It's Too Late for Us to Start Over

Thin, broken strands of song came through my headphones. That night, the track he played was Karen Mok's "Ten Minutes Before Midnight." The special hiss of consonants, the tongue brushing the back of the teeth, the air slipping through the gap in a whisper, all of it was made for midnight. It had almost the power to soothe a person by touch. He was Shoji, the radio DJ whose program always aired at midnight and sent people to sleep on pillows of bright or melancholy music. I listened to every one of his broadcasts twice, once at night when it first aired and again the next afternoon on replay. One time, after I had caught a chill in my legs and gone through massage and cupping and every other step of treatment, my thighs bloomed into great purple bruises. I walked to the mirror, saw my own spotted legs, and let out a shriek. The cry was like a summons. Teng Xin answered it at once. He stared at my fawn-spotted legs for several seconds, then made a foolish grin. I darted behind the curtain and shouted, "I'm not going out anymore." Teng Xin obediently replied, "Fine. We'll go out after dark, then." So we sat together in the hospital lobby all through late afternoon and into evening, watching the sky slowly change. The sunset was beautiful to the point of seeming unreal, dark blue, pale blue, yellow, gray-white, staining over each other in layers. Once it was fully dark, Teng Xin finally walked me out beside his bicycle. At the crossroads he suddenly asked, "Want to go somewhere really fun?" I followed him through twists and turns until we reached what looked like an abandoned factory. The bicycle chain squeaked in the empty road. Then we stepped inside, and the middle of the building was blazing with light. There was an electric guitar on the floor, a bass, a drum kit. And then a voice came through the air, a voice so familiar I could have picked it out strand by strand from a storm of sound. The invisible voice turned into a visible force and pulled me forward. "Which one of you is Shoji?" I cried. I had never imagined he would be so young, or that he would turn out to be Teng Xin's cousin. Being a DJ was only his side job. The rest of the time he gathered a few like-minded people and made music in a band called TooYoungToDie. His voice, whether coming through cheap radio equipment or rough rehearsal gear, could change from clean candor to low mystery in an instant. It was stunning. He was nothing like the quiet, moon-cold man his radio show made me imagine. The music he wrote was all hot smoke and reckless fire, the work of someone with two violently different selves.

When I jumped onto the back seat of Teng Xin's bicycle that night, I bounced twice and urged him to hurry. "Seeing as you brought me to meet my idol," I told him, "I'll forgive you for stealing looks at how ugly I am after treatment." The streetlamps came on in a row, bright as day. TooYoungToDie already had a name in the music underground. They were invited to all kinds of up-and-coming festivals, and some of the coolest CD shops would even carry their self-produced discs. Their CDs were all handmade, white covers scrawled with doodles, rough and artsy. Shoji came looking for me on his own. "Teng Xin told me you write essays really well," he said. "Why don't you try writing lyrics for us?" My eyes widened like brass bells. My heart jumped so hard it hurt, but I still asked timidly, "Could I?" "Of course." He pulled a demo disc from his backpack and handed it over. "Here's the melody. Try writing something. There are no restrictions." That same night, the melody on the demo was softer than anything I'd expected, and it stirred up so much heat inside me that I could not immediately pin it down in words. My pen hovered over the page without touching it. For several days afterward I lived under a kind of strange enchantment. My mind whirled at high speed until, little by little, words began covering the paper. A while later, my name and Shoji's appeared side by side on a lyric sheet. That strange connection filled me with far more joy than the fact that I had written my first song at all.

When TooYoungToDie finished their new album, the band decided to celebrate in a bar. Teng Xin and I joined the crowd. It was my first time in a place like that, and the dazzling lights and stale smoke made me dizzy. Then a girl came over, and Shoji reached out at once, caught her hand, and pulled her down to sit close beside him. She wore a blue-violet dress, and there was a faint shimmer of silver dust over her long, soft eyelids. She was especially beautiful when she smiled. My fingers wound around the ruffled hem of my checked skirt. I sat there looking at the graceful swing of her gestures, at the ease of her body, and self-consciousness traveled from my fingertips through my whole body. On the way home I asked Teng Xin whether that girl was Shoji's girlfriend. "You mean Yan Ying? Probably," he said with a laugh. "She's amazing. She does a lot of the backing vocals for the band." "She's really beautiful," I said. Teng Xin caught that thread at once. "Of course she is. I doubt you'll ever cultivate yourself into anything like that in this lifetime." He meant nothing by it. I know that now. But hearing it, my heart still gave a hard jolt. It was as if the secret wish bottle inside me had slipped and shattered. My secret was suddenly out in the light, and the broken glass began pressing into my heart.

That weekend, Shoji's band had a performance at a music festival out in the county. He invited Teng Xin and me in advance. I was overjoyed and agreed immediately, and that same afternoon my homeroom teacher called me over and handed me an admission slip for a composition competition scheduled for Saturday. It was the sort of trust I could not refuse. So in the examination room I sat there burning with impatience, torn between compromise and revolt, and in the end I split the difference by handing in my paper half an hour early and sprinting to the bus station as though I were running the hundred meters. By the time I got off the bus, fat raindrops had turned into whipping cords of water and forced me into a run. To save time, I cut through the woods toward the venue. Through the rain I could already hear bits of music drifting over, a magic flute luring a snake forward. I ran through the trees, broke out into the open, and saw the field, the tents, and Shoji's helpless, half-laughing face. I was panting so hard that the first thing I managed to say was, "I'm exhausted. But I made it." He looked at my rain-soaked body and said nothing, only took a can of hot black tea from the tent and handed it to me. The warmth of the red can passed from my palms straight into my heart. "Didn't you say you couldn't come?" he asked, looking at me like I was an uninvited guest. My bedraggled state answered for me. I ducked under the clear rain shelter and stood among all those people drunk on music. The wild drumbeat did not drive me mad; the only thing that moved me was the voice riding over it, blow after blow, striking my heart with dull pain, with tremor, with a kind of fierce release. The concert scheduled to end at nine went on until a quarter past, but I absolutely had to catch the last bus back to the city. I had slipped away without even telling Teng Xin I was coming. If I did not make it home in time, there would be hell to pay. So I kept glancing back as I pushed through the crowd. Fireworks burst over the festival behind me, a perfect movie shot slowing and saturating itself in the sky, and sadness began to well up. In the middle of my ragged run, tears suddenly spilled out. Then my legs went soft. I could not force myself one step farther. I pitched forward and crashed hard to the ground, with the taste of blood in my mouth.

I remember nothing after that. When I woke, I was lying in a bed at the herbal clinic. Shoji came through the door. "Foolish girl," he said. "How did you faint in the grass like that? If nobody had found you, you'd have vanished into the wilderness." So I guessed that he had carried me to the car. I lifted my head slightly, and the angle brought my eyes level with his lowered face. In that room, heavy with the smell of medicinal herbs, our eyes locked. There was a little circle of magic in the gaze, something like opposite poles of a magnet drawing closer inch by inch, hair by hair, until just before we touched, the door creaked open and Teng Xin's voice floated in ahead of him. Shoji and I jerked back like two people struck by electricity. In a way, that kiss that never happened may have been another kind of perfection.

In all the running and the fall that day, I knocked one of my teeth loose. After that I began falling asleep to Shoji's radio program as if it were an anesthetic. His voice was like a thick quilt, always able to stop up the place where the wind leaked through my feelings. The day I went to the hospital to have the tooth fixed, I watched in shock as the dentist drove the implant straight into my gum. Terrified out of my mind, the first number I dialed without thinking was his. "Shoji," I told him, "my mouth is bleeding." He came rushing over, and by then my lips were so stiff I could no longer speak. I wrote on a piece of paper, Take me somewhere, anywhere, so I can think about something else. So he brought me to the abandoned factory where I had first seen him. There was no one there. The roof hung low over us. Inside that sealed-up space, with blood still in my mouth, Shoji's kiss came down on me with greater force than the pain. Later he wrote a song out of that scene: My gums steamed with blood and a trace of kissing / your teeth parted and knocked my thoughts off their rails. I traded a tooth for a love affair. I hatched a dream out of a mouthful of blood.

After that, I started avoiding Yan Ying whenever I could. The more inferior I felt in front of her, the stronger my guilt became. Even slow-witted Teng Xin noticed something was wrong. One day in the school corridor he asked, "Why do you act so nervous every time you see Sister Ying?" Maybe because I was used to being reckless in front of him, I spilled everything about Shoji and me in a single breath. Teng Xin's mouth dropped open into a perfect O. He stayed that way for a long time before managing, "How could you... how could you do that? You know she and Shoji are a couple. How can you do something that tears people apart?" It was the first time I had ever realized how sharp his eyes could be. The nameless anger in him cancelled out the guilt in me. "Tears people apart?" I snapped. "From beginning to end, I was the passive one. What's wrong with liking somebody? And how can you say that to me? You're so worked up over Yan Ying, and yet you're the one who won't admit you like her." We knew exactly how to hurt each other, and both of us reached for the sharpest possible weapon. After that argument, Teng Xin and I fell into a cold war. Even when I was stretched out under acupuncture at the herbal clinic, I no longer saw his smug face peeking out from behind the curtain. A month later, someone began appearing on the back seat of his bicycle. He had actually gone after the pretty, innocent Fang Xu. He rode past me with her behind him, her skirt flying, the whole world storming around them. At the same time, I began attending Shoji's social circles as his girlfriend. Social circle was still a foreign phrase to a high-school girl, but his world was woven entirely from fine, tight strands of connection. The clubs, the noise, the strange clothes, the drinking and smoking, the careless talk, all of it made me dizzy, as if I were flying too high. I greeted those people timidly and then became nothing more than a transparent wall, with light and music passing straight through me toward them. All of Shoji's friends had glamorous girlfriends, girls with dark or blue cat's-eye glances that looked full of mystery. Only I wore braces and a schoolgirl's checked skirt and looked like moss growing at the foot of a wall. Sometimes I would think in despair that when Shoji and I stood side by side, we were standing inside two separate worlds. Yet he stood onstage singing lyrics I had written, and that always made me feel there was a red thread running through all the noise and binding us together.

After TooYoungToDie became an instant sensation at one of the festivals, Shoji grew more obsessed with the band and with the thick-blooded ferocity of loud music and blood-colored lyrics. He played their songs on his midnight show, but the station received too many complaints from people who did not want to hear that harsh noise in the middle of the night. Without hesitation, he quit his job at the station. Shoji grew more and more like a genius, a genius no one understood. I, in turn, became completely the lover of a wandering singer: my life intense, romantic, happy, and painful all at once. I lied and schemed to get sick notes from my teachers. I slipped behind everyone's backs to follow him to performances in nearby places on the weekends. Then the results of our pre-exams came out, and my ranking had dropped by more than twenty places. After the parents' meeting, the teacher specifically asked my father into the office and opened with, "There is something a little off about Xingyun lately." In my strict, tightly controlled home, one sentence like that was enough to set off an earthquake. That same night my parents' harsh words made me feel utterly ashamed. My father sat there smoking while I cried in silence, offering neither explanation nor defense. Of course they would never learn about Shoji. He was the grand secret I kept hidden inside myself. The next day, after a long silence between us, Teng Xin finally came over and said the first thing he'd said to me in ages: "Let's take a walk after school." I nodded stiffly. After class we went to a nearby park. He pushed his bicycle beside him as always, and I could no longer simply hop onto the back as I used to. "Yesterday, when the teacher criticized you, I was there too," he said. "Oh," I answered. "Do you know what you've become?" I was already fed up, already close to breaking. "The best thing in you has gone missing," he said. "Can you not make things worse?" I snapped so loudly people nearby turned to look. Then someone walked over. When I raised my eyes, it was Yan Ying. So Teng Xin had brought reinforcements. "Xingyun," she said, "maybe now is not the best time for you to be with Shoji. I know that because I was the one who took him from someone else in the first place." By then I was like a cornered animal, savage toward everyone. Teng Xin said, "Are you really going to hurt every person around you before you're satisfied?" My tears poured down. Every grievance in me seemed finally to have found a crack to burst through. "Teng Xin," I shouted, "you like Sister Ying too, don't you? If you were me and everyone was trying to force you to back down, how would that feel?" His face flashed white, then red, then white again. I had hit the exact place that hurt most. He flung his schoolbag to the ground. "Liu Xingyun, I'm done with you. Do whatever you want. Just don't regret it later." After that I simply smashed what was already cracked. I no longer bothered inventing lies before cutting class. I said nothing at home and let their disappointment grow wild around me. I fought the whole world if that was what it took to keep this love everyone disapproved of. My life descended into chaos. Yan Ying said this was not the best time for Shoji and me. All I knew was that if I let him go now, I might never cross paths with him again.

There was a woman at the bar who often came sidling up to Shoji. Everyone called her A May. She was vulgar and flashy, always in lurid pink, every swaying step spilling an air of frivolity. I disliked her from the moment I first laid eyes on her. That night she laid one finger tipped in scarlet polish lightly on Shoji's shoulder, pressed her thigh against him, and sat down at his side while people in the crowd whistled and laughed as if I weren't there. I was furious, but I did not dare say anything. On the way home Shoji noticed my expression and said it had only been politeness, an obligation of the scene. I smiled and let it go, because I did not want him to think I was childish. At home the cold war continued. Then one day my father sat down beside me on the sofa. For the first time in a very long while, his face was gentle. "Xingyun, your mother and I have discussed it. We've decided to send you to a boarding school in the suburbs." "What?" In my mind those schools were practically prisons. "We're doing it for your own good. If this goes on, you won't have a future." "I won't go. Even if I stop studying altogether, I still won't go." I stormed out of the house and ran straight to the bar where Shoji was performing. The instant I stepped in, I saw A May in the middle of the crowd with both arms around his neck, writhing to the music. The smell of something foul and sweet hit me. Her face kept drawing nearer and nearer until her hand climbed up and touched his face. The red nail polish stabbed my eyes. I lost my head, charged through the crowd, seized a glass of beer from a table, and flung it into her face. The me who had always stayed quiet finally erupted like that. The whole bar went silent. A May shook out her wet dress and raised her hand to slap me, but before it landed, Shoji caught her wrist. "Let go of me!" she shouted. "Don't hit her," Shoji said, frowning. I thought that moment might become the turning point that saved us. Instead it became our end. A May picked up another glass of beer and held it out to him. "Fine. I won't hit her. Then however she splashed me, you can splash her right back." What happened next was beyond belief. Shoji took the glass and poured the whole thing over me. I stared at him. Then he turned away. At that exact instant, A May slipped her hand through his arm. The beer was so cold it felt like ice needles going into my skin. The sight before me was another kind of poison needle driving into my eyes. It felt as though I had gone blind on the spot, all the light around me turning into black negatives. I bit my lip hard to stop myself from crying. The whispers all around me were perfectly clear. He only got involved with a high-school girl for fun. How could she take it seriously?

My love with Shoji had opened in a way so romantic it was almost absurd, and then it had left behind a trail of loose ends anyone could pull on. Every tug tore skin from flesh. When I got home, the first thing I told my parents was, "I've decided to go to the boarding school." My surrender surprised them, but it also relieved them. For the first time in months, the atmosphere at home softened. I left my old school without saying goodbye, handled the transfer quietly, and submitted myself to the full lockstep regimen of the new school. I packed every day so full that there was not even space left for wild thoughts. I only came back to the city once a month after that, because I still had to visit the herbal clinic regularly. Three or four months passed. The next time I came home, I saw a glossy official CD with Shoji's poster on it in the record shop at the corner. I bought it. The voice I had loved was now pressed into that thin little disc. The new CD was far grander than their old homemade ones: laser-printed cover, famous designer, full concept packaging. I opened the lyric booklet and found the same songs as before. Only the lyricist's name beside the songs I had written had all been changed to A May. That did not surprise me at all. By then I already knew that A May had a rich backer who could spend enough money to drag Shoji out of the underground and into the light. I took the CD with me to the hospital and ran into Teng Xin there. "I've been calling Shoji's old number," I told him. "It's changed. Can you give me the new one?" He nodded. Then I called Shoji. "Congratulations," I said. "You've finally released a proper album." He was clearly startled by both the call and the sentence. After a very long silence he said, "About the lyrics, there was no way around it. But I'll pay you." "So the only topic left between us is money," I said. "I'm sorry, Xingyun. You're such a good person. This is all my fault." I curled my lip. "Is that the standard excuse people use when they're rejecting someone?" "Xingyun, you're still too young. There are a lot of limitations and pressures in the real world that you can't understand." "No, I don't understand them. But Shoji, when I was with you I thought you were a genius. Even if I had to comfort myself after we split, I could still tell myself that geniuses are simply too difficult to love, and that even in defeat I had loved gloriously. But now? Now you're only selling your talent cheaply." When I hung up, I looked at Teng Xin and said, "See? I got hit by your curse after all." He sat down beside me and held out an arm. "If it hurts, bite me." So I did. I bit down and left a deep mark in his skin, a dark violet flower.

After the chaos of the entrance exams, no miracle came for me. I decided to repeat the year. Teng Xin and Fang Xu got into a university in the south, the exact same school and the exact same major. I called to congratulate him. On the day he left, I myself was still in the hospital, half asleep on a sickbed. Half a semester later, close to the New Year, he came home and brought me specialties from the south. We sat in a bright, spotless restaurant together, and by coincidence or mockery, one of Shoji's songs was playing in the shop. "Actually, I regret it," Teng Xin said. "I regret taking you to their rehearsal that day. If I hadn't, Shoji would have stayed nothing more than a name in your head." Back when everyone was forcing me to retreat, all I wanted was to hold my ground. I had not even noticed that in truth I had already lost. That was both my failure and my grandeur. "I broke up with Fang Xu," he added, turning the paper cup in his hand. "Why?" "At the time I was too angry with you, so I pursued her. It was a kind of indirect protest. It wasn't fair to her." "It's all right," I said lightly. "You'll find someone else. Next time the specialty you bring me from the south can be your girlfriend instead." He froze for a moment and then laughed too. The subject sank beneath the surface just like that. If Yan Ying had not told me later, I might never have known that when I fainted after the music festival, it wasn't Shoji who carried me back at all. It was Teng Xin, step by step, all the way to the car. His instincts had told him that if I was missing, then I must have gone to the festival, so he had chased me all the way to the county. All those times he tried to stop me using Yan Ying as an excuse had been driven by his own selfishness, yet he was too proud to admit he liked me. Later he even took the lyric booklet with A May's name on it and went to find Shoji. They fought so badly that those two cousins, who had once been so close, ended up estranged. For me. All of it was for me. But some things, once they are past, can only wound you if you keep turning them over.

By the time I graduated from university, Shoji had already become one of the hottest stars in music. His press conferences had moved from outdoor stages into hotel halls. Flashbulbs sketched the elegant line of his profile without mercy. I was working as an entertainment editor at a newspaper then, so of course I had to attend. He had been packaged now into something immaculate, speaking without a drop of water out of place, so polished that perhaps only I was still foolish enough to worry for him. No one there would ever know that I had once had an affair with the man everyone was surrounding. Our love had cooled into a piece of amber, something people could look at but never touch or relive. We had loved each other inside a tiny, cramped space. Back then the world had only been a few square meters wide. Our hearts had been free of distractions. One glance had been enough to see all the way to the horizon. But once we had seen seas and mulberry fields, once we had lived through enough change, returning to that same space only meant squeezing the world so hard that it could barely hold two people. Life is a game of chess, and love is only one move inside the balance of all the others. At eighteen I could never have understood that. Just as my eyes were wandering off into the distance, a colleague from another paper came over and said, "Come on, I'll introduce you to Shoji. You might even get an exclusive interview out of it. He's huge now." I curved my mouth into a smile, shook my hand lightly, and turned away without a word. The rain had passed, the clouds had broken, and it was already too late for us to meet again from the beginning. That was true of Shoji. It was true of Teng Xin too.