1980s - Chapter 8

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The first anyone knew of it was at the barber’s, where news traveled faster than razors.

Zhao Rui went in for a trim because Li Ming had teased him two mornings in a row: “You’re starting to look like the pump before we replaced the bearing.” The shop smelled of talc and steel and weekend gossip. A small boy with a scabbed knee was flattening the corner of a newspaper with both palms so the grown-ups could see.

“Look! Our river!” he crowed. “And the city engineers!”

Zhao Rui felt the shift in the room before he saw the page. Heads tilted as if dragged by the same thought. He turned—carefully, always carefully—and there it was: a provincial feature titled WATER CLIMBS THE HILL with three photographs stacked like steps. In the second—full width—stood the pump they’d installed, the farmers, and, front and center, two men in faded work shirts.

Him. Li Ming.

The earlier clipping on the city bulletin board had been small, names omitted, the image soft with ink bleed. This version was crisp enough to see the squint at the corner of Li Ming’s smile and the oily boyishness of Zhao Rui’s hairline. Beneath, the caption for the first time named them both: Li Ming (Mechanical Plant) and Zhao Rui (Supply Depot).

“Comrade Zhao!” the barber laughed, delighted at proximity to print. “You didn’t say you were famous.”

A dozen gazes clicked onto him, friendly and curious. The air lifted and tightened at once. Zhao Rui made his mouth shape a modest smile, the kind that agreed with the barber and nothing else.

“It was a team effort,” he said, and heard his own voice steady itself on habit.

“Team, yes,” someone chimed in. “But look—” a thick finger tapped the page with a reverent thud “—two city lads shoulder to shoulder with the fields. That’s what the paper wants: proper examples.”

Zhao Rui’s eyes slid to the photo as if by accident. He saw the shine of the casing, the neat line of irrigated water, Li Ming’s stance: open, confident, careful. He also saw, with the cold precision of a man trained by danger, the single detail the photographer had accidentally honored—how the noon sun had cast their shadows along the stones until the edges of those separate silhouettes touched. No hands, no stray gesture, only that threaded darkness.

The barber flicked the cape open. “Sit, sit—if you’re on the page, everyone must admire you properly.”

Zhao Rui sat. The scissors sang. He breathed evenly and felt each hair fall like a counted second. He left a small tip, accepted a ribbing for the extravagance, and stepped back into the brightness of the alley with a smile he didn’t trust to stay.

He did not run. He walked home through ordinary noise, heart keeping its own counsel.

On his table, the provincial paper lay beside the tin of letters. The headline looked louder here. He traced the ink lightly, then let the page go. It curled in the heat, warping their faces by a fraction.

Li Ming burst in ten minutes later, wind-stung, half-laughing, half out of breath. He didn’t knock.

“You saw?”

“The barber laminated me with pride,” Zhao Rui said dryly.

Li Ming took the paper, read the caption out loud as if daring the room to disagree. He swallowed, throat working once. “They printed our names.”

“They did.”

“And no one spat on the floor.”

“Not yet.”

Li Ming dropped into the chair and scrubbed his face with both hands until his hair stood. “Rui… if this were another time, I’d take you to the noodle shop and bang the table and say, ‘Look, that’s us,’ and then buy the entire pot for the whole street and burn my tongue laughing.”

“If this were another time,” Zhao Rui said softly, “we wouldn’t have had to lift water uphill to be seen.”

Li Ming’s hands fell. He looked up, all the jokes drained to a quieter brightness. “Do you want to tear it up?”

Zhao Rui considered. Then he folded the paper once, twice, clean lines, and slid it under the tin with its hidden lid-scratch now erased by a stranger’s cloth. “I want to remember we did a thing worth paper,” he said, “and still sleep behind a latched door.”

Li Ming blew out a breath. “Both. Always both.”

They did not touch. The light was too open. But the room’s air felt warmer for what they had chosen to keep and not keep.

Fame in a small city is a hum, not a shout. For a day, men at the plant clapped Li Ming on the back and joked about borrowing his pen for autographs. Someone pinned the article on the noticeboard beside a poster about workplace safety; a foreman wrote with chalk: Good model! and drew a crooked pump with heroic steam.

At the depot, an old clerk slid the paper across the counter and said, “You did well, Comrade Zhao,” and under his breath, so only paper could hear, “Be careful, hm?”

By evening, the new committee woman in the bright scarf hailed them in the street. “Comrades! So proud. The district wants a little talk for Youth Day. Ten minutes. Show the diagram. Very simple.”

“Of course,” Li Ming said. “Very simple.”

Very simple was three meetings, two seating charts, and one rehearsal in an echoing hall where slogans faded like old bruises. They stood side by side at a table and explained how pressure becomes lift, how friction becomes loss, how cooperation becomes flow. The youths clapped on the beats the instructor cued with his eyes.

Afterward, the committee woman pulled Zhao Rui aside. Her scarf—a stubborn sun in a gray room—smelled faintly of starch and ambition.

“This photo,” she said, tapping the paper folded in Zhao Rui’s hand, “does two things. It tells the district we are competent, and it gives some people a story to carry home.” She held his gaze, not unkind. “Make sure it’s the right story.”

“What story is right, Comrade?”

“That you two are comrades,” she said, smiling as if the choice of word were a small mercy. “Inventors. Useful. Visible in the ways that pay off, and invisible in the ways that do not.”

He inclined his head. The scarf’s yellow stung his eyes. “Understood.”

“I like my district quiet,” she added softly. “Quiet makes room for work.” Then, brighter: “The design—can we scale it? The next commune wants it.”

“We can,” Zhao Rui said, relieved to be handed a problem with bolts.

“Good. Bring your camera,” she said, already turning away. “The paper likes pictures.”

The word camera grazed him like a wire under tension. He nodded, smiled, passed Li Ming at the door with a glance that said not yet, later, and they left the hall together speaking the ordinary sentences of men who own only a portion of their lives.

Evening brought the inspector with the clean shoes—the one who had shaken Li Ming’s hand in the yard months ago and smiled with too many teeth.

He appeared at the plant as dusk sharpened its edges, carrying a leather folder and a manner that made clerks stand up straighter.

“Comrade Li. Comrade Zhao.” He shook hands again, cooler this time. “A small thing. The newspaper requests the original negative for archival reproduction. You understand.” He smiled like a camera flash—white and gone.

Zhao Rui said nothing. The photograph had been taken by the provincial photographer, not by him. But the inspector’s eyes slid to the strap looped around Zhao Rui’s neck anyway, cataloguing.

“We don’t keep negatives,” Li Ming said mildly. “We keep bolts.”

The man’s smile did not change. “Then any photographs you possess related to the project would help. The paper is preparing an ‘innovation of the year’ feature. It reflects well on the plant.”

It reflects light into corners, Zhao Rui thought.

“We’ll check,” Li Ming said. “And bring what we have to the office tomorrow.”

“Excellent. Tomorrow. Early.” The inspector’s gaze dropped to the floor, where the shadows of their legs touched and intersected in the lamplight. He tipped his head, as if committing the geometry to memory. “Good evening, Comrades.”

When he left, the room felt a degree colder.

“He doesn’t need our negatives,” Li Ming said when the footsteps had flattened. “He needs our compliance.”

“And our door frames,” Zhao Rui murmured. “He’ll want to see where the mirror sits.”

Li Ming’s jaw worked once. “We could say no.”

“And turn a small curiosity into a large zeal,” Zhao Rui answered. “Or we could give him a story he can file.”

“A decoy.”

“A decoy.”

They looked at each other—the kind of look that takes inventory before the battle: three prints they could afford to sacrifice; an older camera registered with the committee; a set of harmless frames of fields and faces. The real gallery—their life pressed thin behind silver—would remain a secret, or the future would not be.

Night came with moths tapping the lamp. They worked in silence, choosing what to surrender: the public photo clipped from the paper; a copy of the pump-side image the cooperative had asked for—the one where Zhao Rui had stepped back on purpose so only his sleeve entered the edge of the frame; a blurred shot of children splashing in the channel. Nothing dangerous. All useful.

Then they slid the real life deeper into its hiding place, peel-and-press, mirror-skin settling like a calm face. Li Ming’s fingers lingered on the glass as if it could transmit warmth. His reflection looked back at him and at Zhao Rui, two men wearing everyday weather over something that had learned to survive all climates.

“Do you ever wish we’d never taken any?” Li Ming asked without moving his palm.

“No,” Zhao Rui said. “If we vanish, I want us to exist somewhere even if no one else sees it.”

Li Ming nodded once, the kind of nod that could anchor a wall. “Tomorrow, then.”

“Tomorrow,” Zhao Rui echoed.

They trimmed the lamp. They drank tea that had gone cold without either of them noticing. He wanted, absurdly, to say thank you to a man he had already stayed alive for and because of. Instead he said, “Sleep.”

“Sleep,” Li Ming agreed. “We’ll need ordinary faces.”

He woke before dawn to quiet that was almost too clean. The city holds its breath a moment each morning before delivering itself to noise; Zhao Rui knew the timing. This stillness was a beat too long.

He slipped on his shoes, moved to the door without the floorboards complaining. In the corridor, a faint scuff faded down the stairs—the sound of someone who had already taught his shoes to lie. The latch on their room was intact. The window they never opened was still closed. The mirror sat patient on the wall.

He crossed to it, lifted a corner of the frame with two fingers. The silver backing lay flat, smooth, unbubbled. He let a breath leave him slowly. They hadn’t been inside this skin.

On the table, however, lay something that hadn’t been there when the lamp died: an envelope with no name, cheap paper, a single crease.

He looked at it without touching. Li Ming came awake behind him like a quiet machine powering up—no sudden motion, only readiness. “What is it?”

“Paper,” Zhao Rui said. “From someone who knows where to put paper.”

He opened it. Inside was a photograph printed on cheap stock, darker than their careful baths in the bathroom would have liked. The image made his heart misstep.

Not the provincial shot. Not the pump. Their courtyard at noon—the picture Li Ming had asked for weeks ago, the one with the sky ordinary and their shadows touching like threaded cord. They had developed a single copy, pinned it behind the mirror with the rest. But this was a different print, made from a negative they had never handed anyone.

A note was scrawled on the back in quick strokes: Nice picture. Bring the others. Office, 9 a.m.

No signature. No threat. The absence of both was worse.

Li Ming’s face cleared to a single, distilled focus. “So he’s been here,” he said quietly. “Not just the corridor. Here.”

“Or he knows someone who’s watched long enough to know our habits,” Zhao Rui said. “A friend of the friend of the glass.”

They stood with the envelope between them like a small, precise bomb.

“If we burn,” Li Ming began.

“We don’t burn,” Zhao Rui cut in, gentle and absolute. “We debug.”

Li Ming almost smiled at the choice of word. Almost. “Debug what—him?”

“The story,” Zhao Rui said. He picked up the envelope again, turned it over, studied the uneven blacks, the muddied whites. He imagined a hurried hand in a darkroom lit red, a print yanked wet and shoved in paper, a messenger paid to slip it under a door and forget the house it belonged to.

“He wants the others,” Li Ming said.

“He wants leverage,” Zhao Rui said. “If he had the others he wouldn’t need to ask.”

Silence gathered, then ordered itself into lines. They moved—gathering the decoys, pocketing the innocents, sealing the mirror’s secret with an extra line of paste made from rice the way Madam Li had taught Li Ming when he was a boy who mended kites.

Zhao Rui tucked the envelope into his coat. He reached for the small packet of chalk he kept near the frame—the fisherman’s moon, southeast break, the sign that meant not now but later. His fingers found the paper cylinder, lifted it.

Li Ming’s hand came down over his—warm, steady, not stopping, but asking. “Are we running?” he asked, and his voice did not waver.

“Not yet,” Zhao Rui said. His thumb pressed chalk to chalk until the sticks clicked softly. “But we may need later.”

He set the chalk down without drawing. He looked at Li Ming, and Li Ming looked back at him, both men holding two choices like weights in the same scale: vanish now and become rumor forever, or walk into a morning that might not be kind and make it prefer speaking to acting, as the woman with the scarf once had.

Footsteps stirred in the stairwell. Slow. Measured. The hour was not yet nine.

Three knuckles tapped the door—confident, official—exactly the rhythm bureaucracy practiced until walls learned to open to it.

Zhao Rui exchanged one brief, exact glance with Li Ming. Then he stepped forward.

The knock sounded again. The paper on the table curled a little tighter as if bracing.

Zhao Rui slid back the latch. The door began to open—

—and the chapter’s light cut there, thin and bright, like a blade held steady over a knot that might yet loosen.

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