The Night Tiger(85)

Yi sighed and swung his short legs. “That’s his master’s business. Do what you think is right.”

Alarm was rising in me, like a distant thin bell that was starting to ring. No, had been ringing for some time now, except I hadn’t been paying attention. “Look at me, Yi. Why aren’t you more worried about Ren?”

He hunched over, twisting his body away as though he couldn’t bear to look me in the eyes. All of a sudden, he was a child again.

“You’ve been waiting for him to die, haven’t you?”

That guilty, guilty look. The scrunched-up, miserable face, about to cry. I wanted to shake him, but I’d never touched him before. Not even that time when I’d been chased out of the water by the black shape in its depths.

“How could you?” I said bitterly. “Your own brother.”

He was bawling now. Shoulders shaking, fists curled into his eyes.

“I didn’t mean to. At least, not in the beginning.” Hiccupping. Smearing the tears across his face. “I love Ren. He’s everything to me.”

“Why did you stay then?”

He shook his head. “We’d never been apart before. And I knew he was miserable without me. How was he going to manage alone? So when the train crossed the river, I got out. This is the very first stop on this side. I’m sure there are better places farther in, but I didn’t want to go without Ren.”

“And so you stayed.” I looked hard at him.

“I wasn’t the only one. There are always a few of us who get off. You saw them before.”

I remembered the distant figures of people wandering this shore the first time I had drifted down the river.

“In the end, however, they all give up and go on. There’s no point, you see. From this side, you can’t call anyone over or talk to them.”

I watched him carefully. “But you could.”

He nodded. “We’ve always had this twin thing. When I got off the train, I found that I could still feel it. Very faint, like a radio signal. So I didn’t go on. Not as long as I could still sense Ren at the other end.”

He looked so small and pitiful: a child who’d been waiting for his brother for three years. Waiting alone, on a deserted shore. My heart went out to him, but at the same time, I knew that what he’d done was horribly wrong.

“I found that as long as I’m here, I can call him to this side of the river and then things happen to him. Accidents and stuff. Sometimes, I think I’ll get on the train and go away. But I always chicken out. I don’t want Ren to forget me.”

“I don’t think he’s forgotten you.”

But he wasn’t listening to me. “At first I thought I’d just watch and wait. Sometimes I can see bits of what he’s doing. Then I realized I’d have to wait a long, long time if it was going to be the rest of his life. And Ren is always changing. He’s growing up. One day, he’ll forget all about me.”

“So you tried to lure him over?”

Yi turned to look at me. There was such misery in his eyes I couldn’t be angry with him. “I thought we’d be happier together. But I’ve never managed to get him over. Not really. Though just the other night he had a high fever and he showed up on that sandbar.” He pointed to a thin sliver of white in the river.

“He wanted to cross over. He did! He even jumped in by himself. I was terrified because of the water. There’s something in it, that’s made so that people can’t swim back to the other side.”

I shuddered at the memory of that black shape, rising from the depths of the water.

“But I made him go back. There’s no use coming that way. He would have just separated from his body and it would be even worse.”

“Like a coma, you mean?”

Yi blinked. “I don’t know what that word means.”

“When your body’s alive but the mind is gone.”

“Yes. Then we’d both be stuck here waiting for his body to die.”

“Well,” I said wearily, “you’ve got your wish. Your brother is dying right now.”

Yi dropped his head. Stared miserably at his feet.

“So what are you going to do?”

He burst into tears again. “Yi means righteousness. I’m supposed to be able to choose the right thing, but I can’t!”

“Don’t cry,” I said, resisting the urge to hug him. Now that I knew exactly where I was, I had a tingling sensation of danger. “You meant well.”

“But that’s not good enough!” he shouted, rubbing his red, anguished face. “Meaning well isn’t the same as doing the right thing. Maybe we’re all cursed. We should have all been born together in the same family, or even as the same person, not separated like this by time and place.”

The five of us should have made a kind of harmony. After all, weren’t the Confucian Virtues supposed to describe the perfect man? A man who abandoned virtue lost his humanity and became no better than a beast. Dazed, I wondered whether that was happening to all of us.

“It’s all a problem with the order—the way things are being bent and rearranged. The further each of us strays, the more everything warps,” said Yi miserably. “And the fifth one is the worst.”

“What are you saying?”