Bro | Chapter 68

Wei Qian behaved himself in the hospital for a little over a week, but before even half a month had passed, he could no longer stay put.

He had long been used to a hectic life. In the first few days after surgery, when his energy was poor and he would get sleepy after wandering around for a bit, that was one thing. But as the amount of time he stayed awake each day gradually grew longer, he began to find the hospital’s monotonous, boring life increasingly unbearable.

Once Little New Year passed, New Year’s Eve was close at hand. Outside, things were getting livelier by the day, while Wei Qian increasingly felt as though he were sitting in jail. He endured it in silence for several days like a prisoner, and finally made up his mind to escape.

Wei Qian had always been a man of action through and through. So long as he wanted to do something, and the timing was right, he could always put it into practice in the shortest time possible, for example, by putting on his clothes and running.

But on this particular day, Wei Qian thought it over for a moment and ultimately did not run. He was afraid Xiao Yuan would panic, so he patiently waited until noon for Wei Zhiyuan to come.

Wei Zhiyuan brought a thick stack of documents. “These are the funding plans from our side, one Chinese copy and one English copy. The budget control section has already been revised a third time. This is the annual company event plan submitted by your administrative department. This is the year-end bonus proposal submitted by your HR department. All of them need your signature. Do you want to read them yourself, or should I read them aloud to you?”

If you had never worked with Wei Qian, you would never know just how nitpicky he could be, especially when he had nothing to do in the hospital.

Wei Qian could never simply and happily say, “I know,” and let his subordinates off the hook. He always managed to revise submitted materials into a total mess, with the handwritten comments between the lines outnumbering the original text itself. Of course, the one usually doing the handwritten copywork was the long-suffering laborer Wei Zhiyuan.

But this time, Wei Qian acted completely out of character. He read through everything from beginning to end, actually said nothing, and signed all of it.

Wei Zhiyuan had even taken out a gel pen with a newly replaced refill, only to discover that there was no place for it to prove its worth. He looked at Wei Qian rather unaccustomedly and asked with some concern, “Ge, are you feeling unwell today?”

Wei Qian rubbed his nose. “Well… I want to discuss something with you.”

Wei Zhiyuan was practically stunned. He had never known the word “discuss” even existed in his brother’s dictionary. For a moment he failed to react, and only let out a dazed, “Huh?”

“I want to go out for a while this afternoon, just to get a little air,” Wei Qian said sincerely. At the end, he even added, in remarkably good form, “Okay?”

Wei Zhiyuan did not answer his question for a full half minute. Half a minute later, still completely out of it, he said, “Are you asking me?”

A vein twitched at Wei Qian’s temple. “Who else would I be asking?”

“I… I, um…” Wei Zhiyuan’s brain had turned to mush, and he nearly stammered. “No, no problem.”

Wei Qian had in fact already changed clothes and was only waiting for him to say that. He stripped off the patient gown he had been wearing as a front, threw on his coat, and was ready for his jailbreak. In a few quick motions, he gathered the scattered documents from the hospital bed and stuffed them into Wei Zhiyuan’s bag, then produced a hat from who knew where, put it on, and tugged the brim down. “Come on, hurry. The nurses are all out eating lunch.”

Still in a haze, Wei Zhiyuan was dragged out by him. The entire way, he thought deeply and arduously, Wait, what exactly did he say just now that made me answer “no problem”?

Only after Wei Zhiyuan had gripped the steering wheel did it occur to him, dreamily, to ask, “Where to?”

Wei Qian said, “Home.”

Wei Zhiyuan hesitated, then told him, “Xiao Bao has been staying at home these last couple of days. Do you want her to catch you?”

Without thinking, Wei Qian blurted, “Then the office.”

Wei Zhiyuan said inexplicably, “What would we go to the office for? Didn’t you already review and sign everything?”

Wei Qian: “…”

He finally discovered how boring he was. Other than those two places, he could not think of anywhere else to go.

Wei Zhiyuan turned his head, thought for a moment, then asked him carefully, “Ge, could you… go out with me? I’ve grown this old and I’ve never been on a date.”

Wei Qian looked at Wei Zhiyuan with a rather sympathetic and pitying expression, as though he himself had ever gone on one.

“All right, let’s go. I’ll treat you… treat you…” Wei Qian agreed at once, but then the rest of his sentence got stuck. He was at a loss for words for quite a while, and finally made an utterly uninspired suggestion. “Mm, dinner?”

Wei Zhiyuan was amused by him. “What are you planning to treat me to?”

Wei Qian said, “Western food?”

Wei Zhiyuan replied, “Western food isn’t easy to digest. Your body can’t handle it right now.”

Wei Qian said, “Then that Japanese stuff…”

Wei Zhiyuan said, “Don’t you dislike how much raw stuff they have?”

“…” Wei Qian said, “Let’s just go home. I’ll make you a bowl of noodles.”

In the end, the two of them found a Chinese restaurant so gaudily decorated it practically blinded dogs, yet somehow still looked very refined and elegant. They went in and each ordered a bowl of fried noodle lumps, and watched as the waiter drifted away with a greenish face.

And the more shameless part was that Wei Qian did not even pay for those two bowls himself. Because halfway through the meal, Wei Qian happened to glance downstairs and unexpectedly spotted Ma Chunming and his assistant Mengmeng.

“Damn…” Wei Qian cursed under his breath. “Company executives are required to hold the line every year until the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. This brat actually dared to sneak off while I’m gone.”

As he was speaking, Mengmeng suddenly stood up and waved her hand. The band in the main hall immediately stopped, as though they had arranged it with her beforehand.

Mengmeng’s young face seemed almost to shine, and her big eyes burned brightly as she looked at the bewildered Ma Chunming. Then she suddenly announced loudly, “President Ma, every year during the New Year I make a wish, and it’s always extremely effective. Up until now, not one has failed. So I’ve decided to do this before the year is over. If I succeed, then this year’s wish opportunity can be spent on something else. If I fail, then with the blessing of the New Year, I’ll definitely succeed next year!”

From the way she carefully economized her “wish opportunities,” you could tell she was actually rather thrifty and practical.

The people dining all stopped talking and turned their attention to the girl.

Mengmeng continued, loudly declaiming like she was reciting a poem, “Dr. Ma, I think your ex-wife ought to change her glasses. But I’m very glad she didn’t, because it was only because her eyesight was bad for a moment and she lost you that I got the chance to pick up this bargain…”

At that point, no matter how dense Ma Chunming was, he knew what she was about to say. He hurriedly and flusteredly stood up.

Radiating domineering confidence, Mengmeng grabbed him by the shoulder, went up on tiptoe, leaned in, and planted a loud, resounding kiss on the side of his face, leaving behind a bright red lip print. “I’m confessing to you!”

Ma Chunming staggered backward several steps and, unfortunately, tripped over one of the decorative little stools, landing on his backside on the floor.

Wei Qian covered his eyes. “How embarrassing.”

Dr. Ma practically felt himself evaporating. Mengmeng was so young, so pretty, and smart and capable too. Why in the world would she fall for an old, ugly man like him, someone unromantic, bad with words, and divorced to boot?

Was she blind?

The whole world felt dreamlike to him, until the moment of paying the bill, when the waiter handed him a napkin and said, “Sir, two gentlemen asked for the bill to be added to yours. They said you’d understand once you looked at this.”

Ma Chunming lowered his head and saw a little turtle drawn on the napkin, in exactly the same style as his own drawings, glaring eye-to-eye at a mung bean.

Mengmeng leaned over. “What’s this?”

Dr. Ma blushed and, stammering, interpreted it aloud for her. “He’s saying one of us is the turtle and the other is the mung bean.”

Then he turned back to the waiter. “What did they order?”

The waiter’s mouth twitched. “Two bowls of fried noodle lumps.”

That settled it. Other than his freakishly eccentric变态 boss, nobody else on earth would do such a thing.

Wei Qian sponged a meal off Ma Chunming and treated it as a wage deduction for sneaking off work. He worked very hard to come up with a number of plans, but in the end still, with complete lack of creativity, brought Wei Zhiyuan to the movies. Any sports they might normally have done together were obviously too strenuous at present for a patient like Wei Qian, and in the dead of winter, there was nowhere to go fishing anyway.

Unfortunately, before the movie had even reached the halfway point, Wei Qian very disrespectfully fell asleep.

Wei Zhiyuan drew him in with both arms, let him lean against himself, and watched the entire film with great enjoyment. When they walked out of the theater, there was still a smile at the corner of his mouth.

Wei Qian rubbed his eyes. “Was it really that good? What was the ending?”

Wei Zhiyuan said, “No idea.”

Wei Qian said, “What about the plot?”

Wei Zhiyuan scratched his head in embarrassment. “…Forgot.”

Wei Qian had just been about to ask him if he was smiling like a flower because it was a comedy, but then he saw a few girls walking past beside them wiping tears from their eyes. He looked up and saw the promotional poster, elegantly emblazoned with the words A Love That Toppled a City, a Tragic Song Beyond Compare, above an image of a woman crying beautifully like pear blossoms drenched in rain.

Wei Zhiyuan’s heart was so full of immense sweetness that he had been happy from beginning to end and had not even noticed that what he had just watched was a tragic film of separation and death.

What a failed date. And yet both parties actually thought it had gone pretty well.

Because of that, Wei Zhiyuan stood Lao Xiong up and did not go listen to the eminent monk’s sermon.

Lao Xiong, after speaking until spit flew everywhere, swept his gaze over the audience below and, unsurprisingly not seeing Wei Zhiyuan’s shadow, smiled in satisfaction.

His words were for those who wanted to hear them. Those who did not listen had no troubles, so of course they did not need to hear.

Wei Qian’s unauthorized departure from the hospital earned him quite a scolding from the nurse making her rounds. Even more unfortunately, he was actually going to have to spend the New Year in the hospital room.

There had not been many truly happy, complete New Years in his life, so he immediately made the decision to hand the attending doctors and nurses each a fat red packet. Then, in collusion with Wei Zhiyuan, and under everyone’s indulgent policy of seeing with one eye open and one eye shut, he ran away again.

The two of them, together with Xiao Bao, made dumplings. Xiao Bao rolled the wrappers, Wei Zhiyuan wrapped the dumplings, and Lord Wei Qian sat on the sofa like an old master supervising the work, exclusively in charge of pointing fingers and giving commentary.

When the first firecracker sounded outside the window, Xiao Bao’s expression suddenly dimmed. She said, “It would’ve been nice if Grandma were still here.”

Many years ago, it seemed, the three of them had also been celebrating some holiday or other when Grandma Song descended from the heavens like an uninvited guest, knocked on their door without allowing any refusal, and then, like a cuckoo taking over a nest… simply stayed, overbearingly and just like that.

…But from now on, at every holiday and festival, there would never again be such an annoying old thing knocking on their door, would there?

For a moment, all three of them fell silent. But just then, the doorbell suddenly rang.

Xiao Bao leaped three feet into the air and shot to the door, flung it open, and then discovered in disappointment that the person standing outside was Lao Xiong, all smiles.

Seeing the stiffness on her face that she could not quite conceal, Lao Xiong patted her head. “Why do you look like you’ve seen a bringer of funeral luck? Am I really that unwelcome?”

Xiao Bao came back to herself and hurriedly let him in.

Lao Xiong sized her up. “Didn’t I say it back then, this girl’s feet were so big, once she grew up she definitely wouldn’t be shorter than anybody… hey, I’m freezing to death. Got any dumplings?”

Xiao Bao said, “We do, but we didn’t make any vegetarian filling…”

“Get out of here.” Lao Xiong said, “Who eats vegetarian filling? That’s for rabbits.”

He sat down grandly and majestically, bit into one in a single mouthful, swallowed it in two bites, and gave a thumbs-up. “Mm, pork and cabbage. Fragrant!”

Wei Qian said coolly, “Amitabha.”

Lao Xiong grinned at him from ear to ear, then turned to Wei Zhiyuan. “Hey, Xiao Yuan, guess what. I uploaded your info and photo to the internet. Just a couple of days ago there really was a response.”

Wei Zhiyuan smiled faintly, neither here nor there.

But Wei Qian immediately asked, “What? What happened? Who is it? How old? What do they do?”

“A woman. Judging from her voice, she sounds not especially young. Don’t know anything else yet, just made contact.” Lao Xiong picked up another dumpling. “Girl, pour me some vinegar. Got garlic?”

Wei Qian said, “Xiao Bao, don’t give him any. I sponsored you with all that money just so you could answer me with nothing but ‘don’t know’?”

Lao Xiong stretched out his arm and took the Laba garlic and Laba vinegar himself, doing things by hand to ensure abundance, while simultaneously looking at Wei Qian with annoyed exasperation. Very slowly he said, “Sigh, Qian’er, you really are one of those people who don’t need to be anxious yet insist on being anxious anyway.”

Wei Qian: “…”

Lao Xiong reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper with an address and a phone number written on it. “The woman who called is surnamed Zhou. Xiao Yuan, if you want, you can go meet her.”

After freeloading his way through New Year’s Eve dinner, Lao Xiong took his leave.

Wei Qian hurriedly pulled on a coat and followed him out. “I’ll walk you downstairs. It’s hard to get a taxi out front these few days because of the holiday. I’ll take you to the back exit.”

Downstairs, the cold wind hit him, and Wei Qian could not help shivering hard from head to toe. The surgery really had damaged his vitality. That winter he was terribly afraid of the cold.

Lao Xiong said, “All right, all right, go back upstairs. Just tell me how to get there. I wouldn’t dare trouble a patient like you.”

Wei Qian said, “Actually I just wanted to ask…”

“How the person who called is, right?” Lao Xiong picked up the thread for him.

“Ah, right.” Wei Qian admitted readily. “If after all this searching, we end up finding a pile of troublesome relatives who’ll only sincerely add to our misery, then that wouldn’t be much fun.”

“Judging from what this Ms. Zhou said, she seems to just know some information. She herself doesn’t sound like a direct relative. But from the way she spoke, she seems like a well-bred and well-educated sort of person.” Lao Xiong glanced at him and needled him. “I say, once it’s actually found, you’ve suddenly got all these concerns, and yet back then you were even willing to make an iron rooster pluck feathers and shell out that much money to look. Got nowhere else to spend it? Come donate a threshold to our temple, benefactor.”

“Get lost.” Wei Qian breathed into his hands and rubbed them quickly together. “Actually… maybe it’s because of what happened when he was little. Xiao Yuan’s always had this kind of… mm, I don’t quite know how to put it, kind of rootless, groundless feeling, you know? He’s much better now that he’s older. When he was little it showed especially clearly, like he was always worried other people would abandon him.”

“Insecurity,” Lao Xiong said.

Wei Qian nodded. “Something like that, yeah. I just think maybe if he had a father and mother, maybe he’d be a little better.”

Lao Xiong looked at him. In the end he still said nothing, only reached out in the cutting cold wind and patted Wei Qian on the shoulder. “I know. Hurry back inside, you…”

After the fifth day of the New Year, Wei Qian had completed a full month in the hospital and was finally allowed to be discharged.

The first thing he did was book plane tickets and fly together with Wei Zhiyuan to the address provided by the woman surnamed Zhou.

The person who opened the door for them was an elderly lady with a full head of white hair, about seventy-something by the look of her, yet she had kept herself in very good shape. Her silver hair was swept high and neatly coiled at the back of her head. She wore a wool dress and, as though specially dressed to receive them, had paired it with a shawl.

Among old ladies of her age, very few were as particular as she was. Whether in bearing or in speech, she carried an elegance tempered by the passage of years.

Grandma Zhou took out a large photo album and showed it to them. She flipped to an old photograph of a man, handsome in appearance, who looked startlingly like Wei Zhiyuan, seven or eight parts alike, with the side profile especially almost identical. “My daughter saw your photograph online and pointed at it, saying, ‘Isn’t that Uncle Xiao Ye?’ I looked, and it really was. Comparing it against the time you went missing, I felt it was almost certainly you, so I took the liberty of making the call.”

Wei Zhiyuan carefully slid the photograph out.

“His name was Ye Shu. We used to live next door to each other. I treated him like my own little brother.” Grandma Zhou then flipped to a photograph of a woman. “This was his wife, in other words, your mother. Her name was Ruan Hong. She had once been my student, stayed on after graduation, and later became my colleague. They were both very good people. She had primary hypertension, and when she gave birth to you it caused a whole string of complications. Her body was never well after the birth, and she passed away in less than a year… ai, when I first saw you, you were only this tiny little bundle, chubby and adorable.”

Wei Zhiyuan softly asked her, “How can you be sure it’s me?”

Grandma Zhou said, “On your back, a little below your shoulder blade, there’s a tiny scar, isn’t there?”

Wei Zhiyuan unconsciously straightened his back a little.

“That scar came from when you had only just learned to roll over. Your father was all thumbs and for one moment failed to watch you carefully enough, and you rolled off the bed and struck the sharp corner of a cabinet.”

There really was such a tiny scar on Wei Zhiyuan’s back. It was already very faint, to the point that if you did not touch for it carefully, you could hardly detect it.

Wei Qian frowned. “Then he now…”

“He also passed away,” Grandma Zhou sighed. “He was a meteorologist, specializing in the study of inland tornadoes. After your mother died, he became even more obsessed with his work, almost like a madman. One time while tracking a tornado, he got too close and a falling tree smashed into his car… ai.”

Tears glimmered briefly in Grandma Zhou’s eyes. She looked at Wei Zhiyuan. “At the time your whole family was in complete chaos, and nobody had any attention left for you. The nanny had disappeared somewhere too. You were only a little over two years old, just barely able to walk in that toddling, unsteady way, and you had no understanding at all of what was happening. Somehow, taking advantage of nobody noticing, you ran out by yourself. By the time us adults realized, you could no longer be found… who would have thought that in the blink of an eye, you’d grow so big? Child, what did you say you do now?”

“I make software,” Wei Zhiyuan said. “Games mainly, but also some applications.”

“Good, good, good.” Grandma Zhou patted his arm comfortingly. “Very good, very good. You’ve grown up properly, become a proper person. Very good. When I go down there in the future, I’ll be able to let your parents rest easy too.”

That afternoon, Grandma Zhou sat with them for the entire afternoon, talking about the parts of Wei Zhiyuan’s childhood he did not remember, until finally the nanny came over to remind her to take her medicine.

At the very end, she walked them to the door and told Wei Zhiyuan the address of his parents’ cemetery plot.

Only then did Grandma Zhou turn to Wei Qian and take hold of his hand.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

From beginning to end she had never asked what sort of relationship the two of them had, yet Wei Qian suspected she had somehow already noticed. He lowered his head a little, forced a smile at her, and felt undeserving of this thanks.

Together, they found the joint grave of Ye Shu and Ruan Hong. Wei Zhiyuan bent down and gently wiped the dust off the tombstone, revealing the old epitaph beneath the years: Though I die nine times, I will still have no regrets.

The fact that his parents’ looks were so similar to his own did not move Wei Zhiyuan very much. Only when he saw that epitaph did he suddenly feel that blood tie spanning the worlds of the living and the dead.

So this is how I came into the world. These were the kind of people my parents were, Wei Zhiyuan thought.

All of a sudden, those childhood years of wandering and fleeing, which had once been carved into him down to the bone, no longer felt quite so real. He was like a child who had traveled far away and finally found some kind of spiritual homecoming and sense of belonging.

Wei Qian bent down, placed the bouquet in front of the tombstone, put an arm around Wei Zhiyuan’s shoulder, and gave him a pat.

Wei Zhiyuan took hold of his hand. And on that long journey, he had, incredibly, been fortunate enough to gain the person he treasured most in his life.

Compared with that, what did the terror and pain of drifting from place to place amount to?

Maybe it was tempering meant for me, Wei Zhiyuan thought.

Wouldn’t the spring wind soon blow open the frozen earth of the north?

Author’s note:

Though I die nine times, I will still have no regrets.

From Li Sao