They stop talking. I listen for the sound of their feet. I can't tell if I hear them or not, an empty godown is not a silent place. I can hear our breathing. I can hear my heart. I think I can hear Haibao's heart.
I listen to the words running through my head, Padre Nuestro, que estas en los cielo, santificado sea tu nombre. Venga a nos tu reino. Hagase tu voluntad asi en la tierra como en el cielo… Meaningless snatches of prayer. I think they are on the stairs, I can't exactly hear them, but I think I do. I count again. They are coming without lights. They wouldn't come without lights. I rock Haibao, he has my jacket clenched in his fists and he is hyperventilating. I can't hear over the sound of his breath.
Will Peter ever find out what happened to me? He will call mama, and she'll tell him. She knows Peter is my friend. She may even suspect that there is more, she has never indicated that she knows what I am. She doesn't ask me about my life, I don't ask her about hers and every Christmas when I am home in New York I go and see her second husband and my half-brothers and Craig came to stay with me when he was eleven and I still had a place. We went to the kite races.
They will tell her, will she tell Craig that his huaqiao half-brother is a fag?
It has been a long time.
Maybe they aren't coming.
But we wait for a long time.
Even when we know they aren't coming, we wait. Haibao begins to shake. "I want to die," he whispers, "I can't stand it. Stop it, please, make it stop."
I stroke his hair and rock him. I kiss his hair as if he were a little boy. "Hush," I whisper, "they're not coming." They may still be downstairs, we'll wait. "We're okay, nothing's going to happen to us here."
He shakes and shakes. I doze, and wake and he is still trembling. My arms ache. My back aches. I shift, try to shift Haibao and he grabs hold of me. "Shhh, shhh. It's okay, here, lie this way. Shhh." I rub his back and his temples and sooth him as best I can. His face is wet. "I want to die," he whispers, "I'm so afraid."
But he stops shaking eventually, and we doze together. We stay there until dawn comes in through the dirty skylight.
I am so stiff I can barely move. In the night I have slid down on my side and Haibao lies curled beside me. The light is not very good, only enough to make out shapes. Haibao's white suit is a little more visible.
"Haibao," I whisper.
He stirs.
"Now we should try to go," I say.
He sits up but doesn't look at me. I try to work the cramps out of my back and arms, stand up and try to move about a bit. I am chilled to the bone and my teeth start chattering. Haibao sits woodenly.
"Come on," I say, "stand up." I reach down and take his upper arm and he stands up.
The catwalk is too narrow for us to stand side by side. It's wider than an I-beam, of course, but we are high above the floor and it looks narrower. I take Haibao's wrist with my left hand and start across it. I can see the control panel on the other side and a set of stairs going down, but that side of the building is shadowed and I can't see if there is a loading dock. There should be.
"Hold on to the railing," I say. Haibao does what he's told. I wish he would think a little for himself, I am cold and I ache and he's acting like a child. Damn it, I ought to leave him here, let him find his own way out.
Anger is good. Anger is better than what Haibao is feeling, than apathy or, what did Maggie Smallwood call it? Perlerorneg, the awareness of the futility of it all. Despair. Underneath my anger I am all too aware that I've been just as paralyzed as Haibao is now.
There is something exhilarating about being the one who is intrepid. I think, I have done it, I have saved us. We go step by cautious step across the catwalk and I am exhausted and angry and full of a hard, terrible joy. We have survived. Yes, it was luck as much as anything else, but we made our own luck. The chain and tackle system dangles in lines and shadows all around us, the light slowly brightens above us. There is a purity of form and line; reality, hard lean reality is very beautiful.
We take the stairs down. I'm so tired my knees are shaking, but Haibao follows me without complaint. The door to the loading dock is bolted shut, but it isn't meant to be safe from the inside. And then we are outside and we walk away, not going around the front but climbing the fence in the morning halflight. I make a stirrup of my hands and boost Haibao up, then climb the chain link and drop, shaking with fatigue, on the other side. Haibao's white suit is streaked with rust like old blood, but we come out on a street two blocks away.
And then, it is all too normal. It is Sunday morning.
"It's okay," I say to Haibao. "We're okay."
He nods, listlessly.
"I'm never going to play pressball again," I say, grinning, but he doesn't respond.
I start watching for bus stop signs. "What is our bus?" I ask Haibao.
He doesn't act as if he heard.
"What number is our bus," I say. And when he doesn't answer, "Haibao!"
"Seventeen," he says. "A 17 or a 17 Special."
It is too easy, I find a stop for the 17 and we stand, Haibao slumped against the wall with his eyes closed. The bus comes and the driver eyes Haibao's stained suit but nobody says anything. "Nanjing University," I say.
"Back," he says, "Up."
We climb up and go back and collapse into seats. Haibao nods. I stare out the window. Eventually his head comes down against my shoulder. The bus is warm and slowly the warmth creeps into me. I doze with my head against the glass, waking when we separate from the front, then again when we join another bus. I awake the third time when our segment peals off to go up, and I know we are close to the University so I wake Haibao. He is bleary eyed.
We get off, the stop is familiar, and yet different. Just as the morning, which would usually be a beginning, is an ending to the night.
"I'll come up with you," I say to Haibao.
"It's okay," he says.
"No problem." I go up in the lift with him, and when we get to the flat, I send him in for a shower. "I just want to go to bed," he protests, but he has no fight in him. While he is in the shower I make tea and sweeten it. I check out the bruise on my face in the mirror in Haibao's bedroom-I have a blue knot and the side of my face aches. Tea and aspirin. I take my hair down.
Haibao comes out in his bathrobe and I feed him sweet tea and aspirin, and remembering Maggie Smallwood, talk to him softly. "It is a pretty morning," I say and "You are warm now, and tired, and you'll sleep well. Finish your tea, the sugar will make you feel a little better, and then into a warm bed. We'll darken the windows, and I'll call this evening."
Then I make him drink all the rest of his tea and put him in bed. I dim the windows. I am so tired. I want to be clean like Haibao. But I sit for a moment and he says something for the first time since I asked him about the bus. "Don't go," he says.
"I'm here," I say, feeling a little foolish. "I'll stay, and I'll call you this evening."
He closes his eyes and I sit what seems like a long time, but which is really only five minutes by my watch (I count the seconds. I decide to stay ten minutes, then seven, and then slide carefully off the bed at five.)
I dim the windows in the front of the apartment. It is easy, I've seen Haibao do it so many times, I just rest my fingertips against the glass and say "Dim," and when it is dark enough I take my fingers away. On the little table next to the door I see a letter signed with the red official chop of the University. I am tired and I almost leave it, but I pick it up.
'Comrade Yang:' it begins, they all begin with Comrade. 'This is to inform you that pending an official investigation from your home district, you are suspended from study-'