Chapter 12

Chapter 12: Suicide, Murder, Homicide

How do you put the three words “suicide,” “murder,” and “homicide” in the same context?

On that rainy night when he was sixteen, after hearing Zhao Meiyou’s answer—“Because you ate my dad with me”—Diao Chan asked, calm as ever, “Is this some kind of test?”

Busy shoveling down dumplings, Zhao Meiyou said, “What test?”

“Testing how antisocial I am, that sort of thing,” Diao Chan said. “To decide whether you’ll take my job.”

“Not really.” Zhao Meiyou was wolfing it down. “As long as the money’s in place, everything else is negotiable.”

“That so.” Diao Chan nodded. “I get it.”

Then the boy walked over to the sink and crouched.

He bent over and threw up till the world went black.

“Oh come on, seriously? You’re puking that hard…” Zhao Meiyou leaned in like he was watching a show. Even a puddle of vomit in front of him didn’t slow his appetite; he kept stuffing his face, clicking his tongue. “But I think the drain here empties into the sea—good for him.”

As if to clarify for Diao Chan, Zhao Meiyou added helpfully, “I was actually planning to take a dump in the public toilet outside after I ate, and those pipes run down into a dozen layers of compost pits. My mom used to say she wanted to scatter my dad’s ashes into the septic tank.”

Maybe it was his imagination, but the kid in front of him seemed to be retching even harder.

Once he was down to stomach acid, Diao Chan finally stopped. He rinsed his mouth, looked at Zhao Meiyou through wet hair dripping cold water, and asked, “When should I bring you the deposit?”

“Anytime. We offer a full suite of packages: check out early, reincarnate sooner; keep someone hanging by a single breath; or the can’t-die-even-if-you-want-to special.” Zhao Meiyou smiled, sincere. “Our master’s craft is impeccable—venerable shop, a hundred years in the trade. Rest easy.”

“You won’t back out, will you?”

“As long as the money’s there, anything’s negotiable.”

“Alright then.” As if reassured, Diao Chan relaxed. Zhao Meiyou was about to ask for details on the murder-for-hire plan when the kid rolled up his sleeves and swung a punch.

Zhao Meiyou ducked his head out of the way. “We scrapping here? Or were you after some kind of venting service, sir?”

“I just fucking want to hit you.” Diao Chan snapped a kick—rare for him to swear. “Don’t hold back.”

“Can do.” Zhao Meiyou nodded, grabbed the boning knife off the counter, and brought the back of the blade down.

Even if a rich kid’s learned a bit of self-defense, he’s no match for someone born-and-bred in the Lower District. In under a minute, Zhao Meiyou taught the young master what it means to plunge from money man to little bitch.

The next day, Diao Chan came again. Even when a pampered young master hires a killer, he keeps it classy: on the dot, on time, money in full. Zhao Meiyou counted the cash, tore the seal off a good pack of cigarettes, and offered one over. “Smoke?”

Diao Chan’s answer was an earth-shaking coughing fit.

“Alright then.” Zhao Meiyou shrugged. “I can probably finish the job within a week. Any requirements for handling the body?”

Diao Chan’s voice was hoarse. “...Just don’t eat it.”

“No problem,” Zhao Meiyou agreed at once. “Though honestly, when it comes to disposing of a body, it’s a pretty cost-effective method...” He caught Diao Chan’s look, threw up his hands in surrender, and mimed zipping his lips.

A week later, Diao Chan came back to the butcher’s. The roll-up shutter was half down, light spilling across the tile at the threshold. He ducked in and nearly tripped.

He looked down: a pair of high heels.

“Hey, you’re here?” Zhao Meiyou called, cigarette clamped between his teeth, words muffled. “I just got back. Didn’t have time to clean up—sit wherever.”

He stood by the chopping block, took off his wig, ripped off the fake lashes, and artificial pearls pattered all over the floor. Then he unfastened his corset, padded barefoot across the tiles and almost slipped. Diao Chan caught him without thinking. “Give me a hand,” Zhao Meiyou said, passing over the corset and pointing at the cold case. “Stick the outfit in there—my feet are killing me.”

“What are you standing there for?” Zhao Meiyou lit another cigarette. “This is gear my mom left me. The beads oxidize and they’re a bitch to fix—hurry up and put it in the fridge.”

Ash drifted down; Diao Chan watched him squint, coughing on a stray spark. “Where did you go—what were you up to?”

“Doing your business, obviously,” Zhao Meiyou said as if it went without saying. Then, as if something occurred to him, he leaned into Diao Chan’s arms and rubbed his fingers together in the universal money sign. “If you sweeten the deal, we could do some other ‘business’ too.”

The next second he was tossed face-first to the floor with a smack.

“Tsk.” Unfazed, Zhao Meiyou rolled over and lay flat on the ground, smoke spiraling up. He heard the cold case door open and shut, then the tap of a dress shoe heel on the floor, a hard clack as it dropped, and then the muted tread of footsteps, coming closer.

Diao Chan had taken off his shoes. In gray cashmere socks, he came over, hugged his knees, and sat down beside Zhao Meiyou. “So—how’d it go?”

“What problem could there be?” Zhao Meiyou said, rubbing his lips with his fingers, crimson smeared across his face and hands. “Hey, tell me—what are you going to do about the funeral?”

Diao Chan said nothing. Zhao Meiyou finished his cigarette and went on, “How about this—tell me about your stuff. Turn your tears into spit and spit them out through the story. You’ll feel a lot better.”

Diao Chan glanced at him. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

“You’ve barely known me,” Zhao Meiyou scoffed. “For all we know, we even crossed paths up in the Upper District.” He hooked a high heel from across the floor with his toe. “Hey, did you know that at your place—the Diao Chan Group—one of the department heads is impotent?”

The topic came out of nowhere, but Zhao Meiyou revved up, words spilling: “One of my ‘big sisters’ is on long-term retainer with him—her whole job is to be his plus-one and prop him up at every big function. He gives her a monthly beauty allowance. Besides mistress, sometimes she has to play his mother or his daughter… I heard she even went to a doctor later, and her symptoms were different every time. The doctor couldn’t tell if she was performing split personalities or actually sick…”

Zhao Meiyou’s network ran wide, and the Lower District’s trade really was cradle to grave. Pick a block with decent feng shui and read the jumble of signs—unlicensed clinics, places that make fake papers, dentists, herbalists, coffin shops, and so on—enough to cover an ordinary life from birth to burial.

By the time Diao Chan had sat through the hundred and eight precautions for a sow’s postpartum care, the stiffness had finally left his eyes; the lines of his face eased. He’d been clenching his jaw the whole time.

“…so that summer, at four in the morning, my mom dragged out the suitcase she’d stashed under the bed, left a note, and vanished. My entire inheritance was a heap of expired makeup and dance dresses cut for an overwhelming bustline.”

Zhao Meiyou wrapped up the story. “She said she was off to die for love with Dawn; to this day I still can’t tell whether that was a poetic flourish or whether one of her men was actually named Dawn.”

After a moment, Diao Chan’s voice drifted down from overhead. “Do you miss her?”

“I have to say she spared me some trouble on that one,” Zhao Meiyou exhaled a stream of smoke. “She used to tell me to kill her the minute she sprouted her first crow’s-feet. Every year, before I blew out my birthday candles, I had to announce at the top of my lungs that year’s creative method for killing my mother.”

This time Diao Chan finally laughed. “Your mom was just messing with you.”

Zhao Meiyou gave a lazy little huff, with a hint of pride in it.

The smile lingered on Diao Chan’s face. Zhao Meiyou’s wildly off-key stories were like a mask, washing everything in gaudy, comic color. The mask itself never changed; beneath the greasepaint it cast a safe zone. With the mask on, you could show your truest expressions, your truest self.

Diao Chan began, slowly, to tell his own story: parents married for the family’s sake, an affection that was cool and faint. His mother was a textbook ice beauty, frail, forever convalescing. The house was too big; he hardly saw her day to day. She would surface now and then, dressed to the nines on holidays, or at the dining table on a night with the fire going.

Guests, however, always said he’d inherited her East-Asian eyes and brows—like jade, an ancient mineral that once came out of the mountains and now could only be synthesized.

Diao Chan excelled in his studies. He had a study so large it bordered on absurd. Before he was formally brought into family affairs, he secretly imagined he might become a scholar, with a little spare time each day to sit at the piano.

When his mother heard, she told him, “It’s good to have ideas of your own, and being a scholar is a respectable profession.”

And of course the second half: “Provided your last name isn’t Diao.”

It was the expected answer; Diao Chan didn’t react. Boys of his background were like that—an arrogant kind of obedience about them. He thought the matter was over, until months later a servant suddenly informed him the lady wished him to set aside an hour every day to come to her room.

His mother’s room was like a secret chamber. His parents would only occasionally sleep a night in the ancestral master bedroom; the rest of the time they kept rooms of their own. In this, they displayed impeccable breeding. As far as Diao Chan knew, neither had ever set foot in the other’s domain.

In another sense, in a house where everything was regimented, his mother’s room meant absolute safety.

He arrived on time, knocked, and froze.

His mother was seated at a piano.

They didn’t talk much. She demonstrated basic fingerings and the rudiments of reading music; the hour slipped by.

After that, he set aside an hour every day to go to his mother’s room.

The break came when he was sixteen.

Because of a not-too-severe cold, his mother died.

Diao Chan couldn’t have said what he was feeling. His mother had always been frail, ill on and off for so long that he’d had time to steel himself. Perhaps sensing her own end drawing near, in the days before she died this ever-conventional grand lady taught him one last piece. It was the first time he had learned anything outside the classical repertoire.

He played that piece at her funeral. Guests murmured; his father flew into a rage; after that he was forbidden to touch the piano. Like every hackneyed story about a boy, he tried to run away and on the road met a few strange things—though for someone raised behind deep walls, many things could count as strange. In the end he joined a government agency, one of the few places his father’s hand could not reach.

He returned home months later, braced for his father’s wrath. Instead, the whole mansion moved as if none of it had ever happened: servants coming and going; the gardener trimming lily of the valley—his mother’s favorite flower.

“Young master.” The butler, catching sight of him, looked mildly surprised. “When did you step out?”

Then, as if remembering himself: “You’ll be late today—off you go.”

“Late”—within these walls, Diao Chan had the privilege of being late to anything. Everyone would make allowances for the young master of the Diao Chan family, lining up excuses for his tardiness: the young master is so busy; something important must have detained him.

Except for one thing.

Diao Chan shoved the door open.

His mother was seated at the piano.

She turned her head and, in that cool yet affectionate tone he’d heard for years and knew by heart, said to him, “You’re late.”

...

He went to see psychiatrists, even the celebrated psych clinics in Megalopolis.

But they all regarded him with a mild, probing gaze and told him, “Young Master Diao Chan, there’s nothing wrong with your mind.”

It was as if it really had all been a dream—starting from the moment he clambered over the estate wall to his return—those intervening months carved clean out. In the courtyard, the lily of the valley never withered, blooming cold and fierce. He sounded out many people in private—about his flight, about his mother’s death. The butler, after hearing him out, lifted an eyebrow; surprise smoothed almost at once into matter-of-fact composure: “Young master, you mustn’t think like that.”

Diao Chan couldn’t tell whether his supposedly discreet inquiries had turned into a kind of cue. He had once told a servant it was best not to leave the birdcage in the corridor—the cat might eat it.

The operative word in that sentence could have been “corridor,” or it could have been “eat.”

After that, he never saw the bird again.

Within a few months his mother caught a cold again—the identical illness, no final words, the same death.

The funeral was as lavish as ever. Well-preserved ladies whispered behind their fans. Diao Chan played that piano piece—so offensive to their taste—from first light until dark. Once night fell, he packed a bag and climbed the wall again.

This time he was gone only a few days. Standing once more before the gates, he looked at the lily of the valley in the courtyard and understood how grave it was.

His mother was still in the room, waiting for him.

His mother, who had died twice, was waiting for him alive.