Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

when that actually happened, they became underdogs, and everyone was now in their corner. The police knew all about these two and were aware of the special relationship they had with their deputy commander. So in the face of the crowd’s militancy they simply shrugged their shoulders and said nothing. One of them grabbed the bully by the neck. “Let’s go,” he said angrily. “You can knock off the phony victim act!”
    The incident alarmed members of the county Party Committee. Out of kindness, Party Secretary Sha Wujing sent his office manager and a clerk to the basement of the train station hotel to talk to Fenghuang and Ximen Huan. The monkey bared his teeth at the two men when they passed on the Party secretary’s request, which was to send the monkey over to the new Phoenix Zoo in the western suburbs, after which he would find jobs for the two of them. For most of us, that would have been exciting news. But Fenghuang held the monkey in her arms and said with an angry glare, “Anyone who so much as touches my monkey will have to answer to me!” Ximen Huan merely smiled mischievously and said, “Thank Secretary Sha for his thoughtfulness, but we’re doing fine, and his time would be better spent taking care of government workers who have lost their jobs.”
    From here my story takes a cruel and unhappy turn. Don’t think I’m happy about that, dear reader. The characters’ fates have made it inevitable.
    The story continues that Pang Fenghuang, Ximen Huan, and their monkey were sitting at a food stall on the southern edge of the train station square eating dinner when the bully they’d dealt with that day, his face covered with gauze, crept up. The monkey screeched and sprang at him, but wound up doing a somersault, thanks to the chain around his neck. Ximen Huan jumped to his feet, turned around, and was immediately face-to-face with the sinister bully. Before he could say a word, the man stabbed him in the chest. Quite possibly, the killer may have wanted to kill Fenghuang while he was at it, but the screeching, jumping monkey frightened him off before he could even pull the knife out of Ximen Huan’s chest. Fenghuang threw herself on Ximen Huan and wailed. The monkey stayed put, glowering at anyone who tried to come close. When Kaifang and several of his men ran up, they were stopped by the monkey’s fearful screeches and threatening gestures. One of them drew his gun and pointed it at the monkey; Kaifang grabbed him by the wrist.
    “Fenghuang, grab your monkey so we can send Ximen Huan to the hospital.” He spun around. “Get an ambulance!” he shouted.
    Fenghuang wrapped one arm around the monkey and covered his eyes with the other hand. He lay docilely in her embrace.
    Lan Kaifang removed the knife from Ximen Huan’s chest and pressed his hand over the wound to stop the bleeding. “Huanhuan!” he shouted. “Huanhuan!” Ximen Huan’s eyes opened slowly. “Kaifang,” he said as blood seeped from his mouth. “You’re my brother . . . I’ve . . . gone as far as I can go. . . .”
    “Hold on, Huanhuan, the ambulance will be here in a minute!” Kaifang put his arm under Huanhuan’s neck; blood flowed between his fingers.
    “Fenghuang . . . Fenghuang . . .” Ximen Huan was beginning to slur his words.
    Siren whining, the ambulance drove up and the EMTs jumped out with their medical equipment and a gurney. But Ximen Huan lay in Kaifang’s arms, eyes closed.
    Twenty minutes later Lan Kaifang had his hands, covered in the blood of Ximen Huan, clamped around the killer’s throat.
    Dear reader, the death of Ximen Huan hurts me deeply, but in purely objective terms, it swept away the barriers keeping Lan Kaifang from pursuing Pang Fenghuang. That said, the curtain was raised on another, even greater, tragedy.
    All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout — nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be initiated and controlled by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I’ll remain a member of the loyal opposition.
    But enough about that. We need to look at Lan Kaifang. He took charge of Ximen Huan’s funeral arrangements and, after gaining approval from