The Overpass
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This year, we partnered with the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize to publish our favourite story from the shortlisted entries. Jiaqi Kang’s story, ‘The Overpass’, was placed second in the prize.
I
The flyers bounded into the air as a flock. It was an overcast day. Sheets of paper unfurled and bloomed against the low heaviness of the clouds. White on one side, a diagram on the other and ant-like handwriting, words crowded the page in Yi-ting’s elegant script. For a moment they seemed to float like that, above the traffic. Yi-ting’s hand was still outstretched, dangling by the railing, discus-thrower after the feat.
Then the flyers fluttered. The breeze took hold of them and brought them down like snow. They landed on the pavement, mostly. Those on bicycles or scooters swore and looked annoyed. The cars didn’t stop. Flyers papered the street, were trampled. Some people bent to pick them up. After a glance, they were crumpled into balls and tossed into the gutters. Others pocketed them, perhaps to use as wrapping paper later that day. A pair of passersby who looked like a couple on a date – pigtails on the girl, corduroy jacket on the boy, with elbow patches – stopped to snatch a flyer out of the sky, the girl jumping for it while the boy watched her with something in his face that Binbin, from afar, could only guess was adoration. Binbin watched them study the flyer and speak to each other. Perhaps they would come, but they certainly weren’t in a position to buy anything.
Binbin turned to the others. Jia Jun had his arm around Yi-ting’s shoulder and she rested her head in the crook of his neck. They seemed pleased with what they’d done. Binbin hesitated, then spoke anyway.
Do you think we’ll get in trouble for that?
Hm? Jia Jun didn’t stop cradling Yi-ting. He turned his head a little, the bottom half of his face obscured by her hair, his eyes meeting Binbin’s and crinkling at the corners. Why would we? he said.
Binbin looked down onto the street. The couple was still there, the girl holding the flyer. They had spotted the three culprits on the overpass. The boy brought his hand to his brow.
Obstructing traffic, Binbin said. Causing a nuisance.
But that’s the point, Yi-ting replied. She disentangled herself from Jia Jun’s arms. Came and grabbed Binbin’s hand. Hers was clammy and cold. She wasn’t as nonchalant as she was making herself out to be.
Binbin interlaced their fingers with hers. Yi-ting squeezed, but Binbin didn’t feel like squeezing back, so instead they ran their thumb in tiny circles across the smoothness of her skin.
Okay? Yi-ting said.
Binbin looked at her, her flushed cheeks and her eyebrows raised in concern. Her haircut was starting to grow out and the ends of it curled around the base of her neck. Just seeing it made Binbin feel itchy. How they wanted to reach out and pinch those strands between their thumb and forefinger, lop them off with a single snip of the kitchen scissors. Just one last time, before she left. But there was no time. They were embarrassed even to suggest it, like it was they who needed to cut her hair more than she needed it cut.
Remembering that she’d asked a question, Binbin finally nodded.
Jia Jun bent down, picked up the tote bag with the rest of the flyers inside, hefted it back onto his shoulder. His whole body keeled sideways from the effort. He looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, in the faded cutout from the magazine that Yi-ting had tacked onto the kitchen wall when they’d first moved in. The text of the article, which had been thrown out or maybe used for a collage, Binbin couldn’t remember, had mentioned the gravity experiments that scientists would conduct from the top of the building. In powdered wigs and long-sleeved robes, they would lean their bodies out of the balcony and drop things in synchrony, to see how long it would take them to fall.
Jia Jun used his thumb to adjust the tote bag strap. It didn’t seem to help.
Let’s go, he said.
They crossed the bridge.
II
Yi-ting’s skin was itchy and she’d been scratching at it all day, pieces of it flaking off the sides of her face and the bumps of her knuckles. She’d forgotten to bring her ointment today. She didn’t want people to notice her scaly hands when she handed them flyers, in case it put them off.
When they got down to street level, Jia Jun handed Yi-ting and Binbin stacks of flyers wrapped tightly in twine. Earlier that week, Yi-ting had fretted about the cost of getting them mimeographed, but now that she was witnessing them in their abundance she felt so excited that she could barely contain it. All of this was theirs. Black on white. She wanted to throw more flyers in people’s faces, smack them on the nose with them, stuff their mouths with them and have the moisture of their tongues make the ink bleed so they’d be spitting black for the rest of the day.
She walked to one of the thick concrete pillars that held up the overpass. It was grimy and covered in graffiti, phone numbers for call girls and bad jobs. Standing in front of it, she could feel its heft. Its field of gravity. She imagined how she looked: like a mural, her body encased between the pillar’s edges. Behind her Jia Jun headed to the pillar in the other corner, and Binbin crossed the street, back to the other side. Four corners, three bodies, two intersecting roads, and one footbridge looming over their heads. She watched Jia Jun walk. He always moved with decisiveness, befitting his name, like he was executing an order to march somewhere. Binbin, on the other hand, was a trudger. They wove between the cars, occasionally stopping to wave a flyer in some driver’s window, to no avail. The cars rumbled and squeezed past their legs.
Her treasures. Like the wad of bills her parents kept fanned out beneath their mattress, growing up, dozens of Mao-zhuxi faces that amounted, still, to very little. Like her parents, Yi-ting didn’t have money, didn’t have anything, only her friends. So long as she knew where they were, nothing could go wrong.
She waved. Binbin, having reached their station, saw her and waved back. Jia Jun seemed not to have noticed, but that was okay. She knew that he knew.
Art exhibition next week! she said, thrusting a flyer at the next person to walk past, an old woman holding two canes. The old woman stopped and looked at her curiously, tried to take a flyer but had no free hands. Yi-ting put the flyer in the old woman’s pocket, which was already full.
Thank you, the old woman said, and smiled encouragingly.
We’re selling paintings and drawings, and also furniture, Yi-ting explained. It’s a moving-out sale. Everything has to go.
Ai, the old woman said.
Here, take more. Give them to your family.
With some difficulty, Yi-ting stuffed more flyers into the old woman’s pocket. The top few sheets untucked themselves and flew back out as soon as the old woman began to walk again – she stepped on one and it stuck to her shoe, flapping lightly behind her as she moved. Yi-ting liked the idea that the old woman would end up bringing it to some other part of town, like a pollination.
And she liked the idea of the old woman coming to their apartment next week. Climbing the four flights of stairs with her two canes, grandchildren in tow, the old woman might purchase one of the still-life sketches Yi-ting had made as a student. Or an ashtray that Jia Jun had moulded with clay and snuck into one of their friends’ kiln batches, or the enamel face-washing bowl Binbin had brought from home and which they’d been so reluctant to put on sale, even though all it did was collect dust under their bed. Yi-ting would get up early and make sugar candy to give to the children. White daylight would stream in from the windows and make their home look like a real gallery.
Art exhibition next week! Yi-ting said, over and over again, waving the flyers in her chapped and reddened fist.
III
Jia Jun had wanted something braver than this. There was an old bedsheet with period blood on it that nobody was using anymore, and Jia Jun had thought of making a banner with it and draping it from the railings. ART EXHIBITION ART SALE ART PERFORMANCE, it would say in enormous lettering, followed by their address and the date. ONE DAY ONLY. The bedsheet was square. He’d use the kitchen scissors to cut it in half and restitch it into a long, thin rectangle, like a hand scroll. Cut four small holes in each corner and loop rope through them, use that to tie the whole thing to the railing on the overpass. Paint for the writing, obviously, big block strokes – okay, not in red, obviously, but maybe green or blue, inoffensive. When he’d proposed it to the other two, Binbin had grimaced and said, You can’t be fucking serious, and Yi-ting had shrugged and pouted at her congee, too polite to reject it outright.
As if Yi-ting even had anything to lose anymore. Once she got onto her plane to Moscow, she was never going to come back, no matter what she was saying to placate Binbin. Jia Jun was, at the very least, honest. It was his best trait and it was all he would have left one day. Even if Binbin couldn’t appreciate it now, they would realise down the line that his forthrightness brought them fortune, not harm.
No stunts, Yi-ting had finally said. We’re doing things normally.
We’re not a juice company, Binbin had added.
Jia Jun didn’t get the difference, really, between a big banner unfurling over traffic and the thousands of flyers they had gone with instead. They were selling something. Why couldn’t the others admit that?
No banners, Binbin had said, slamming their chopsticks down on the rim of their bowl. No statements.
Jia Jun could’ve retorted: It’ll cost less than the mimeographs.
But how vulgar to talk about money! Especially when he was the one who had it.
Instead they’d walked back to the apartment in sullen silence and spent that day sorting through their art school portfolios, jotting down unit prices on the backs of drawings with stubby pencils. Three yuan for a careful rendering of a plaster cast that had taken Jia Jun five hours to sketch back in 1993. He’d let it go for free. It just needed to not belong to him anymore.
At some point in their long friendship it had been established that Yi-ting had the prettiest handwriting. To make the flyer, she dipped a calligraphy brush in black ink and filled the bottom half of the page with their joke manifesto. ART IS OVER. THE ‘CONCRETE’ IS A FORM OF INVESTMENT. THE ‘SPIRITUAL’ IS A FUTURE RELIC. LET US FREE OURSELVES FROM ‘LIFE’. REJOICE IN THE ‘NEVER’. WHEN YOU ENTER THE RESIDENTIAL COURTYARD FROM THE EAST GATE, TURN RIGHT TO FIND BLOCK THREE, UNIT ONE. WE ARE ON THE FIFTH FLOOR AND THE SECURITY GATE WILL BE PROPPED OPEN BY A BRICK.
They’d decided on three key spots in the city. The overpass by Jiefang Road. The square in front of the new mall, with its shiny paving stones and young people loitering by shop windows. Behind the main train station, where they would mingle with the fat men who stood there day in day out, leaning against their mopeds, hawking rides in clicky, throaty voices. There had also been the big road that went past city hall, but in the end they’d decided against it.
Yesterday, they had gone to three of the bigger universities and wheatpasted some flyers onto noticeboards and along the walls of dormitory corridors. This isn’t anything troublesome, is it? a custodian auntie, spotting them, had asked.
Everything that is worthwhile is troublesome, Jia Jun had responded. Binbin had rolled their eyes.
It’s an art show, Yi-ting had supplied. Meishu are sending a reporter to cover it. We’re putting this city on the contemporary art map. You should come!
The auntie had clicked her teeth and said, Not my thing. But she’d left them alone after that.
When they’d finished with the universities and ridden the bus back to their apartment, Yi-ting and Binbin had gone to get takeout while Jia Jun dawdled at the payphone outside the convenience store, waiting for the village operator at the other end to retrieve his fiancée from her family compound.
Just walked around a lot, he’d told her when she’d come to the phone; she’d been in the middle of marking homework. Said goodbye to the streets. You wouldn’t like it here.
Mm, he’d said. I think the only people who will come are people I know. Still, it’s important to have a ritual. My head will be clear.
Your cousins in the northwest? he’d said. That’s great. Looking forward to it.
It was only when he’d hung up that he realised he’d really meant it – everything he’d told her. That was the thing. He was honest even when he was trying not to be.
IV
By nightfall, Binbin still had a thick stack of flyers in the crook of their arm, but they didn’t want the others to get on their case about it, so, after making sure Jia Jun and Yi-ting were too far away to see them properly, they wandered to a gutter nearby and stuffed the rest of the flyers down the dirty slit. With time and rain they’d clump into a flaky ball, like the books that the Xiamen artist had put into the washing machine. Then, brushing their hands against their trousers, Binbin went back to their spot in front of the pillar and waved.
Jia Jun and Yi-ting came over. They were chatting about something, but their laughter happened to die down once they reached Binbin.
Sometimes Binbin wondered whether Jia Jun’s fiancée was even real. Maybe he was running away with Yi-ting. They would take separate routes to Moscow, to avoid suspicion, but upon arrival live as one person. By day Yi-ting would go to school and Jia Jun would use her identity to get a job in a restaurant. By night they would take walks in blizzards while wearing matching fur-lined hats and make out as the snow fell onto their flushed pink faces, and their tongues would freeze up against each other, impossible to tear apart without making themselves bleed. Binbin alone in this city of nothing, the stray dog they would finally manage to leave behind.
Yi-ting hugged Binbin hard, ran her hands affectionately up and down Binbin’s arms. You okay? she said. Lately she had been asking it nonstop, as if Binbin were a child.
Yes, Binbin said. Pulling away from Yi-ting, they lifted a hand and stretched out their index finger. Used it to point behind them. There’s a barbeque place near here, they said. I’ve been smelling it for a while now.
Let’s go, Jia Jun said. He sounded upbeat. Binbin let him loop his arm around theirs and pull them along. He took long, striding steps. Yi-ting grabbed Binbin’s other arm, put all her weight against theirs. Binbin was now stuck between them, being fawned over, unable to escape. It was the other two’s favourite configuration, and it made Binbin angry. Why did those two get to pretend that everything was still going to be the same. Every day they stuck big white labels on all the objects in the apartment. Mine, yours, theirs. Not even the bedsheets were being spared.
Inside the restaurant, all the tables were occupied except for the one closest to the kitchen. Sauce bowls with spoons swimming in them sat greasy and uncovered in the centre of the table, splatters all over the plastic tablecloth. Binbin sat down first, with Yi-ting to their left and Jia Jun across from them. They got beers, lukewarm. The food came in shallow tin trays with fragrant red oil pooling all along the bottom. Irregular pyramidal chunks of lamb drowning in cumin and pepper powder, the fatty parts still sizzling from the spit. Binbin grabbed two brochettes, one in each hand, and tore into them, burning the roof of their mouth. That was normal, too. Barbeque tasted best when it was unbearable. The fizz from the beer soothed their palate. Together, they and Jia Jun picked the plates clean in no time.
Yi-ting ordered slices of potato, yam, lotus root, and a side of smashed cucumbers. Binbin watched her use her chopsticks to pick the white sesame off the cucumbers she wanted to eat, seed by seed. In Russia she would have to get used to vegetable soup and brown bread. If she wanted Chinese food she would have to make it herself, squatting over a camping stove on the bare floor of her room, like Binbin’s grandfather when he went there on a delegation visit in the fifties. He’d told Binbin that everyone he’d met there was interesting. But he never did go back.
Jia Jun ordered another round of everything, then put his jacket on. He said he was going to find a payphone to call his fiancée.
How is she? Binbin asked. As if she and Binbin were old friends, as if they’d met even once.
Jia Jun had shown them a picture as soon as everything had been settled. She wore a perm that piled her hair high on top of her head, like a winter hat, and she was holding an acoustic guitar, one hand gripping the fretboard so tightly that it must have made grooves in her fingertips. She and Jia Jun looked a bit alike, actually. Maybe that was to be expected. They were both from Jia Clan Village. They had the same half-moon eyes, heavy-lidded and lazy.
Oh, Jia Jun said, frowning a little, like he was surprised Binbin would even ask. Same old, you know. He nodded at them and made to leave.
Tell her we say hi, Yi-ting called after him. Her mouth was full, so maybe Jia Jun didn’t hear. But he didn’t respond, or even look back. The PVC blinds at the restaurant entrance parted around the broadness of his shoulders, then slapped back into place.
More beers were brought. Binbin and Yi-ting knocked their knees together, clinked their bottles. Ganbei.
Binbin: How do they say it in Russia?
Yi-ting shot Binbin a look of concern, but they refused to take her bait.
Ba ye he li? Binbin prompted.
Ba ye he li, Yi-ting agreed.
V
Jia Jun picked them up and picked up the bill. Yi-ting was drunk. As she put one foot in front of the other, Jia Jun steering her by the elbow and Binbin walking a few metres behind, she felt herself getting hot, droplets of sweat coming together at the base of her neck and in the crooks of her elbows. Sensitive. By the time they got home and slammed the door shut she was breathing heavily and loudly, keenly aware of the wholeness of her body, feeling as though her chest were expanding outwards with every additional inhale until the surface of her skin grew so large that it enveloped everything in the apartment, bringing Jia Jun and Binbin into the folds of her.
With shaking fingers she unbuttoned her jacket, then her shirt. Someone turned on a lamp for her, thank goodness. I miss you, she said. I miss you guys.
We’re right here, Binbin said. Deadpan, they sounded impatient, bored, upset.
Please don’t be mad, Yi-ting said.
I’m not mad, Binbin replied.
She turned around. Binbin and Jia Jun were looking back at her, Jia Jun halfway through unlacing his shoes. The light at the end of the hall gave them wispy outlines, like the sketch on top of an underpainting. A dark, deep brown for the shadows. Yolk-white for the cheekbones and the tip of the nose. The rawness of the strokes, the easy way the diluted pigment slid across the canvas – these were things that were made to be covered up, and yet every time Yi-ting looked at a finished painting she would feel suffocated by all that modelling and depth, all that hard work amounting to nothing but surface.
It occurred to Yi-ting that she would probably never paint again. She’d always thought she needed to get out of the place she’d come from in order to become the artist she was destined to be. See more things. In a heated, painful argument that she and Binbin had had a few weeks ago, when it had finally become impossible for her to continue to conceal the truth, she’d stammered through tears: We all have to leave, Binbin, we all want to leave and someday we all have to act upon it, don’t you see? and Binbin had stared at her and scoffed. I’ve never wanted to be away from you, they’d replied, looking and sounding so like a child. That’s not true, Yi-ting had replied. Of course you have, you just won’t admit it.
Now, unbuckling her belt and dropping it to the floor, shimmying out of her cotton trousers and peeling off her underwear, feeling the goosebumps bloom across her arms and chest and thighs, Yi-ting thought about the lines of the manifesto she’d transcribed so meticulously for the flyers, of which there were still stacks sitting on the tiled floor of the kitchen, waiting to be distributed tomorrow.
LET US FREE OURSELVES FROM ‘LIFE’.
Yi-ting was naked now and Binbin and Jia Jun were still standing there. Cautious, as if she was about to boil over, the lid of her rattling against the brim. Jia Jun had his hands in his pockets. In the semi-darkness Yi-ting squinted at him and saw that he was getting hard, his silence was the proof, he was erect just from looking at her.
She strode up to him and he didn’t back away, looked down at her with fondness, she thought, if nothing else. Cupping his face in her palm, pushing into the prickle of his hairs. She kissed him and he kissed her back. She pressed herself up all along his body and felt his cock against her belly, tickling.
Do you think this is a good idea? Binbin asked. They had their arms crossed but their mouth drooped open, their lips were wet. Yi-ting went and kissed them too. Their tongue was eager, their spit tasted of meat. They grabbed Yi-ting’s waist, their hands still a little cold from outside, and pinched her, groped her, pried her asscheeks apart and traced her rim with the tip of their finger.
Of course it’s a good idea, Yi-ting mumbled into Binbin’s mouth. We’ll always love each other, won’t we? She trailed kisses on their neck and led them towards the living room, which still had their mess from earlier that day – unwashed plates and cutlery, books and pamphlets in piles waiting to be labelled, and in the middle of it all, the stained bedsheet which Jia Jun had spread out on the floor because he insisted on trying to do something with it anyway, a painting or a performance or a funeral.
Yi-ting arranged herself on the sheet. It was thin, and she could feel chill of the concrete flooring through it. Her shoulder blades were uncomfortable where they touched the floor, but she didn’t care. Spreading open her legs, she caressed herself with one hand and sucked at her fingers, her gaze fixed on the doorway where Binbin and Jia Jun were undressing each other. There was a latent aggression to the way they moved against each other, like they were pissed off, even as Binbin got down on their knees and took Jia Jun in their mouth, their hand tugging roughly at the base of his cock. Jia Jun looked at Yi-ting and smiled. Yi-ting was sliding a wet finger into her hole, stretching her rim more than it could take just yet, enjoying the stinging feeling. Sprawled on the sheet with the light of the lamp cast onto her, she probably looked like a work of art. Or like a meal – both. She wanted to be ravished. She wanted Jia Jun’s cock thrusting deep in her hole and Binbin’s sitting on her face, their wetness smeared all over her chin and their pubes rubbing against her nose. All of their bodies moving in and out of sync, Binbin’s legs twitching with desperation, Jia Jun’s grunts, the precarious towers of stuff crumbling around them like buildings in an earthquake and falling on top of their bodies. She would feel split open like an earthquake.
Soon Yi-ting wouldn’t have this anymore – these moments with them, the two people she loved most in the world. Jia Jun would be back home pumping babies into his peasant wife. Binbin would find someone new, or more likely someone would find Binbin and force Binbin to accept their love. Yi-ting wasn’t sure what she would do, but she imagined that she would never settle down – she couldn’t – it would be bad for her. Nothing would ever be as good as this, or not for her. Maybe Binbin and Jia Jun didn’t understand, didn’t feel the same. They’d look back with condescension at the years they’d spent together in this apartment, blowing cigarette smoke out the window, rolling dumpling skins with empty beer bottles, posing for each other’s art, bartering with other hoodlums for food and art materials, arguing with the landlord. Laughing at their own naiveté, they would reunite over baijiu and wonder what had happened to that person who’d been in their lives at the time; Yi-ting was her name. In that moment it would be as though she were there with them, sitting next to them at the table, ghostly face above the smouldering ashtray.
I won’t forget you, Yi-ting said, after Jia Jun had come inside her and she’d wet herself in ecstasy, after Binbin had screamed and cried and let Jia Jun fuck them too, on all fours over Yi-ting’s body, their nipples rubbing against Yi-ting’s, chafing her, like she was on fire. The three of them laid across the sticky cold sheet with its new, wet stains, shivering but unwilling to pry themselves apart. Yi-ting continued: Jia Jun, Wang Binbin. You won’t forget me either, right?
Jia Jun wrapped an arm around Yi-ting’s, nuzzled his head against her chest. Of course not, he said.
Binbin was silent, but that was okay. She loved them. They knew that.
VI
After heading out of the barbeque place, Jia Jun had gone back to the overpass to look for a payphone, but hadn’t found one, even after circling the area twice with his neck stuck out like a bird’s. He’d been about to leave when he’d suddenly snapped back and scanned the area again. It was dark now, and the streetlights didn’t do much. Amid the now denser traffic as people plodded home from work, amid the loose stream of pedestrians chattering to each other and paying him no mind, and past the street vendor who’d set up his stall selling coal-baked sweet potatoes, Jia Jun’s eyes finally adjusted and showed him what it was that he hadn’t noticed before.
All the flyers were gone.
There had been hundreds of them papering the streets just a while ago, but in the time it had taken for them to eat dinner, someone had come and swept them all away.
Was that even possible? Jia Jun wondered if he had somehow stepped into a different time, a world where he, Liu Yi-ting, and Wang Binbin hadn’t been born, where nobody had made what they had made, where their spots at art school had been given to other people, where the tenants of their apartment were ordinary workers who didn’t know each other and didn’t care, where the world was a quieter, emptier place. In a fit of delirium, he retrieved the empty folded-up tote bag from his jacket pocket and shook it out, looked inside – for what, he wasn’t sure – something to prove that he existed, that they had existed today.
He felt weighed down by sadness. He thought about the banner he’d originally wanted to fly across the footbridge, its text promising a performance that he hadn’t actually managed to plan yet. He thought about his generation’s obsession with performances. Shooting a bullet at a telephone booth. Hanging in chains from a ceiling. Breathing fog onto the ground. Cutting things off. Getting naked. Disappearing.
All those who disappeared had to come back. Or at least, they had to announce their intention to disappear before they disappeared. Otherwise, how would anybody know?
Jia Jun didn’t want to go back to Yi-ting and Binbin empty-handed, so he bought a yam from the street vendor. It was wrapped in scrap paper, and as Jia Jun held it up to his face his heart skipped a beat – but it was only a page from some discarded textbook or manual, the words block-printed and impersonal. Of course.
Jia Jun gave the vendor a coin. The vendor said, Go slowly. And on the walk home, Jia Jun made sure to lead the others on a different route. They didn’t need to see what hadn’t happened at the overpass.
.
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“#china #street #photo” by allenran 917 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Jiaqi Kang is a writer who unconditionally supports Palestinian resistance and liberation.
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