The Incarnations

22. Sirens

THE PASSENGERS ARE from Henan. A man and wife, and a baby wrapped in a shawl. Recent arrivals at Beijing railway station, smelling of long train journeys in cheap, hard seats, sour milk and baby vomit. The woman cradles the squalling baby as her husband anxiously watches the fare on the meter rise, and Wang knows that, limited by poverty, they usually avoid taxis and struggle on to crowded buses, rousing the antipathy of Beijingers as they block the aisle with heavy bags. The baby is sickly and grizzles all the way to their destination, a run-down block in the south, where the man counts out the fare in one-yuan notes and coins, warm and sticky from being squeezed in his fist. He looks so wretched and pained to part with the money that Wang hands it back, telling him to buy medicine for the baby instead. He accepts the husband and wife’s thanks, then watches them struggle away with their bags, relieved their stifling human misery is out of his cab.

Urgent. Come home now. The message comes as he is driving away. Wang calls her in confusion. Listens as her phone rings and rings. Yida should be home. She has every other Monday off from Dragonfly Massage and spends the day lazing about, watching Korean soaps. Wang hangs up and steers his taxi in the direction of Maizidian, worrying that Echo has had an accident. He wonders if Yida’s parents are ill or dying in Anhui. Yida has been estranged from her parents for years, and Wang has never met his mother- or father-in-law, nor Echo her grandparents. What impact their death would have on his wife, Wang has no idea.

The TV flickers in the shadows of the living room. Coffee cups and bowls, peeled eggshells and the walnuts Yida feeds Echo to improve her grades (persuaded by the superstition that they nourish the brain, because they are the same wrinkled, hemispherical shape) clutter the table from that morning’s breakfast. There’s earthquake coverage on TV. A child’s limp hand in the rubble of a collapsed building. People’s Liberation Army rescue workers heaving at the concrete slab trapping the child to a soundtrack of pulse beats that reminds Wang of the clock ticking on a game show. Then an orchestral swell as the child is freed. Dusty and semi-conscious, his legs bloody and mangled, a stretcher bearing him away. The clip is a week old and Wang has seen it before. He wants to know what has become of the boy. Has he recovered? Can he use his legs? But the story ends here.

‘Yida?’ he calls.

Silence. He goes into the bedroom to look for her. Disorder is the natural state of the room, and a second or two passes before Wang sees the chaos is worse than usual. The mattress has been flipped up, the wardrobe doors are open, and Wang’s shirts dragged from the wire hangers like guilty suspects and dumped in a heap. The underwear drawer has been capsized, and Wang’s boxers, machine-washed to a shade of grey, cast out. Even his trouser pockets have been turned inside out, receipts and coins scattered on the rug.

‘Yida!’ he shouts.

Wang goes back to the living room. The laptop is still there, and Yida’s handbag and wallet are on the chair. Nothing seems to have been stolen. He calls her phone again. Listens to it ring and ring. Celebrities on TV are asking for donations for an earthquake relief fund. The men are grave as they request that viewers call the hotline. The female performers are quivering and emotional. A songstress wipes her tears with pink acrylic fingernails. Wang hangs up.

He is debating whether to call the police when the sirens start wailing outside. The sirens rend the skies with a loudness that can only signal disaster — a fire, or flood or air-raid attack. Wang rushes to the window. Then he remembers the national mourning for Sichuan, and the three-minute ‘silence’ scheduled one week to the minute after the earthquake struck.

The television screen has gone black as sirens call the nation to a halt. Workers gather outside every office and factory, hospital and bank. Teachers and students gather in the grounds of every university and school. Out in the yard, the security guards and residents stand by the gate to the Maizidian community, heads bowed, the guards with caps in hand. Out in the streets the traffic has stopped and drivers are pushing down on their horns, producing a fog of noise, like lowing herds of mechanical cows. The sirens are inescapable, and Wang stands by the window as though paralysed by the waves of sound.

When the sirens cease, the blackness of the TV screen brightens to a live broadcast of crowds in Tiananmen Square. Thousands of citizens stand facing the portrait of Chairman Mao on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, shouting, ‘Zhongguo Jiayou! Go, China! Brave and strong!’ Thousands of citizens, grim-faced with defiance and national pride, punch their clenched fists to the sky as they chant. Wang watches the crowds for a moment, then reaches for the remote and switches the TV off.

Click click. Click click. Wang’s head turns at the sound of the stove — the rings sparking to ignite the hissing gas. He goes to the kitchen, where Yida stands by the cooker, lighting one of his cigarettes from the ring of flames.

‘Yida! Why didn’t you say you were here?’

Yida stares at him from beneath the wildness of her hair. She is bare-legged, in an old, holey T-shirt, and her eyes are swollen and red. She takes a drag on the cigarette and, out of practice, coughs on the smoke. Yida quit smoking years ago and has been nagging her twenty-a-day husband to do the same.

‘I got your message,’ Wang says. ‘What’s happened? Why is the bedroom turned over like that?’

‘Who are you?’

Yida asks the question slowly, cigarette smoke casting a veil over her face, a penetrating look in her eyes. Wang is confused. Yida is not in the habit of asking strange philosophical questions. Where are the keys? Have you charged the electricity card? These are the questions Yida asks.

‘What do you mean, who am I?’ he asks.

Yida glares at her husband. She grabs her mobile phone from the counter and throws it at him, hard. Wang catches the phone, fumbling as it nearly slips through his fingers. On the screen is a digital photograph, the resolution low and grainy. Wang squints to make sense of the pixels and, when he does, his insides lurch as though in a suddenly braking car. The photo is of two men side by side on a narrow bed, smoking and gazing at the ceiling as they lie on their backs.

‘Who sent this?’ he croaks.

Yida exhales from her cigarette and watches Wang squirm through the haze.

‘I don’t know who sent it,’ she says. ‘There’s one more.’

Wang scrolls to the next message, sick with dread. This time they are sitting on the bed, with Zeng’s head inclined towards him. Wang checks the inbox. No more photos. Yet. Not that it matters. Wang looks at Yida and knows the damage has been done. She stands behind her fortress of smoke as though composed, but he knows she is fighting back tears.

‘Are you sleeping with that man?’ she asks.

‘No!’

‘Who is he?’

‘His name is Zeng Yan.’

‘Your friend from the hospital?’

‘Yes. I ran into him in the street the other day. He said he worked in a salon nearby and offered me a free haircut. So I went with him and he cut my hair. I’d slept badly the night before and was nodding off in the chair. So Zeng Yan said I could take a nap in his back room before going back to my taxi—’

‘You expect me to believe this pack of lies?’ Yida interrupts. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t know it was a place men go to have sex with other men! Not even you are that stupid, Wang!’

‘Look,’ Wang says, ‘I was tired and not thinking straight. I trusted this guy, I thought he was my friend. I lay down for a nap and woke up ten minutes later to find him next to me on the bed. I pushed him away, then I got out of there as fast as I could. .’

Wang hears his desperate, wheedling tone and knows Yida is not convinced. Sure enough, her stare remains cynical and hard.

‘You don’t look in any hurry to get out of there in that photo,’ she says. ‘You look very comfortable to me.’

‘Oh, come on! I bumped into an old friend, and made a stupid mistake,’ Wang says. ‘The thought of being with a man makes me physically sick. Yida, you have to trust me on this. .’

‘Trust you?’

Yida stubs her cigarette out on the window ledge. In her agitation she has flicked ash everywhere, on her T-shirt, on her bare feet and the kitchen floor — an offence she would rebuke her husband for. Her eyes darken, and she nods at a cardboard box on the counter.

‘I’ve been reading your letters.’

Wang had been so distracted by Yida and the photos, he hadn’t noticed the box. He’d hidden it in the suitcase on top of the wardrobe — the suitcase they never use, because they never go anywhere. He thought the letters would be safe there. He’d never expected that Yida would one day turn the bedroom over. Yida grabs some loose papers, her hands trembling as she reads aloud:

‘“Yida is a woman who stirs up in men the animal instinct to fuck and procreate. Tempting men as spoiled fruit tempts flies. But sleeping with Yida must be a sad and lonely experience. . The thought of you with your wife repulses me too.’

She chokes back a sob in her throat.

‘They are from Zeng. .’ Wang stutters, thinking how odd it is to hear the letter read out in Yida’s voice. ‘I meant to tell you about them, but I didn’t know how to explain. They are harmless, I think. . just strange.’

Tears slide down Yida’s cheeks.

‘You think you are so much cleverer than me, don’t you, Wang Jun?’ she says. ‘Because you went to university and I dropped out of school at fifteen. Because you are the son of an official, and I am the daughter of peasants from the countryside.’

Wang shakes his head and mumbles weakly, ‘No.’ But what she says is true.

‘But I am not so stupid that I don’t know you wrote these letters yourself,’ Yida cries. ‘This is what you do at night, isn’t it? When you stay up late and don’t come to bed. You are writing these crazy stories on the computer. . writing nasty things about your wife!’

She crumples the letter up and throws it at Wang. The balled-up paper bounces from his chest.

‘Yida, I swear I never wrote those letters,’ Wang protests. ‘Zeng Yan wrote them. .’

Yida rubs her eyes, and for a moment looks as young and vulnerable as when he first met her during the storm, and it pierces Wang’s heart. He wants to go to her and put his arms around her — something he once did without a second thought. But now he hesitates, as he would before scaling a hazardous barbed-wire fence. He steps towards her, and Yida steps back.

‘Don’t!’ she warns. ‘Don’t come near me! Why did you marry me if you think so little of me? What does that say about you, Wang Jun?’

Wang shakes his head. He starts to tell her, No, he does respect her. Then stops as Yida snatches the cardboard box from the counter and hugs it to her chest.

‘I am throwing these away!’ she says.

‘You can’t!’ Wang says. ‘They aren’t yours!’

Wang lunges for the box as Yida spins to the window and leans over the ledge, holding the letters out over the yard below.

‘Don’t!’ he yells.

But she lets go, and Wang reaches the ledge in time to see the lid come off and the letters tumble out into the car park four floors below. He turns back to his wife and shouts, ‘What have you done?’

Yida stares at her outraged husband. She bites her lip, eyes wide with the fear that she has gone too far. Then she bursts into giggles.

‘Quick! Run down and fetch your precious stories, Wang Jun!’ she says. ‘Hurry! Before Granny Ping reads them! Before the wind blows them away!’

Wang turns to go down and do exactly as she suggests. But Yida calls after him, stopping him in his tracks.

‘Lin Hong warned me about you! Before we got married she came to see me, and warned me that you liked men. I thought she was making trouble, and I didn’t listen to her. But now I wish I had. I hate to think of all the men you’ve been with behind my back over the years. .’

Wang strides over to her. ‘Well, don’t you offer special services to your customers at the Heavenly Massage? Didn’t Zeng Yan pay you six thousand yuan to strip for him the other day?’

Yida gasps. ‘Wang, have you lost your mind? I don’t work at the Heavenly Massage. And I’ve never met Zeng Yan in my life. What are you talking about?’

‘You know exactly what I am talking about.’

Wang hadn’t believed the letter at first. He had thought the ‘exposé’ of Yida was an imaginary scenario straight out of Zeng’s perverted mind. But Wang now looks at Yida, gaping at him, lost for words, and knows the letter was telling the truth. Yida had stripped for Zeng. Not for the money, but to make a fool of him. To prove he didn’t own her.

‘You’ve been screwing your customers for years! You think you can hide it from me, but I’ve always known what you’ve been up to!’

Blood rushes to Yida’s head as she leans towards him. She stabs her finger at the door and shouts, ‘Get out of my home! Get out! You’re fucking crazy!’

Wang sets her straight. ‘It’s not your home. It’s mine. I brought you here off the streets, remember?’

Sobbing, Yida shoves him with both hands, pushing him out of the kitchen. But Wang won’t be thrown out of his own home. He grabs Yida’s shoulders and shakes her hard, with more strength than he knew he had. As he shakes her and shakes her, a strange thing happens. He somehow detaches from his body and hovers above them, watching him shaking Yida until she stops screaming, until she stops fighting him off and goes limp and insensible as a rag doll. When he stops shaking her, after a minute or two, his wife is silent. She stares at Wang as though she had glimpsed something nightmarish in his eyes.

‘Who are you?’ Yida whispers.

Wang smells the cigarette smoke on her breath. Even through his rage, he can still see how beautiful his wife is, desirable to any man. He takes her head in his hands and kisses her hard on the mouth, feeling her teeth beneath her lips. He knows he is hurting her, that later he will regret being so aggressive. But he takes her slack wrist and pulls her out of the kitchen. He is sick and tired of the dishonesty in their marriage; the time has finally come to show Yida who he really is.