Susan Barker - The Incarnations

Laughter and the sounds of ping pong in the yard drifted through the window. Nervous of Zeng making a hysterical scene and attracting a crowd, Wang took his book of poetry and went out the door.

‘Go then, Wang Jun,’ Zeng called after him. ‘Go and live like a eunuch then. You’ll regret it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ muttered Wang.

‘You will,’ said Zeng. ‘You will.’

Old Chen shook him awake the next morning. ‘He’s overdosed,’ he said.

‘What?’ Wang yawned as he sat up, rubbing his bleary eyes.

He could hear the shriek of trolley wheels out in the hall and the nurses shouting at patients, ‘Go back into your rooms! Go back into your rooms!’

‘Your friend, Zeng Yan,’ said Old Chen. ‘They found him on the shower-room floor.’

Wang got out of bed and reached the corridor in time to see Dr Ling rushing by, white coat flapping over his pyjamas, a mechanical stomach pump in his hands. A bilious taste seeped into Wang’s mouth and his stomach spasmed, as though in anticipation of the pump being used on him. He stumbled after Dr Ling, until a nurse shouted through the early-morning gloom, ‘Go back inside your room, Wang Jun!’ She dashed into the shower room, slamming the door.

When they emerged with Zeng on the trolley, he was unconscious, and his skin was pale and shiny with the pharmaceutical toxins his body was sweating out. He looked pathetic as a drowned child. The trolley was pushed out of sight and the patients woken by the commotion had lots of questions. How had he broken into the medical supplies? How many pills had he swallowed? What was his motive? Would he live, or would he die? Everyone looked at Wang, searching his face for guilt or complicity, grief or remorse. But Wang betrayed nothing. He went back to bed, pulling the bedsheet over him and facing the wall.

The night before, Zeng had slipped a note into his collection of poems, a scrap from an envelope on which he had scrawled in his disturbed hand, ‘You will see me again. We are destined to be together. I will come back to you in dreams, or another life.’

Wang had torn the note up in irritation and thrown it away.

Wang was on his best behaviour when Dr Fu called him into his office. In the role of polite, well-educated young man, he answered the doctor’s questions, denying knowledge of how Zeng got the sleeping pills or what he had planned.

‘He is under surveillance, for he is a high suicide risk,’ Dr Fu said gravely. ‘But, fortunately, the psychiatric ward of the hospital he has been transferred to has a doctor who specializes in his disorder. They say he is responding well to treatment. The liver damage should be reversed in time.’

‘I hope he recovers soon,’ said Wang.

‘You must be upset,’ said the doctor. ‘I understand you were close.’

Wang made a neutral sound in his throat.

‘Well, no doubt you will choose your friends more carefully in the future. Zeng Yan’s disorder is very severe. He was corrupted in his teens, and his life has since been a downward spiral, with mental illness and a high incidence of criminal behaviour. Zeng Yan has to undergo extensive treatment to cure his deviancy.’

Dr Fu hesitated, then said carefully, ‘There was discussion about whether you needed treatment too.’

‘I am not like Zeng!’

‘Yes, I advised against it,’ Dr Fu said briskly. ‘You came under Zeng Yan’s bad influence at a vulnerable period in your life, and picked up his bad habits. But once you are discharged, you will avoid men like Zeng Yan and drop these bad habits? Am I correct?’

Wang nodded.

‘You are a bright young man with a promising future ahead of you,’ said the doctor. ‘You have had a minor setback, but are bound to make your mark one day. . just like your father.’

Dr Fu smiled, lines crowding his face, and Wang nodded, as though becoming his father was his greatest ambition.

‘Your father called this morning to discuss your discharge. He has arranged for you to re-enrol at Beijing University. How do you feel? Ready to move on with your life. .?’

Wang walked out of the hospital one morning in July with a rucksack of clothes on his back. None of the patients or doctors had come to say goodbye, but Wang didn’t mind. He went to the Ministry of Agriculture sedan waiting in the road and, before he got in, he looked back at the low building where he had lived for the last seven months. He looked at the weeds straggling up through the cracks in the yard and the wrought-iron bars over the windows, detaining the wards of patients cast out of the world and unlikely to find their way back.

He got into the car and, as the driver pulled away, Wang hoped he would have forgotten Zeng in a year or two. That he would have forgotten what Zeng looked like, and the things they had said and done. He was looking forward to the day when sad and destructive Zeng wasn’t constantly on his mind. It couldn’t come soon enough.

IN THE DARKNESS of the living room, the screen of the muted TV casts a spectral glow on Wang as his eyes dart over the pages in his hands. Furtive as an alcoholic with a secret bottle of baijiu, he rereads the letter about the Jurchen slaves staggering through northern China and the Gobi dunes. Though it’s after two, the Jin Dynasty story quickens Wang’s heart, jarring him into wakefulness. He is confounded by Zeng’s strangeness. What does he want?

Wang reads and reads, then tenses at a creak in the other room. He looks up nervously. Yida rolling over, or Yida getting out of bed? Yida does not appear, but his palms are sweating and his conscience uneasy, so he refolds the letter and stuffs it back in his jacket pocket. He lights a Red Pagoda Mountain and thinks of how exhausted he will be behind the wheel the next day. He castigates himself as he smokes, for not going to bed with Yida at eleven. But he is not willing to bet tomorrow night won’t be the same.

Wang is stubbing out the cigarette when he hears the cough out in the stairway — loud and clear as knuckles rapped on the door. He stands up in an adrenalized surge and thinks, Zeng . Quietly, he goes to the door. Eye to the peephole, he sees nothing but magnified dark, but he senses the living, breathing presence on the other side. He slides out the security chain, pulls the latch and wrenches open the door. For a moment he is convinced that Zeng is standing there. But the shadowy figure recedes into nothingness, and Wang understands he has ambushed empty air.

There is a thud of footsteps one or two flights below and, without thinking, Wang is bounding down the steps, three or four at a time, in pursuit. Each flight of stairs bursts into brightness as he activates the motion-triggered lights, the impact of his bare feet on concrete jolting his knees. When he reaches the bottom, he rushes out through the exit into the yard. But Zeng is nowhere to be seen.

Wang catches his breath outside Building 16, his gaze sweeping over parked cars, the rows of bicycles in the shed and the outdoor exercise machinery, the pedals, levers and wheels utterly still. The compound is silent under the low security lights, but Wang knows he is there somewhere, hiding and watching. ‘ Zeng? ’ he calls, and stares into the shadows as though he can summon Zeng out by sheer force of will. Shivering, Wang looks over the yard one last time, then goes back inside.

The ceiling lights spring on as he climbs the stairs, back to 404. As Wang locks the front door behind him and slides the security chain into the slot, something strange occurs to him. There had been darkness ahead of him when he chased Zeng down. The lights’ motion sensors are sensitive even to the wind blowing through the windows, and not to have triggered them in his descent, Zeng must be substanceless as a ghost.