Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

than ten years:
    “I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you from the first time I saw you.”
    “You don’t know what you’re saying,” she sneered. “The first time you saw me was on your granny’s kang in Ximen Village. That was before you could even crawl!”
    “I fell in love with you before I knew how to crawl!”
    “No more of that, please.” She lit a cigarette. “For you to fall for a woman like me is like tossing a pearl down a latrine, don’t you think?”
    “Don’t run yourself down,” he said. “I understand you.”
    “You understand shit!” she sneered again. “I’ve been a whore, I’ve slept with thousands of men! I’ve even slept with the monkey! You, in love with me? Get out of my sight, Kaifang. Go find yourself a good woman and stay clear of the foul airs I give off.”
    “Liar!” Kaifang said, covering his face with his hands and starting to sob. “You’re lying. Tell me you haven’t done any of those things.”
    “What if I have? And what if I haven’t? What business is it of yours?” She sneered. “Am I your wife? Your lover? My folks have washed their hands of me, so what makes you different?”
    “I love you, that’s what!” he was screaming.
    “Don’t use that disgusting word with me! Get out of here, poor little Kaifang.” She waved the monkey over and said, “Dear little monkey, let’s you and me go to bed.”
    The monkey sprang onto her bed.
    Kaifang drew his pistol and pointed it at the monkey.
    Fenghuang wrapped her arms around her monkey and said angrily:
    “Shoot me first, Lan Kaifang!”
    Kaifang’s passions were running high by then. He’d heard rumors that she’d been a prostitute, and he wasn’t sure if he believed them or not. But when she maliciously told him to his face that she’d slept not only with thousands of men but with her monkey, it was as if a volley of arrows had pierced his heart.
    Shocked and hurt, he stumbled out of the room and ran up the stairs, out of the hotel, and onto the square, his churning mind and heart erasing all threads of thought. As he passed a bar lit up by neon signs, two heavily made-up women dragged him inside. Seated on a high bar stool, he slugged down three shots of brandy and then laid his head down on the bar as a woman with blond hair, dark circles under her eyes, bright red lips, and lots of skin, front and back, drifted up to him — he never went to see Fenghuang in uniform — to reach out and touch his blue birthmark. As a recently arrived butterfly from the countryside, she didn’t realize that he was a policeman. Almost as a conditioned reflex, he grabbed her by the wrist, drawing a shriek from her. He smiled apologetically and let go. She rubbed up against him and said flirtatiously, “Elder Brother has quite a grip!”
    Kaifang waved her away, but she pressed her hot bosom up to him and sent blasts of air reeking of cigarette smoke and liquor into his face.
    “Why are you so sad, Elder Brother? Did some little vixen break your heart? Women are all the same. But your little sister here can make you feel better. ...”
    As pangs of loathing swept through his heart, Kaifang was thinking: I’ll get even with you, you whore!
    He tumbled off the bar stool, and “little sister” led him by the hand down a dark corridor and into a will-o’-the-wisp room, where, without a word, she stripped and lay out on the bed. She still had a nice figure, with full breasts, a flat tummy, and long legs. Since this was the first time our good Kaifang had laid eyes on a naked woman’s body, it had its desired effect, although he was more nervous than anything. She, on the other hand, quickly tired of his faltering. Time, after all, is money in her profession. She sat up.
    “Come on,” she said, “what are you waiting for? You can knock off the little-boy act!”
    Unfortunately for her, as she sat up her blond wig slipped off and revealed a flattened head with sparse hair, which bowled Kaifang over. Pang Fenghuang’s lovely face beneath a full head of blond hair floated before his eyes. He took a hundred-yuan note out of his pocket, tossed it to the woman, and turned to leave, but not before she jumped to her feet and wrapped herself around him like an octopus.
    “You no-account prick!” she cursed. “You’re not getting away that easy, not for a measly hundred yuan!”
    She reached down and felt around in his pants while she was cursing, looking for money, of course, but what her hand bumped