From the novel: April Affairs
Below deck, the air was stagnant and close. There were five or six cabins for the crew to rest in — each cramped, like the sliding-door compartments of an old-style train.
A crew member had cleared one out specifically for them. They pushed the door open and stepped inside: upper and lower bunks on either side, with barely enough room to turn around in the passage between them.
Luggage stowed on the upper bunk. Wei Lai and Cen Jin sat on the lower bunks opposite each other. For a moment, there was nothing to say. The scant familiarity built up between them the previous night, in the wake of the crisis, seemed to have dissolved entirely with the coming of daylight.
Perhaps because of the injury, or simply from exhaustion of body and spirit, Cen Jin pulled her hat down — this time without even a word of acknowledgment — and lay down and went straight back to sleep.
Wei Lai piled the bedding and pillow into a heap to use as a backrest and settled in with nothing to do. He hoped he wouldn’t fall asleep; after the smuggling ship, he had never once slept on a boat — he had a feeling that if he dozed off, he would have unpleasant dreams.
He wasn’t sure how long had passed before his eyelids began to grow heavy. Sure enough, what you fear finds you — he was back in the dim hold of the smuggling vessel.
The air was foul — body odor, the smell of excrement and urine, the sour stench of vomit, and the reek of mold, all fermenting together in the sealed space. On the ship’s boards, in the corners, people lay sprawled in every direction — disheveled, half dead. In the dark, you couldn’t tell the men from the women. Disaster levels everything.
He saw himself as a small child, propping himself up on arms as thin as kindling, turning to the father lying beside him: “Why did we have to leave home?”
There had been no warning whatsoever — his father had come to collect him directly from his primary school classroom and brought him straight to the ship. His schoolbag was still there, with his textbooks inside: language arts, mathematics, moral education.
His father never answered. He never answered, not once.
To this day, Wei Lai had never quite worked it out: so many people leave their homes and travel far away, as if clarity and direction can be found in distant places — when in reality, they are simply carrying their confusion to a different location.
The ship pitched and rolled from side to side; the voyage stretched out as if it would never end.
Wei Lai opened his eyes.
For a moment he felt disoriented. Close to his ear was a very faint rustling sound. He planted his hand on the bunk and started to push himself up — then heard Cen Jin speak.
“Don’t move.”
He had no idea when she had woken. She sat cross-legged on the bunk opposite, head lowered, drawing.
Using him as a model?
Wei Lai thought it wasn’t unreasonable to go along with it — after last night, he had developed quite a good impression of her.
He held the posture he had been in when he woke and took stock of it. Not particularly elegant: one arm tucked under his head, neck tilted to one side, one leg dangling off the bunk, the other stretched out beyond the edge.
He tried to console himself: maybe it makes you look like you have a good figure. Like you’re very long.
He had never been a model for a drawing before. Did he have to hold this position the entire time? How long? Half an hour at minimum, probably. They might as well chat a little — just sitting here in silence was stifling.
His forehead, the back of his calf, behind his ear, his chest — all inexplicably beginning to itch.
But this angle was good for observing Cen Jin. She had no expression; the top of the pencil moved above the edge of the paper, shifting with a soft rasping sound, faint light brushing the nape of her neck.
She was still wearing the same necklace.
The necklace must have special significance — who gave it to her? Jiang Min?
Wei Lai frowned: she had gone to Jiang Min’s lecture without any apparent feeling, burned a hole in his shirt, and called it “settling things.”
He couldn’t help himself.
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“Go ahead.”
“You and Jiang Min — what kind of relationship did you have?”
The pencil tip swaying in her hand stilled, barely perceptibly, then everything continued as before: “An ordinary relationship between a man and a woman.”
“What does ordinary… look like?”
“When there’s no disaster, you get along amicably. When disaster strikes, you each fly your separate ways.”
Oh.
In Wei Lai’s mind’s eye, a vast expanse of woodland appeared, countless birds flapping their wings, scattering in every direction in a disorganized flurry.
Reasonable enough — in this day and age, men and women are both restless. Even without disaster looming, each harbors a heart already half-ready to scatter.
“Did he ever wrong you in any way?”
Otherwise — you were the one who betrayed first; on what grounds do you go and burn someone’s shirt?
“Nothing in particular… he talked too much, said things I didn’t care to hear.”
Wei Lai felt something like regret — running his mouth after a breakup wasn’t illegal, but it couldn’t be called a virtue either: “He went around telling people you… betrayed him?”
“Not that either. At his wedding, he said that having survived the ordeal brought on by a former partner, he thanked God for not letting him die for the wrong person.”
She raised her eyes; her gaze slid over the sharp edge of the drawing paper toward him, word by word: “He called me an ‘ordeal.'”
You were his ordeal, though.
The man was a scholar — the gravest hardship of his life was probably failing to secure a full scholarship. He nearly took his own life with pills over your betrayal, almost lost everything, and could no longer protect the Earth — no wait, protect humanity. And yet you won’t allow him to call you his ordeal?
Wei Lai bit his tongue. He did not speak up for Jiang Min. It was clear enough that Cen Jin could go and rescue strangers on a ghost ship and at the same time be entirely narrow-minded — he was afraid that one day his own clothes might also end up with two burned holes in them.
The arm tucked behind his head was going numb. Wei Lai lost patience: “Are you done yet?”
She was putting the finishing touches on it, adding the date as a signature: “Just drawing for fun — I’m not planning to keep it. Do you want to see?”
The drawing paper was passed over. Wei Lai’s gaze fell on the page, and in that instant, he sat bolt upright.
Pencil, sketch style — several endearingly plump little pigs, one leading the way at the front, the others following behind.