Little Li
little li
Xiao Li jintian wanshang he pijiu. Tonight, Little Li will drink.
The sound of my own pencil against the desk is slowly making me crazy. It’s Saturday night, and as usual, I’m alone in my dorm with the half-light on, holding the beat-up Berol pencil I use for doodling in class, marrying hopscotch and tic-tac-toe on paper. My mind is scattered in five different directions that aren’t related to Chinese. Grammar is a suggestion. Xiao Li jintian qing wo chi wanfan.
I’m jealous of Little Li and his textbook comrades. I’ve always been jealous of him and the fantastic world where he lives, where nothing exists except cheerful greetings and the polite way to treat someone to dinner. Little Li isn’t real. Even alcohol has no hold on him. Little Li can he pijiu, drink beer, all he wants, and he’ll never be anything but ink.
Little Li always finds the time to liaotian, shoot the breeze, with Little Bai. I think that out of all of the people he spends time with, I’m the most jealous of her. Little Bai will watch from the pages of that textbook while Little Li falls over drunk in the stairwell, runs to the bathroom to throw up, stumbles cross-eyed into her su she, her dorm, slurs out a few fragmented stories, and falls asleep. He’ll squirm around with his eyebrows in a knot like he’s in pain, and still, Little Bai will bow and smile and ask where the washroom is.
I have a real Li. And it just so happens that as of this week in class, we’ve learned the words for all the things he does on weekends. Shuijiao, chifan, he pijiu. Sleep, eat, drink. I wanted to tell him, just as a joke; I tried earlier today when he was doing shots in the lounge to get ready for the party at Tau, but he was too drunk to notice.
Li is one of those rare halfies with the Chinese on the dad’s side. His hair is dyed strawberry blonde, circa some time last month; it’s shaggy and somehow curly. He looks like an anime character. I’ve never been attracted to him, but I can certainly see how someone would be. We’ve been compared to Holmes and Watson – the opinions I have about strangers I tell my friends, the opinions I have about my friends I tell my best friend, and the opinions I have about my best friend I tell to Li. We have a relationship that’s neither here nor there, and it might eventually put me in the asylum.
My cell phone rattles on the table. I flip it open immediately – I’m never so quick to answer it as when I’m doing work and don’t want to be.
From: Li Xiang
ni aii laAAAma
2:07am 9/23/08
Li’s drunk texts are a bastard hybrid of all the words I’ve learned in class that week – a cumulative exam of comprehension and retention. This is a sign that he’s passed that point of human reason where words have meanings, into that horrible place in his mind where letting go is the only thing left.
– – –
I’m being crushed by bodies. I’m wheezing, lightheaded, full of air and collapsing. Someone else wants to dance with me, but I push her away.
Everything is blue, red, green. It blows my mind every time it changes, and oh, how it changes, too often. Sways, swirls, undulates. The vibrations under foot tell me where to go, and I follow; I’m throwing myself around, jerking my shoulders from side to side. I feel my body swaying to the pulse, dancing. Is this what it’s like to be free? To be high, dreaming, dead?
These are faceless people, long plastic limbs with moving joints and blonde wigs and black paint running down those smooth eerie faces. Tight jeans, size-zero. I could put my hand around them and squeeze, and chhk, they’d splinter. Too much lipstick. Too much leg, too much flesh. Where are the girls I like? The thought swims against my forehead but then it’s green and the bottom drops out of my brain. I feel like I’m falling, but that’s the stairs, going by my feet faster than I can catch them.
Fuck Tau. The girls I like are not here. Not size-zero. Healthy. Baggy jeans and wispy hair, no jewelry, no makeup. My head is so clear when I’m about to throw up.
Why can’t I have the clarity and the sense without the spinning and the vertigo? There are no colors any more. I’m outside. Where are they and where is she and where am I? I’m Xiang Ming-li, for God’s sake, and I should have everything. I’m Ming-li Xiang – who cares? – and here’s the ground coming to meet me. It’s never enough time; why do I always realize it just before it’s gone? Everything is through and away in an instant. I need more time with this other me, this nonsensical non-me, the one that knows more about myself than I do.
– – –
I look at my watch. It’s 2:30, there’s music thumping the ground from clear across campus, and there’s a body face-down under the ginkgo tree, one hand out further than the other like he was reaching for the trunk before he keeled over. I’ve never seen a guy passed out this cold and this far from Tau while the party is still going on.
I’ve spent two years at Knight U, and I’ve learned that there’s only one observed rule concerning drunk etiquette: a girl should never rescue a boy, never get him home, give him first-aid or call an ambulance. Apparently, when a woman finds him choking on his own vomit in a parking lot at two-AM with not a soul in sight and has the balls to interfere, his manly ego is suddenly destroyed. It’s true. I save drunk boys from death and they thank me by calling me a narc and a killjoy.
Anyone else who comes by will probably draw on his face with a Sharpie. He smells like booze and perfume; he’s dressed in that skinny bells-and-whistles Asian chic I see all the fobs wearing. He’s got big pouty lips and epithelial folds. I both envy and pity his girlfriend.
I look in his pockets for his ID, and he gives a deeply throaty groan when I shift him over. Despite the fact that he’s flat on the ground, incoherent and about to puke up his liver, I’m looking at his lips and the weird charming shape of his eyebrows, and the flutter comes into my stomach. It’s normal. I’m nineteen and hormonal. Most of the guys I’ve rescued have been good-looking – that’s why they’re out grinding and dancing and puking their guts out instead of sitting at home in the dark. Ming-li Xiang is his name, and his ID photo looks like a fashion headshot. It was obviously taken back when his hair was still black.
I pull him up and sling his arm around my shoulder. He doesn’t want to walk. It’s a long way to Kennedy House, where his ID says he lives, but I’ve half-dragged heavier bodies. This one will live to see another day. Maybe he’ll get his senses back before we get to Kennedy. Maybe he’ll remember my face, but I hope not.
– – –
When I stick my hand out my tiny window to gauge how cold it is, I’m usually wrong. For the last two years I have always brought one layer too few, but this time I’m wearing too much. The winter coat came off the moment I got outside, and right about now it’s time for the sweatshirt to go. The cold will come back after I stop running – after I get to Tau, slow down, and see for myself that the sirens blaring across campus are not for Li.
It’s two-thirty in the morning, and my religion essay is due at noon tomorrow. I have three more hours to finish my work and get to sleep before sleeping at all becomes pointless.
The first time I heard these sirens, all the way across campus in my tiny room in Coggin Hall, Li had drunk too much in Tau and gotten into a fight. Someone had punched him and knocked him out; he’d collapsed on the floor, bleeding, and no one was brave or sober enough to call for help. He told me the story the next day, trying to smile with a split lip and a bruise like an orchid on his left cheek.
The time after that when I saw that flashing red glow lighting up the sky, Li had been drinking in someone’s room. He’d downed an entire bottle of vodka, and they had to pump his stomach. That was one of the better times.
The time after that, someone spiked Li’s drink with Rohypnol. He threw up four times in two hours and nearly stopped breathing. He only got to the hospital in time because he called me from the floor of Tau’s only bathroom and I dialed 911. He remembers close to nothing from that night. I’ll never tell him how scared I was staying on the phone with him after calling the ambulance, listening to him shudder and gasp and wheeze my name against the mouthpiece, quietly, over and over. I found out at the hospital later that he had sleep apnea and weak lungs, and that he could have died.
There’s cold sweat under my arms, and I rip off my sweatshirt as I get close to Tau. Everyone else is running away from the big house. I half expect to see it in flames, people gathered outside as fire trucks and ambulances crowd them in, paramedics running to and from the house carrying stretchers –
A mob is gathering by the door in the front yard. My chest is on fire – I can see flashes of white and red between the crowd’s shuffling feet, the cross symbols on the uniforms of ambulance staff. There’s a stretcher on the grass, and people in white are crouching around it, and there’s a body on that stretcher and I can’t see anything…
I rip through the wave of people running towards me. The police aren’t even here, it’s just the ambulance, so why are they trying to get away? Images go through my head of Li lying there on the ground, unconscious, his liver finally giving in and surrendering to the dozens of shots he’s probably just thrown back. My brain is working in circles, I’m dizzy – all I can think as I get closer is that there’s something about tonight that’s just not right, that he’s not playing this time. This time, he’s actually going to die.
My hair is plastered to my face when I get to the front of the crowd, and I’m panting, extra clothing clutched in my arms as my stomach churns and my heart hammers my ribs. I can’t stop imagining the moment I look down between the paramedics and see Li’s face: the things that will go through my head, the sound of his voice in my brain, calling me in the middle of the night to tell me some random, beautiful thought he’s just had about meaning and identity –
The paramedic’s head moves to the left, and my breath catches in my throat. I feel sick. The person in the stretcher is a girl.
– – –
I remember Kennedy House from last year. It was substance-free, two stories of colonial terraces and verandas with central heating and bay windows, the second-cheapest housing option on campus. Everyone wanted to live there, me included, but then they changed it. From this year on you have to test into the house, to ensure a ‘rich and intelligent discussion environment.’ It’s now a kind of honor society for prudes, meaning I’d be right at home there.
The door is in sight across the building’s manicured lawn, and I’m not sure what to think. This drunken idiot on my shoulder got into Kennedy, and I didn’t.
The front door’s unlocked, which means I won’t have to go through his pockets for his key until I get him upstairs to his room. We sprawl through the doorframe, barely staying upright as his lolling head knocks against my shoulder; I heave him up like I would a piggybacking toddler and coax him towards the staircase.
His feet are still dragging, but he’s more coherent now. Not enough to talk to me or look at me with focus, but enough to walk with me up the stairs, one at a time, without making me carry both of us. His hair swings in front of his face as we advance little by little, and his lips move like he’s talking, but his voice is barely a mutter. I read the signs on the doors as we pass them; the third one matches the name on his ID. “Ming-li Xiang,” except there’s so much written on it that I can hardly make it out. There’s a circle around the last word, and an arrow from that pointing to the space before “Ming-li”; on top of that, the whole thing is scribbled out, and below it are three characters huskily inked on the paper as if with a brush.
The thing that’s been prodding my leg turns out to be his keychain. I free one hand precariously and dig it out of his pocket. It’s filled up with all sorts of useless trinkets, a plastic squid, a shiny ribbed fish, tassels, a lot of little gold nothings and the tiniest firecracker I’ve ever seen. There are only a handful of actual keys; I go through at least five before I get the right one. My eyes hurt when I flip on the light, and surprise hits me like I’ve been gut-punched – the room is an explosion of red and gold, as if that entire keychain exploded across the walls. It’s glossy and rosy and warm, and I’m in love.
It’s like a shrine. The walls of my own room are bare and white as they came, but I’m looking around and there doesn’t seem to be a spot uncovered – everything is hung with red streamers and paper lanterns; posters of weird abstract oil paintings are up next to calligraphy scrolls, real calligraphy scrolls that look like they’ve been painted by a real person on real rice paper. There’s a folding screen in the corner with cherry blossom branches all over it, a squashy red chair by the bed, a Persian rug with a bamboo mat on top of it, some kind of a rosewood nightstand with nothing on it but a music box. Everything about it is cozy and enclosed. It feels like a home, not a prison.
The deadweight on my shoulder sways and groans again. I lean him against the wall, where he slumps to the side and puts his fingers to the bridge of his nose. He’s stopped muttering, but he doesn’t seem to want to do much else, so I drop my satchel on the side of the room and sit down in the squashy chair. I deserve a rest – it’s a long walk from Coggin to Kennedy with a hundred and thirty pounds of extra weight.
The warm colors make me feel happy and snug. I look more closely along the walls, across big sprawling ink paintings of mountains and mist and spidery black trees. They’ve all got the same red-ink stamp in the lower left corner, and the characters in them match the ones on his door. The same is true for the calligraphy scrolls, the charcoal drawings scattered across the desk, the pencil drawings and what looks like watercolor experiments spilling out of a fallen sketchbook across the room. The boy strewn so repulsively across the ground is a beautiful artist.
Chills trickle down my spine, and out of the corner of my eye I see him looking at me. His eyes are lidded and half-open; the vacant, hazy stare and the way he’s just sitting there like a statue makes me want to keep as still as he is, like he won’t see me if I don’t move. My head turns though I didn’t tell it to, and suddenly we’re locked in a silent contest. I don’t know him, he doesn’t know me.
He speaks clearly for someone who’s been unconscious for the last twenty minutes, with razor-sharp focus that’s almost scary.
“My name’s Li.”
I don’t care. “Okay.”
– – –
There’s a girl is sitting on my chair. She’s leaning back, knees together with her feet skewed apart and her hands folded on her stomach. She’s a figure of dark colors, out of place against the jungle of red behind her.
Flashes of Tau come back. My head hurts. There’s pressure behind my eyes.
Her boots are sleek and black, laced up over tight jeans. She looks like a city girl. Clubs and smoke and loud music push against my brain, lights flashing, people raving and dancing and crushing each other, but then I open my eyes again and everything is a vacuum. The stillness floors me, she doesn’t move a muscle, and the only thing I can hear is the low whine in my head, ears ringing, aliens communicating.
My voice is clearer than it should be, but I don’t know what I said. Her face is boxy. Strong. Unusual. Her mouth is twisted and her lips are pursed. She’s not wearing lipstick, lipgloss, whatever it is. She looks distant and disdainful, like a goddess. Disgusted, like a stranger looking at a pathetic wreck she’s just found passed out on the side of the road.
“You’re awake.” Her voice rings in my ears. Her eyes are grey. She gets up from the red chair and straightens her shirt; ridiculous panic pounds at my chest as she bends down and reaches for the bag at her feet. “Bed is that way. Help yourself. Good night.”
My mouth is glued helplessly shut. I’m fascinated by her voice. Nothing I say will ever be as grand and articulate. Without another glance she sweeps around and moves towards the door, but before she can take two steps, my motor functions sputter to life and I reach for her passing ankles. I try to speak, like I know I can, but pain crashes through my head and all that comes out is a jumble of groans. My fingers brush against leather and she stops. I try again. Something real comes out this time, some noise that may or may not be a word.
There’s no reason for her to stay, but she doesn’t leave. I’m conscious, I’m coherent, and the world is still spinning in circles. It shouldn’t be this hard to control my body. I look up at her and hear my own voice – it’s dull and slurred; I feel the stress in my throat but that cold revulsion on her face is too much for me.
“I’m not me.” Finally. It’s not going well, and the look in her eyes proves it. The words rise to my mouth, but they make no sense. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this. Please stay. I need – ”
The pain comes back and my arm can’t stay up anymore. My world is completely wrong, pitching and bobbing like I’m at sea. There’s no more leather against my fingers, and I put my head back against the wall, squeezing my eyes shut and watching the white ghosts dance behind my eyelids. “Every time I get closer. Every time is better, only it’s not…”
My head lolls back and I say whatever swims to the surface. “Bel… she knows, she doesn’t like it. She knows, but she doesn’t understand. It’s not getting better, not getting easier. I’m trying to get to this place, and it’s just not… not getting easier. Please stay.”
The girl’s eyebrows furrow. She takes a step backwards towards the chair and sinks back into it, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. My jaw relaxes, and I realize how tightly it’s been clenched. Her hair is ash brown and curls into springs at her waist, and sways when she moves. My muttering goes on, and this time I’m more sure that I’m actually saying the words I think I’m saying. “It helps me. It’s going to help me. I need…”
I can’t even say it. I can’t think of how to make her understand. “I need to be with myself. I want to know me. You know? And… when I do this, I’m not just this thing that’s… that’s pretending. To be me. I am myself.”
Her eyes show no comprehension whatsoever. There’s a light dusting of makeup on her eyelids. She sounds like she’s trying to understand, trying so hard, but the words die in her mouth. “You are…” She sounds disgusted. I’m a rambling idiot.
My mouth moves on its own, and my mind falls into a mess of too many thoughts, foggy mountains and splashing ink and comic book heroes with damsels fainting in their arms; I blink and force myself to focus, and her boxy, beautiful face ripples back into view. Her nose and mouth are small. “Like Bel.”
The girl’s eyebrows scrunch together again, and she hangs her head before looking back up at me.
“Who…” She has a tired expression on her face, exasperated, like she’s taking the bait and knows it. “… who’s Bel.” It’s not a question. Her voice is flat and a little husky.
“Bel,” I mutter. “Her name’s Beryl. Like the stone. But she hates that.”
I swallow; my dry throat is getting worse. My mind is jumping around more than it was before, but the words are there – they’re not eloquent, but the girl is still here, and I need her here. She looks at me like I’m an insect, but I need her here. Bel and her too-big jeans float around the walls of my mind. “I called her Bel in freshman year. She hated that too… I didn’t stop. I had to call her something…”
She floats suspended in my mind with her eternal frown and the short brown bob that curtains her face, but then the pain floods back and washes everything else away. The hand propping me up buckles like someone’s hit my joint with a hammer, and I feel myself sliding sideways – my head spins, and suddenly the girl is crouching down in front of me and I’m still upright, looking into her face and trying to keep my eyes from crossing. I’ve never been this close to her. I wasn’t just drunk. She really is beautiful.
“Here,” she says quietly, and pulls on my arms to make me stand up. “It’s just a few feet away and then you can sleep. Can you stand up for me?”
Stand up, fall down, spin around. The world’s going faster than I am, stop-motion and slow shutter speed. It’s going to be one of those times, like getting a stomachache – calm, normal, right up till the moment the pain crashes down and makes you curl up in agony.
Stand up. “Sure,” I slur, and the air whistles by my head. I’m pitching forward, time slugging by my ears, but then it’s mercifully black.
– – –
The girl across the lawn is letting herself out through Kennedy House’s enormous front door, hitching her bag over her shoulder like she’s just run a marathon. I’m not sure how long she’s been inside.
I’m not going to follow her. I don’t care who she is. It’s time to trek back to Coggin Hall, sweat-drenched, dissatisfied. After all, Li’s safe, and that’s all that’s ever mattered, isn’t it?