jump out of their sockets. The doctors pulled out handkerchiefs to wipe away their perspiration and appeared to breathe sighs of relief. For some reason, they didn’t approach Gu, but went to the two beds on the west side of the room. After asking questions for a while, they left the ward. Their unusual behavior made Gu’s brain alternately tighten and turn blank. After a while, Lei vomited blood. It fell onto his face and then streamed onto the pillow. The blood was blackish-red. He no longer struggled, nor could he struggle. Now he could move only his mouth, eyes, and nose. No. His ears, too. Gu noticed that his ears were moving, making him look as cute as an animal.
“Lei, let’s just take it easy” Gu found something to say.
“You————idiot!” he said.
Gu fell silent. The right side of his belly pulsed again, and he patted it. It throbbed even more. With waves of heat gushing in, he began feeling feverish. In the west part of the room, wardmates—a man and a woman—compared notes on cemetery reservations. Their meticulous, earnest attitude made Gu shiver with cold. Feeling partly hot and partly cold, he touched those spots and said softly, “This isn’t like my body.” He secretly intended to slip out after a while and look for those “catmen.” Ordinarily, he didn’t dare leave the ward, because as soon as he left, Lei would push the call button and he’d be hemmed in by nurses.
Gu got up stealthily and, making his way along the wall, left the room. At the doorway, he looked back and saw Lei glowering at him. This suddenly struck him as quite funny, and he almost laughed. At this time, the corridor was empty, and he stole over to the staircase and quietly went upstairs. As he climbed the stairs, he held his paunch with both hands and imagined that he was a kangaroo.
When he reached the sixth floor, he heard the “cat language.” But where were the “catmen”? No one was on the sixth floor corridor except for two nurses making their rounds with medications. After a moment’s rest, Gu continued climbing up. On the seventh floor, a worker delivering water was pushing his small cart. He stopped at the edge of the corridor and sat on the stairs to smoke a cigarette. Gu wondered how he could smoke near the wards. The person patted the floor next to him and invited Gu to sit down and have a cigarette with him. Surprised, Gu accepted his cigarette and a light. The cigarette was very strong. Gu had never seen this brand before; perhaps he had rolled it himself. Then he noticed that the cigarette case was plastic.
“You know how to roll your own cigarettes,” Gu commented admiringly.
“My buddies . . . We have the right tools . . .” he answered vaguely.
After finishing the cigarette, Gu thanked the worker and stood up, intending to continue up the stairs, when he suddenly heard the worker beside him make a cat sound. It was very harsh. But when he glanced at him, he looked as if nothing had happened. No one else was here. If he hadn’t made the sound, who had? Gu changed his mind; he wanted to see if this person would do anything else.
He waited a while longer, but the worker didn’t do anything; he just put his cigarette butt in his pocket, rose, and went back to the water cart. He pushed the cart into the ward. Gu subconsciously put his hand into his own pocket, took out the cigarette butt, and looked at it, but he saw nothing unusual. In a trance, he twisted and crushed the butt. He saw an insect with a shell moving around in the tobacco threads. The lower half of its body had been charred, but it still didn’t seem to want to die. Nauseated, Gu threw the butt on the floor and, without looking back, climbed to the eighth floor.
Everything was in a hubbub in the eighth floor corridor, where there were a lot of people. Probably someone’s condition had worsened, for he saw a cart of instruments being pushed into the ward. After resting for a moment, Gu started up to the ninth floor—the top floor.
When he had almost reached it, he looked up and was so startled that he nearly fell down the stairs. A person clothed all in black and wearing a ferocious opera mask stood there, looking as though he were waiting especially for Gu.
“Hello, Mr. Gu!” he said in a loud voice, as harsh as a chapel gong.
Gu sat on the floor, gasping for breath and unable to speak. Suddenly, he felt tired and his belly began aching. It seemed that no patients were on the ninth floor, so the corridor was empty. Gu wondered which room the “catmen” were in. Was this masked person a “catman,” too?
“I was your student!” the masked person said loudly. “I’m Ju—the one who jumped into the icy river to save someone. Have you forgotten?”
“You’re Ju? Take off your mask and let me look at you. So you didn’t disappear, after all!”
He took off the mask, and Gu saw the pale face of a middle-aged man who was a stranger to him. How could he be the Ju who had jumped into the icy river to save another person and then disappeared? That had been a warm-hearted boy. Something was wrong with this middle-aged man’s eyes; there was a film on them—probably cataracts. But never mind: Gu felt quite emotional about encountering a student he had liked in the past.
“I’ve been looking for you all these years, and not long ago, I finally ran into someone who knew where you were. He said you were hiding out here. This place is really concealed!”
Ju took Gu’s arm and said he wanted to go into a room to talk. They went into a ward and sat on the beds. It was dark with the blinds closed. Gu started coughing because of the dust raised from the bed. Puzzled, he wondered how long it had been since someone had stayed in this room. Ju sat on the bed opposite his. When Gu looked up to take stock of him, this middle-aged man seemed to have turned into a flimsy shadow. Gu watched him writhing as he lay down, lifted up the dusty quilt, and covered himself. Gu started coughing hard again.
“I’m so lucky,” he said, “to be in the same room with the teacher I loved and respected. Please sit on my bed and put your hand on my forehead, okay? I’ve been dreaming of this for a long time.”
When Gu placed his right hand on Ju’s forehead, his own body trembled as if an electric current were running through it. It was plain to see that this person really was Ju! Back then, he and Ju had been chasing a red leaf up to the cliff, talking along the way. Seen from the top of the cliff, their high school had looked like blackened scars on trees. It was that day that Gu had told Ju of his own unmentionable disease.
When someone knocked a few times on the door, Gu wanted to get up and open it, but Ju held him back.
“Who could it be?” Gu said.
“Ignore it. It’s those doctors. They knock a few times to confirm that no one is here and then they leave.”
Sure enough, Gu heard several persons’ footsteps going down the stairs.
“Don’t you find it hard to lie down in all of this dust?” Gu asked Ju.
“It’s wonderful here, Mr. Gu! Would you put your hand on my forehead again? Ah, thanks so much. It’s so peaceful here that three roosters are running over.”
Gu strained to recall what they had talked about back then and finally remembered. Ju had also divulged his own unmentionable disease. He told him there’d been a hole in his chest since birth and his heart protruded from that hole. He could see his own heart beating. Ordinarily, he covered the hole with gauze and then taped it in place. He confided to Gu that he didn’t feel this defect was a major handicap, and he also added innocently, “Look, I get along fine, don’t I?” Later, he jumped into the icy river and didn’t emerge. So was it just on a pretext that he had come to the hospital? Was the real reason that his life was also nearing its end?
“When
