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He was Xiao Ge, or so he'd been told. It wasn't what was printed on the flimsy plastic bracelet around his wrist, but it was what he was called, though he could hear the skepticism in some people's voices when they said it. It was strange, that he knew so little, but knew enough to know it was strange to be called that. It was just that he didn't seem to have anything better to replace it with.
Besides, he liked the way Pangzi said it. "Now this, Xiao Ge," said Pangzi, holding up a photograph of a handsome man with a close, military haircut. Xiao Ge felt no spark of recognition, but he looked anyway. "This, this is Pan Zi. He's one of the friendly ones. Definitely one of the friendly ones, and good to have around! Strong. Good in a fight. Army background. Survivalist training. Knows a lot of things. One of Wu Sanxing's men. Pan Zi's a good guy. Takes good care of us. Just a really good guy."
Pangzi wasn't a name either, in the same way Xiao Ge wasn't. Or maybe they both were names, each in the same way as the other. What were names, anyway, except sounds that sometimes meant a person? Not all the same person, even. Earlier, he'd had a Dr. Wen and a Dr. Wen stop by to see him, and they had been two different people.
He took the photograph from Pangzi's hand. He could memorize who these people were; that wasn't so hard. The hard part was that it wasn't just remembering names, faces. Pangzi wanted him to remember how he should feel about them.
It should probably have bothered him, that he wasn't really a person, that he didn't really have a name. But it didn't bother Pangzi, so it wouldn't bother him. Pangzi treated him like a person, just like he said "Xiao Ge" like it was a name. Pangzi thought he was a person, and Pangzi was right about most things, at least so far.
"Put him in the friendly pile, go on," Pangzi instructed. Xiao Ge took one more look at Pan Zi's sharp features and quiet little smile, then placed him in the leftmost pile of photographs. That was for the people who were their allies, unquestionably. The pile on the right was for people who could not be trusted under any circumstances, a stack that should be known in the way jungle creatures needed to know that bright colors meant poison, and if they didn't, they would learn the hard way. The middle pile was for the in-betweens, the well-meaning folk who could only sometimes be counted on in a crisis, or the ones whose self-interest was always their most important principle, or the ones you could trust so long as no one else was paying them more than you were. At least, that was what Pangzi said about them.
Xiao Ge heard the instruction, but he hesitated. Instead of sorting the picture of Pan Zi appropriately, he reached for the middle pile and pulled up another picture. He put them together and looked at Pangzi, waiting for an explanation.
Pangzi sighed and leaned back in his chair. "No, he's still in the middle pile," Pangzi said, pointing to the photograph of Wu Sanxing. "He's trouble. Tianzhen loves him, but you'd be better off not trusting him any farther than you can throw him. Which could be a lot for you, I hadn't thought about that. So don't trust him any farther than Tianzhen could throw him, how about that?"
Tianzhen was the other not-a-name at play here, but that one had a real name more closely attached to it, and that name was Wu Xie. That had been the first photograph Pangzi had handed him. Instead of sorting that picture into a pile, Pangzi had taped it to the cabinet by the bed. Xiao Ge could see it every time he turned his head, the friendly face looking at the camera through a pair of thin-rimmed glasses, bangs falling stylishly across his forehead as he smiled indulgently at the unseen photographer.
With an understanding nod, Xiao Ge put the picture of Wu Sanxing back in the middle pile. He looked at the picture of Pan Zi a little longer before placing it, remembering everything he could from a single photograph yellowed as though it had been taken some years before. He imagined finding a blank book inside himself and writing you can trust this man across its pages. Pangzi said he could. Pangzi was right about most things. So far, anyway.
"Pan Zi," Xiao Ge said as he stared at the man's face, setting the connection as firmly as he could in his head -- not the name to the face, but the name and face together to a sense of goodness. There were things deeper than memory, like how he still knew how to speak and read and feed himself and use a light switch and identify most objects in the room. Those parts hadn't gone anywhere. He felt reasonably confident, for example, that he could get into a car and drive it, even though he couldn't remember ever having been in a car in any capacity. He wondered if he should be bothered by that, that it was easier to lose himself than it was to lose the ability to drive. That was why needed his muscles to remember that he could trust the man in the photograph, because Pangzi had said so.
Pangzi clapped his hands in approval. "Here, let me tell you about this, you should know about this: There was a time and he, Tianzhen, and I were all in this vast mountain tomb -- and you were there too, or at least you were around, but you weren't there for this part in particular, so don't feel bad about not remembering it, because you couldn't have remembered it anyway -- and of course I was trying to keep everyone calm and together, because we'd gone down a corridor -- or, well, we'd fallen down a bit, and then there was nowhere to go but the corridor -- so I said to him..."
This would go on for some time now. Pangzi's stories were sprawling, like brilliant threads woven into a rug that blended from color to color, making patterns. Xiao Ge found it annoying and comforting at the same time, which was a combination he couldn't quite explain. Like pressing on a bruise. Maybe he'd understand if he kept listening.
~*~
"You're lucky I know what you like," Pangzi announced as he walked in the door. Xiao Ge supposed this was objectively true, especially considering that he himself didn't even know what he liked, or even what they were talking about.
With a little grunt of satisfaction, Pangzi dropped the bags he was carrying on the other bed. Even though the room had two beds, the other had never been occupied by a patient, not while Xiao Ge had been staying there. Sometimes Pangzi slept there. Xiao Ge wondered if that was actually acceptable for him to do, or if no one yet had been able to tell Pangzi no and have it stick. Maybe somewhere between the two.
Xiao Ge sat up, only feeling a little dizzy when he did. That had gotten better, at least, the disorientation and vertigo that had plagued his first several days of waking up in the National Stroke Center. He felt a little less like a spun top now. He looked over at the bags Pangzi had brought in -- a few plastic, mostly paper.
"Ta-dah!" With a flourish, Pangzi opened the nearest bag and grabbed a folded stack of fabric. He held it by one end and let the other fall toward the floor. It was a pair of pants. "What do you think?"
Xiao Ge thought they were pants. He wasn't sure what else he was being expected to think, so he nodded.
Pangzi clicked his tongue dismissively and rolled his eyes. "They are for you," he said, bringing them over and setting them down across Xiao Ge's legs. Closer now, Xiao Ge could tell they were nice denim, black and slimly cut. They looked much sturdier than the pants he was wearing now, which were part of the almost-paper-thin pajama set that seemed to be standard hospital wear here. "There's a nice little garden, right in the middle of the hospital grounds. We could go there. It's nice outside today. A little warm, maybe, but nice."
The doctors didn't want him going much of anywhere, on account of how they still couldn't explain what had happened to him, which meant they couldn't guarantee it wouldn't happen again. But the doctors did say it would be good for him to get out, walk around, get some fresh air. He didn't know what fresh air was supposed to do for him. He still liked the idea.
"But first!" Pangzi rummaged around in some of the bags and pulled out plastic multi-packs of things that Xiao Ge recognized as socks and underwear. "They're not as stylish as the ones I've bought for you before, but there's not a lot of cute boxers in the stores in the hospital neighborhood, for some reason. I may have to order those online."
Xiao Ge didn't mind. He didn't know what stylish underwear looked like, but what was there seemed suitable. He nodded.
"And then some shirts" --Pangzi patted one of the bags-- "and a few more pairs of pants." He patted the other. "All black, I promise. I didn't try to get fancy. When you're feeling better later, we can go out and get fancy. I'll take you shopping and you can wear whatever you want."
Xiao Ge didn't know what he wanted. He wasn't sure that he wanted to be fancy. He wasn't even sure he liked the idea of going shopping. It seemed like a lot of decisions, and he wasn't very good at making decisions right now. It was easier just to let Pangzi choose for him. At this point, Pangzi knew what he liked far better than he did.
"But I haven't shown you the best part," Pangzi said, and before Xiao Ge could wonder what the best part was, Pangzi reached into the largest of the bags and pulled out another folded stack of fabric. This particular bundle unfolded into what was apparently the best part: a black hooded sweatshirt. "What do you think?"
What did he think? He thought it looked soft. He thought it looked like it would be nice on nights when the air conditioning in the hospital was turned up too high. He thought he might like pulling up the hood and hiding beneath it. It wouldn't make him less visible, but it would make him feel less visible. Xiao Ge nodded and held out his hands for it.
The grin of accomplishment across Pangzi's face was radiant. Instead of tossing over the hoodie, he bustled over to Xiao Ge's side. "Reach for the sky," he told Xiao Ge, who did, holding his arms straight up above him. If he'd been standing, the gesture would have made him too tall, but sitting, he was the perfect height. Pangzi grabbed the hem of the hoodie and put it over Xiao Ge, tugging it down around his torso. Xiao Ge's hands emerged from inside the sleeves at the same time his face popped out through the neck hole. "There you are!" Pangzi brushed a few strands of Xiao Ge's hair back from his face. "Handsome as ever."
Xiao Ge couldn't have quantified it, and he certainly couldn't have articulated it. But there was something about being inside that heavy layer of soft black fabric that made him feel just a little more like himself.
~*~
It had taken several days of constant strange tests from more doctors than he could count before Xiao Ge had realized they were trying to tell the difference between couldn't talk and wouldn't talk. The truth was that Xiao Ge himself didn't even know. When did quiet stop being a preference and start being a neurological disorder?
The problem wasn't words. He had words in his head. Sometimes he had more words in his head than he knew what to do with, in languages he couldn't readily identify. Some things, he knew three or four different words for. He didn't know when he had learned those words, much less how he knew which one to use when.
Pangzi never tested him. It had never seemed to cross Pangzi's mind that maybe something had broken inside Xiao Ge's brain, rendering him occasionally incapable of speech. Xiao Ge, Pangzi had told all the doctors, was just quiet. He'd say something when he needed to. He always did.
Sometimes Xiao Ge stared at Pangzi's head and realized that more of himself was in there than was in his own head. He knew that was true about other people, too, but he didn't like the thought when he thought it about them. He liked it better when he thought it about Pangzi.
"This is Xiao Hua." Pangzi handed over a picture of a man Xiao Ge had seen lurking a few times outside the door to his hospital room, never coming inside. He was another member of the small but expanding club of people who had names that weren't real names. Xiao Ge looked at his face in the photograph, wondering what made him like a flower, wondering if it was the same thing that made Xiao Ge himself like a brother. "He's rich. And very smart. Brilliant. Very good at pretty much anything he does. Kind of infuriatingly so, you know?"
Did Xiao Ge know? It seemed to him that people should be mad when other people were bad at things, not too good at them. He paused, holding the photograph in his hand, unsure about how to sort it.
"Oh, left pile, left pile," Pangzi assured him, seeing his hesitation. "He's too good for us. Don't know why he hangs around with us. Well, no, I know. It's because he's part of the Jiumen Association too. He feels responsible for us, I think. For Tianzhen, but for the rest of us by proxy. His uncle and Wu Sanxing, they were ... well, that doesn't matter right now, it's complicated. It's so complicated, even I don't know how complicated it is. I'll tell you later when you're ready for more complicated things."
Xiao Ge nodded. He'd heard Pangzi make mention of the Jiumen Association several times now, but hadn't yet been able to piece together from context clues just what it was. He was a part of it too, he'd learned, though he couldn't remember how, or what it meant to be.
"He's very fancy," Pangzi said, and Xiao Ge realized they were still talking about Xiao Hua. "He's so fancy he's got about fifty different names. I guess he can afford them. But you can call him Xiao Hua. Unless he asks you to call him something else. But I don't think he's going to. Wears a lot of pink, too. I'm kind of jealous. Pink's never worked with my complexion." Pangzi held his hand up to his face, pinching his chin and turning his head back and forth as though examining himself, before shaking his head and letting his hand drop.
Xiao Ge stared at the photograph for a minute longer, trying to see if anything within him resonated with the sight of this person. He sighed as nothing did. The photograph went onto the friendly pile. It was the biggest of the three. That was good, Xiao Ge supposed. Maybe they had a lot of friends. Or maybe Pangzi just hadn't told him about the enemies yet.
"Do you want another?" Pangzi asked, patting the envelope with the other pictures inside, the ones Xiao Ge hadn't seen yet.
Xiao Ge shook his head. This part of the process wore him out. At best he could do maybe three photographs a day, and even that was stretching it. Thinking felt heavy. He suspected he could run up a hundred flights of stairs without breaking a sweat, but committing something to memory just made him want to take a nap.
Pangzi nodded and put the envelope away. "All right. How are you feeling? Are you thirsty? Do you want some juice?"
Oh, that was probably the sensation Xiao Ge was feeling: thirst. He occasionally had the same problem with hunger and needing to go to the bathroom. His body felt a little uncomfortable at all times, and he had yet to relearn the differences between sensations he could do something about and sensations he couldn't. Pangzi usually knew, though. He seemed very good at knowing these things about Xiao Ge. Xiao Ge nodded.
With a grin like he'd just accomplished something, Pangzi slapped his thighs and stood up. "I'll go get you a juice box. I'll get you two juice boxes. I'll be right back."
The room always seemed smaller when Pangzi left, like he somehow was holding the walls wide by his very presence, and when he was gone, everything collapsed back in on its ordinary, boring self. Maybe it was the way candles inside paper lanterns made them take off into the sky. He didn't know how he knew that.
Xiao Ge looked again at the picture of Xiao Hua. It was a candid shot, not posed, taken while Xiao Hua had his head turned to the side, looking at something the camera hadn't captured. Xiao Ge imagined himself stepping in front of Xiao Hua, arms raised in a defensive posture, protecting him from a blow from some unspecified assailant. That felt right. That felt like something he knew how to do. Of course, if Xiao Hua was really as good at things as Pangzi seemed to think he was, an action like that from Xiao Ge might not even be necessary. Might be appreciated, though. One person to another.
~*~
Even though Xiao Ge knew somehow that nudity was shameful, at least socially, he didn't feel any shame about it. There was nothing about his body that felt like it belonged to him enough that he didn't want it seen by other people.
"Like a bridge at night, when the stoplights are all green," sang Pangzi as he stood behind Xiao Ge, scrubbing his hair. Xiao Ge couldn't tell if Pangzi was singing an actual song or just making it up as he went along. "Like the light that says the tunnel's open for business." The shampoo Pangzi had brought smelled of roses and warm wood. It was a very Pangzi scent.
Pangzi always smelled nice. That was something that Xiao Ge had noticed, even before he'd really been able to open his eyes much. Even when the hospital room was completely silent, he could tell that Pangzi was there, or at least had been there recently, because something smelled good. Pangzi liked earthy scents, things that smelled like dark forest floors and the insides of old trees.
Xiao Ge was naked now, sitting on a plastic stool in the hospital room's tiny bathroom. The tiled shower area was barely big enough for a single person, so Pangzi had to stand just outside of it while he sang and washed Xiao Ge's hair for him. He hadn't even asked Xiao Ge if he could do it; he'd just declared that it was time for Xiao Ge to clean up a little, then all but marched him right into the shower.
"That's how much I love you, girl." It sounded like Pangzi had switched to a different song, or maybe it was just a different part of the same one. "That's how much I need you, baby." Xiao Ge had no real concept of whether someone had a good voice or a bad voice, but he liked hearing Pangzi's voice. When Pangzi sang like that, it meant he was happy. That was the part of it Xiao Ge liked best.
According to Pangzi, they'd showered together before. He'd told Xiao Ge the story as Xiao Ge had undressed (and Pangzi had turned his back for the process, even though Xiao Ge didn't care if he looked or what he saw), about the mud and the jungle and the snakes. Wu Xie had been there too, Pangzi had said. Pangzi got a certain sound to his voice every time he talked about Wu Xie. Xiao Ge was still trying to figure out what it meant.
Pangzi tutted a little and gave the back of Xiao Ge's head a nudge. "Okay, tilt your head forward. And close your eyes. I'm going to rinse you off now."
Xiao Ge did as he was told. He brought his chin down to his chest and shut his eyes.
Humming softly to himself, Pangzi took the shower head from its clip on the wall and turned the dial. Water splashed against the tile at Xiao Ge's feet, starting out cold, then warming up shortly after. It was cold in the hospital. The hot water felt good as Pangzi lifted the shower head and aimed the spray right at the back of Xiao Ge's head. The sudsy water washed away, cascading over his body as it went.
He could have washed his own hair. He wasn't helpless. Pangzi knew that and did this anyway. "Feels good?"
Xiao Ge made a little sound in the affirmative. It felt good to be touched. Pangzi wasn't afraid to touch him. Doctors and nurses poked and prodded him, of course, but that wasn't the same thing. Other people kept a respectful, even fearful, distance, stepping aside as they passed in hallways, hugging the far sides of elevator cars. Pangzi just grabbed him, held his hand, put his arm around Xiao Ge's shoulders or waist, rubbed his hands over Xiao Ge's bare wet shoulders as he rinsed him clean. Pangzi treated him like he wasn't a thing to be feared.
Were they lovers? The question had crossed Xiao Ge's mind, and he honestly would have believed either answer. Maybe Pangzi was even more intimately familiar with his body than he'd let on. Maybe Pangzi was just like that. Xiao Ge couldn't figure out if the question would be rude to ask or not, much less how to word the question either way, so he didn't.
Did Xiao Ge want them to be lovers? That was too complicated. He'd think about that later when he was ready for more complicated things.
When he'd been rinsed to Pangzi's satisfaction, Pangzi turned off the shower and readied a towel for him. Xiao Ge stood and pushed his hair back from his face, wringing out some of the water. He walked forward into the towel Pangzi held out for him, allowing Pangzi to dry his hair and torso with a playful roughness.
As he stood there, he caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror. He hadn't known before that moment about the tattoo that covered his left side, but at the same time, he wasn't surprised to see it. He understood without being told that the heat from the water had been what had made it visible, but it had been there all along. Without consciously deciding to, he lifted his hand and ran it over the designs that swirled across his shoulder. His fingertips couldn't detect the difference between inked and uninked skin. That art had been part of him for a long time.
With a chuckle, Pangzi took a single finger and booped the qilin right on the nose, complete with sound effect -- then lifted the same finger and booped Xiao Ge on his own nose. Xiao Ge must have made a funny expression at that, because Pangzi winked. "What a scary monster," said Pangzi, who wasn't afraid of him at all.
~*~
When Pangzi came back with lunch, he found Xiao Ge looking through his piles of pictures. Xiao Ge knew all their names by now, as well as most of their biographies. Some of them he'd had to piece through from Pangzi's more colorful bits of narration. A few of them, he'd actually met in person, as they'd dropped in here and there to visit. Only one absence felt conspicuous.
Pangzi sat their sandwiches down on the bed. At least, Xiao Ge thought they were sandwiches, given the way they were wrapped. Lunch was unpredictable with Pangzi. "Got any questions? Anyone you want to know more about?"
The pictures all put together were a cast of characters he'd been shown for a life he couldn't remember living. He wanted to know more about the threats the dangerous ones posed. He wanted to know more about what made the ones in the middle so ambiguously trustworthy. He wanted to know how they were all supposed to feel about him, and not the other way around.
He pointed to the first photograph he'd been given, the one on the wall, which had been joined since by several pictures of the three of them in various combinations, in various locations. "Wu Xie."
Did Pangzi's face fall for a second? It was hard to tell, because Pangzi disguised his reaction in the same move by looking down and unwrapping his sandwich. "He's our best friend," Pangzi said, his eyes fixed on the task of getting the tape off the butcher paper without tearing it. "Well, he's your best friend especially. You're always swooping in to save him. Catching him before he falls off cliffs. That kind of thing."
Xiao Ge had already been given the impression of their lives as ones that would would lead them to the edges of enough cliffs that rescue from them was a regular enough thing to be remarked upon. Perhaps Wu Xie needed to be around fewer cliffs. Perhaps he just needed to get better about not falling off them. Xiao Ge decided to go after his own sandwich. It appeared to be made entirely of roasted vegetables crammed between two slices of bread. The doctors had said he needed mental stimulation, and Xiao Ge sometimes wondered if Pangzi hadn't decided to accomplish this task through food variety. Maybe Pangzi was waiting for his stomach to jog his memory. So far, nothing. "Where is he?"
Pangzi pressed his lips together and exhaled. "He wants to be here. He really does. He was here the whole time when we first got you here, every day. He just -- there's a lot going on, and things he can't manage from here. But he would be if he could. He really would."
The defensive tone in Pangzi's voice made Xiao Ge wonder if he was supposed to be upset that Wu Xie wasn't with them. He wasn't upset. He was just curious why someone so important, at least to hear Pangzi tell it, hadn't stopped by the hospital once since Xiao Ge had woken up.
"He's got a lot of things to do, that's all. He's a Wu. He's important. Not like us. Well, no, that's not true. You're important. You're a Zhang."
He was a Zhang, but not quite the right kind of Zhang, at least as far as the Jiumen Association was concerned. Or maybe he was too much the right kind of Zhang. There were other Zhangs, but he was also the only one. He hadn't quite figured how that all worked out yet. Even his real name, the one printed on his hospital bracelet, still wasn't a name, not really, any more than chief of neurosurgery who had visited him yesterday had been named "Chief of Neurosurgery" by her parents. It was a title, a place that had existed for him to step into. Someone else could be it. He didn't have to be anything.
"That's where we're going. First thing we do, when we get you out of here, we're going wherever he is." Pangzi took half of his sandwich and swapped it for half of Xiao Ge's, motioning for Xiao Ge to continue eating despite this switch. "He'll probably still be in Changsha. His family has a place there, Wushanju. You like it there. Well, mostly. It can be busy. Lots of people running around, in and out, coming and going. There's a little attic space, we were talking last time we were all there about making it into a room for you. A little nest. Wouldn't be too much work. And then you could hide there whenever you needed to run off, and not, you know ... really run off."
The sandwich Pangzi had gotten was entirely meat. Xiao Ge wondered if Pangzi hadn't just asked for two normal orders divided into component parts and reassembled into separate sandwiches. The meat was spiced with something that tasted familiar, even if Xiao Ge couldn't put his finger on what it was or when he'd had it before. Still, familiar was something. Maybe if he kept eating, it'd be more so.
"We can call him, if you want. You can talk to him on the phone."
Xiao Ge shook his head before he'd even really considered the offer. No, talking was bad enough, and telephones seemed like an even worse idea. He hated it when people were waiting for him to speak. That was what was both exhausting and nice about conversations with Pangzi, that Pangzi could hold up both sides by himself.
Pangzi nodded, seeming to understand Xiao Ge's reluctance. "Well, we'll see him soon enough. I'm sure he misses us. I miss him. I just ... really miss him. He's something to be around, you'll see. Like a warm room when you're coming in out of the snow. Bah, listen to me, getting all sentimental. You'll see soon enough. You'll remember. Sometimes when you're in the same room, you can't take your eyes off him. I mean, nobody can, but you in particular. I mean, I know the feeling. I get it." Pangzi took another bite of his sandwich. "You want to hear how you two first met?"
Xiao Ge did. He nodded a little, leaning in to listen, working hard to remember the details of their first encounter as Pangzi related it. He didn't know how, but he knew this part was important. Maybe if he heard enough of it, he'd start to remember on his own.
~*~
He woke up with his heart pounding and the urge to run hammering in his veins. He didn't know why. He wasn't thinking about reasons. He felt like an animal that had just heard the first click of the hunter's trap. If he didn't move, and move fast, it would snap, its jaws sinking into his flesh.
He swung his legs out over the side of the bed. The bed made a creaking sound. That wasn't good; he couldn't make careless noises. He hopped out and landed softly on the floor. He didn't have shoes, but bare feet were quieter, even if they slowed him down. That didn't matter. He could worry about building speed later. He could worry about everything later. He just had to live long enough to worry. He had to get out.
The room was never truly dark, in the way hospital rooms in cities always had a faint glow, even at night. The dark wasn't dark enough to hide him. He would have to hide himself. Pants first, then a hoodie, then run. It was after him.
...That thought gave him pause, at least enough to make him stop and catch his breath. What was after him?
That didn't matter, his instincts shouted at him; It was after him, and he had to run!
He grabbed his hoodie from the hook by the door and pulled it on. Or, at least, that was what he tried to do. He realized halfway as it went over his head that it wasn't his soft black hoodie at all; it was too big and smelled wrong. He got half-lost trying to get his arms out through the sleeves, stumbling when the cuffs where his hands should emerge weren't where he expected them to be. It was a straitjacket. They'd given him a straitjacket and he'd stupidly put it on himself. Instead of escaping the trap, he'd walked headfirst into it. His heart was hammering in his ears. He had to get out. He had to get it off. There was no time, he was running out of time, but he couldn't go like this, not when his head was still wrapped in fabric and he couldn't even see. It was coming, It was still coming, and he had to get out--
"Xiao Ge," he heard, but the sounds only became words too late. At first they were just noise, and to his terrified animal hindbrain, noise was danger. Flight became fight. Before his brain had made the sounds into words -- words that meant his name, even, that meant him -- he had swung wildly, taking a desperate blind strike in the direction the noise had come.
His hand connected with a solid object, an object that felt like a face. The same voice that had made the sound made a cry of pain. No. No, that was bad. He had done something bad.
At last, his mind caught up to his body's reflexes. He knew his not-a-name name now. He knew the voice that had said it. He even knew that the straitjacket wasn't a straitjacket. It was Pangzi's hoodie. That meant Pangzi was there in the room with him. That meant he had just punched--
Xiao Ge ripped the hoodie back off his head. His eyes widened in horror as he saw Pangzi with a hand clamped to the side of his face, blood trickling from a cut in his lip. In the darkened room, the blood appeared black. "It's me, it's me!" Pangzi stammered out, holding out his other hand between them. It took Xiao Ge a second to realize Pangzi wasn't doing that to keep Xiao Ge at a distance, but to assure Xiao Ge that Pangzi himself was harmless.
Xiao Ge knew he should be doing something else. He should be helping Pangzi. He had hurt Pangzi, and now he should be helping Pangzi get un-hurt. But his body wasn't responding the way he wanted, in the same way he couldn't always make his mind put together the sentences he wanted. There was a wall between what he wanted and what he was capable of convincing his body and brain to do. The frustration only made the knotted tension in his muscles worse. He could hear a panicked animal breathing. It was him.
"Xiao Ge, you're safe, I'm right here," Pangzi said, inching closer. There was a book fallen open on the floor behind him, and the room's second bed was still crisply made; Pangzi must have fallen asleep in the chair. "You're safe. Nobody's going to hurt you. I'm not going to hurt you. It's me. ...You remember me, don't you?"
"Pangzi," Xiao Ge rasped, his voice barely a whisper.
Despite how much it must have hurt, with his lip split like that and blood in his teeth, Pangzi smiled and nodded. He looked so relieved that Xiao Ge suddenly understood the terror in Pangzi's eyes. Pangzi must have thought Xiao Ge's memory had gone again. That had been the real horror of the situation, the idea that nothing they'd done over the past weeks had mattered, that they'd have to start from zero once more, that Pangzi was still looking at a beloved friend but Xiao Ge was once again seeing only a stranger.
He felt like a puppet whose strings had been severed. He collapsed to the hospital floor, shirtless and shivering. The floor was icy against his sweat-drenched skin. He wanted to get up but it wasn't working.
He didn't protest as Pangzi got up under him, but he couldn't exactly help the process either. Everything beneath his skin might as well have been replaced with sand. "Up-up-up," Pangzi coaxed him, and Xiao Ge tried, he really tried to get his feet under him. It just felt like every time he got close, everything else gave way. "There we go, you're like a sack of rice. Thank God for your bird bones. I'm too old to be doing this."
Up and over the side of the bed he went, until he collapsed in an ungainly lump atop the sheets, shivering and staring into the dark. The world smelled like fear and blood. He wanted to say he was sorry, but that was working as well as his feet had been. He felt like a firecracker after its burn, ashy and useless.
Pangzi put a hand on Xiao Ge's shoulder. "Go back to sleep," he said, the slur of his accent already worsened by what must have been swelling around his mouth. Pangzi should have been mad at Xiao Ge. He should have been furious. He wasn't. "I'm going to be right here, okay? I'm right here." He drew up a blanket over Xiao Ge's body, tucking him in tight. "You can go to sleep. I won't let anything get you. Anyone who tried, they'd have to get through your Pang Ye first. I'd tear them apart before I let them touch you."
That promise was so comforting that Xiao Ge passed out almost immediately.
~*~
"Pangzi."
"Hm?" Pangzi turned to him. They were outdoors now, watching some koi swim around a pond in the hospital's garden. A morning rainstorm had blown through earlier, leaving everything green and damp in what sunlight managed to peek through the clouds. Pangzi's envelope of photographs -- much slimmer now than it had been when they'd started -- lay with his jacket on the table between them.
That hadn't been what Xiao Ge had meant. He took a slow, thoughtful breath, trying to assemble the sentence he wanted. "Tell me about Pangzi." He'd gotten such extensive biographies on everyone else, and yet the more he learned about them, the more he realized that the person closest to him was still a mystery.
"Oh, me, I'm--" Pangzi laughed a little. His tongue flickered briefly over the cut in his lip, which was healing nicely. "I'm me. I mean. What could you want to know? What you see is what you get."
That couldn't have been true. There was so much to say, good and bad, about every other person Pangzi wanted him to know about. Even the ones that weren't members of fancy alliances or mysterious figures with sketchy pasts, even the ordinary people who followed along to dig and do research and sometimes carry guns, they all had their stories, and Pangzi knew them all. Pangzi seemed to know everybody. More than that, there seemed to be something about everybody that Pangzi thought was worth knowing. Xiao Ge couldn't understand how that didn't extend to Pangzi himself.
Pangzi looked over to see that Xiao Ge was still looking at him, and he laughed, scratching at the short hairs at the back of his head. Xiao Ge wondered if he too would look good with a haircut like that. Probably not, and it seemed like it took a lot of effort to maintain, given how often he saw Pangzi pulling out a comb and brushing it back, even when it looked perfectly fine to Xiao Ge. Maybe there was something about its messiness that Xiao Ge couldn't see.
"Sorry to disappoint," Pangzi continued with a shrug after a moment, "but there's really nothing to be said. No mystical family history stretching back generations. I'm not the scion of anything. I don't even have anything to be the scion of. I was born, I grew up, and now I'm here."
Did Pangzi want to be a Wu, or a Zhang, or something else? Did he wish he'd been born into the Mystic Nine? Xiao Ge couldn't tell. Maybe he thought it would make things easier for him, or at least clearer. Xiao Ge was here to vouch that it would not.
Pangzi sighed and turned around a little on the bench, leaning so his back rested against the table. "I did ... I did some bad things. In the past. For people, to people. That's where I come from. And it's not my parents' fault, they raised little Wang Yueban right. They did their best. But sometimes things get messy. And people do what they have to do." He picked up a leaf than had fallen onto the bench and spun its stem between his thumb and forefinger, watching it twirl. "So maybe that's what you need to know about me. I'll give you a picture of me, you can go ahead and put it in the middle pile. Good, but only good for so far. Maybe as far as you can throw me. Maybe not even."
That was a lie. Or maybe it wasn't a lie, a false statement meant to deceive on purpose, but it wasn't true either. At the moment, though, that distinction mattered less than the fact that Xiao Ge knewit wasn't true. Since he'd woken up in the hospital, he'd taken everything he'd been told as it had come to him, mostly without comment or complaint. He'd had no reason to question what he'd heard.
But now here was Pangzi, lying to him, and Xiao Ge knew it. "Left pile," Xiao Ge said.
Pangzi was quiet for a moment. Turned away like that, his expression was invisible to Xiao Ge. The leaf twirled in Pangzi's fingers, dancing about. Then his shoulders hitched in a short laugh. "Ah, you're too good to me, Xiao Ge, you always believe the best of people."
That was meant to be a joke, so Xiao Ge didn't contradict him. Xiao Ge was fairly certain, though, that it wasn't true. He didn't really want to believe the best or the worst of people. He mostly just wanted them to go away. Even Pangzi, sometimes. But Pangzi less than everyone else.
Pangzi was so much noise and activity that he could chase away all the bad thoughts that crept out during the long moments of quiet. Xiao Ge had just never considered before that moment how many of those bad thoughts might be stalking Pangzi's own brain. The two of them sat together on the picnic table and watched the fish in shared silence, until a nurse came and got Xiao Ge and told him it was time for another scan. Pangzi checked with the nurse about how long the procedure would take, then announced his plans to step out for a bit. He'd use the time while Xiao Ge was in the imaging machine to run home and take a shower. He'd be back before Xiao Ge even knew he was gone.
As he and the nurse stepped through the hospital doors, Xiao Ge glanced back over his shoulder. Pangzi hadn't gone anywhere yet. He was still sitting there on the bench, his back turned, his shoulders half-slumped in the quiet of the garden. Xiao Ge didn't even know how to begin to ask what that meant.
~*~
I am lost , read the little card. Please call my family. You will be rewarded.
Xiao Ge had seen cards on lanyards like this before. A number of his fellow patients at the National Stroke Center wore them as they shuffled their way around the halls, in case they slipped out while their caretakers' backs were turned and let old habits lead them into situations that were no longer familiar. He supposed it was only fair; he was the oldest person in the hospital, after all, at least to hear Pangzi explain it.
"For my peace of mind." Pangzi patted the card and Xiao Ge's chest beneath it in the process. He looked a little more worn down than he had before, or maybe he always had and Xiao Ge was just noticing. He'd been gone the last two days without explanation, just a promise that he had some business to attend to, nothing to worry about, he'd just be gone a minute. Huo Xiuxiu had stopped by to check in on him, which was nice of her. Xiao Ge didn't mind. She was quiet and she didn't stick around, which were two of his ideal qualities in a person.
The world was quiet without Pangzi in it. Xiao Ge had spent most of his time with his photographs, spread across the tray table that went over his bed. Once, he mixed them all up and sorted them again, and was pleased to find that he had no hesitation about where everyone belonged. He was learning. He was remembering. Pangzi would be proud.
Xiao Ge turned the card in his hand, feeling the way the lanyard rested against his neck. He didn't mind that sensation, no more than he minded the feel of the hospital bracelet around his wrist. His name was already on the bracelet, but the bracelet was only useful at the hospital. Giving him the lanyard meant Pangzi expected them to leave.
No. That wasn't it. Giving him the lanyard meant Pangzi expected him to leave.
Xiao Ge looked down at Pangzi, who was sitting on one of the room's short stools, the kind the doctors sometimes perched on when they performed their longer examinations. Pangzi looked at him, but didn't quite raise his head to the level of making eye contact. He cleared his throat. "I know you're not going to stay forever. You never do. You're always -- sometimes -- sometimes you need to be somewhere else, and you're not exactly good at communicating that, even when you can remember things."
That felt right, to hear Pangzi say it. Even now, something inside Xiao Ge was telling him he needed to be gone. It was the same sensation that had roused him in the middle of the night, panicked and trying to flee from a danger he couldn't identify. If he hadn't had Pangzi to stay for, he would have been gone from the hospital weeks ago -- not gone to anywhere in particular, just gone.
"I just want to make sure that if you don't come back to us, it's your choice. And not..." Pangzi exhaled, then dragged the heel of his hand roughly across his cheek. "Look, I had Tianzhen run out on me last time I had to do this; don't you do it too, okay? Leave a note. Or call. We don't have to talk. You don't even have to say anything. You just call, and I'll know it's you. That's my number. I'll know it's you."
So that was what the card meant by family. Xiao Ge had been afraid for a moment that the calling the phone number scrawled there would return him to the Zhangs, whoever they were. But Pangzi had a different definition of family, one that didn't mean obligations based on random chances of birth. The family Xiao Ge's card wanted him returned to was the family that still chose him, even when he didn't know who they were anymore.
Pangzi leaned his head forward until his forehead touched Xiao Ge's chest. Hands still knotted in the lapels of Xiao Ge's cardigan, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "If it were up to me, I'd never let either of you out of my sight. But it's not. It never is." Xiao Ge could feel the way Pangzi's breath hitched, the way he stammered and swallowed when talking became too much. "So I'll do what I can, and I'll be here. Just come back to me, okay? Promise you'll come back to me."
Xiao Ge couldn't promise anything. That didn't mean, though, that he didn't feel Pangzi like an anchor -- like gravity, the way comets, in their own time, orbited suns. No matter how far away he went, he'd know that steady center was waiting for him, a cheerful, noisy, loving tether tied to whatever in his not-a-person chest passed for a heart.
"Okay." Pangzi nodded, as though the silence had been agreement. For all Xiao Ge knew, it had. Pangzi took a steadying breath and stood, scrubbing at his cheeks with his sleeve; his eyes were red-rimmed, but he was smiling. "Come on. Let's pack you a little bag. Not so much they get suspicious. Just your favorites. We'll send someone back for the rest. I bet Xiuxiu would do it if we asked real nice."
Xiao Ge looked at him curiously. Where were they going?
Pangzi laughed at that, clapping Xiao Ge on the shoulder with his strong, steady hand. "First, I know a restaurant a few blocks away that serves amazing pig brain. You'll love it. It'll get that memory of yours back on track faster than whatever useless nonsense they're doing here. You need to fight fire with fire! Or, uh, brains with brains. Same principle, though."
This wouldn't be the first trip they'd made off the hospital grounds, with Pangzi signing Xiao Ge out for lunch, or to go to a park, or to see a movie, or whatever he thought that day might be of greatest use for clearing Xiao Ge's foggy mind. Xiao Ge had never taken a bag with him before, though, nor had they ever talked about his hospital room as though it were a place he might not see again for a long time, if ever.
"And then," Pangzi added, pulling something out of his vest pocket that looked like a pair of tickets, "we're going home."
~*~
He didn't know if he'd ever been on a train before, but he liked it. The rhythmic white noise from the wheels along the tracks muffled most sounds around them, so even people only a few rows behind them were all but silent to him. Pangzi had given him the window seat. It was raining again in Beijing that morning, the grey cloud cover low and sleepy. At some point, he closed his eyes and dozed off.
He woke to a warm, steady pressure against his shoulder. It was Pangzi, who had at some point in the journey himself fallen asleep, using Xiao Ge's shoulder for a pillow.
The closeness made the outline of a memory emerge from the murky depths of Xiao Ge's mind: the back of a truck, a ride through the desert, Pangzi's arm around his shoulders. Someone else next to him -- Wu Xie. That was Wu Xie. That was what it felt like to be between the two of them, helpless but unafraid. That was what it was to be one leg of a triangle, in danger of collapse without the other two at his side, but invincible with them.
He saw the corner of a photograph peeking just out of the breast pocket of Pangzi's plaid shirt. With nimble fingers, he plucked it out, then held it up for examination. It was Wu Xie, shirtless and in bed, his hair mussed, his cheeks flushed, caught in the middle of a laugh. In the picture, Wu Xie's arm was extended toward the camera, as though he were trying to push it away but hadn't quite managed before the shutter snapped. It was obviously an intimate picture, one not meant for public eyes. Xiao Ge himself wasn't probably supposed to see it. From its battered, crinkled state, it seemed Pangzi had carried it with him for some time now.
Looking at it, he felt a sharp longing in his chest, though he couldn't say for what. Did he want to be the one holding the camera, lucky enough to be a witness to such a tender, unguarded moment? Did he wish he were on the bed instead, the object of adoration, knowing what it was to feel an emotion so sharp and bright that it could only spill over into laughter? Was he feeling envious, and if so, of which of them?
"We have to take care of him," came a groggy mumble from just at Xiao Ge's side. Pangzi shifted his weight, turning toward the photograph without taking his head from Xiao Ge's shoulder. "That's the important part. Tianzhen. We have to do what we do so that he can keep being who he is."
Xiao Ge nodded. He'd never needed any convincing of that. He'd never needed thought exercises, practicing affection by imagining stepping into danger on Wu Xie's behalf. He knew, bone-deep, that he could lose himself a thousand times and still, knowing nothing else, walk into fire for Wu Xie.
But what about Pangzi? Xiao Ge's entire time in the hospital had been about what Pangzi could do for him -- not that either of them ever would have phrased it that way, of course, but seen as a whole, it was undeniable. To be cared for was not in Xiao Ge's instincts, nor to trust, nor to stay. In many ways, he'd prefer the fire. It was altogether simpler and less stressful than learning to be loved.
"It's okay if you--" Pangzi cleared his throat. "If you two..." He tapped the corner of the picture. "It's okay with me. Better than okay. I'll get out of the way. Don't mind me. I want you two to be happy. If that's what makes you happy. If that's what you want."
Maybe that was what Xiao Ge was feeling, the indescribable emotion that gripped him as he looked at that photograph. Maybe that was, but maybe that wasn't all of it. Maybe this photograph held in its existence a third possibility: being there, neither behind the camera nor captured by it, but just out of frame, still within arm's reach, ready to catch someone before they fell off not a cliff but a bed. Not the center of attention, but vital nonetheless. Not an intrusion on joy, but part of it. Not in but still in the picture. Was that an option? Was that what made him happy?
Had he been there when that picture had been taken? He was fairly sure he hadn't. Nothing about the way Pangzi talked about it suggested that. But oh, what if he had?
"Or not!" Pangzi added after, patting Xiao Ge's knee affectionately. "It's whatever you feel is right. No obligation. My point is, we have to watch out for him. Who knows what he's gotten up to, being left all alone? Rattling around Wushanju, bumping into things. I bet he's not sleeping right. He can't be eating right. That's what I need you there for. I need you to make your sad face and convince him to eat. Show me your saddest face. Come on."
Xiao Ge showed Pangzi his regular face.
"That's perfect. Irresistible!" With a laugh, Pangzi nudged his shoulder -- and just as jovially, took the photograph from Xiao Ge's hand and slipped it back into his own shirt pocket, right over his heart, right where Wu Xie belonged.
Xiao Ge wished he spoke a language that had only a hundred words in it. Then, maybe, he could say what he meant now. But as it was, there were far too many words floating around inside his head, colliding and disappearing and choking any attempts to get any of them out. He couldn't even articulate his own thoughts to himself, any more than he could speak the same language as a tidal wave washing him away. The best he could do was not to drown.
And the best way to not drown was to hold on tight. Xiao Ge reached for Pangzi, slipping their hands together and interlacing their fingers. Pangzi's hand was so much warmer than his, and Pangzi himself so much sturdier. There was no mistaking who was the iron of the Iron Triangle.
There was still more of him inside of Pangzi's head than there was in his own, but the balance was slowly shifting. Soon they'd be back with Wu Xie, who had so much of him as well. Then they'd meet other people who'd known him, go to other places he'd been, and everywhere they went, there would be a little more of Xiao Ge to be remembered. Which was what Xiao Ge wanted, to be sure. But the more he thought about it, the less the past seemed like it would be enough. He wanted both the things that had happened and the things that hadn't happened yet. He wanted to find out who he'd been, but he also wanted to be find out who he was now. He wanted to learn what could happen now that hadn't been able to before.
He wanted to know how many more ways there were to be not in but still in the photograph in Pangzi's pocket.
"We're going to be okay." Pangzi squeezed Xiao Ge's hand tight as the countryside rolled by their southbound train. "We're going to be together. As long as we're together, we're unstoppable."