The last time they saw Teacher Gu was at the thank-you banquet held by Ning Xiaobei, Fan Xia, and the others.
Teacher Gu had done an excellent job with this class of students. Even though things had been chaotic since the military training in their first year of high school, and they even went through the nerve-wracking SARS epidemic before the college entrance exams, the class still managed to maintain an undergraduate admission rate close to 95%. Countless students were admitted into various 985 and 211 universities1“985” and “211” refer to elite university initiatives in China, designating top-tier institutions with strong government support and prestige.
Among them, the best performer was Tan Ruirui. With her already outstanding grades, plus an extra ten bonus points for being an Outstanding Youth League Cadre in Shanghai, she successfully got into Tsinghua University. She waved goodbye to the two simps who had chased after her for three years and headed north to pursue her studies.
Ning Xiaobei remembered it clearly. When he went to toast Brother Kai, the man had been brimming with pride, boasting that he would be teaching another key class next semester. By the end of the year, when the school selected outstanding teachers and decided on talent recruitment quotas2A formal allocation system in China that allows institutions to recruit and grant benefits (e.g., residency, housing, or promotions) to qualified professionals for the next year, there was no way he wouldn’t have a share.
He, Fan Xia, Ding Zheyang, and the others had even joked around, saying that once Brother Kai got his household registration settled, he would definitely have to treat them to a big meal; after all, half the credit for his achievements belonged to them.
Who would have thought that just a few months later, before the school had even gone on winter break, the promising young teacher Gu Kaige would leave the Affiliated High School.
At the same time, Teacher Peng Yue also left.
The two of them asked around at school, but the other teachers were all evasive and unwilling to say much. With no other choice, they left the campus and went to the small rural courtyard that Gu Kaige used to rent to check on him; the mansion that had brought Fan Xia and the others endless joy throughout their three years of high school.
The moment they arrived at the courtyard gate, they immediately felt what it meant for things to remain while people were gone.
They had always entered through the back gate. In the past, right after stepping in, there would be a basketball hoop; apparently discarded by the school gym. Brother Kai had paid to hire a farm tractor to haul it all the way from the school to here, bringing untold joy to countless boys ever since.
Now the basketball hoop was still there, but the back gate of the courtyard was locked with an iron chain. The silver-gray padlock looked cold and unfeeling under the bleak winter sun.
Relying on his height, Fan Xia stood on tiptoe and jumped a few times, calling out Bush as he did so. In the past, as long as this group of students called its name, the yellow dog, carrying a kind of poet-like melancholy, would come out wagging its tail to greet them. Then the students would take out whatever they had in their pockets and feed it. Bush had a great temperament and never minded what it was given; it accepted everything happily. Once, Fan Xia somehow got his hands on a piece of broccoli and fed it to the dog, and it actually crunched away on it with great enthusiasm.
They called for Bush for quite a while, but it never came. Instead, they ended up calling out the landlady.
“Oh my, aren’t you Teacher Gu’s students… Xiaobei, hmm… and Little Dark Kid, right?”
The landlady still had quite an impression of this black-and-white duo and greeted them warmly.
After entering the landlady’s house, both of them felt a little restrained. In the past, whenever they went into Brother Kai’s courtyard, they came and went however they pleased; lying sprawled on the ground was no problem at all. Brother Kai himself would lie on the ground too, without the slightest air of a teacher.
“Sit, sit down. Have some fruit, don’t be shy.”
The landlady went into the kitchen to pour them tea. The dog she raised at home wagged its tail and came over, sniffing here and there, then went to lie by the doorway to bask in the sun.
“How nice, you’re all university students now, right? I remember when you first came, you weren’t this tall yet, just tiny little things. Little Dark Kid was alright, but Xiaobei wasn’t even as tall as the sweet sorghum growing in my field.”
Carrying over two cups of tea, the landlady began talking about the first time they came to Brother Kai’s courtyard back in their first year of high school. It had only been three years, but now that she thought about it, it felt as if more than ten years had passed.
“Suddenly, he moved out. I didn’t expect it at all. We had agreed that he would keep renting until the end of the year, even said he’d take at least one more class of students.”
The landlady rested her hands on her knees. Draped over them was a blue homespun apron commonly used by locals. In the past, rural people around Shanghai, men and women alike, wore this kind of apron skirt over their wide-legged trousers, called a zuoqun. In recent years, though, this style had basically disappeared.
“Then one day, he came back with red eyes. Oh, and that day, that Teacher Peng came too. At first the two of them were fine, but as they talked, they started arguing. And what an argument it was! You know how us country folk are; we eat dinner, watch the evening news, and then go to bed. But that night, they argued until at least past nine. There was smashing of cups, and banging on walls…”
“Bang, bang, bang—it was terrifying to hear. In the end, I really couldn’t take it anymore, so I had my husband throw on a coat and go knock on their door, telling them to keep it down.”
“Then that Xiao Peng ran out. When he left, my husband took a glance…oh my, the place was a complete mess. Even the dog was so scared it hid in its kennel and didn’t dare make a sound.”
Ning Xiaobei and Fan Xia exchanged a glance, both worried about Brother Kai and the others.
But the one who worried more was Ning Xiaobei; after all, he knew more than Fan Xia did.
“Auntie, has the place not been rented out since? I saw the courtyard gate was still locked.”
Ning Xiaobei asked.
“No, no, it hasn’t been rented. Teacher Gu already paid the rent through the end of the year; there are still a few days left. And his things haven’t all been moved out yet. He only took the dog and some personal clothes. Even if we wanted to rent it out, we’d rent to nearby workers. Before the New Year is over, no one really comes asking.”
The landlady waved her hand and urged them to unwrap some candy to eat.
The sorghum candy melted sweetly in their mouths, but it did nothing to sweeten their mood.
In the end, the landlady still unlocked the courtyard gate and let them go inside to take a look.
After that night’s argument, the place had probably been tidied up. It actually didn’t look very different from the last time Ning Xiaobei and the others came here to relax before their exams. In the northern corner of the wall, various dumbbells and barbells were still there, and the treadmill remained as well. The large TV and sofa were covered with a gaudy red transparent gauze cloth to keep off the dust; whether that was done by the landlady or Brother Kai himself, no one knew.
In the kitchen, quite a few cups and dishes were indeed missing. A painting that had once hung on the wall, supposedly one of Teacher Peng’s proud works, was also gone. It seemed that the battle that night had been quite intense, and the two of them had smashed a lot of things.
Upstairs was Teacher Gu’s bedroom. They didn’t feel comfortable going up, so after chatting with the landlady for a while longer, they hurriedly took their leave.
“I feel really down.”
Fan Xia said, draping an arm over Ning Xiaobei’s shoulder.
Facing the setting sun, they walked along the asphalt road through the countryside. On either side were harvested fields, the brown soil broken here and there by the occasional utility pole. A sparrow or two perched high up on the wires, staring down with bead-like eyes, giving the whole scene a bleak, desolate feeling.
In another two weeks, once the final exams were over and the students all returned to the city, this small town would become even lonelier.
Perhaps the local residents had long grown used to this kind of life; week after week, semester after semester. The children came and went, left and returned. Just like those little birds: noisy and lively one moment, chirping nonstop, and then suddenly gone again. To them, people and birds were probably all the same.
“Without Brother Kai at our alma mater, it doesn’t even feel like our alma mater anymore.”
They said they had come back to visit their old school and teachers, but in the end, it was really just to see Brother Kai; to chat, brag a little, and catch up on life.
“Why do you think Brother Kai left? From what the landlady said, it doesn’t sound like he switched jobs. It’s more like…”
More like something sudden had happened, like he’d been abruptly… fired.
Fan Xia didn’t say those two words out loud, but Ning Xiaobei understood anyway.
“The strangest thing is, whether we call him or message him, he hasn’t replied at all.”
Fan Xia usually kept in touch with Brother Kai. Just two months ago, when he sent a message to check in, Brother Kai would still reply a couple of times. So they had always thought everything was fine, just that he was busy starting over with a new batch of first-year students and didn’t have time to chat.
But this month, there had been no news at all. That was why they decided to come to the school and take a look.
“Hey, hey, you two, wait! Xiaobei, Little Dark Kid…”
They had already walked quite far, about to head to the main road to catch a ride back to the city, when they suddenly heard someone calling out to them.
Turning around, they saw it was the landlord himself, pedaling toward them on an old 28-inch” bicycle that rattled loudly; everything made noise except the bell.
“Here, this is for you. My wife, honestly… not the sharpest. She chatted with you for so long and didn’t even think to give you this. It was only after I came back from the fields and she told me that I remembered.”
The landlord was a bit long-winded. As he spoke, he pulled a slip of paper out from the pocket on his chest.
“Teacher Gu said that if anyone came looking for him and he wasn’t around, we should give this slip of paper to that person. It’s been so many days since he left, and you two are the only ones who’ve come to visit him. Ah… come to think of it, even if Teacher Gu can’t be said to have ‘students all over the world,’ he’s still taught at least a hundred students, right? So how come only the two of you came to see him? Not to mention all those students, there were at least a dozen who used to come to his place often, playing ball, eating and drinking together. Why is it just you two?”
The old man was extremely talkative, rambling on and on with a string of nonsense. Fan Xia’s hand, still held out in midair, was starting to go numb, yet the slip of paper still hadn’t been handed over.
A taxi drove by, the driver honking twice, asking if they were getting in or not.
“Oh, look at me, look at me. My wife says it too; everything about me is fine except I talk too much.”
At last, the landlord showed a bit of self-awareness. He stuffed the slip of paper into Fan Xia’s outstretched palm, like he was giving alms to a beggar, and waved them off.
“Come visit again sometime. And when you find Teacher Gu, tell him to remember to come back and pick up his things.”
The old man showed a simple, honest smile, then turned and got back on his bicycle, riding off with a clank-clank.
After getting into the back seat of the taxi, the two of them leaned their heads together, staring at the small slip of paper in Fan Xia’s hand.
“This address…”
Fan Xia looked surprised.
“Isn’t this near our university town? Teacher Gu really went from high school straight into the university scene, huh?”
Ning Xiaobei looked at it a few more times, feeling like something wasn’t quite right.
“This address… I feel like I’ve seen it somewhere before… wait…”
As he spoke, he reached into his pocket and fumbled around, pulling out a business card that the Black Snake-like boss had forcefully stuffed into his jacket pocket at VENDY bar last time.
After he got back from the bar that day, Ning Jianguo had taken his clothes to wash and found it while emptying the pockets. Not knowing what the black card with a butterfly printed on it meant, he had simply tossed it onto Ning Xiaobei’s desk.
When Ning Xiaobei came home the following week and saw the thing sitting on his desk, he felt inexplicably guilty. He casually grabbed a book and stuffed it inside. Somehow, through a series of coincidences, it ended up in this pair of pants.
Things at home were just like that; disappearing for no reason, impossible to find no matter how hard you looked. And then, when you stopped thinking about them, they would reappear just as mysteriously.
Whenever something like this happened, Grandma Ning never bothered to look for it, and she would even tell Xiao Mei not to search either. She’d say the household items had been borrowed by immortals to play with for a few days, and once they were done, they would naturally return. Ning Xiaobei had never believed in such superstitions, but now, looking at this black card with a white butterfly that had somehow reappeared in his pocket, it seemed he had no choice but to half-believe it.
Comparing the two, the address written on Teacher Gu’s slip of paper was unmistakably the same as the address of VENDY bar.
To be precise, it was the second floor of the bar.
“Oh, you’re asking about Yueyue and the others…”
After going in a full circle, the two of them returned to the university town as usual. But instead of heading back to their respective schools, they first made a trip to the bar street.
Inside the bar, where the song 《Mo Hu Luo Jia》 was playing, the same improper boss lounged on a booth seat like a snake, lazily smoking from a hookah.
Seeing Ning Xiaobei covering his mouth, clearly in a refuse secondhand smoke stance, he lowered his head with a smile. His ten fingers were painted with dark green nail polish; the color like heavy moss that had sunk at the bottom of a lake for hundreds of years without ever seeing sunlight, dark and dense, almost black.
“Couple months ago, they came here and stayed in the room upstairs.”
He pointed to the second floor.
“And now?”
Fan Xia lifted his chin, asking.
Ever since they entered, he had been standing in front of Ning Xiaobei protectively. After learning from Xiaobei that this was a gay bar, his nerves had been wound tight—what if someone else tried to take Xiaobei away?
“Oh, little brother, instead of worrying about the guy next to you, why not worry about yourself? Around here, it’s scattered all over, full of lonely, helpless people. What we lack most is a strong guy like you.”
Vendy said this, blowing a smoke ring toward Fan Xia. The hookah smoke smelled different from normal cigarettes, a mix of mist and fruity aroma. Coming out of his mouth, it almost had the flavor of a supernatural creature from a mythological drama. Fan Xia shrank back, ducking behind Ning Xiaobei.
Seeing this, the boss laughed so hard he nearly toppled over. Maybe the smoke he exhaled choked him a bit; he coughed twice, his eyes reddened, looking even less human.
“You’re late.”
He said.
“They died together.”
………………
Author’s Note
Fan Xia: In a place like this, I have to protect Xiaobei properly. Everyone else, stay out of the way!
Xiao Bei: Protect yourself first…
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