Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

his father and his aunt, buried Huanhuan’s ashes behind Ximen Jinlong’s grave. Now, instead of dwelling on the older folks’ mood, we return to Lan Kaifang, who showed up every night in the train station hotel basement room rented by Pang Fenghuang. And whenever he wasn’t tied up during the day he went to the square and fell in behind Fenghuang and her monkey, wordlessly following them like a bodyguard. When grumbling among his men at the station reached the ear of the old commander, he sent for Kaifang.
    “Kaifang, my young friend, there’s no lack of nice girls in town, but a girl with a trained monkey. . . the way she is . . . how do you think it looks.”
    “You can remove me from my post, Commander, and if you think I’m not even qualified to be an ordinary policeman, then I’ll quit.”
    This stopped the talk immediately, and as time passed, the grumbling members at the station changed the way they viewed him. Sure, Pang Fenghuang smoked and drank, dyed her hair blond, had a nose ring, and spent her time roaming the square, the antithesis of a good girl. But how bad could she be? Eventually, the cops started making friends with her, and liked to tease when they ran into her on their beats:
    “Say, Golden Hair, take it easy on our deputy commander. He’s wasting away to nothing.”
    “That’s right, you’re going to have to ease up sooner or later.”
    Fenghuang never paid any attention to their well-intentioned taunts. The monkey snarled at them.
    At first, Kaifang tried to get her to move to 1 Tianhua Lane or into the family compound, but after receiving one refusal after another, even he began to realize that if she stopped spending her nights in the train station hotel basement and roaming the square, he’d probably lose interest in working at that substation. It did not take long for the town’s hooligans and troublemakers to realize that the pretty “golden-haired, nose-pierced, monkey-trainer girl” was the favorite of the blue-faced, hard-nosed deputy commander of the train station, and they abandoned any thoughts of moving in on her. Who’d be foolish enough to try to take a drumstick out of a tiger’s mouth?
    Let’s try to imagine the scene of Kaifang’s nightly visits to Fenghuang in her basement room. Originally a guesthouse, the place had been bought and turned into a hotel, and if regulations had been strictly enforced, it would have been a prime candidate for being shut down. That was why the fat face of the proprietress crinkled into an oily smile, honey dripping from her reddened lips, when Kaifang showed up
    Fenghuang refused to open the door the first few nights, no matter how hard he pounded. So he’d stand there like a post and listen to her weep — sometimes laugh hysterically — inside. He also heard the monkey screech and, sometimes, scratch at the door. Sometimes he smelled cigarette smoke, sometimes liquor. But he never smelled anything illegal, at which he was secretly overjoyed. If she’d taken up drugs, she’d have been a lost cause. Would he still have loved her if that were the case? The answer was yes. Nothing could have changed that, not even if her insides had rotted away.
    He never failed to bring a bouquet of flowers or a basket of fruit, and when she refused to open the door, he stood there until he had to go, leaving the flowers or fruit outside her door. With a decided absence of tact, the proprietress once said to him:
    “Young man, I can get you a handful of girls. All you have to do is choose the one you want. . .”
    The icy glower in his eyes and the cracking of knuckles as he clenched his fist nearly made her wet herself. She never said anything like that again.
    Then one day Fenghuang opened the door. The room was dark and dank. The paint on the walls was peeling and blistery; a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling provided little light in a room heavy with the smell of mold. It was furnished with a pair of twin beds and a couple of chairs that looked as if they’d been scavenged from the local dump. Being in one was like sitting on cement. That was when he first tried to get her to move. One of the beds was for her, the other was for the monkey, who slept among some of Ximen Huan’s old clothes. There were, in addition, two vacuum bottles for hot water and a fourteen-inch black-and-white TV set, also picked up at the local dump. In those shabby, uninviting surroundings, Kaifang finally said what he’d kept bottled up for more