Lao Xiong for so many days, Wei Qian crawled up like a walking corpse, swallowed a couple of rough mouthfuls without even chewing, then crawled back and resumed lying there like a corpse.

That night, Wei Zhiyuan worked on homework until one in the morning.

Originally, he had planned to use the summer-camp money to buy Xiao Bao a piece of clothing and simply not go himself. Now, obviously, he had to revise the plan. The summer camp was something he had to attend, otherwise da-ge would never agree, so he had no choice but to hurry up and finish all the extra Olympiad math homework he had put aside over the last few days, the teachers there were going to inspect it.

As for that brat Song Xiaobao, it seemed he did not need to worry about her for the time being. The moment da-ge came back, she was freed from her brief period of being a bitter, sensible little cabbage and turned lively again. That very afternoon she ran out to find her classmates to play, and instead of saving her pocket money, she spent it at light speed on a new dress for herself.

He closed his books and sat quietly in his chair, studying Wei Qian for a while. The way da-ge looked now, in this miserable state, naturally had nothing in common with the image from his dream that had made his heart pound. Wei Zhiyuan steadied himself, curling four fingers into his palm and taking turns digging his neatly trimmed nails into the center of his hand.

It was only a dream, it doesn’t mean anything, the newly grown boy thought calmly. If someone dreams about streaking, does that mean he’ll really go streaking? If someone dreams about flipping over a car, does that mean he really has the strength to flip one over? Impossible. If dreams weren’t absurd, people wouldn’t use the words “go dream” as another way of telling someone to get lost… Da-ge has been lying in this position all afternoon and all night. Aren’t his arms numb?

Thinking this, Wei Zhiyuan slowly walked over and gently shifted Wei Qian by the shoulder, carefully avoiding Wei Qian’s injured leg. He rolled him onto his other side, then moved his head to the middle of the pillow.

Wei Qian’s steady breathing was not disturbed in the slightest. It brushed across Wei Zhiyuan’s wrist, stirring a little puff of warm air.

His outline in the darkness made Wei Zhiyuan’s heart jump. He hurriedly withdrew his hand, then lay down properly beside him with his body straight as a corpse, close against the edge of the bed.

Wei Zhiyuan sank into a strange state. Wei Qian’s return loosened the spirit that had been stretched taut inside him like a zither string, and an instinctive wave of joyful fatigue welled up. He should have fallen asleep the moment his head touched the pillow, yet he was being controlled instead by some indescribable excitement. In every vessel in his body, blood was rushing faster than usual, quietly carrying that moving warmth through his veins and delivering it to his skin.

No matter what, he could not close his eyes.

When he had looked up at the youth beside him from the perspective of a child, he had once felt him tall and omnipotent. Now that upward gaze had vanished without a trace along with the change in his own viewpoint.

He discovered that his brother, too, was only a mortal of flesh and blood.

And yet that one mortal body of flesh and blood, tiny as an ant among the teeming masses, that mortal body of flesh and blood tanned into something like an African mummy, seemed like a tornado. In an instant it swept away all the black clouds and bitter rain in his inner world, and in the blink of an eye the wilderness stretched vast and boundless beneath a high sky and pale clouds.

Wei Zhiyuan lay flat on his back on the bed, plucking at each clearly separated string of his own heart, as if holding a magnifying glass, trying to identify every last subtle emotion hidden in every crevice of his bones. Like a third person floating in the night sky, he looked down from on high and examined himself, himself who was still full of fear and panic, weak and incompetent.

Wei Zhiyuan came to a conclusion. He believed that he was still too weak, and that was why he needed a pillar like da-ge in his spiritual world.

He decided to clear that pillar out completely.

And yet even so, his mood still did not suddenly brighten. There was still some part of his soul that remained stubbornly stuck fast.

Wei Zhiyuan’s dissection of his own soul stopped there. It was as if he instinctively feared that little patch of shadow, where the truth of that clinging, sticky sensation seemed to be hidden. Out of self-protection, he sealed that tiny truth away.

It was love and desire mixed together with death, twisted, perverse, immoral, and yet absurd and horrifying, already beyond the limit of what a boy could bear.

“The spring breeze does not understand romance, yet it stirs the heart of a youth.” The lyric is beautiful, but a youth whose heart has been stirred is not necessarily every one of them open and upright, clear as moonlight and bright as wind.

Wei Zhiyuan knew with perfect clarity that he was sliding toward an abyss, and yet he did not know how to stop.

This sleep of Wei Qian’s lasted all the way until the following evening.

Under the worried gazes of his family, he swayed and staggered upright. He had grown so thin that he looked like a mobile clothes rack. He went into the bathroom and casually turned on the water, planning to take a shower.

The shower setup in their home was extremely primitive, just two crude pipes, one connected to the hot-water tank and one to the tap. The tap water came faster, so every time they turned on the shower, the water stayed cold for the first ten seconds.

The cold water made Wei Qian shudder all over, and he instinctively stepped back. Only then did he remember that he had already returned to the plains, full of bubbles of oxygen.

He had slept until every bone in his body felt sore and aching. Balancing on one leg, he hastily rinsed himself off in a high-difficulty shower, then ate three full bowls of rice in one go. Only then did he feel that he had come back to life.

His hands were covered with all sorts of scars from scrapes and abrasions, but at the dinner table his chopsticks still flew. It did not affect his performance in the slightest.

Grandma Song looked on and sighed repeatedly, nagging at him, “You heartless little white-eyed wolf, where on earth did you go fooling around? Were you trying to torment us to death?”

Where had he gone?

That really was a long story.

Wei Qian truly had not meant to make his family worry. On this whole trip, he had suffered every hardship there was to suffer, and run into every bit of rotten luck there was to run into.

Besides Wei Qian, Lao Xiong had brought three others with him, all of them young and strong. Who would have thought that among those few lads, aside from one called Xiao Liu, the others all had severe reactions, one worse than the next.

Their first stop was Zadoi County in Qinghai, a place more than four thousand meters above sea level. Wei Qian vomited all the way there.

It was the kind of vomiting that practically brought up his gall. At its worst, he could not sleep all night, and felt as though something heavy were pressing on his chest while his temples throbbed with splitting pain. At the time, every one of them envied and resented Xiao Liu for how unaffected he was. But after only a couple of days, Xiao Liu died.

In that sea of misery and gloom, Xiao Liu had been healthy as an ox and able to eat anything with gusto, so he developed the delusion that he was made of bronze skin and iron bones. That night, in the little inn, he cheerfully gave himself a thorough bath. The inn they were staying in had limited conditions, and the hot water came and went. The first half of Xiao Liu’s bath was hot, and the second half turned into a cold rinse.

That night, once the sun went down, the temperature dropped by nearly twenty degrees. By midnight Xiao Liu was running a fever. At first he did not pay attention, thinking it was ordinary altitude sickness. Only when he could no longer endure it did he fumble for the phone and call Lao Xiong. Lao Xiong scrambled up in a panic and took him to the hospital before dawn. Once they got there, they found it was cerebral edema, serious enough that there was no time to transfer him elsewhere, so they had no choice but to try to save him on the spot.

In the end, they still could not save him. Xiao Liu was gone, only twenty-seven years old.

From that point on, nobody needed reminding. Every day they wrapped themselves up like quails.

And this was only the beginning. After natural disasters came man-made calamities, and Lao Xiong himself was a walking man-made calamity.

First he took Wei Qian and the others around locally, made a test purchase of some cordyceps, got a rough sense of the market, and stored it there. Then, with one grand flourish of his pen, Lao Xiong made a decision, head south and enter Tibet!

At the time, Wei Qian still naively failed to question this idiot’s decision. He thought Lao Xiong had some deeper meaning behind it. It was not until they reached a small town south of Lhasa, where Lao Xiong took a liking to a pot and decided to cross mountains and rivers on foot for the sake of that pot, that Wei Qian truly and fully realized that there was something wrong with Xiong Yingjun’s brain.

As they went farther and farther into places where nobody lived, the first thing they lost was mobile signal, and after that, they lost the phones themselves.

That day, midway through the journey, they stopped to rest. Some people were eating in the car, and some got out to “sing mountain songs,” which meant peeing in the wilderness.

Wei Qian did not have much appetite. Just as he was about to get out of the car to get some air, Lao Xiong, who had just come back after relieving himself, suddenly pointed at them with a horrified face and shouted, “Out of the car! Out of the car! Get down, now!”

Lao Xiong rarely looked that savage. His voice was even more shrill, like a rotten shovel scraping across a broken iron wok. The sound drilled into people’s ears and was almost enough to stir up the urge to pee. The others, well-trained by now, grabbed their bags of valuables and flung open the doors, jumping out one after another.

It all happened in an instant. Wei Qian was the last one. Lao Xiong reached in and yanked him down. Together with the property he clung to for dear life, Wei Qian landed on the ground on his backside. Then all of them stood there gasping for breath, watching helplessly as their car rolled off the cliff with a tremendous crash and disappeared.

Later, Lao Xiong said that when he had walked back that way, he noticed that the soil under the rear half of the car, which had been parked by the roadside, had started to loosen. At that moment he sensed something was wrong and immediately shouted. Once everyone jumped out, the center of gravity of the car shifted, and the loosened ground gave way completely. The off-road vehicle that had accompanied them all this way thus passed into eternal glory.

No village ahead, no inn behind. Beneath their feet, there were only two No. 11 bus routes, meaning their own two legs.

Wei Qian asked sincerely, “Xiong Laoban, could you repeat one more time exactly what we’re suffering our way along this godforsaken road for?”

Xiong Laoban, that bastard, replied with equal sincerity, “To buy a pot.”

Wei Qian spoke from the bottom of his heart. “You really are a huge fucking idiot!”

A huge idiot led a pack of little idiots and lost contact with the outside world. Luckily, on the Sichuan-Tibet route there were occasionally Buddhist devotees from Tibetan areas of Sichuan making the pilgrimage on foot to Lhasa. Some traveled alone, and some pushed tricycles loaded with supplies and went in groups. After trudging on hungry and cold for several days, Wei Qian and the others were finally blessed by Buddha and came across one such group of Tibetans.

The other side did not have much property, and as for fixed assets, all they had was a little three-wheeled pedal cart. But simply seeing people was a good thing. At the very least, they could mooch a few bites to eat. The old Tibetan fellow was experienced and even knew how to get supplies, so at least they did not starve to death.

Along the way, the group of them hitched rides whenever they could, camped and slept in the open, and truly suffered every kind of foreign torment imaginable. Lao Xiong joked that this bunch of theirs, however much they might now be running all over the place and scrambling for food, would surely become great in the future. After all, the Shanxi merchants who once went west through Xikou, and the Huizhou merchants who headed south along the ancient Huizhou-Hangzhou route, had lived exactly like this too.

No one paid him any attention. They all wanted to kill this fathead fish.

Later, Lao Xiong finally got his wish and bought his pot. It was a stone pot carved from soapstone produced on the cliffs of Namjagbarwa, that unconquered virgin peak. The stone was so soft that fingernails could leave marks on it, so no matter what was made from it, it could only be handcrafted. Even if Lao Xiong called Wei Qian “a country bumpkin who’s never seen the world,” Wei Qian could still tell that the thing was a genuinely good thing.

Unfortunately, the area was not accessible by road. So when each of them was burdened with a pile of cordyceps, safflower, and several big pots purchased from local villagers, trudging on foot with faces to the earth and backs to the sky, every one of them developed a kind of indescribable class hatred toward pots as objects.

The journey in between was simply impossible to sum up in a few words, like crossing snowy mountains and trudging through grasslands. Wei Qian even rolled down a slope and injured his leg.

Luckily, although Wei Qian had no faith in his heart, he did possess the kind of spirit that valued money above life itself. After fixing his leg with a splint, he actually dragged that injured leg behind him and kept walking with them for another full day before they finally reached a place with people.

There still was not much in the way of modern communication there among the herders, but fortunately the local customs were simple and honest, and they took them in. One family that did business in Lhasa had a small pickup truck, but the owners were not home. So Lao Xiong had no choice but to remain there for nearly a month before he managed to rent that truck and haul the goods to Chengdu.

Only after reaching Chengdu did Wei Qian get the chance to contact his family.

They stayed in Chengdu for three or four days. Then, with his glib tongue that could practically overturn clouds and rain, Lao Xiong resold the stone pot at nearly ten times the original price, recovering all the costs of the trip in one stroke and even leaving a little extra profit.

There were also people who wanted to buy the medicinal herbs, but Lao Xiong refused them. He did not sell off a single stalk, because those things were light and easy to carry. Once he took them back inland, he would have better returns.

The moment the pot changed hands, they did not linger for even one day. That very night they set off back to Qinghai, retrieved the luggage they had stored there, and in this way came rolling and scrambling all the way back.

The countless twists and turns of it all could hardly be described, on par with the eighty-one tribulations.

Yet in the face of this whole family, old and young alike, in the end the sense of responsibility in Wei Qian’s heart overcame the bragging instinct of a teenage boy who had survived disaster. He only said with mature restraint, “It was nothing. The signal was bad over there, so the calls wouldn’t go through. We moved some goods around and can sell them for a bit of money. You’re getting older, so don’t go out doing such heavy work anymore.”