Chapter 81#

During the gap in the afternoon, the driver had already made a run back. Other arrangements had been made for most of what they’d bought during the day to be delivered to the Stone Drum Island sanatorium — they didn’t need to worry about it themselves. Yan Zishu took the opportunity to mock Fu Jinchi as a capitalist of the worst kind.

“Which makes you what?” Fu Jinchi asked.

“Currently subsisting on someone else’s generosity,” Yan Zishu said, with complete lucidity and a small smile, “but at my core, still one of the exploited.”

“Save your voice.” Fu Jinchi said. “After talking to the Ding person all evening — you’re not tired?”

“You have no standing to be jealous about that.” Yan Zishu pressed his fingers against his hand. “Tonight I was a completely decent person all evening, more than can be said for everyone.”

Fu Jinchi laughed in an unhurried way: “That’s good of you. Thank you for your trouble.”

After a full day of wandering and seeing things, the whole world looked new, and there was a particular kind of tiredness that came with that — the pleasant exhaustion that followed a stretch of heightened energy.

Fu Jinchi was holding his hand. Yan Zishu’s hands ran cold, as always. Fu Jinchi reached over and pressed the back of his hand to Yan Zishu’s forehead. Yan Zishu shook his head: “It’s fine. I’m not running a temperature.”

He sometimes ran a low fever when he’d pushed himself too hard, but his forehead was cool now — genuinely fine.

Fu Jinchi relaxed, gave the driver the route and destination — which was not the ferry terminal. The hour was late, and heading to the pier now meant the last ferry might not be catchable.

There was nothing requiring an urgent return, and the medication was with them. Spending the night on the main island was perfectly manageable.

The driver made a slow circuit along the waterfront boulevard, taking in the night scenery as they went, and the Lincoln eventually stopped in front of what appeared to be a factory warehouse.

Hong Kong was full of hills; not only were the city streets constantly going up and down, but many buildings followed the slope of the terrain, stacked at varying heights. You’d climb to the top floor of a building thinking you’d gone high enough, step outside, look up, and find the hillside still rising above you.

The warehouse stood in exactly such a position. Yan Zishu couldn’t even gauge what elevation they were at — mountain-high or sea-level, it was impossible to say. What he saw was a mottled iron door of no great distinction, one dim yellowish lamp overhead, and no signage whatsoever.

Just inside the door: a long, narrow staircase heading down into the dark.

Yan Zishu glanced at Fu Jinchi, asked nothing, and followed. Inside was nothing like what the outside had promised.

Not a warehouse at all — an art hotel. The design was post-industrial in every dimension, full of the particular personality of someone with strong ideas about space. Walking through after checking in was like navigating a raw, cool, dark-toned labyrinth.

Fu Jinchi collected the keycards at the front desk, and said with amusement: “You just walked in. Not worried I’d sell you?”

Yan Zishu had in fact felt his pulse kick up a little, and had the familiar, reluctant appreciation for the man’s ability to locate these extraordinary places.

They found their room through the maze. Yan Zishu was genuinely tired; he walked in and curled up on the sofa, turning to look around.

Having traveled for work regularly for some years and accumulated extensive experience with upscale hotels, he’d found the novelty wore off within the first two years on the job. By now, even a five-star suite didn’t produce much of a response. Looking at this hotel, he caught himself approaching it the way he used to analyze Fu Jinchi’s hotel properties — his mind running immediately to profit margins and operational efficiency — then caught himself and offered himself a dry private acknowledgment that the mercenary thinking was apparently structural.

Fu Jinchi seemed untroubled by any of this, and turned on the television as he passed it. The room filled with manufactured cheerfulness.

In that sound they held each other and stayed that way for a good stretch.

In silence, neither of them speaking, chest to chest, heartbeats gradually losing their individual distinctions.

The room had bathrobes, but Yan Zishu didn’t particularly want to move. He gave Fu Jinchi a nudge — go shower first.

Fu Jinchi kissed the side of his neck and went to the bathroom. When he emerged, the person on the sofa was soundly, quietly asleep.

The main light was off, but the television was still on, the volume turned very low — close to white noise, voices just barely audible, the kind of murmur that pulled you under. Yan Zishu was curled into himself, the shifting light from the screen moving across his sleeping face.

Fu Jinchi stood there for a moment. The place was entirely different, and yet something in the scene caught him — a drifting quality, a déjà vu.

He remembered: the first time he had appeared uninvited at Yan Zishu’s building, and had been permitted to stay as an honored guest.

That had been a weekend; Yan Zishu had said he needed to work the next day. He had been like a perfectly calibrated workaholic with the emotional temperature of a thermostat. When Fu Jinchi had been seen out, one part of him had felt the satisfaction of having acquired something genuinely challenging to acquire. Another part had thought: this person has no instinct for pleasure — but that, too, was interesting. There’s plenty of time to teach him.

Round and round, through everything, and the person beside him was still here.

They would have a long time yet to tangle themselves together.

As long as he was careful not to lose him again.

The corner of Fu Jinchi’s mouth lifted.

He went over, carried Yan Zishu to the bed, sat at the headboard, and looked down at the sleeping face for a while. Something occurred to him. He took out his phone and aimed the camera at the small mole beneath Yan Zishu’s eye, then woke him to take his medication.

“I took a photo of you.” Fu Jinchi murmured close to his ear. “Is that all right? This time?”

“I suppose…” Yan Zishu half-opened his eyes, sat up, and swallowed the water from Fu Jinchi’s hand. He came back to himself slowly, and then suddenly smiled — he’d worked out what Fu Jinchi was referring to. “Let me see it after I shower.”

The next morning, both of them slept through it entirely, and woke to order in-room dining — breakfast and lunch combined.

The cart arrived with one black coffee and one Hong Kong-style milk tea. Fu Jinchi didn’t care for sweet things. Yan Zishu, meanwhile, had just recalled a moment from the day before when Fu Jinchi had made him lose face, and with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, added two sugar sticks to the milk tea, stirred it, and held it out.

Fu Jinchi looked at his expression, accepted his fate, and took two sips. Then the cup was suddenly no longer at his lips. He looked up to find Yan Zishu, with a small satisfied look at the corner of his eyes, finishing the remaining half of the cloyingly sweet milk tea himself, then sliding the black coffee over.

Fu Jinchi’s throat moved. He watched Yan Zishu put his mouth to the same cup he’d just been drinking from and drain the rest of the milk tea without a moment’s pause — entirely natural about it — and felt the strong pull to make this indirect thing into a direct one.

His phone rang: the driver checking on the day’s plans.

They’d originally intended to go back to the island fairly quickly. But now that they were out — partly because the street-level energy of Hong Kong’s festive atmosphere was genuinely contagious (even the post-industrial art hotel had a black Christmas tree by the entrance) — there seemed no particular reason not to stay a few more days.

On the subject of how to spend one’s time in a city, Yan Zishu was easily a hundred paces behind Fu Jinchi.

Fu Jinchi could conjure a list of places to go as though pulling them from nowhere, a comprehensive walking map of himself.

Yan Zishu leaned against his shoulder and asked: “When you were in Hong Kong before — what did you actually do with your time?”

Fu Jinchi said: “All the things I just listed — spending every day mastering every form of food and entertainment available.”

“And then?”

“And then…” Fu Jinchi thought about it. “Figuring out how to cultivate the right people on the golf course. How to engineer a coincidental meeting with someone well-connected over afternoon tea. How to talk about horse racing with other rich young men and build rapport that way. That entire genre of calculated social climbing.”

Yan Zishu was quiet. He looked up from the side and took in the clean line of Fu Jinchi’s jaw.

Fu Jinchi raised an eyebrow, gave a small oh of apparent just-remembered: “The Ding person said he’d seen me somewhere. Probably turning up on a golf course cultivating someone, now that I think of it.” Said with complete composure, not a trace of self-consciousness.

Yan Zishu laughed and reached over to straighten his collar. “Don’t joke around — tell me a few real things.”

“That would be embarrassing.” Fu Jinchi still had a trace of wryness at the edge of his mouth.

But he told him anyway.

Yan Zishu listened without looking away, his expression steady, the whites of his eyes very clear.

At some point in the telling, it shifted naturally into a decision: they would go and visit the places Fu Jinchi had known here, trace the path of what had been.

And perhaps meet some of the people he’d been close to along the way.

This was Yan Zishu’s suggestion. Fu Jinchi looked at him for a moment with an expression that was difficult to name, seemed mildly surprised — then said nothing against it. His tone grew less flippant, and he talked more about the life he’d actually lived here.

Being sent to Hong Kong, for Fu Jinchi, had been neither particularly good nor particularly terrible, to be honest about it.

He had watched the situation with cool eyes, and thought of it the way he’d thought of everything else that had happened to him: an objective circumstance, one thing among others.

Settling here had, at first, meant some temporary distance from all the irritating complications of the eastern district — which had its uses. But Fu Jinchi, with the temperament of someone who generated trouble, found the quiet unsatisfying fairly quickly. And Fu Weishan’s mother’s side would never truly let him settle in peace anyway. In which case, Fu Jinchi had thought: then keep fighting. One way of living was as good as another.

A person watching Fu Jinchi’s life from the outside, at that time, would probably have said: hard going. Not easy.

He had received his share of Fu Zhizhang’s estate, and immediately met with fierce opposition — lawyers finding one pretext after another to dispute it, tying it up for years before he could touch it. Meanwhile, he’d been living a life of late nights and entertainment in Hong Kong, simultaneously keeping Fu Weishan’s mother’s informants lulled and threading himself into the social fabric of the local wealthy young — playing every angle, making himself useful in all directions, enduring the mockery of people who found him a figure of low comedy, a provincial upstart forcing his way into upper-class circles.

There had been setbacks and condescension, certainly. But with some nerve and quick thinking, he’d given plenty back in kind.

Perhaps Fu Jinchi’s greatest asset was that he’d always maintained a kind of detached playfulness about all of it — treating each maneuver as a mission to complete. Winning was a bonus; losing wasn’t worth mourning, and he carried no particular weight of pride or shame.

He had clawed his way through everything, growing however he could in whatever narrow gap was available, rarely stopping to evaluate whether his life looked respectable or not.

Fu Jinchi knew the survival rules of the grey zone. Better than any status symbol, what mattered was what you actually had in your hands.

Wherever he was — Hong Kong or anywhere else — he had always been something of an anomaly: working the vanities and intrigues of the privileged social world, circulating between old money and new money, always affable on the surface and always calculating underneath, and all the while holding the world of the wealthy in quiet contempt and having no real interest in joining it. He ended up belonging to none of the groups, had found a foothold but stood in a landscape that struck him, ultimately, as something of a farce.

Rather than foolishly seeking belonging in any of them, Fu Jinchi preferred to stand in the river and watch their self-important comedy from the bank.

Yan Zishu had been listening in silence, and then found his attention drifting — to a story he’d read when he was young. The third bank of the river.

Fu Jinchi was exactly like the man who refused all counsel and would not come ashore, alone in a small boat, making a decades-long drift down the river for reasons no one quite understood. The little boat under his feet was his own third bank — belonging to no land. He wouldn’t come ashore, and he wouldn’t allow anyone else to board. It had been unclear, then, where the current would finally take him.

Yan Zishu found he had tightened his grip on Fu Jinchi’s arm without noticing.

They stayed on the main island for nearly a week, changing hotels two or three times, moving through different neighborhoods. They didn’t visit the famous attractions, but they did follow Fu Jinchi’s old geography — small trace by small trace, detail by detail.

The guesthouse where he’d landed hastily when he first arrived. The serviced apartment he’d relocated to later when the harassment became too persistent. The cha chaan teng he loved but rarely had a reason to visit. The glass walkway where he’d once stood and looked at the view alone. The nightclub where he’d performed friendship with people worth knowing and people not worth knowing. The spot where someone had mocked him as a stray dog. The place where someone had called him a nouveau riche to his face. The location of a failed con attempt and a failed setup.

Times of disgrace and times of success. Times of smallness and times of recklessness. Both the good stretches and the bad.

He had never been someone who treated face as something precious. Yan Zishu wanted to know, and Fu Jinchi told him, without ceremony.

Except that the more Yan Zishu heard, the more puzzled he became: “Why does it sound like… everyone was just picking on poor you?”

This helpless, hard-done-by figure was Fu Jinchi?

What about all the times Fu Jinchi had retaliated?

Fu Jinchi let out a short sound, then couldn’t hold back and laughed properly — caught Yan Zishu and pulled him into a back alley to kiss him.

“It can’t be helped,” Fu Jinchi said quietly. “I really am very pitiable. So you have to be good to me.”

Yan Zishu slid his fingers into his hair, and answered him gently.

The shops had still been shuttered when they’d gone out in the morning; in what felt like a blink, layers of neon signs were flickering above them, the streets dense with the smoke and noise of ordinary life and simultaneously as electric as something from a cyberpunk film. Red, blue, and green light washed over their faces and covered whatever expressions they were wearing.

In this place that was not quite familiar, not quite foreign, Yan Zishu simply wanted to fill in the piece of Fu Jinchi’s life that he himself had not been present for.