TA •Chapter 64

Chapter 64

When the message Cheng Ke sent came in and was immediately recalled, Jiang Yuduo’s phone hadn’t even gone dark yet.

If Cheng Ke hadn’t withdrawn it in that instant, he probably wouldn’t have reacted so quickly.

I just missed you.

When Jiang Yuduo saw those words, he didn’t think there was anything worth recalling about them. He missed Cheng Ke too. During New Year, he kept staring at Cheng Ke’s Moments, waiting for a message from him, wanting to go to the shop and help Cheng Ke with something.

Because he wanted to stay with Cheng Ke.

When they weren’t together, he missed him too.

Only after he replied to Cheng Ke’s message did he freeze a little. The meaning of that sentence probably wasn’t as simple as he had thought.

Miss you.

Chen Qing had said something similar to him before, often.

Third Brother, let’s eat together. I miss you.

Third Brother, come out and hang out for a bit. It’s been days since I saw you, I really miss you.

No matter which version it was, it didn’t feel the same as the line Cheng Ke had said.

It also didn’t feel the same as that urge he had to stay beside Cheng Ke.

His phone chimed, and Cheng Ke’s reply came back.

– Good night, asshole

Jiang Yuduo looked at those four words and laughed. He could even picture Cheng Ke’s expression right now.

– Good night

He sent the reply, and was just about to send another cat photo when his phone suddenly rang. An incoming call. He glanced at the screen. Da Bin.

"What is it?" he answered.

"Third Brother, I spotted one," Da Bin said. "But he only circled around your place and left. Didn’t do anything else, so I didn’t let anyone move on him. Didn’t want to spook him."

"Mm," Jiang Yuduo said. "Where’d he go?"

"Took a taxi," Da Bin said. "I followed on my motorcycle for a bit. He headed north on the main road, and motorcycles couldn’t get through there, so I stopped following."

"It’s fine. If there’s really something, he’ll come again," Jiang Yuduo said. "What about that side?"

"No one near Ke-ge’s place," Da Bin said. "I took a photo of that guy, I’ll send it to you. See if you can recognize him? It’s just… a little blurry. It was too dark out."

"Okay," Jiang Yuduo lit a cigarette. "You guys head back. Come out again tomorrow if you have time."

After he hung up, Da Bin sent over a photo.

The moment Jiang Yuduo saw it, he wanted to tell him to go learn from Chen Qing. It was even blurrier than the photos Chen Qing took. Chen Qing’s were often at least kind of atmospheric, but Da Bin had turned this one into a complete smear. For most people, all they could make out was that there was a person in it.

But he could tell. He was extremely sensitive to figures in the dark.

At times like this, he didn’t look at details, only the outline, the way the body moved.

This was one of the two people he had seen today, the one with the white stripe on his clothes. He had changed clothes, but the whole feel of him hadn’t changed. Because Jiang Yuduo had seen him twice today, the impression he had left was very deep.

He sent Da Bin a message, telling him to keep an eye on this person.

Then he put down his phone and walked to the window.

Even though Cheng Ke thought he didn’t really have any “enemies,” and this person probably wasn’t coming for him, Jiang Yuduo was almost certain this was aimed at Cheng Ke.

If it had been aimed at him, it wouldn’t have been like this.

If someone wanted to find trouble with Lao San, they didn’t need to go to such lengths, trailing him around, circling the area. Usually it was like Zhang Daqi, where they ran into each other and started fighting, or like Ba Bie, who came straight to your door with the goods.

The two people today were nothing like the style of their streets.

He still couldn’t be sure, though. If they were coming for Cheng Ke, what was the point? The only thing this young master had that was worth anything was that watch, and he had already taken it off him.

But no matter the reason, no matter who they were after, he didn’t care. Here, in this world, from the day he first came here until now, there had never been anything he feared.

He knew the way things worked here. He knew the style of everyone involved. He also knew what kind of existence he was in this place.

What he feared…

He yanked the curtains shut and turned around.

Ignore it.

Ignore it.

Ignore that person.

The one who had slipped quickly into the dark within his line of sight.

He clenched his fists and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath before slowly exhaling.

Ignore it.

He could ignore that person.

He could pretend he hadn’t seen him.

But he couldn’t ignore the fear that was slowly seeping up from the deepest part of his heart.

Fear couldn’t be ignored. It wasn’t controlled by willpower. It came and went as it pleased.

"Scared? You can’t run from it. Go face him, go beat him! You’ve got no choice. If you’re scared, then just beat the fear!"

When Jiang Yuduo rushed out of the room, he heard Miao lazily meow once.

It was like the last connection between him and this world, in that moment.

"Third Brother!" Chen Qing’s voice came from the living room into the bedroom. "Third Brother, I’m coming in, okay?"

"Mm." Jiang Yuduo answered hoarsely.

"I bought breakfast," Chen Qing appeared at the bedroom door. "Why weren’t you picking up your phone?"

"I was asleep and didn’t hear it." Jiang Yuduo turned and glanced at him. "What time is it?"

"Past eight," Chen Qing said. "I’m off today, so we need to go to the rental place, right?"

"Yeah." Jiang Yuduo lowered his head, closed his eyes, and let himself recover for a bit. It took several seconds before his legs started to feel like his own again, numbness spreading in waves. He frowned and drew in a shallow breath.

His waist and back ached badly too, as if a hook had caught in his muscles and was dragging them up and down.

He had been sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, and he wasn’t sure how long he had stayed like that. His phone was by his foot. When he picked it up to look, he found a spiderweb crack in the upper right corner of the screen.

But it still worked. He lit up the screen and checked the time he had told Cheng Ke good night yesterday.

Less than ten hours ago. Not bad.

He rubbed his legs with his hands. Once the numbness eased, he stood up and leaned against the wall with a soft sigh.

At least he hadn’t spent the night at Cheng Ke’s place yesterday.

But he was still very depressed.

He didn’t know why.

Why still couldn’t he ignore it?

Why was it impossible?

Why was it so hard just to make himself look like an ordinary, "normal" person?

Why?

Besides wanting to keep him from ever having peace, what else did they want from him?

Jiang Yuduo flopped onto the bed.

He had always thought he had stronger control than anyone else, stronger willpower… He had still overestimated himself.

"Did you sleep at all yesterday?" After feeding Miao, Chen Qing came back to the bedroom door. "Why are you lying down again?"

"I slept sitting up. My back’s sore and my whole body hurts." Jiang Yuduo buried his face in the blanket, rubbing away the dampness at the corner of his eye, then got up and climbed out of bed.

When he was washing up, he felt a burning sting on the back of his hand. He looked down, frowned, and clenched his fist again. The wounds on his knuckles were only scrapes, but once the hand tightened, the pain became much clearer.

He raised his hand, made both fists, and slowly pressed them against the wall, applying pressure bit by bit until every wound was flush against the surface.

Maybe two fists, maybe more.

Aside from the pain of the skin abrasions, there was also a dull ache underneath, but the bones should have been fine.

Back in the living room, he took out the first-aid kit and casually stuck a few bandages on the back of his hand.

"Did something happen yesterday?" Chen Qing asked, eating as he watched him apply the bandages.

"There are a few days when nothing happens," Jiang Yuduo said. "How’s Er Tu’s leg?"

"Resting at home," Chen Qing said. "I went to see him. It wasn’t too serious, but there’s no way that bitch Zhang Daqi is just going to let it end like this."

"He wants me to go over and lower my head to him." Jiang Yuduo picked up a bun and took a big bite.

"Say something soft, you mean." Chen Qing frowned. "Are you going?"

"No." Jiang Yuduo said, "He didn’t make a move himself, it was all his people. If I go, there’s nothing to say."

"Then what do we do?" Chen Qing asked.

"After all these years, it’s not like I’ve only run into one Zhang Daqi," Jiang Yuduo said. "There’s nothing to do. I’m not in a hurry."

"That’s true," Chen Qing nodded. "Zhang Daqi’s basically been mixed up long enough. In a few years, maybe he’ll be ready to retire and settle down. Isn’t that how those old bastards are? They jump around till the end and still end up like that."

Jiang Yuduo took a sip of soy milk and said nothing.

"We’re still so young," Chen Qing said with a wave of his hand. "Let him fuck off first."

Jiang Yuduo kept his head down and ate, not picking up the conversation.

He couldn’t.

He was suddenly very afraid.

It was a brand-new kind of fear.

It was the fear he had only felt for the first time when Chen Qing said, "We’re still so young."

He was only twenty-one, and he still had several months before he turned twenty-two. He still had many years ahead of him, five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, all here, all in this kind of life.

Boring and calm, without a ripple, full of hopelessness.

He was different from everyone here, even though he had once wanted to make himself believe he was one of them.

But Chen Qing and those little brothers, they had parents, they had a home, they had everything that belonged to this place. They had where they came from and where they could go back to. Even if there was no hope, they still existed.

As for him, year after year in this place, he was swallowed by the prosperity around him. No one could see him. He was that kid who had come from who-knew-where ten years ago. He was Lao San. He was the rumored Third Brother who had no nerves for pain.

In the end, no one would remember him, because no one had ever really seen him.

He was just a passerby in his own story.

Yesterday, when he was working in the shop with Cheng Ke, he had wanted to do something for the first time.

When Luo-jie brought these things up, with him having no clue at all, he had only felt annoyed and irritated. But yesterday, he had suddenly wanted to do something.

Something real, somewhere, standing in a place.

Only…

Maybe it was just the wanting.

He wanted to struggle a little, but he didn’t know which finger to start with.

Or how he was supposed to start.

Today, Chen Qing was driving a Beetle, the top down, parked by the entrance.

After Jiang Yuduo got in, he turned to look at Chen Qing. Chen Qing started the car and looked back at him too. "What is it?"

"What month is it now?" Jiang Yuduo looked at him. "How many degrees?"

"You mean this top?" Chen Qing asked.

"I’m not asking about the top," Jiang Yuduo said. "I’m fucking telling you to put the top up!"

"No, Third Brother," Chen Qing said, looking a little embarrassed as he leaned toward him. "There wasn’t a suitable car at the shop today, so we only had this one. This car, well… it was sent in for repairs. Its top… won’t close anymore."

Jiang Yuduo was honestly unable to describe his feelings: "When you drove it out, were you still pretty grateful to heaven that it wasn’t snowing today?"

"It hasn’t snowed for several days. I figured it probably wouldn’t snow again." Chen Qing turned the car onto the main road.

"Isn’t the north wind supposed to have stopped too!" Jiang Yuduo shouted at him.

"Wrap up warmer." Chen Qing shrank his neck.

Jiang Yuduo sighed, pulled Chen Qing’s coat zipper all the way up, then pulled the hood of his own coat over his head and tugged it down as much as possible to cover his face, lowering his head against the seatback.

"Third Brother, covering your face doesn’t help," Chen Qing said. "Anyone who knows me knows the person next to me is you."

"Fuck off," Jiang Yuduo said from under the hood, his voice muffled. "What if they think it’s Cheng Ke? This coat is his."

"…Fuck," Chen Qing froze for a moment, then burst into laughter. "Hey! I was saying this outfit of yours today looked familiar even though I’d never seen you wear it, it’s Jiage’s, right?"

"Yeah, he traded this one for my thicker coat." Jiang Yuduo said.

"He really does have young-master style. This one could buy twenty of the kind you wear," Chen Qing said. "Hopeless."

"The key is I couldn’t buy one like this anyway." Jiang Yuduo smiled. Sometimes when he thought about Cheng Ke, he really was a self-centered, dazed kind of person.

"Ask him if he wants mine," Chen Qing said. "I’ve got one that’s even thicker, barely worn it twice. Have him trade you his thick wool short coat for it. I think that one looks pretty good on him."

Jiang Yuduo lifted the brim of his hood with a finger and looked at him. "Have some shame. Tie a plank of wood to your shoulders and see if you can fill out someone else’s clothes, okay?"

"I bulked up, okay? I put on several jin over New Year." Chen Qing was unconvinced.

"Shut up and drive!" Jiang Yuduo pulled his hood back in place.

The ground outside the rental building was covered in red firecracker scraps, new and old, along with all kinds of firework tubes soaked through with melted snow, then crushed by people and cars passing back and forth into black mud cakes.

Jiang Yuduo looked around. Even though there were bright festive reds everywhere for the New Year, it still somehow felt desolate and lonely.

"Let’s go to Building 3 first." He walked ahead.

"Mm." Chen Qing followed him. "Are we still going door to door to tell them to clean up?"

"What else?" Jiang Yuduo said.

"We should get a building manager, like the owners’ committee in residential compounds," Chen Qing said. "That’d make things easier."

Jiang Yuduo glanced at him and didn’t even want to speak anymore.

"I was just saying it casually," Chen Qing said.

"Don’t be so casual all the time in the future." Jiang Yuduo said.

Chen Qing laughed for a long time.

Telling all these tenants to clean their own hallways and then tidy up the small sanitation area downstairs was pretty annoying. It took explanation.

"Why do we have to sweep downstairs too? I didn’t set off firecrackers at my place," a woman said unhappily while holding a child. "Besides, that’s the street, isn’t it? Sanitation workers should clean it."

"There aren’t sanitation workers assigned here. If you don’t want to sweep, I’ll hire someone to do it," Jiang Yuduo said. "The cost will just get added to this month’s rent."

"Why should the rent go up!" the woman raised her voice.

"Because the rent here is the lowest in this whole area," Jiang Yuduo said coldly. "Every other place has to sweep it themselves too, and their rent is higher than yours. Decide for yourselves. If you don’t want to sweep, tell me now."

"It’s just a fucking palm-sized bit of space," Chen Qing also raised his voice. "My ass is bigger than that when I sit down. We don’t usually make you sweep anything, and it’s only once a year. What’s there to be unhappy about? If you’re not happy, move to the place next door. Pay fifty more a month and you still have to sweep."

Jiang Yuduo went up to the third floor, while Chen Qing moved up floor by floor. He knocked on one of the doors on the third floor.

"Uncle Zhang," Jiang Yuduo greeted the man who opened the door. "I need to ask you something."

"What is it?" Uncle Zhang asked.

"Last time I came over, I saw you had a lot of wooden strips and blocks here, right?" Jiang Yuduo entered the room.

"Quite a lot," Uncle Zhang pointed to a pile of miscellaneous junk beside the toilet. "They’re all over there. What, you want them?"

"I remember there was a kind of wooden strip with a really nice grain," Jiang Yuduo walked over and, holding his breath, rummaged through the pile, pulling a strip about a finger wide out of a broken plastic box. "This one."

"That’s chicken-wing wood. It’s all scrap. What do you want it for?" Uncle Zhang asked.

"Making something." Jiang Yuduo looked at it. "This kind works pretty well. How much do you have?"

"It’s all in that box. Go look," Uncle Zhang said. "What are you making?"

"A lamp." Jiang Yuduo dragged the box out and sifted through the broken wood inside, long pieces, short pieces, finding seven or eight of them. "These. I’m buying them. How much?"

"Just take them," Uncle Zhang said. "I brought them back to make chopsticks. Leave me two pieces and that’s enough."

"Mm." Jiang Yuduo pulled out two shorter ones and put them back. "Lend me your tools too, the hammer, little saw, sandpaper and stuff. And if you’ve got any tung oil left, give me some of that too."

"What kind of lamp are you making?" Uncle Zhang looked completely baffled.

"I can’t explain it to you. When it’s done, I’ll take a photo and show you. Maybe it’ll inspire you," Jiang Yuduo said. "Could help raise the standard next time you go make furniture for people."

"You’re ridiculous." Uncle Zhang laughed.

Originally, Jiang Yuduo had wanted to use the antiseptic wood left over from the desks and chairs he and Cheng Ke had made for the lamp, but Cheng Ke was too annoying, always going on about surprises, surprises. To at least make this thing a little surprising, he decided to change the type of wood.

That counted as a surprise, right? The material was different.

He left Uncle Zhang two packs of cigarettes and carried a bundle of things out. The thought that all this had to become a lamp by tomorrow made him a little excited.

Even though he had absolutely no idea how to make it, he felt like he had already made it.

After he handled the things for all the buildings, Jiang Yuduo and Chen Qing ate something simple together, then prepared to go to Cheng Ke’s shop and continue making that construction-site-style cement table.

"I’ll take you there," Chen Qing said. "Save you the trouble of taking a taxi."

"In this car?" Jiang Yuduo looked at him. "I’m afraid you’ll drive back to the shop and catch a cold later."

"I’ll drive my own car! It’s not like I don’t have one." Chen Qing said.

Jiang Yuduo sighed. "Lend me the car. I’ll drive over, and I can still bring Cheng Ke back this afternoon. Otherwise I’ll have to take a taxi again."

"Fine." Chen Qing nodded.

Jiang Yuduo was driving Chen Qing’s little car and hadn’t even reached the intersection when Cheng Ke’s call came in.

"I’m on my way now." He answered.

"Did you eat lunch?" Cheng Ke asked.

"Yeah," Jiang Yuduo glanced at the time. "It’s already after one. I ate with Chen Qing. Why?"

"Bring me something to eat later. I haven’t eaten breakfast." Cheng Ke said.

"…You haven’t eaten anything all morning?" Jiang Yuduo paused.

"Didn’t feel like eating," Cheng Ke said. "I’m hungry now, and I checked delivery on my phone, but nothing looked appetizing."

"Then what do you want to eat?" Jiang Yuduo asked. The light ahead was red, so he stepped on the brake and automatically glanced at the rearview mirror.

"No idea. Just bring whatever. Leave it to fate," Cheng Ke said.

"Okay." Jiang Yuduo answered. Behind him was a very ordinary black car, but the person in the passenger seat pretending to play with his phone was not ordinary at all.

Jiang Yuduo could tell at a glance that he was only pretending to use his phone.

This was the other person from yesterday, the one who had followed him and Cheng Ke.

After he hung up with Cheng Ke, he called Chen Qing. "Take Da Bin and a few others to Cheng Ke’s shop. I’ll send you the address in a minute."