I couldn’t move. Even to breathe I had to be especially careful; otherwise, the area around my lungs would really, really hurt. I wanted to open my eyes but I knew that if I did it would be as painful as tearing a piece of flypaper off my eyelids. Of course, as I was experiencing this pain, my brain was also suffering. You have simply no way of stopping this multiplied pain; all you can do is remain still and try not to think of anything, just like a dead man. Now I know why corpses don’t move.
But I was even a bit more unfortunate than a dead man. I could still hear. The sound of birds chirping pecked at my eardrums—peck, peck, and then even harder, peck, peck, peck! It was as if the sound of cars rumbling, horns beeping, and from even farther away, machines grumbling, were all collected in a boiling noodle pot; the brimming stew was overflowing the sides and the bubbles were scalding my nerves. And then there was the sound of voices; the people speaking were either standing or sitting right beside me, and every word was like a saw cutting into my bones. But at a time like this you can’t even scream out; if you do, your throat will be torn into thin sticky cotton-candy strands.
Although I didn’t move, I couldn’t shut out the sounds of their voices.
“What if we can’t wake him up?”
“We have to.”
“He’s got a fever.”
“How can you know if you haven’t even touched him?”
“You never worked in a hospital, so how do you know that I don’t know? Don’t touch him! It’ll hurt like hell!”
“What do you think happened?”
“What else could have happened? Naturally it had to be Zeng Ahzhi. This time he went a little overboard hitting him. Damn!”
“Should we take him to your dad’s or what?”
“Are you kidding? Since when can my dad treat this kind of injury?”
“Then what did Uncle Xu say?”
“He said we should see what happens.”
“Then pull him out. Put him on the side there.”
“So even if he doesn’t die, he’ll end up getting picked up by some nosy cop and sent to the juvenile detention center? Anyway, we can’t move him now. Let’s see if he’s any better after lunch.”
“No matter what, we can’t take him with us, can we? It’s already too late.”
“There’s no other choice. Anyway, as long as he doesn’t move he won’t be in the way.”
“Fuck, this bastard’s really big. He’ll cut down on our speed!”
“Give me the keys, I’ll drive.” Afterward this voice leaned over close to my ear and whispered, “It’s all right. Don’t move. Everything will be okay soon.”
“Swaa—bam!” As the side door slid closed and slammed shut, I felt like I had been blown apart by a bomb. After that, something even worse than the worst bad luck times ten happened: they started up the van and I became a tattered leaf floating atop the waves of the sea. Swaying this way, jolting that way, popping up as we headed east, falling over as we headed west, every time we hit a bump I thought a new bone was breaking.
If I keep carrying on about how much it hurt, how much pain I was in, I could ramble on for two and a half hours, but other than proving how big of a chicken I am, what would be the point of that? However, right now I needn’t tell you: after this incident in the van, I was never again afraid of pain. Never again was there a suffering worthy of being called pain. But before I go on about this, let me get back to the story at hand.
So I lay there like a tattered leaf floating atop the waves of the sea, both my eyes and mouth tightly shut. I wasn’t pondering anything in particular, yet I was still hopelessly alert. All that went through my mind was one thing: Where am I? I’m in Taipei. I’m at an intersection waiting for a green light. Now I’m making a right turn beside the vegetable market. Now I’m passing by a sea of yulan magnolias. Now I’m heading downhill. Now I’m… Now I can sense speed, we’re moving smoothly and steadily, yet I can tell that our speed is continually increasing. Now I’m on the highway. Now I’m leaving Taipei. Shit! Now I won’t know where I am anymore.
I could hear the sound of someone clearing his throat from the driver’s seat; then the same person said in the faintest of voices, “Hey kid, you should be feeling a little more comfortable now. In a little bit you’ll feel even better. Be good and don’t move. Pretty soon you’ll forget about the pain.”
“Ahzhi is really one strange bastard,” the guy in the passenger seat suddenly cried out. “Fuck, he hits harder each time!” As he spoke it was as if he were jabbing me in the ear with an awl.
“Keep quiet!”
I started to imagine what the guy driving looked like. He was a bit older than I was, probably around seventeen or eighteen. He looked pale and white, just like somebody’s mother. And then I began to think about my own mother. When you are in terrible pain and thoroughly uncomfortable, imagining your mother driving a smelly van isn’t difficult at all. But of course it is just your imagination.
Right then, my mom should have been at work. She probably already knew what I’d done yesterday, but just like always she would still go to work. On Tuesdays she would always wear a pair of gray pants to the office. The pants were especially light and soft and very resilient; that way she could go straight from the office to her meditation class without wasting time to change clothes. So if I was correct, she should have been at the office wearing a pair of gray pants and talking on the phone.
“Hello? Mr. He? This is Hou Shichun’s mother. That’s right. Hou Shichun still hasn’t returned! He’s really making me crazy!”
I don’t know what Mr. Hippo’s reply would be, but who gives a damn what he says?
“Then do you think I should call the police?” As my mother spoke, I’m sure she was sketching a draft advertisement or scribbling out some document—who knows, maybe she was knitting her brows and shaking her head at somebody else, telling them not to do anything silly while she was on the phone.
As I thought of my mother and this scene, I drifted off to sleep. It was the kind of sleep where one doesn’t dream, and throughout my slumber I could occasionally hear the person in the passenger seat mumbling, “It’s already been more than an hour, we’ve only got eighty minutes left… there’s only sixty minutes left… we’ve only got a half hour. Can we make it?”
Within my darkened world, the van finally came to a stop. They killed the engine and someone rolled down the front window. Instantly, a strong wind, the kind that blows only on the open plains, rushed through the entire van, sweeping away the stench of cigarettes, liquor, betel nuts, perspiration, and piss. That guy who my imagination told me had a mama’s face got out of the van and opened both the side doors, but he opened them only a slight crack. Then he pressed up close to me and, with that same faint and gentle voice, told me, “We’re going to play a little game.”
I have all too much experience with this—whenever a kid slightly older tells a younger kid: “We’re going to play a little game,” what he means is: “You don’t get to play, only we do.” In this van game, the rules I had to follow were: close your eyes just like before, don’t move and don’t make a sound, at least not until the guy driving returns, bringing with him a few people to play the game with me. I was supposed to play dead until they got back—no matter what I might hear, playing dead till the end was the way to go.
“My name’s Little Horse,” the guy driving introduced himself. “His name is Little Xinjiang;* we’ll get to know each other in a minute.”
And then they left. The gusting prairie wind, however, swept their two-sentence dialogue back to my ears from far away:
“How’s the time?”
“Perfect. They’ll be changing shifts at the back door in six minutes. We can still make it.”
How long did I wait after that? I estimate it was somewhere between one minute and one hundred years. Gradually, I began to realize that my body no longer ached as much as that morning after I had woken up. I had already lost the strength to keep my eyes pressed shut; I daresay that if I were to open them it probably wouldn’t hurt. I could even hear the sound of my stomach squirming—I was hungry. Could it be? I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all day! What do they think I am, some celestial being? It was at that moment I said, “Fuck their damn game!” I then opened my eyes and sat up.
Fuck!
The van was parked at the edge of a cliff. Looking out through the crack in the right door, I saw that if I went any farther than two book bags away, I’d have to say bye-bye. Over the cliff was a straight, steep, precipitous slope, overgrown with wild grass. I opened the door a little wider and saw that the wild grass spread downward and extended forward all the way to the boundless valley below.
In the center of the valley was a green building that resembled a warehouse. The roof of the building was made up of a collection of crooked and slanted red iron sheets. Parked in front of the building were a couple of shiny black limousines. Parked out back were a pair of trucks and a whole bunch of Honda RZRs, Sanyang Wolves, Harley Davidson Choppers, and other motorcycles. Looking carefully, I caught sight of two spots on the slope down where the grass was matted and crooked. Was that where Little Horse and Little Xinjiang were? Apparently they were really taking this game seriously. I rubbed my eyes and both my eyes and my hands began to hurt and everything within my field of vision went fuzzy. By the time my vision recovered, Little Horse and Little Xinjiang had already slid down the slope and were cutting what looked like a barbed-wire fence.
Following that, the prairie wind carried a string of sounds to me—sounds of people talking through a set of wireless walkie-talkies:
“Breaker, breaker. They’ve already descended.”
Not far from the van—actually he was standing right behind the van—was a muscular guy with a large emerald dragon wrapped around a pine tree tattooed on his back. This sturdy fellow instantly replied through his walkie-talkie: “Copy. Their van is up here.”
“Copy. I’ll be up momentarily.”
“Copy.” The tattooed dragon hesitated for a moment. “It looks like they are going to enter through the rear,” he said a bit nervously. “Should we proceed according to plan? We should just push their van over the cliff.”
“Copy. Do not proceed. Repeat, do not proceed. Do you copy?”
“Copy.”
It was only then that I realized I had already slid off the seat and was clinging to greasy, dirty, and foul-smelling upholstery. I saw that in the faraway gorge, tiptoeing like a pair of thieves, Little Horse and Little Xinjiang were sneaking into that large, green building with the red roof. From that angle, I could no longer make out the guy with the dragon tattoo, who was obscured, behind the space between the right rear windows and the back of the seat. But I could still hear the voices coming from his walkie-talkie:
“Breaker, breaker. Have they gone in?”
“They’re in. But if things go down like this, won’t… won’t those inside be taken out by them?”
“Copy. You don’t need to worry about it.”
“Copy.”
Then the firecrackerlike sound of a gunshot rang out from the green building; I knew it was a gunshot, and a real one at that. The shot wasn’t as loud as what you hear on television, but the sound was much sharper. I found myself tightly squeezing my eyes shut.
There were three of four more gunshots. Then from the front of the van, I heard the sound of someone brushing through the long wild grass. The swooshing sound of a person wading through grass continued right up to the side door, when this person was what must have been only one book bag away from me. I opened my eyes to see that the tiny crack between the door and its frame had already been blocked by that person’s body; he was wearing a black and blue raincoat, or maybe it was a windbreaker; his clothes emitted the scent of cologne. By this time, he didn’t even have to use his walkie-talkie. He had one sentence for the guy with the dragon tattoo behind the van: “Ah Tang! Horsefly sends his apologies.”
Before he even finished his sentence, the echo of two more gunshots came in through the van door. Only this time the shots were much louder, and as their noise squeezed in through the crack in the door, the buzzing sound reverberated throughout the van. At almost the same moment I heard that stout, dragon-tattooed fellow’s body roll down the cliff—I even heard the unpleasantly messy sound of his body flattening out the prairie grass on its way down. Next, the front door on the right side quickly opened and then slammed shut, making the van floor shudder. I figured this time out, I was really screwed—this cologne-wearing assassin wouldn’t toss in a grenade, would he?
Was this a game? For the longest time, with tears streaming from the corners of my eyes, I repeatedly pondered this question.
I climbed back onto the seat, lay down flat like before, and after I wiped the tears dry from the four corners of my eyes, continued to ponder: Was this a game? I began to shudder; my back suddenly turned cold and wet and beads of sweat that crawled like ants across my chest began to emerge from my skin.
Then the van doors rattled open and some chick cried out, “What the fuck! Who the hell is this?”
I opened my eyes to see a woman’s upside-down face almost pressing up against my nose. This was Annie, a woman whom I would momentarily come to know and later love for the rest of my life. With one hand, she grabbed me and sat me up straight. “One seat per rump,” she said, facing me, “okay?”
“Ahzhi just gave the kid a run-through with his ‘super-chops,’ so don’t be so hard on him,” Little Horse said as he started the engine. “Hoop, go lie down in the back, make sure you put your feet up…” Before he could finish, another chick, half rolling half crawling, slid over me into the back seat. Her breasts even brushed against my cheek, ice-cold and slimy. I touched my cheek and found my fingers covered with blood.
It was then that two men squeezed in the left door. Their faces, necks, and even their T-shirts and clothing were soaked with half-dried blood. And that’s not to mention their hair, which had hardened into messy clumps, as if they had used blood for hair gel or had just crawled out of a manure vat. Neither of them spoke. In the end it was that girl in the back named Hoop who burst out profanely, “Fuck, we really lost face back there! Hell, we might as well have given our money away! Annie, how much did you lose?”
“I didn’t count,” Annie answered as she lit a cigarette. The van seemingly made a quick U-turn, which caused a few sparkling ashes to fly from the butt of her cigarette and singe my ear. Annie said she was sorry and even gave me a kiss on the ear. After that, Annie started to get on Little Horse’s ass about showing up too late and driving like a maniac, blaming him for not giving a damn whether his big sister lived or died.
I glanced at Little Horse and saw that his hair was straight, long, and near the neck was tied into a ponytail. In the rearview mirror all I could see were his eyes, eyebrows, and the bridge of his nose, but I discovered that his features really did resemble somebody’s mother’s—pale-white, refined, and delicate. My gaze panned to the right where I also saw Little Xinjiang—he really did have the mug of a foreigner, a face almost exactly the same as an American. It was precisely at that moment that he called out in Mandarin with a thick Taiwanese accent—a voice that was at complete odds with his features—“Who the fuck does this belong to?”
Little Xinjiang pulled out a gun from under his seat.
