Bro | Chapter 65

It was Xiao Fei who screamed, because she saw her boss, without the slightest hesitation, grab the blade barehanded. Her heart nearly leapt out through her throat.

With one hand braced against the wall and the other clapped over her mouth, Xiao Fei stared in shock as blood from Wei Qian’s hand ran down along the groove of the dagger and over the back of his hand. Then he lifted a knee and drove it into the short man’s stomach. Xiao Fei heard a dull thud and could almost imagine how badly it hurt. The man let out a short “Ah,” even spraying saliva, bent over involuntarily, and immediately afterward took a vicious elbow strike to the back of the neck.

The short man staggered on the spot and collapsed, like a dying fish. He rolled his eyes for a long while, twitching faintly on the ground.

Only then did Xiao Fei start to feel that her ankle hurt a little from being twisted.

The elevator doors opened, and a security guard who had been patrolling the underground garage and was about to head upstairs was so frightened by the bloody scene that he took two steps back on the spot.

“Call the police.” Using his good hand, Wei Qian picked the knife up from the floor, pinned the phone in the hollow of his shoulder, and said to San Pang, who had not had time to hang up yet, “I’m in the parking garage under our building.”

The suit he was wearing was too fitted, not suitable for such violent movement. Wei Qian had already felt it when he threw Xiao Fei out of the way. Sure enough, when he looked down, there was a tear ripped open in his jacket.

He simply took the torn jacket off and wrapped it around his hand, which was still bleeding nonstop.

San Pang shouted at the top of his lungs, “You scared the fucking life out of your daddy! What happened?!”

“Tsk,” Wei Qian said. “Maybe we should invest in a clothing factory too. Crappy clothes, sold that expensive, and they’re still this flimsy.”

San Pang said, “Get lost! Fuck, stay right there!”

Then, with a bang, San Pang hung up. A string of busy tones came from the phone.

Xiao Fei hurriedly fumbled a pack of tissues out of her bag and limped over, face pale as paper, wiping at Wei Qian’s hand, where the blood still would not stop. Looking at the savage wound on it, Xiao Fei felt like she was about to faint at the sight of blood. “Th-this-this won’t do, you need to go to the hospital. Chairman Wei, you scared me to death just now, do you know that? He was still holding a knife. Y-you, your guts are way too big. Weren’t you afraid he…”

“Afraid of him?” Wei Qian raised a brow lightly, then stretched out one foot and nudged the man lying on the ground with it, stepping on his back as he said in that rough, lawless tone of his, “Back when I was risking life and death working as somebody’s hired thug, the little punk was probably still wearing split-crotch pants.”

“At a time like this and you’re still joking!” Xiao Fei did not believe a word of that story. Still frightened out of her wits, she dragged Wei Qian out of the elevator. “Oh my god, this person’s way too dangerous, get farther away from him! Security, can you think of a way to tie him up first? He’s some lunatic who stabs people with knives.”

The security guard immediately called a whole bunch of people down over the intercom, and several of them swarmed over Wang Dongliang’s brother-in-law, restraining and surrounding him.

“I’m not joking.” While wiping his hand, Wei Qian said to Xiao Fei, “When I was little, my family was poor. We couldn’t afford school, so I ran off to Guangdong alone to make money fighting underground black-market matches. Then I found out it wasn’t some black-fighting ring at all, it was a testing base for a new kind of drug. I only barely escaped with my life in the end.”

Xiao Fei stared at him expressionlessly for a moment, then said in an utterly flat voice, “Oh. Actually, my family was poor when I was little too, and we couldn’t afford school. To make money, I became a spy for alien agents and specialized in catching cats and dogs for them to research. Later one of the agents got bitten by a dog that had never had a rabies shot and died of rabies, and only then was I finally freed from my double-agent life.”

Wei Qian laughed along with her.

At the same time, something indescribable welled up in his heart. It had only been a little more than ten years, but the things he had really gone through back then, when he spoke of them now, nobody believed a word.

Could a person’s life really be that full of rises and falls?

Or had he just hurriedly crammed other people’s entire lifetimes into the short first half of his own?

So Wei Qian said no more about it. Instead, in a rather gentlemanly way, he asked, “By the way, I was a little rough just now. Your foot’s okay, right? I didn’t wrench it, did I?”

The moment he said that, Xiao Fei brightened for no apparent reason. She shook herself out of her earlier terror almost instantly and asked, beaming, “Chairman Wei, did you really lift me with one hand?”

Wei Qian raised a brow, gave a reserved fake smile, adjusted his shirt collar, and waited for her to praise how heroic he’d been.

Unexpectedly, Xiao Fei only cupped her face in delight and said, “That’s wonderful, then I’m obviously not fat at all. No need to diet!”

Three minutes later, Xiao Fei had called two people down from upstairs. One drove Wei Qian to the hospital, while the other stayed behind with her to wait for the police to come handle the matter.

Outside, the air was full of dense fog, and visibility was terrible. The driver was panicking over Wei Qian’s hand, which was still bleeding, and several times he cut lanes recklessly, driving in a way that made the whole trip one close call after another.

Wei Qian said, “It didn’t hit any major blood vessels. The bleeding’s practically about to stop on its own. It’s not like I’m having a miscarriage, so what the hell are you in such a hurry for?”

The driver shot him a frightened glance.

Frowning, Wei Qian leaned back against the seat. “Drive slower… in fog this thick, who knows if the flight can even take off on schedule.”

The answer was no.

A huge crowd had been stranded at the airport. It was packed shoulder to shoulder, just like a train station during the Spring Festival travel season. After a lot of trouble, Wei Zhiyuan finally found a seat in a café and passed the time reading. Unexpectedly, even after he finished an entire book, there was still no reliable flight information at all, so he had no choice but to take out his computer and go online instead.

With nothing to do, Wei Zhiyuan wandered aimlessly across a few websites. Suddenly, a local news item popped up. He had just been about to close it the way he usually did, but with one hurried glance, he felt that the accompanying picture looked a little familiar.

Looking again, he realized it was the underground parking garage of his gege’s company.

The headline read: “Man subdued after stabbing attack in office building.”

Wei Zhiyuan immediately called the company landline. No one answered, and the call got transferred through internal lines to the front desk.

After hearing only a couple of sentences about what had happened, cold sweat came pouring down his back. He immediately dialed Wei Qian’s cell phone.

Wei Qian was at the hospital. With one hand out of commission, it took him quite a while to dig the phone out. “Yo, you still haven’t taken off yet?”

Wei Zhiyuan said, “Where are you?”

“I… uh…” Wei Qian paused, then mumbled vaguely, “I’m outside. Something came up…”

Wei Zhiyuan cut him off impatiently. “Where are you hurt?”

Wei Qian was taken aback. “Your information network’s pretty fast.”

Wei Zhiyuan lost it on the spot. “Don’t give me that bullshit! Exactly where are you hurt?!”

Chairman Wei had never been shouted at like that in his life. He sat there stunned for quite a while before he came back to himself. “What are you yelling for? I’m not dead yet. It’s just a small cut on my hand, it’s been nothing for ages.”

The café was packed, crowded, and heated too well. Many people had already taken off their coats because it was so warm, but Wei Zhiyuan felt that his own hands were so cold they had gone numb.

He closed his eyes, forced himself to calm down for a moment, made himself slow his voice and drop the pitch by a full octave. “I’m going to rebook.”

“Are you full and idle?” Wei Qian’s tone sounded lazy. “I’m not reimbursing your taxi fare.”

“Even if I have to take a rocket, I’m coming back. If I don’t look at you with my own eyes, I won’t be able to rest easy.”

“Sigh… fine, wait.” Helplessly, Wei Qian called him back. Wei Zhiyuan heard him sigh, and then there was a click on the other end.

After a moment, his phone informed him that he had received an MMS. Wei Zhiyuan opened it and found it was a photo sent by Wei Qian. The area around the wound had already been cleaned up. A doctor in a white coat was keeping out of the frame, head lowered as he treated it. After the blood had been wiped away, although it still looked like flesh had split open, it really was not that serious.

“Got your one look at it?” Wei Qian said. “If you’ve seen it, then stay there like a good boy and wait. Don’t go running around and tossing yourself back and forth.”

Wei Zhiyuan’s brow furrowed. He suddenly found it all strange in the extreme.

First, he had never once seen Wei Qian take a photo with his phone. Wei Qian had no habit of playing with his phone. Either he made calls, or he sent texts. Other than that, there basically was no third function to it. Could someone who never used it actually remember at the crucial moment that the thing could take pictures too?

And all of this just to stop him from changing his flight?

It was true that the investment money did need Wei Zhiyuan there to handle the handoff, but it was hardly an emergency. Whether he went half a month earlier or half a month later made practically no difference at all.

Even if nothing had happened on Wei Qian’s side, if his flight had been delayed because of the fog and he had called back to say, “Ge, I probably can’t leave today. How about I switch to a day with better weather,” would Wei Qian really have refused to let him come home?

Impossible.

Wei Zhiyuan felt that with his gege’s temperament, if the weather was bad enough to make him uneasy, he might well drive over himself and pick him up.

The trouble with anything was that once you started turning it over in your mind, suspicion only grew.

The more he thought, the more anxious Wei Zhiyuan became. Wei Qian was very obviously pushing him away, so then… what exactly had happened over there?

Wei Zhiyuan had never known that his imagination could be so rich. In just that short stretch of time from running out of the airport to getting into a taxi, every possible worst-case scenario had already spun through his head in a full revolving parade.

He felt like his heart rate was about to shoot up to one eighty.

Acting first and reporting later, Wei Zhiyuan rushed to the hospital in a panic, only to find no one there. He immediately hailed another taxi and turned right back around toward home. It was not until he opened the door and saw the person lying on the sofa that he was finally able to let out the breath he had been holding.

Leaning against his own front door, Wei Zhiyuan felt like his legs were about to go soft as noodles. He stood there a while calming himself down before finally walking over slowly.

The TV was on, playing some extremely boring variety show, and Wei Qian had already fallen asleep on the sofa. One hand rested on his lower abdomen, while the injured hand, wrapped in clean bandages, lay spread out to one side.

Without waking him, Wei Zhiyuan bent down and carefully looked over Wei Qian’s injured hand, then confirmed that his complexion was all right and that there were no additional injuries on him. Only then did he finally set his heart down, inwardly cursing: You bastard, what the hell were you hiding? You scared my soul right out of me.

Just then, the phone Wei Qian had tossed onto the little table in the entryway rang. Wei Zhiyuan walked over and picked it up. It was Xiao Fei. He glanced back at the soundly sleeping Wei Qian, answered the call, and pushed open the door into another room. “Xiao Fei-jie, it’s me.”

Xiao Fei paused. “Oh, Xiao Yuan? You didn’t leave? Where’s your gege?”

“I saw the news at the airport and couldn’t stop worrying, so I came back. He’s asleep. Is it something urgent?”

“That’s great,” Xiao Fei said. “Could I trouble you to make a trip over? There’s an urgent document from one of the project companies that needs his signature immediately. Their person still has to catch a train back tonight. I was supposed to deliver it myself, but in the elevator today your gege broke off one of my heels when he threw me, and I just borrowed another pair this afternoon that doesn’t fit very well. Could you…”

Wei Zhiyuan agreed at once, put his own luggage back in the room, grabbed Wei Qian’s car keys, and left.

From beginning to end he moved quietly, and Wei Qian did not notice a thing.

It was not until Wei Zhiyuan had already been gone quite a while that Wei Qian was jolted awake by the knocking of San Pang, that unexpected guest.

San Pang said, “I’ve come to express my sympathy to our comrade who lost a paw. So, how is it? Does it hurt?”

Wei Qian had been sleeping soundly and was in a terrible mood after being woken. “There’s a kitchen knife in the kitchen. Chop yourself once and see what it feels like. What kind of idiotic question is that?”

San Pang flopped down onto his sofa. “Oh, come on. The old hero himself is being plenty brave. I heard Xiao Fei’s practically blown you into Ximen Chuixue by now. Once you go back, you can enjoy two full months of admiring looks from the little girls.”

As he spoke, San Pang pulled Wei Qian’s arm over and looked at the hand wrapped up like a rice dumpling. “So now you’re the One-Armed Hero. Man, what rotten timing. Xiao Yuan had to leave right then and there, and at a time like this there’s nobody at home to look after you either. I told you long ago that you should’ve gotten yourself a wife. Let other people give up already and settle yourself down early. Now… sigh. Forget it. The more I say, the worse I feel. Right, where’s little sister?”

“Her manager called yesterday and asked her to go back and look over a script,” Wei Qian said.

“Huh? She’s gone too?” San Pang scratched his head. “Yang Guo, what kind of dogshit luck is this? How about I stay here for a few days?”

“No need.” Wei Qian hesitated for a moment, then suddenly said, “Isn’t Ma Chunming up and bouncing around again already? In a couple of days I may need to take a short leave. If there’s anything at the company, discuss it with him more.”

San Pang said, “Hold it, that doesn’t sound right. What are you going off to do?”

“Nothing. Small surgery. I’m planning to stay in the hospital for a few days.”

San Pang froze. “Surgery? What surgery?”

“Just… nothing. Really small.”

“Chronic appendicitis?”

“Mm.”

“‘Mm’ what ‘mm’? Who are you bullshitting?” San Pang frowned and looked Wei Qian up and down with endless suspicion. “You explain this clearly right now. If you don’t explain it clearly, there’s no way out.”

“There’s a little lump on my lung. I’d already made the hospital appointment over half a month ago. In a couple of days I’m checking in to have it done.” The moment Wei Qian saw the ghostly look on San Pang’s face, he hurried to add, “It’s really nothing. Not a big problem. Benign. They cut it out and that’s that.”

The fire in San Pang’s heart ignited with a roar on the spot. He demanded, “I… I fucking… Wei Qian, you… when the hell did this happen?”

“Wasn’t there that company physical this fall? The film they took then said there was a shadow on my lung. Then they did a PPD test, and it wasn’t tuberculosis. Anti-inflammatory medicine didn’t make it go away either, so it wasn’t inflammation…” Seeing San Pang’s face getting uglier and uglier, Wei Qian immediately shifted gears and added, “But the bronchoscopy and the sputum both showed no signs of cancer. It’s probably benign. Stop looking like your own father just died, okay?”

“Probably?!” In an instant, San Pang’s vocal range shot into a pitch almost inaccessible to ordinary human beings. He bellowed straight into Wei Qian’s ear, “Your father did die! Why don’t you hurry up and go die a little yourself, you surnamed Wei. Can you speak like a human? What the fuck do you mean ‘probably’?”

Wei Qian rubbed his ear. “I just knew people like you would…”

“Fuck your third maternal great-uncle. You can bottle up even something like this and not say a word? What are you, some turtle-spirit reincarnation?”

Wei Qian could only raise his voice even louder than San Pang’s. “Mr. Chamber Pot, could you please calm down a little?”

“I’m not calm. My balls hurt.” San Pang paced around the room twice, then came back over with a twisted expression and leaned toward Wei Qian. “No, brother, I’ve been a coward since I was little, my guts were never bigger than the tip of a needle. What exactly did the doctor say? Is he reliable? Don’t give me this ‘probably’ crap. Give me a clear answer. Is it benign or not?”

Wei Qian leaned back against the sofa. “It’s really nothing. The doctor’s opinion is that it’s not a big issue either, but he can’t state it too absolutely, understand? Otherwise if they diagnose it as benign and then when they open the chest it turns out it’s already spread, he’d be carrying a huge responsibility…”

San Pang jumped three feet into the air. “I’ll beat you to death! Sp-sp-spread… What the fuck are you even saying?”

Wei Qian waved both hands. “Pah, pah, pah. That’s not what I meant. What I meant was…”

“Would you just shut up already!” San Pang dropped onto the sofa with a thump and gouged him with a vicious glare. Only after a long while did he catch his breath again, and when he spoke his voice had finally weakened a little. “I get it now. I was wondering why the hell you’d quit smoking all of a sudden. I thought you’d turned over a new leaf. Turns out this is what was waiting for me. If you weren’t about to be away from the company for a while, were you not planning to tell anybody at all?”

“Look at the way you’re jumping around. Who the hell was I supposed to tell?” Wei Qian kicked his feet up onto the coffee table. “That’s the end of it. Don’t go broadcasting it everywhere for me. Especially…”

“Especially not to Xiao Yuan,” San Pang said, finishing for him.

“Mm. And Xiao Bao too. Tell them after the operation. For now, keep it hidden.”

San Pang gradually calmed down. Hearing a hint of something in Wei Qian’s voice, he looked up at Wei Qian’s face, which seemed utterly unconcerned. “Qian’er, is it that in your heart, you’re actually… kind of unsure too?”

Wei Qian forced out a smile. “It’s like bungee jumping. Rationally you know it’s fine, but in your heart it still feels creepy as hell. If one person’s going to be creeped out, then let it just be me.”

San Pang stared into his old friend’s eyes, and for a moment he felt overwhelmed with mixed emotions.

Suddenly, he had the urge to chat, so he asked Wei Qian, “Back when Chen Lu-jie got sick, you told me that one day if you ever got some terminal illness too, you’d just disappear, hide somewhere, and go die by yourself. Was that true?”

Wei Qian said, “Of course not. How could I do something like that?”

San Pang blinked in astonishment.

“That was then. This is now.” Wei Qian flattened the strip of orange peel he had peeled off whole against the coffee table, broke the fruit flesh in half, and handed one half to San Pang. “I’d get treated. Chemo, radiation, surgery, whatever works, I’d use it.”

“You’re not afraid of becoming some withered, half-dead thing with all your hair fallen out? Not afraid of dragging other people down?”

“Chen Lu was born a great beauty. Being afraid of turning ugly was perfectly natural for her. What exactly am I supposed to be afraid of?” Wei Qian smiled. “As far as money goes, I won’t drag anyone down. I could live in the ICU for the rest of my life and still not run out of money.”

San Pang said, “So now you know to be afraid of death? I told you back then…”

“Not that either,” Wei Qian said. “When Grandma passed, I’d already figured something out. If a person stays sick and miserable for a long time, suffers enough, gets bad-tempered from being sick all the time, and in the end dies looking like some sort of monster, the family usually feels it’s a relief. They won’t find it unbearable to accept. But if they’re just suddenly gone all at once, I personally wouldn’t feel much, it’s just that Xiao Yuan and Xiao Bao… they probably wouldn’t be able to accept it, especially…”

He had not finished speaking when the front door was suddenly kicked open.

Probably San Pang had not properly shut it when he came in. It had been left ajar by a narrow crack, so one push was enough to open it. The two of them lifted their heads to see Wei Zhiyuan standing at the door, pale as death, still holding a briefcase in his hand.

When Wei Zhiyuan came back with the papers, he had happened to hear part of the conversation between San Pang and Wei Qian from outside the half-closed door. But he had not heard the whole thing. He had only caught that one disconnected line from Wei Qian: “…get treated, chemo, radiation, surgery, whatever works.”

Wei Zhiyuan’s entire mind went blank.