Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

into was a hard, cold handgun. Knowing he couldn’t let her pull her hand back, he grabbed her wrist for the second time. The beginnings of a scream leaked out of her mouth before she could swallow the rest of it as Kaifang gave her a shove and sent her stumbling back onto the bed.
    Kaifang emerged onto the square, where he was hit by a blast of cold air. The alcohol he’d consumed came rushing up into his throat and out onto the ground. The emptying of his stomach served to clear his head, but did nothing to ease the pain in his heart. His mood swung between teeth-clenching anger and heartwarming affection. He hated Fenghuang, and he loved her. When the hatred rose in him, it was swamped by love; when the love ascended, it was beaten back by hatred. During the two days and nights he struggled with these competing feelings, he turned his pistol on himself and contemplated pulling the trigger more than once. Don’t do it, boy! It’s not worth it! Finally, reason won out over emotion.
    “She may be a whore,” he said softly to himself, “but I still want her.”
    Having made up his mind, once and for all, he returned to the hotel, where he knocked on her door.
    “What, you back again?” she said, sounding thoroughly fed up. But he had obviously changed over the past two days. His birthmark was darker, his face thinner, and his brows looked like a pair of caterpillars squirming above his eyes, which were blacker and brighter than before; his glare, so intense it felt as if it were scorching her, and not just her, but her monkey as well, drove the monkey into a corner, where he cowered. “Well, since you’re here,” she said, her tone softer, “you might as well sit down. We can be friends if you’d like, but don’t let me hear any more talk about love.”
    “I not only want to talk about love, I want you to be my wife.” With a hard edge to his voice, he continued, “I don’t care if you’ve slept with ten thousand men, or with a monkey, or, for that matter, a tiger or an alligator, I want to marry you.”
    That was met with silence. Then, with a laugh, she said:
    “Calm down, little Blue Face. You can’t throw a word like love around, and that goes double for marriage.”
    “I’m not throwing them around,” he said. “Over the past two days I’ve thought things out carefully. I’m going to give it up, deputy chief, my career as a policeman, everything. I’ll be your gong-beater and become a street performer with you.”
    “Enough of that crazy talk. You can’t throw away your future over a woman like me.” Feeling a need to dampen his enthusiasm and lighten the atmosphere, she said, “Tell you what, I’ll marry you if you can turn your blue face white.”
    As they say, “Casual words have powerful effects.” Making jokes to a man as deeply in love as he was dangerous business.
    Lan Kaifang took sick leave, not caring if his superiors approved or not, and went to Qingdao, where he underwent painful skin graft surgery. When he next showed up at the hotel basement, his face swathed in bandages, Fenghuang was stunned. So was her monkey, possibly recalling the swathed face of Ximen Huan’s killer. He snarled and attacked Kaifang, who knocked him out with a single punch. Then he turned to Fenghuang and, like a man possessed, said:
    “I’ve had a skin graft.”
    She stood there looking at him as tears welled up in her eyes. He got down on his knees, wrapped his arms around her legs, and laid his head against her belly. She stroked his hair.
    “How foolish you are,” she said, nearly sobbing. “How can you be so foolish?”
    They embraced, and she gently kissed the side of his face where there was no pain. He picked her up and carried her over to the bed, where they made love.
    Blood covered the sheet.
    “You’re a virgin!” he said in surprised delight, his tears soaking the bandages covering half his face. “You’re a virgin, my Fenghuang, my love. Why did you say all those things?”
    “Who says I’m a virgin?” she said with a pout. “Eight hundred yuan is all it costs to repair a maidenhead.”
    “You’re lying again, you little whore, my Fenghuang. . . .” Mindless of the pain, he planted kisses on the body of the prettiest girl in Gaomi County — the whole world, in his eyes.
    Fenghuang stroked his body, hard yet pliable, as if put together with branches of a tree, and said, sounding utterly forlorn:
    “My god, there’s no way I can get away from you. . .