Hanli sat on the post office steps, her thoughts chaotic. She considered going to Shu Gong, who would be home asleep, but was afraid to enter Fragrant Cedar Street. Maybe she could wait till nightfall, when no one would see her. Where is all this sunlight coming from? How come the afternoon is so long? As hope faded, she felt like crying. But no tears came, for some strange reason. Maybe she needed to escape the eyes of Fragrant Cedar Street residents. Sometime after four o'clock, she spotted Hanzhen walking home with her schoolbag over her shoulder. She was eating candy. "Hey, what are you doing here?" Hanli grabbed her sister's bag and wouldn't let go. There was madness in her eyes as she looked into Hanzhen's round, ruddy face.
"Say something! What's wrong?" Hanzhen was nearly shouting.
"Not so loud." Like a girl snapping out of a daydream, Hanli clamped her hand over her sister's mouth. "Tell Shu Gong I need to see him."
"What for?"
"Just say I have to talk to him about something."
"No. You shouldn't have anything to do with boys like him."
"That's my business." Hanli pulled a handful of peanuts out of her pocket and stuffed them into Hanzhen's hand. "Hurry, and don't tell anybody."
Hanzhen finally agreed, and as Hanli watched her run toward the dark building at number 18, she breathed deeply to calm herself. This wasn't her problem alone-it was Shu Gong's, too. Would he know what to do? She'd wait for him there. The afternoon seemed endless. Later that day, Hanli and Shu Gong walked single file to their love nest, the limestone quarry, where Hanli sat down and hugged herself tightly as Shu Gong rested on his elbow. This was one of Fragrant Cedar Street 's better-known love scenes a decade or so ago.
"What'll we do?" Hanli asked him.
"How should I know?" Shu Gong replied.
"Can we get rid of it?"
"How?"
"Don't you have any idea?"
"Who knows things like that? I can barely keep my eyes open. Let me get some sleep."
"No sleeping. You're the original sleeping dog."
"Who do you think you're talking to? I could beat the shit out of you."
"I'm talking to you. Why can't you figure a way out of this mess instead of always thinking about sleeping?"
"How should I know what the hell's wrong with you? Other guys play around with girls without getting into trouble."
"I don't know what happened either. What if we try to beat it out?"
"Beat it out? With what?"
"I don't care. Try one of those bricks."
"Where should I hit?"
"Here, and pretty hard."
"OK, here goes. It's going to hurt."
Hanli closed her eyes as Shu Gong swung the brick, really putting some arm into it and drawing shrieks of pain from Hanli "Not so hard, you coldhearted bastard!"
"You're the one who said to hit hard. Do it yourself then."
Shu Gong jammed the brick up against Hanli's belly. He was mad, and it was her fault. He brushed the dirt off the seat of his pants as he turned to leave.
But Hanli wrapped her arms around his leg and wouldn't let go. She dug into his pant leg and held on for dear life. "You can't leave just like that." She looked up at him.
"Then what should we do?" Shu Gong asked.
"Kill ourselves," she blurted out after a thoughtful pause.
"That isn't funny."
"I mean it, we die together."
"You're crazy."
"Neither of us lives. We'll jump into the river."
"I can swim, so I won't die."
"No. We tie ourselves to a rock. That'll do it."
"Screw you. I'm not ready to die."
"I'll report you. That's a death sentence. You choose how you want to go."
"I'm not afraid, I'm just not ready to die."
"One way or the other, you're going to. Don't think I won't say you raped me."
Shu Gong sat down and scratched his mussed hair, giving Hanli a look of malignant hostility. On that afternoon, Hanli was cold and detached, like a woman rich in the ways of the world and familiar with the tricks necessary to get by. Shu Gong broke into a sweat on his back and felt nearly paralyzed. When he looked into the weakened sun's rays over the limestone quarry, he saw millions of dust particles spiraling lazily downward. Shu Gong snapped off a wolfberry twig and broke it into pieces, which he crammed down the sides of his high-topped sneakers. Then he rubbed the sneakers. "Whatever," he said. "If you want me to die, that's OK with me. So I die, so what?"
"So what?" Hanli sneered. "What does that mean? I didn't get into this mess alone."
"Don't be stupid. When are we supposed to go out and die?"
"Tomorrow. No, tonight."
Hanli took Shu Gong's hand. He shook her off. She threw her arms around his neck. He pushed her away. Shu Gong looked at the patch of skin revealed beneath the collar of Hanli's sweater, a piece of floating white ice. He pounced on her, pushing her to the ground and tearing the buttons off her coat, which he held in his hand to see clearly before throwing them behind the pile of bricks and pawing at Hanli's purple sweater. He heard the subtle sound of snapping threads.
Hanli was staring wide-eyed, her eyes taking on the subdued purple of her sweater, not a trace of fear in them. "Yes, it'll be dark soon." She appeared to smile when she said that, then obediently let Shu Gong have his way with her.
Shu Gong gasped as he ripped off her chemise: Hanli's small, firm breasts were covered with purple blotches, her nipples dark and enlarged. Shu Gong sensed that her body had undergone subtle changes. He had done what he had set out to do the past few months: he had fixed Hanli real good. "It doesn't matter to me," he said. "If you want me dead, then that's what you'll get."
Not far from the limestone quarry, a cat screeched mournfully, but they didn't notice.
The cat was Shu Nong.
After the curtain of night fell, Shu Nong followed Shu Gong and Hanli to Stone Pier, which is at the southern end of Fragrant Cedar Street but hasn't been used for years. It was Shu Nong's favorite spot from which to watch people swim. But this was not the swimming season, and he wondered what they were doing there. He climbed onto a broken-down derrick to observe them through the cracked windshield. From that vantage point, he could look down on the river that flowed through town, although when there was no wind, the water lay heavily, like molten bronze. A motley assortment of lamps were lit in homes along the banks; a new moon reflected in the surface of the water was a luminous oval of goose-down yellow. The two people sitting on the river's edge looked like disconnected marionettes. Not sure what they were doing, Shu Nong observed their movements. First they tied themselves together with a rope, then rolled a large rock up to the river very, very slowly, waddling like geese. Shu Nong assumed it was some sort of game. They stopped at the river's edge. A cat on the opposite bank screeched. Shu Nong heard Shu Gong announce to the river, "So we die, what's the big deal?" Then they wrapped their arms around each other and jumped in with a thud and a splash that sent silvery spray in all directions. The moon splintered.
Die? Finally, Shu Nong reacted. Shu Gong and Hanli are drowning themselves in the river! He jumped down off the derrick and made a mad dash back to number 18. His flat was quiet, deserted, so he ran upstairs and banged on Qiu Yumei's door. "In the river! Drowned themselves!" Shu Nong screamed at the dark-red door. He heard rustling noises inside.
Qiu Yumei opened the door a crack. "Who drowned themselves?" she asked.
"Hanli and Shu Gong!" Shu Nong stuck his head inside to look for his father. He spotted a shaky hand resting on a shoe under the bed. He knew the hand belonged to his father. With a squeal, he tore downstairs, shouting to the steps, to the accumulated junk, to the window:
IN THE RIVER!
DROWNED THEMSELVES!
To this day, if I close my eyes, I can see them fishing the bodies out of the dark river at the end of Fragrant Cedar Street as if it were yesterday. Every man who knew how to swim dived into the black, foul-smelling water. People thronged the neglected Stone Pier, where a single streetlamp lit faces that shimmered like the surface of the water. The Shu and Lin families from number 18 were central figures in the drama, and folks took particular notice of Old Shu, who dived to the bottom, came up for air, then dived again, over and over, while Old Lin stood watching on the bank, a chess piece in his hand. Some said it was a horse. Qiu Yumei leaned against an electric pole and sobbed into her hands, hiding her face.