Candy (26 page)

I got Xiaochun to spend a lot of time with us. I was afraid of the night, afraid of the day, afraid of thinking, because whenever my thoughts turned to this close companion of mine and how he was about to slide into a pitch-black hole where he couldn’t feel the ground beneath his feet, my every breath became fraught with a sense of crisis. Xiaochun was sitting with me. She said, Everyone has his own fate. If heaven wants to take him away, that means his time has come. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t really want to grow old. You know how he’s always been so innocent, so pretty. Have you ever tried to imagine what he might look like when he gets older?

I hadn’t. But that’s nothing more than guesswork anyway. Finally she said, Here’s what I think we should do. First, let’s have him get checked for ordinary diseases by, say, an internist and a dermatologist. I said, No. I don’t want to put him through all that. If he’s going to die, I want him to die a beautiful death. Xiaochun said, Nobody knows for sure if he’s really sick, right? He needs to see a doctor. I said, His Hong Kong visa is going to be ready any day now. It’ll be better if he gets checked out in Hong Kong.

Xiaohua had stopped calling, so I called her up. I said, When something as serious as this happens to a friend, you’re supposed to show even more concern for him than usual. Xiaohua said, I need to know the results of his examinations. It’s confusing for me, not knowing what he has. I don’t know how to treat him. If you need money, I can give you as much as you need. But please don’t come over to my house. I can’t have him touching my things.

I said, What if he is sick? Do you think you’re going to get infected just by talking to him? Do you think if he touches your things you’re going to get infected? You two are close friends.

Xiaohua said, It has nothing to do with whether or not we’re good friends. The point is that you’re going to go get him checked out. You want to know if it’s AIDS. Now, one of the early symptoms of AIDS is hepatitis, and hepatitis is supercontagious. I can’t afford to get hepatitis. I need to work.

I said, Hepatitis? Who the hell told you that? How can you think about yourself at a time like this? You should be thinking about him!

Xiaohua said, Why don’t you mind your own business? It’s not as if we aren’t doing anything for him.

This conversation felt like a death sentence. Once again we felt it had been confirmed beyond any doubt: Bug clearly had AIDS. And the worst thing was that when I was making the call, I’d accidentally pressed the speakerphone button, so that Bug had heard every word Xiaohua said. Bug looked stricken. He said to me, Take me to the hospital. That’s where I belong. And then he started to cry. I’d never seen him sob like that before, and I was struck by how ugly my cute, gangly Big Bird of a sweet-voiced pal looked when he cried. He was shaking all over, and his entire face was twisted into a knot, and I felt acutely uncomfortable. I was used to looking at a pretty face.

I said, Would you stop complaining! Nobody else is complaining.

Bug said, I’m not complaining. My past has caught up with me. But why did it have to happen to me?

I said, Just stop crying, OK? If you die, my life will be over too. I’m your bosom buddy. We’re always hanging out together, and aside from the fact that you never told me you didn’t use condoms, we didn’t have any secrets. Anyway, I’ve lived long enough. I mean, I don’t think I’ll be able to get used to not having you around. We’re going to have to die together.

Bug said, You’ve answered my prayers. But if you don’t die with me, I’ll end up like that girl in
Rouge
and I’ll come back to find you.

I said, It’s a deal.

At the same time, though, I wondered what my mother would do. How she would feel if I went through with it? My dad was really strong, but would my mom be able to manage? Just thinking about losing my friend had plunged me into depression, and if that could make me feel this sad, how would my mother feel without me? I couldn’t bear to think about it. I remembered something my mother had said to me when I was back in rehab: If I thought it would ease even a little bit of your pain, I would gladly give my life. I wondered if I was really willing to die for Bug. I didn’t know. I only knew that I didn’t want anybody to get AIDS. Not anybody.

Xiaohua called up to say she wanted to pay my way so that I could go to Hong Kong with Bug. She said, Think about it. We can’t let him go off on such terrifying business all by himself. He’d probably crash his car as soon as he found out his results. But then Xiaochun said, I don’t want you to take this wrong, but I mean, if he really does have it, it would be better for him if he did what Xiaohua just mentioned! When we talked about AIDS, we never actually used the word. It was as though we were afraid even to mention it, and so we always said things like “has it” or “doesn’t have it.”

Bug said, I don’t want Xiaohua’s help. He said he didn’t want to see her, because whenever one of her friends got into dire straits, she treated it like a math problem; it was just about numbers. What he really needed now was his friends and his mother, because when he went to bed each night, he never knew where he was going to be when he woke up. He knew it was stupid for him to think this way—things wouldn’t happen that fast—but he couldn’t help worrying. He said, You can’t understand what it’s like unless you’ve been there. Words just can’t describe it. He said, I don’t need any drugs anymore. I feel high every day. And I’ve concluded that I’m an idiot, because there are so many things that I don’t understand. I feel as blissfully ignorant as that little dog of yours.

Sometimes Bug was able to forget all about it. He would preen in front of the mirror, just as he always had, and he’d sing and play guitar. But these were the times that left me feeling the most despair. I thought that since I was his best friend, it was my responsibility to make arrangements for him to go get tested. But I also had to think about what I was going to do if he turned out to be positive.

I felt I had to find a way to help him record his own album. He’d always wanted to turn “Surrounded on All Sides,” the general’s swan song from
Farewell My Concubine,
into a rock opera, and he’d even lined up most of the instruments. He could play drums, guitar, and bass, and we had
pipa
players too. The only studio that Bug had ever set foot in was the one I had at home. Saining had set up a recording studio in my apartment, but I was sure it wasn’t well-enough equipped for a project like “Surrounded on All Sides.”

I got in touch with Xiao’er. Xiao’er had a pretty decent recording studio of his own, and even though he was a lousy recording engineer, he was a great guy. When I told him solemnly that Bug was terminally ill and that we all had to help him, the first thing he said was, Is it AIDS? I said, What makes you think that? He said, The crowd you hang out with is pretty high risk, y’know? I said, Will you help him or not? He said, As long as the studio is free, it’s all the same to me. The only thing is that making recordings isn’t easy, y’know? I said, What are you trying to say? Are you going to help or not? He said, What I’m trying to say is this: Are you trying to kill him? How can you think about music at a time like this? You ought to be thinking about getting him treated. Or sending him overseas and marrying him off to a foreigner so that he can get foreign residence and get cured over there. That’s what you should be thinking about. If you were sick, would you sit around dreaming about making fucking records? You must be out of your mind! Out of your fucking mind. At one point I thought I had AIDS, and I just wanted to go away to a beautiful little island somewhere and wait to die. But later on I found out I wasn’t sick after all. I said, How did you know you didn’t have it? He said, It turned out I had an allergy that made me break out in a rash. That’s all it was. It was easy to treat, and it definitely wasn’t AIDS.

What Xiao’er said made sense to me, and I started racking my brains trying to think of ways to get Bug out of the country, but how could we do it without money? We couldn’t even afford to buy new CDs, so how were we going to go overseas? It occurred to me that maybe I should do something with the stories I’d written. I’d never thought about making a lot of money off my writing, but the time had come to start thinking about it. I’d gone over all kinds of possibilities, and the most you could make from a story was a thousand
yuan,
and after a book came out, it was only good for a few thousand more because it would soon be pirated. In my entire life, I’d written only a dozen or so stories, and I couldn’t possibly write a dozen more in a short time just to cure Bug. I couldn’t crank them out like that. In short, we couldn’t afford to go overseas.

We didn’t have money now, and we never had any money. I bought all my lingerie on Huating Road, where you could buy cheap but pretty things and counterfeit designer clothes. I bought thongs and bikinis two for ten
yuan,
but on me they looked like fifty
yuan.
I had a knack for it.

It was these thoughts that emboldened me. A friend of mine once said that people who don’t have shoes aren’t afraid of the well-heeled, and I saw a lot of wisdom in this. We’d grown up on movies from the Soviet Union and North Korea, but now we listened to music from England and sat in our kitchens eating instant noodles, wondering if we had AIDS. We smoked marijuana from Xinjiang, popped three-
yuan
-a-bottle pills, and once we got high, we could listen to punk rock and tell ourselves it was a rave. What did we care? We were so sick of waiting. Sometimes if we waited around long enough there would be some E for us, and you couldn’t waste free drugs. After eating E, I felt euphoric, and it reminded me of a line from “Howl.” But that doesn’t mean that Allen Ginsberg and I have anything in common, much less that I understand him.

Never forget who you are (even if you end up having a lot of money someday). This is very important. We’re poor, so at least we can’t stand around in record stores, chewing gum and picking out whatever records we want. A lot of those records would drive us crazy, anyway. Remember this: always stand in a poor man’s shoes, because if you do, you’ll always be yourself. And keep those bourgeois like Saining and Xiaohua far away from us! We’re not like them at all!

Of course, I still have to go to Saining to borrow money, although I’ve never actually returned any of the money I’ve “borrowed” from him. This time, I’m going to need more than usual. I have to go to the limit for Bug’s AIDS.

I’m also afraid of hepatitis. I think I can stand the thought of dying, but I’ve never wanted to get hepatitis. It got so that I became afraid to go to anyone’s house because I was worried that I had hepatitis.

Apple gave us the name of an AIDS specialist in Beijing. He said, You can call him directly. So I called him immediately, and, using a false name, I described Bug’s situation. Bug was squatting down next to me, and he kept his eyes fixed on me the whole time. The doctor said that from the sound of it, Bug was probably HIV-negative, but he said that Bug might have leukemia or possibly syphilis. The doctor said, If he does have AIDS, then his present symptoms suggest that he would have been infected at least five years ago.

I hastily wrote down “syphilis or leukemia” on a piece of paper, and I held it up for Bug to read. Bug’s face lit up as if he’d just had some kind of epiphany. The doctor said that he would still have to go to the hospital and be examined. I said, We’re afraid of being arrested. The doctor said, That’s ridiculous. Come to Beijing, and come to my hospital. Everyone who comes to me is an AIDS patient. They’re just like anyone else who’s ill: they have a disease. I said, Is it really safe? He said, Of course it is. You can trust me on this. Your friend won’t be arrested.

After I hung up, we collapsed on the bed. I said, Fuck! There was never any danger of your being arrested. That Xiaochun is a real piece of work. Then I said, If you have syphilis, how come you’re so healthy?

I called up Xiaochun, and I said, You’re really something! People don’t get thrown in jail for that. But you almost scared him to death; do you realize that? Xiaochun said, I saw a documentary where that happened, and if you looked at the people in our crowd, you’d realize that anyone who’s ever gotten AIDS has been hauled away. Anyone could have made the same mistake I did. But I guess this time I was wrong.

It was too good to be true. Leukemia was scary, but at least Bug would be spared the extra psychological torment. We decided to go get Bug tested straightaway and made an appointment with a specialist in STDs at Huashan Hospital.

That evening, when I was going to the bathroom, some liquid splashed up onto my vulva. I figured that it was probably full of deadly bacteria, so I decided to disinfect myself with Dettol. It worked on cuts, so I figured it would be good enough. I pulled up my pants and started hunting for the Dettol, cursing all the while: You and your stupid Mr. Syphilis, look what you’ve done to me. AIDS, hepatitis, syphilis! Bug said, What are you doing in there? I said, I’m looking for the Dettol so that I can disinfect my private parts where the water from the toilet got me all filthy. Bug said, For God’s sake, don’t use Dettol on yourself! If you use that stuff, you’re gonna have the face of an eighteen-year-old and the genitals of an eighty-year-old! It’ll turn them black. It has the same effect on women and men. He said he learned this from a hooker, whom he referred to as a chicken. I said, What? You fuck prostitutes? He said, What’s wrong with that? They’re a lot more genuine than you writers! I said, Fuck you! What’s wrong with writers? He said, Don’t go getting angry at me. I was just giving you an honest opinion, but I could be wrong.

The next morning, I helped Bug find some sweatpants and a sweatshirt. I told him, Put these on, and we’ll get a hat to hide your hair. Don’t worry; I’ll talk to the doctors for you. You don’t have to say a word.

We arrived at Huashan Hospital. The Department of Venereal Diseases was full of zigzagging corridors. The large rooms had been divided into lots of smaller rooms, and the little rooms in turn defined a network of twisting and turning passageways. Bug and I got dizzy from going around so many corners, and we lost track of each other and had to call out each other’s names. The more I called, the more hopeless I felt. We’d finally made it to the place where Bug could get tested for AIDS, only to lose each other.