Bro | Chapter 49

Later, when Wei Qian thought back on it, at that moment, the moment Lao Xiong publicly called him out and whipped his corpse in front of everyone, there was really only one question and two choices in his mind: was it better to make a clean break with Xiong Yingjun, or to perish together with him?

But very quickly, he no longer had time to think about such philosophical questions. Lao Xiong stepped aside and pulled the chair back a little. “If you agree, then sit over here. Starting now, I won’t participate in any decisions. You’ll have the final say. Whether we live or die in the end, I’ll bear the responsibility. If you don’t agree, then we’ll keep going with Plan One, and I’ll wait to collect the corpse.”

Wei Qian, suddenly “draped in the imperial robe,” looked at him, and his gaze distilled from a thousand words into one sentence: Why don’t you just go die already?

Lao Xiong’s eyes landed on Wei Qian, then moved away from his gaze again.

At this point, all reflection and repentance were over.

He knew this was a matter of complete humiliation. Holding the nameplate from the conference table in his hand, Lao Xiong knew as clearly as a mirror that this was the most dignified exit he could manage.

He had seen it clearly. When Wei Qian was suddenly called out by name, for that instant, there was panic in his eyes.

Shock, disbelief, and confusion flashed through them in turn, and in the end they settled on anger after he came back to himself.

But Lao Xiong knew he would definitely walk over.

Wei Qian was exactly the kind of person who would not shed tears until he saw the coffin. It had nothing to do with his age or experience. He was already used to living with nowhere to retreat. Even if one day the world ended and everyone else scattered like birds and beasts, he would definitely be the one slowest to react.

Only that kind of person could carry the backbone of a company, even of an enterprise.

A moment later, just as he had expected, Wei Qian lowered his head, straightened his clothes a little, then stood up and walked over.

Lao Xiong handed him the nameplate. Wei Qian hesitated for a moment, then took it. The chairman’s secretary was well trained. Before she even had time to process what exactly was happening, she had already swiftly replaced the cup of water in front of Wei Qian.

The cup sat on the table for quite a while, but the surface of the water still trembled without stopping. It was hard to tell whether that was because the girl who had carried it over had been trembling the whole time.

A wooden chair, if no one sat in it for a while, would turn cold. From that coldness, Wei Qian felt the raging wind and towering waves crashing straight toward the helmsman, and it made him feel unable to breathe.

Of the people present, aside from a few young employees who had only been working for a short time, most of them were older than he was, and every one of them was watching him in silence. In this world, everyone knows how to pick faults in others. Even in the tiniest details, people can always find all sorts of reasons to point this out and criticize that, making themselves seem wise and perceptive.

But when most people truly sit in this position themselves, they too are crushed by that extreme fear of being exposed to risk.

It might sound strange to put it this way, but at that time, the very instant Wei Qian sat down in Lao Xiong’s chair, all the resentment and anger he had felt toward Lao Xiong, the same as everyone else, vanished into thin air.

“Why didn’t I stop him?” Wei Qian asked himself from the bottom of his heart. “Was it because I sympathized with Chen Lu?”

No one would ever have allowed Lao Xiong to take several hundred million yuan and use it to play a sentimental game of throwing it all into the water. The fundamental reason why they had all remained silent until the end was that, including himself, no one had seen the project’s risk points at the very beginning when the decision was being made. No one had foreseen that that little hillside would be carved up into an oversupplied villa market within just a few months. No one had pierced straight through that dazzlingly beautiful project proposal and seen at a glance that it did not have one accurate, solid customer base.

The market was ever-changing and impossible to predict. At the end of every stretch of clear skies and gentle winds, there might be a hideous face waiting. Even the Titanic hit an iceberg. Every single day, countless big and small ships perished and sank silently within it.

And that kind of danger was not so easy for ordinary employees, or even management, to feel, because it all existed in the eyes of the one steering the ship.

Now, it was in his eyes.

Wei Qian did not make any sort of inaugural speech. He simply picked up the cup and took a sip of water to moisten his throat, then said briefly, “Let’s not talk about anything else first. President Xiong, please begin by explaining the project department’s sales situation. After that, the budget department and investment department can announce the funding shortfall. Once we’ve heard that, anyone who wants to leave can end the meeting early and go submit a resignation application to HR in time. Those who want to stay and hold the line can remain, and we’ll discuss the key points of the next stage of work. Lao Xiong, start with you.”

But in truth, although he said that, not a single person left early. Jobs were hard to find. As long as the company could still pay wages for even one more day, employees would not take the initiative to resign. As for the managers, if even one of them had possessed the decisiveness and insight to “leave the field early” back then, perhaps they would never have ended up at this point.

When the longest meeting finally ended, Wei Qian and Lao Xiong were the last two left.

Wei Qian stood up and stopped in front of Lao Xiong. Lao Xiong closed his eyes.

“Why are you closing your eyes?” Wei Qian said irritably. “You don’t actually think that with that bear face of yours, I’d have the appetite to kiss you, do you?”

Lao Xiong said in a low voice, “I thought you were going to hit me.”

Wei Qian swept a glance around the room. “Here? No way. At the very least, I’d wait until after work, until you walked somewhere with no one around, then I’d throw a sack over your head first before beating you up.”

Lao Xiong let out a low laugh. “What a hooligan.”

Then he leaned heavily against the back of the chair, tipped his head back, and stared up at the ceiling.

After quite a while, Lao Xiong said in a murmur that sounded almost like sleep-talk, “Sometimes I wonder what I’m still doing here. Shouldn’t I be taking Chen Lu and running far away, traveling the world, or just quietly waiting with her for the final moment?”

Without making a sound, Wei Qian sat down beside him. In front of them was the empty conference room with no one left in it but them, and the bright, cold stone conference table, reflecting strange and shifting shadows of themselves on its surface, as though it were the opening line of some mysterious fable.

“But I clearly know that at this point, every meeting is one less meeting. And yet I still don’t want to see her more often. I can dream in the middle of the night that I died in her place, but when I wake up, I don’t dare turn my head and look at her face. Tell me, do you think there’s something wrong with me?” Blue-green stubble had emerged on Lao Xiong’s chin. He looked like he had not slept in ten thousand years as he lifted his head to look at Wei Qian. In his gaze was an ash-like stillness and calm. “Qian’er, let me go back to the C City project side. If there’s anything you need me to run around for, I’ll be on standby at any time.”

Wei Qian did not know what he ought to say. He had not even had a single relationship himself, so how was he supposed to know what was going on between husband and wife?

“Sure. Do whatever you want.” After saying that, Wei Qian stood up and left.

Maybe one day Chen Lu would die, and then Lao Xiong would be free.

But if that day really came, would Lao Xiong still be Lao Xiong?

Time could compress loose sand into stone. What, then, would it compress the earliest, greenest love into?

Wei Qian suddenly felt a little regret over losing his temper with Wei Zhiyuan that day.

At the sink in the restroom, Wei Qian splashed water on his face, then pushed aside his regret and doubts as quickly as possible. He knew that what he urgently needed to do now was two things: how to steady his creditors, how to negotiate an extension, and how to fill the funding gap, and whether for the C City project they should think of a way to bring it back to life, or think of a way to pull out.

Wei Qian had never wanted to look back at how that stretch of time had been lived through.

In the past, when he had nothing, he used to sit at home with Grandma Song, pinching their fingers and calculating over every little hundred or eighty-yuan. What he mostly felt then was the pressure of survival. His responsibility was one family, making his own life a little better, so that when his younger sister came asking for pocket money, he would not have to hurriedly think up some excuse and hide because he had none to give her.

Now, he counted as one of the propertied class in this city. No one would think of him as poor anymore. Although these days, if a billboard fell and crushed three people to death, two of them would probably be some kind of “boss,” still, no one could deny that he had indeed managed to become fairly presentable.

And the pressure he bore had changed from one household of old and young into the wages for dozens, even hundreds, of people in the company next month, along with debts amounting to several hundred million.

San Pang secretly told him, “Qian’er, I won’t hide it from you, I really can’t sleep. Every night I get up and wander around the house like an idiot. At first my parents thought I was sleepwalking. The two of them are about ready to send me to the psych ward. My dad said I should quit and stop doing this. A couple years ago we bought a little storefront and rented it out to someone else. We might as well take it back and open a hot pot place ourselves. Even if we can only scrape by, then let’s scrape by first. Scraping by is pretty good too.”

San Pang was telling the truth. These days he wore a constant worried frown and did not even have the energy to date the goddess he adored. Even more so, he had completely forgotten to remind Wei Qian about the way Xiao Yuan looked at him, that gaze like a wolfhound eyeing a bone.

Wei Qian’s assessment of him was, “Look at that pathetic ambition of yours.”

San Pang glared. “Like you can sleep? You think I’d believe that?”

Wei Qian gave him a sidelong look. “Do I look like someone who can’t sleep?”

San Pang took a look, and his spirits really did seem fine. Maybe not radiant, but at least he was neat and clean, his complexion did not look bad, there were no bloodshot veins in his eyes, and no dark circles either. When he spoke, his train of thought was clear. Even his donkey temper and funeral-face were functioning normally. There was not the slightest sign of anything wrong.

San Pang was convinced, and inwardly thought that people really were different from one another.

Back when Wei Qian had gotten into a key high school, he had thought it was because the guy worked hard and loved studying. Now San Pang realized that the gap between himself and Wei Qian truly was like a heavenly chasm. Leaving everything else aside, just this old man’s mental fortitude alone, he could practically compare with Empress Dowager Cixi back in the day, losing power and humiliating the nation yet still eating well and sleeping soundly. It was simply hopeless.

Empress Dowager Cixi had been dead for many years, and there was no longer any way to verify her spiritual world. Wei Qian did not know what her situation had been, but he knew that his own mental state had been swaying all along, teetering right on the edge of collapse.

The whole “I can sleep” thing was pure bluff, no, proper packaging to stabilize morale.

That year, Wei Qian began to suffer from insomnia. Before that, he had never imagined such a problem would ever happen to him. He had once held the prejudiced belief that it was only those rich, idle old men who had nothing better to do who would clutch their chests and lie awake with insomnia and the like.

In the first twenty-some years of his life, he really had been able to drop his head and fall asleep anytime, anywhere. Now, he finally no longer dared to talk big when he was not the one suffering.

He did not know whether his was physiological or psychological. At the beginning, Wei Qian often worked until after midnight. His life was irregular, and once it got past one or two in the morning, he stopped feeling sleepy. Only when dawn was about to break could he doze for a little while. As time went on, he realized that even if he lay down on time, he still could not fall asleep.

To keep himself from looking too much like a dead dog, Wei Qian began taking sleeping pills in small amounts.

This matter had originally been a secret the whole time, until Wei Zhiyuan found out.

That day, Wei Qian had gone out to meet someone from a consulting company and came back fairly early. Lately, Wei Zhiyuan had been leading his own team in carrying out the final debugging on the program, and every day they worked until very late. When he came home and saw Wei Qian’s shoes there and the bedroom door closed, he thought Wei Qian had already gone to sleep.

Since there was basically not much work the next day, and it also happened to be winter break with no classes, Wei Zhiyuan was not in a hurry to rest. After a simple washup, he sat down and started studying the next step of the plan and the rough outline of his ideas.

Close to one or two in the morning, Wei Zhiyuan suddenly heard sounds coming from the living room. At first he did not pay attention, but later he felt something was not quite right. It seemed like the sound of someone rummaging around looking for something.

Wei Qian had run out of sleeping pills. He had been so busy that he forgot all about buying more. Once again unable to sleep in the middle of the night as usual, after painfully tossing and turning on the bed for a while, he had a sudden flash of inspiration and came up with a rotten idea. A lot of cold medicines contained ingredients that caused drowsiness, so he decided to make do for one day and use cold medicine in place of sleeping pills.

Every medicine had some toxicity. Wei Qian knew this perfectly well, and he also knew that taking the stuff too much when he was not sick would damage his organs and his brain nerves.

But setting aside the pain of insomnia, this was not something he could not endure. The problem was that the next day he had to go negotiate the extension of the debt, and there was a hard battle to fight. At a time like this, how could he possibly afford not to sleep?

The more Wei Qian thought about it, the more anxious he became, and the more anxious he became, the less he could sleep. In the end, he almost felt that as long as rat poison could make him lie down and sleep through one whole night, he would be able to drink down a bowl of it without changing expression.

Wei Zhiyuan watched him for a while, then asked strangely, “Do you have a cold?”

In his memory, Wei Qian’s constitution was not the kind that caught colds easily. If he got sick, it was usually something serious. Normally, he was fine.

Wei Qian gave a start, and the cold medicine in his hand dropped back into the drawer with a clatter. He turned back to look at Wei Zhiyuan and resentfully thought that after growing up, this brat’s ability to walk soundlessly like a weasel had not declined at all.

Wei Qian could not be bothered to explain to him. He only fobbed him off with a single sentence. “Yeah, a little.”

Wei Zhiyuan did not believe him at all. There was no strange nasal tone in Wei Qian’s voice when he spoke, and he did not look like he had a fever either. Besides, given his brother’s habits, not to mention taking medicine on his own initiative for some minor ache or illness, he might not even notice it.

“A little? And you’re looking for cold medicine to take in the middle of the night?” Wei Zhiyuan walked over, frowning as he suspiciously sized up the medicine he had taken out. His eyes swept over the effects and side effects at a glance, and suddenly he raised his head and asked, “Ge, you’re not unable to sleep, are you?”

Wei Qian cursed in his heart without expression: How the hell can this bastard even tell that too?

At the same time, he stretched out a hand toward Wei Zhiyuan with complete composure, still using that casual tone of his to brush it off. “Mm, a little. Give it to me. You should go rest earlier too.”

Wei Zhiyuan drew his hand back. “You can’t take cold medicine like this.”

Wei Qian said, “It’s fine. Not often.”

Wei Zhiyuan looked at him as though it were unbelievable. “You still want to do it often? You, wait a second.”

He pulled a bag of milk out of the refrigerator, poured it into a very small pot, set it over the flame to heat, and added a spoonful of sugar to it.

That thing filled the stomach but did not really work. Wei Qian had already tried it long ago. But he did not reject Wei Zhiyuan’s good intentions. He only stood at the side and said, “Wouldn’t it do if you just spun it once in the microwave?”

“It’s not the same,” Wei Zhiyuan said.

How was hot not just hot? Wei Qian could not figure it out. But once he drank it, it did seem a little different. He guessed it might be because of that extra spoonful of sugar Wei Zhiyuan had added.

After finishing it, he went back to his room, planning to come back out and search around some more once the little brat had fallen asleep. But who knew that the moment he lay down, Wei Zhiyuan came in behind him hugging a quilt. Wei Qian twisted on the bedside lamp and silently watched Wei Zhiyuan toss the quilt onto his bed, with something heavy mixed in the middle. Pulling it open, he saw it was a particularly thick notebook wrapped up in the quilt.

Wei Qian said, “What are you doing?”

Wei Zhiyuan squeezed onto his bed. “Watching you sleep.”

Wei Qian felt that while he was not exactly sleepy, he also could not be said to be particularly awake. If he really had to describe it, his whole nervous system was in a numb state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. He numbly tried to think through what exactly this situation was, gave up after a moment, and asked his precious little brother, “Are you planning to use this to knock me unconscious?”

Wei Zhiyuan said, “I’ve got a new idea. I can tell you about it. There’s some very boring algorithm stuff in the middle. Let’s see if I can talk you to sleep.”

Before he had even finished speaking, Wei Qian had already shoved the quilt aside and sat up.

“Mm, alright, come on then. Hand me a pen.”

“…” Wei Zhiyuan paused, then said helplessly, “I just wanted to help you sleep, Ge. Could you not be so serious all the time?”

Wei Qian pressed one hand to his slightly sore, swollen temples and said with a bitter smile, “If that could talk me to sleep, then wouldn’t I have slept through meetings several times over by now?”

Wei Zhiyuan thought for a moment, then suddenly tossed his notebook aside and laughed.

Wei Qian discovered with surprise that Wei Zhiyuan’s eyes usually did not look curved at all, but when he smiled, they were genuine smiling eyes, slightly upturned at both ends, like a pair of beautiful crescents.

“I get it now.” After saying that, Wei Zhiyuan turned the bedside lamp down to its dimmest setting, leaving everything under the light with only a faint, hazy outline. Then he pulled open the curtains and pushed the window open. A great rush of cold air immediately surged into the warm room.

Wei Qian immediately burrowed into the quilt. “Why the hell are you opening the window? You’ve frozen me fully awake now. Student Xiao Yuan, could I trouble your esteemed self to move back to your own room and stop tormenting me here?”

Wei Zhiyuan said, “Look, it’s snowing.”

The windows in winter were always covered with frost flowers or white fog, making it hard to see clearly what was outside.

Only after Wei Zhiyuan said so did Wei Qian notice the goose-feather snow filling the sky. A few flakes even drifted in with the cold wind and melted in the blink of an eye.

Wei Zhiyuan closed the window again, but left a slit in the curtains.

He wiped the white vapor off that little patch of glass so the person in the room could clearly see the snow on the windowsill piling thicker and thicker.

Then he cleared away all the materials from Wei Qian’s desk and tossed them beneath it, pulled over one of Wei Qian’s graduation photos that had been left in the corner and placed it in the middle, then sat back down on the bed and tugged at the pillow and quilt, patting them loose and soft before pulling them up to Wei Qian’s chin.

Wei Qian could not help smiling. “You’re actually pretty good at taking care of people.”

Wei Zhiyuan said, “When you’re old, I’ll still take care of you like this.”

Wei Qian failed to hear the implication of “growing old together” in it. “When I’m old, are you going to be very young? It’s not like you’re my son.”

This time, Wei Zhiyuan did not answer. He rustled as he lay down beside Wei Qian, raised a hand to turn off the light, then bent over and whispered softly by Wei Qian’s ear, “Go to sleep. When the weather gets nice, the quilt ought to be aired out.”

Wei Qian’s ears were extremely sensitive, and he could not help wanting to dodge away. But Wei Zhiyuan withdrew at the first touch, and in the darkness only the light in his eyes could be seen.

Those curved smiling eyes, and suddenly that image flashed through Wei Qian’s mind. Then the words Wei Zhiyuan had spoken by his ear seemed to become a kind of spell. In his dazed state, he felt as though the quilt that had been patted loose and soft carried the scent of sunshine from having just been aired out.

Lying in bed, when he lifted his eyes, he could just look through the slit in the curtain that Wei Zhiyuan had left and see that little patch of window that had been wiped clean, and through the window he could see the great blanket of falling snow outside. Wrapped in the quilt, he therefore felt especially warm.

The temperature difference between inside and outside quickly clouded the clear glass again with a hazy white frost. Little by little, the world of ice and snow outside was shut away beyond the window, and soon it could no longer be seen clearly. The sweet milk he had just drunk spread from his stomach through all four limbs and every bone in his body, exerting a subtle, calming effect.

Milk heated slowly over a low flame really was different from milk carelessly spun around once in the microwave.

The person beside him let out a faint sigh of extreme comfort. In the haze, it seemed as though someone had wrapped their arms around him, but this did not touch Wei Qian’s weakened and sensitive nerves. He fell asleep.

Wei Zhiyuan had never heard him reveal even a single word about what had happened outside. Of course he cared, but he restrained himself, saying not one word and asking not a single question in this time and place, because Wei Qian’s anxiety would not lessen by even one fraction because of talking it out.

Wei Zhiyuan had simply used sight, sound, touch, taste, and even suggestible illusion in a very clever arrangement, and woven a “home” for him.

Not a house, not even a home in the social or moral sense, not the sort of home that needed rice, flour, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea, not the kind of home that needed someone to “run the household.”

It was a place that sealed out the cutting wind and the pouring rain right before one’s eyes.

It was a resting place for a traveler weathering wind and rain, something like a destination.

A whole night of good sleep.

The next day, when Wei Qian was woken by that alarm clock of his that had long since become nothing but decoration, daylight was already bright.

From the living room came the dragging, shuffling sound of Grandma Song practicing walking. Wei Zhiyuan had gone out early to look up materials, and Xiao Bao had gone to class too.

Wei Qian hurriedly got up and washed up. In the dining room there was toasted bread and a fried egg cooked to a golden yellow, and the bottle of sleeping pills he had left on the table the night before had been taken away and thrown out by Wei Zhiyuan.

From that day on, Wei Qian never bought sleeping pills again, and he never needed them again either.