◎ An Attempt ◎

Under the open sky full of stars, Luo Peiyin wrapped her inside his coat and kissed her with an intensity that left her breathless.

This kind of kiss had played out in Gu Qiao’s imagination more than once. She no longer needed to restrain what she imagined. Wrapped inside Luo Peiyin’s coat, her knees bumped against his, but this time she had not the slightest urge to pull away. Through the fabric, she could hear the sound of them pressing together.

It had been over two years since the last time she had received a kiss like this. His lips were very cool — cool like his fingers — those cool fingers that now traced her contours one by one, finally coming to rest on her earlobe. Gu Qiao heard the bright sound of her earrings. But very soon his lips grew warm. Then burning. Her lips grew warm along with his, and her whole body felt as though something had set her alight.

Luo Peiyin scooped her toward him with his palm, and beneath the shelter of his coat, his hand found the softness of her. Gu Qiao’s fingers, having been inside the coat’s shelter this whole time, were considerably warmer than his. While receiving his kiss, she reached up and touched his ear.

Good — just as before, his ear was burning hot. She couldn’t see the color of it in the dark, but she could guess it must be very red. This much hadn’t changed. Very good — this was still the person she had known. Her fingers slid along his jaw, tracing the jawline until she found his throat and the movement of his Adam’s apple. In the night beneath a vast canopy of stars, she could see him clearly.

She didn’t know how others went about kissing. Even now, she had only ever had experience with Luo Peiyin. She kept her eyes open almost the entire time — at these moments, rather than growing unfocused with desire, her eyes were, strangely, brighter than ever.

Her eyes held only him.

But he seemed not to like this. He deliberately kissed her eyelids, and very soon her eyes fell closed. Her fingers slid down his neck and found a scar, and suddenly she came back to herself. She asked him what had happened.

“Nothing. An accidental cut.” He was consistently understated about this sort of thing.

This scar was from a mugging over two years ago. Nothing had actually been taken from him — the truth was, his mood had been genuinely terrible at the time, and he had gotten into a fight with the men over something worth only a few dozen American dollars. Three against one, and none of them were smaller than him. Under normal circumstances, he would never have bothered with something like this — there was nothing to be gained. But at the time, he seemed to have lost all ability to sense danger. All he had felt was that here, finally, was a channel for release. Those three men must have thought this Asian man had gone mad, risking this much over so little money. He had vented to his satisfaction, but naturally not without some damage. That had been such a long time ago — he had completely forgotten about the scar. It was only because of Gu Qiao that he even learned it was still visible after all these years.

He hadn’t been drunk that night. Yet his whole person had felt as though he were. The knife wound had sobered him. That bleak stretch of time needed to end.

Of course, he had always had self-discipline, so when he decided to put an end to that brief period of dissolution, he had done so very swiftly.

He paid no attention to Gu Qiao’s touch, continuing to kiss her face. He left a path of aching impressions all over her. Gu Qiao felt herself being held more and more tightly, until breathing was nearly impossible. It was as though he meant to dissolve her into his own flesh and blood and bone.

Her fingers remained on that scar, caressing it. Other places, one could inflict small wounds on oneself. This place required another person.

Luo Peiyin’s mobile phone rang inside the car. In this wide, desolate wilderness, the phone kept ringing, its rhythm seeming almost synchronized with Gu Qiao’s heartbeat.

The unexpected sound of the phone made the surrounding stillness seem more profound by contrast. At the edge of Gu Qiao’s awareness, she thought she heard other sounds too — some distant, long bird call, whether a squirrel or something else, rising and fading until it dissolved from her hearing entirely.

In the end, Luo Peiyin decided to take the call. He removed the coat — still holding the warmth of both of them — and draped it over Gu Qiao alone. Her face was flushed. She played with her earrings — their swaying made her face appear even redder. He told her to wait for him.

Luo Peiyin spoke in English. It appeared to be a work matter. Gu Qiao had no interest in prying into other people’s private calls and chose instead to look at the stars. Her eyes traced the constellations he had mapped with the red-beam flashlight, searching for the one that belonged to him. Listening to him speak English, she found herself thinking, for some reason, of the phrase she had once used most frequently in English: “Please have the recipient pay for the call.” He had taught her that phrase so precisely that every time she was able to communicate her request to the operator accurately, and in the end the call was charged to Luo Peiyin.

In fact, Gu Qiao had misread the situation. The call had nothing to do with work — it was from Luo Peiyin’s younger cousin, the one who only spoke English. Tomorrow, they were to accompany Madam Liao to Suzhou.

His maternal grandmother was buried in Suzhou. Luo Peiyin had never made a habit of formal memorial visits, but since he was here anyway, he ought to make the trip.

When Luo Peiyin had returned to China, one of the reasons he had given Madam Liao was that he didn’t want to speak English — which was, of course, not the whole truth. There had been many reasons.

When he was young, his maternal grandfather had always made a great ceremony of commemorating his grandmother on the anniversary of her death. Luo Peiyin had never found it moving. He had accompanied his grandmother through her final years as a child; his grandfather had existed only in photographs. There had been many philosophical conflicts between him and his grandfather’s side of the family. As an atheist, he had never believed in any afterlife. If you cared for someone, you should do so while they were still alive — weeping and performing all manner of ritual after they were gone was nothing more than a way to move oneself.

When his grandmother fell ill, he had taken indefinite leave from school. The school, of course, would not grant long-term leave for that reason, so his excuse on the attendance form was that he himself was ill and needed to recuperate. For nearly half a year, virtually everything Luo Peiyin did took place at his grandmother’s bedside. By that time, he already had some understanding of death — death meant ceasing to exist entirely. He did not believe in any afterlife or in anything called a soul. He simply knew that when a person died, they vanished completely.

The first person who had ever taught him to identify the stars had been his grandmother. His grandmother and grandfather had been classmates at one point, before parting ways for decades. His grandmother was from Suzhou — from the time he was born she had always lived in the north, and it was only after her death that her ashes returned to Suzhou.

His grandmother’s final wish had been for him to take care of his mother.

At the time, the people around him had all said what a filial child he was for staying at his grandmother’s side. Yet after her death, he had taken no part in her memorial observances. He had always believed that once a person was gone, they were truly gone — commemorations existed only to bring comfort to the living. His grandfather had somehow come to know of this, and had regarded him more highly ever since than any of the other grandchildren. Those who didn’t know the reason assumed the favoritism stemmed from a resemblance.

He himself had never seen the resemblance. Nor had he ever shown the slightest deference to being under his grandfather’s roof. Whenever his grandfather expressed longing for his grandmother, he would always ask Luo Peiyin to tell him more about what she had been like in her last years. At such moments, Luo Peiyin would ask: if he missed her so much, why had he not written even one letter? A man of his stature, even after relocating to Malaya, would have had no great difficulty corresponding with someone in China — he wouldn’t have been obstructed.

At this point, his grandfather would always fall silent. Luo Peiyin had half expected his grandfather to send him back to China for this display of insolence.

When he had first gone to Singapore with Madam Liao rather than remaining in China, it was because his father appeared to be managing better than his mother. However good a foreign land might be, his mother had uprooted herself and gone to seek out a father she had never met — that was simply harder than staying in familiar surroundings. Luo Bo’an had badly misread this, assuming Luo Peiyin had followed his mother in order to enjoy the perks of capitalism. The foreign life did hold some appeal for him, but only to a degree. Once his mother had demonstrated that she was doing well in Singapore, he had resolved to return to his hometown with its four distinct seasons. His mother had told him: if you go back to China, your father won’t take care of you.

He had always known this. It had never been a secret to him, and it had never factored into his considerations.

A person’s attitude toward love is shaped by their family history. Because of his family, Luo Peiyin’s understanding of love was that it ultimately ended in parting. He had long believed that all farewells were inevitable — that he himself had no attachment whatsoever to reunion or togetherness.

After hanging up the phone, Luo Peiyin looked toward Gu Qiao, who was standing there wrapped in his coat, watching the stars.

Luo Peiyin had not let the kiss earlier interfere with what he’d actually come to do. He continued to keep her company under the stars. His fingers, which had been ice-cold before, had not only warmed the skin at her waist — they had warmed themselves in the process. He used his fingers to learn her again. The pads of her fingers were slightly rough, but her nails were smooth — like the shells he had collected on the beach as a small child. She was, by all appearances, a very healthy person.

Gu Qiao’s fingers grew warmer and warmer, her whole body as though aflame. She felt a longing — something inside her like a small creature tearing at her. Luo Peiyin’s fingers slowly worked their way between hers, kneading and pressing ceaselessly against her palm.

Luo Peiyin stole kisses from Gu Qiao’s face while she was looking at the stars — kissing the place where her neck met her jaw. If not for his hands supporting her, Gu Qiao felt she might slowly dissolve into the ground. Out here in the Shanghai countryside, no matter who spoke, only the other person could hear.

She heard Luo Peiyin ask her: “How far did you get with anyone else — before now?”

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