It was a rainy evening, cold winds howling through the city, swirling fallen leaves in their wake. Le Yao and I stood at the gate of the Municipal Maternal and Child Health Hospital, umbrellas in hand. Amid the surging crowd, she stared at me, her face pale and ashen.
"Zhaoyang, I'm pregnant."
I froze for a split second, then stared back, eyes wide. "Then go find the man who got you pregnant! Why did you call me out here for this?"
"You're the only man I've been with this whole year. If not you, then who?"
"Do you believe me when I say you're the only woman I've slept with this year?"
"Zhaoyang, are you even a man?"
"We were just fooling around. Don't pin this mess on me just because you got into trouble. If you want me to take responsibility, show me some proof. Don't come at me with empty words—who the hell wants to be a dad out of the blue for no reason?"
Le Yao fell silent for a moment, then said, "I already had the abortion. There's no proof left."
I flared up. "Do you really think I'm some easy mark? You get rid of the baby, then..." I raised my hand, then let it drop in utter exasperation. "Then you turn around and tell me it was mine? Are you pretending to be naive, or am I actually stupid? ...Le Yao, we're both adults. Can't we act like it?"
Le Yao bit her lip and stared at me. After a long pause, she said, "So you refuse to take responsibility, huh? Tomorrow I'll go to your company..."
"Damn it... Is that really necessary?!" I snapped, furious.
Le Yao bit her lip hard and stared at me, yet I thought she was a terrific actress. We'd met at a bar, and what followed was a one-night stand. A woman who frequented bars, claiming I was the only man she'd been with all year—if I believed that, I'd be a complete fool.
I had no desire to keep this going. I pulled out my wallet, took out all the hundred-yuan bills inside, and held them out to her. "This is all you want, isn't it? Take the money and leave me alone for good!"
Le Yao said nothing, and made no further attempt to argue. She nodded, turned around, and walked back into the hospital with her umbrella, as if she still had some medical bills to settle...
Watching her lonely figure vanish into the rain, an indescribable feeling welled up in me. Even though I didn't believe the baby had been mine, even though she annoyed me to no end, I couldn't shake the sense that she'd been having a hard time lately. Otherwise, she never would have resorted to blackmailing me like this.
After a long silence, I finally called out to her. "Wait..."
Le Yao turned back to look at me.
I pulled a bank card from my wallet and held it out. "You can overdraw on this. You just had an operation—go buy something nice to nourish your body."
But Le Yao didn't take it. "...I don't need it. Seeing that you're willing to take responsibility was all I wanted. I came to you because I refuse to be just some random fling, to get pregnant and lose it all without a single word of accountability."
...
At the bar, I drank my sorrows away as I waited for Fang Yuan—the only friend I could truly open up to in this city, who was also my colleague.
From the very first day I'd stepped foot in this place, I'd seen countless lonely women and empty men, nursing all kinds of drinks. Some sat in silence, while others scanned the room with hungry eyes, searching for something they called "drowning their sorrows in wine and oblivion".
The truth was, the moment we shed our daytime selves and let our souls get lost in this neon-lit chaos, we were already living in that oblivion.
I couldn't remember exactly which night it was that I'd started calling this bar my home. I loved the women here, swaying their hips to the music; I loved the flickering stage lights, the rainbow of colorful cocktails, the heady mix of perfume and cigarette smoke. I loved this place of drunken escape—and in that escape, I buried my messy past, carving it into a tombstone for all to see, yet no one to mourn.
I lit a cigarette, peeled the plastic wrap off the pack, and held it over my eyes. Staring at the flickering lights through the crinkled film, my body swayed unsteadily, and in the refracted glow, I seemed to see the decadence of a muddling-through life—so transfixed that I lost myself in the sight.
...
Fang Yuan snatched the plastic wrap from my hand, and the world snapped back into sharp focus in an instant.
"What's the rush to call me over?" He set his briefcase down, pulled a cigarette from my pack, and lit it for himself.
"Lend me some money. I got blackmailed, damn it!"
"Knocked another girl up?" Fang Yuan said, unfazed as if this were an old story.
"Fuck off with that 'another'! This time I really got scammed..."
"Who's the one pulling this on you now?"
"Why the hell do you ask so many damn questions?"
"I lend you thousands every single time. The least you can do is tell me who's robbing me blind with my money!"
"Le Yao." I lit another cigarette, my anger still boiling over.
"That freelance model?"
"Who else? Her circle's a total mess. She said I'm the only guy she's slept with all year—do you believe that? Fang Yuan, if this happened to you, would you buy it?" I banged my fingers on the table in agitation, the wood cracking with sharp, rapid thuds.
"This kind of shit would never happen to me. Besides, she wouldn't stoop to conning you out of a few grand, would she? She shot all the promotional posters for our department store last month—she made over ten grand just for that..."
I cut him off with a snort of contempt. "Have you seen her spending habits? Ten grand wouldn't last her a single month. She messed up with some guy, has no money to clean up the mess, and now she's crawling back to me, her easy lay... I'm such an idiot. I should've never been nice enough to hook her up with our company. She's made a fortune off me, and now she stabs me in the back. Does she have any professional morals left at all?!"
Fang Yuan ignored my rage, leaning in and lowering his voice. "Did you use protection?"
I wracked my brain, memories fuzzy with the haze of too much alcohol that night. I couldn't recall a thing. After a long pause, I mumbled, "Obviously not... otherwise I wouldn't be getting scammed like this!"
Fang Yuan shot me a suspicious glance, sighing heavily after a moment. "Zhaoyang, we've been friends for nearly ten years. I really want to talk some sense into you sometimes. I know Jian Wei breaking up with you hit you hard, but it's been two years. You don't have to keep punishing yourself like this... Youth doesn't wait for anyone. Just find a nice girl and settle down, okay?"
The name Jian Wei jolted me. I froze for a split second before snapping, "Mind your own damn business. I'm doing just fine!"
"Fine with nothing but trouble, is more like it!"
...
Fang Yuan went on trying to reason with me for ages, and I gritted my teeth through it, half-listening. In the end, he spat out, "You're just a lump of mud that can't be propped up!" and stormed off in a huff—forgetting all about me asking to borrow money.
Luckily, I'd been hanging around this bar for two years, often bringing friends here to drink, so I was on good terms with the owner. I put the tab on my account for now.
Stepping out of the bar, I opened my umbrella and walked down the rain-soaked street, a sharp, bitter sense of being utterly alone washing over me. I'd struggled in this city for two years, and all I had to show for it was endless emptiness and loneliness. To escape this poison of despair, I'd had to put on a mask to hide my shame, one that let me wallow in recklessness without a shred of guilt.
But no matter how hard I clung to the edge of this pain, she would never come back.
...
Lost in my daze, I walked for several stops before reaching my neighborhood—an old, run-down place with no property management at all. The first day I moved in, the elderly ladies in the complex told me it had been built in the early 1990s. Time had gnawed away at every building, leaving them gaunt and weathered, yet they stood packed tightly together, as if afraid to be alone. It made me think they had a life of their own, that in the dead of night, they whispered to each other, easing decades of loneliness.
With a cigarette dangling from my lips, I pulled my keys out of my pocket and headed for my building—the only one in the complex covered in ivy. Every summer, its south wall blazed with green. If these buildings had genders, this one was undoubtedly a woman. A cold, unfeeling woman.
One that always made you feel sorry for her.
...
What caught me off guard was the red Audi Q7 parked at the foot of the shabby building. In the two years I'd lived here, I'd never seen a car worth more than 500,000 yuan in this neighborhood—not once.
I didn't give it a second thought, whistling as I trundled up the stairwell to my place. But when I reached the top floor, I froze—my door was ajar. I'd definitely locked it when I left. My first thought was a burglar, but after a quick steadying breath, I remembered I hadn't paid Old Li, the landlord, my rent in two months. It was almost certainly him come to hound me for it.
I pushed the door open. Old Li was sitting on the sofa with a strange woman, and on the coffee table lay a set of Audi Q7 keys—no doubt the red car downstairs was hers.
A thought immediately flashed through my mind: what trick had this petty, shrewd old landlord pulled to bring a woman as elegant and untouchable as a white lily into this shabby little room? I was utterly baffled.