"Our school teaches everything in Chinese. I'm only average," Fingel said.
"Really?" Old Tang paused. "No wonder it's an elite school."
"Hello, Old Tang." Lu Mingfei stepped forward, taking Fingel's place, and shook his hand politely. "I'm Lu Mingfei."
Now Old Tang was thoroughly confused. The Lu Mingfei before him looked poised and imposing. His shirt and jeans were the same sort of outfit Old Tang had seen on their video calls, but what was with that restrained warmth and courtesy, like two heads of state meeting?
"Man, Lu Mingfei, college sure changed you," he murmured.
"Oh, and this is Wang Wei. He was playing on my account for a while." Lu Mingfei introduced Constantine, who stood behind him.
"Oh, right, so you're the newbie. Sorry, I went a little too hard on you before..." Understanding dawned on Old Tang's face.
For games with such a steep learning curve, the player community generally treated newcomers well. Stomping beginners was considered poor sportsmanship.
But Constantine merely stared blankly at his face, saying nothing for a long while.
Old Tang frowned at Lu Mingfei. "Man, your friend..."
The cold expression on Lu Mingfei's face immediately stopped him short.
"Is he your older brother?" Lu Mingfei asked Constantine softly.
Constantine finally reacted. He lowered his head and shook it. "I don't know."
"Wait, wait." Old Tang scratched his head, utterly bewildered. "Guys, what are you talking about? What older brother? Did I miss something? I don't get it."
Lu Mingfei glanced at him, then suddenly regained his calm expression. "Oh, nothing. He's an orphan like you. He grew up in an orphanage, so I thought he might be your younger brother."
"How is that even possible?" Old Tang gaped, unable to follow his reasoning. "It's only been a few months, Mingfei. How did you go from the wisecracking straight man to the space cadet?"
"Ah, he gets like this sometimes." Fingel stepped in just in time to ease the stiffening atmosphere. "Old Tang, buddy, let's buy our tickets first."
Only then did they get moving, heading toward the ticket counter.
Fingel and Old Tang walked ahead. Suddenly, Fingel leaned close to Old Tang's ear and whispered, "Our school has some nasty start-of-term traditions. They did a number on Mingfei." He pointed at his own head.
"What?" Old Tang had already been puzzling over what felt wrong. Now he understood at once, and indignation spread across his face. "That's illegal! I'm telling you, don't think you can bully Mingfei just because he has no family in the United States. I'll take him to court and sue you!"
Fingel immediately slung an arm around his neck. "Shh-keep it down. Our school has professional psychologists, and he's already received treatment. As long as nothing upsets him, he'll gradually recover. Why do you think the principal personally approved a long vacation so he could come see you? The old man's afraid of trouble at the school, too."
"Don't bring it up for now. Even a lawsuit should wait until he recovers. Relax, I'm his senior. I'm on your side." Fingel thumped his broad chest with a couple of resounding thuds.
"Really?" Old Tang remained dubious.
"We have medical documentation. That old principal won't escape justice. But the patient's needs come first, right?" Fingel coaxed him patiently, soon leaving Old Tang almost entirely convinced.
Lu Mingfei and Constantine trailed a few paces behind.
"He looks very similar?" Lu Mingfei asked.
Constantine nodded.
"But he isn't the same person? His personality or presence is different?"
Constantine nodded again.
"All right. I understand." Lu Mingfei could tell he wasn't lying.
By the time they left the subway station, night had fallen. There were few pedestrians along either side of the street.
Old Tang's neighborhood lay in northern New York. The buildings looked steeped in history, their weathered walls covered in graffiti of every style. One enormous mural covered an entire three-story wall. The man depicted looked Mexican, and his lantern-sized eyes gazed calmly over the street beneath the streetlights.
Shops lined both sides of the street, and a few vendors sold small goods on the sidewalks. Apart from the unusually broad asphalt road and sidewalks, it looked much like a street in a small Chinese county town.
They reached their destination after a short walk.
Old Tang lived in a six-story building. The entrance opened onto a combined living room and kitchen, though the cookware looked largely unused.
Farther inside lay the largest room-the bedroom. A double bed took up almost half the space, its head and foot nearly touching the walls, making the room feel cramped.
The whole room had only one narrow sash window. A desk with a computer stood in front of it, beside a small shelf cluttered with odds and ends.
Old Tang gathered the clothes scattered across the bed into a bundle and stuffed them into the built-in closet.
"Sorry, it's a bit messy."
Lu Mingfei and the others set their luggage on the floor. Fingel was the first to flop onto the bed. "No problem, no problem. Messy is good. Feels like home."
Old Tang took out his phone and checked it. "I ordered food. I'll pick it up when it's ready."
He had ordered four large Puerto Rican sandwiches, along with some little corn fritters and other snacks.
He rarely treated himself to food this good. But now that he saw Mingfei as a patient, he had gritted his teeth and splurged on something tasty.
Chapter 54: Old Tang
After eating and drinking their fill, the four sprawled around the bedroom.
Lu Mingfei, Fingel, and Constantine lay crosswise on the double bed, while Old Tang spread a waterproof sheet and a quilt on the floor to make do for the night. He had already booked four Greyhound tickets for the next day, from New York to San Francisco. The whole journey would take about five days.
Late that night, a faint reddish glow filtered through the window. The night sky in big cities was always like that: countless lights shone into the atmosphere overhead, which reflected a dull red glow back down.
Fingel fell asleep remarkably quickly, but he was a restless sleeper and kept kicking Lu Mingfei in the backside.
Lu Mingfei simply sat up and leaned against the wall, closing his eyes to rest. Among shattered walls and ruins, he could light a warm campfire and spend the night resting like this. By comparison, a roof that kept out the wind and rain and a soft bed were already comfortable accommodations.
"Hey, man?" Old Tang whispered. "Can't sleep either?"
Lu Mingfei opened his eyes and met a bright, alert pair staring at him through the darkness.
"Come sleep on the bed." Lu Mingfei got up and stepped down.
"No, no, I'm used to sleeping on the floor. My work has me roughing it outdoors all the time." Old Tang hurriedly refused. "I just ate too much today. I don't usually have late-night snacks. It's unhealthy. What I mean is... want to play a few rounds?"
"Sure."
Old Tang and Lu Mingfei shifted quietly into place. Old Tang drew the room's partition curtain-a dark length of fabric. Lu Mingfei looked up. Its track ran along the ceiling, much like the curtains separating beds in a hospital ward. The tracks seemed as old as the apartment itself; rust had eaten away any markings on the nails.
"This place used to belong to a doctor with a private practice. He treated patients here," Old Tang explained when he noticed Lu Mingfei looking. "Otherwise it wouldn't be so cheap, haha."
Lu Mingfei said nothing. He sat beside Old Tang and watched him turn on the computer. The curtain blocked the screen's light from reaching the two sleeping on the bed, creating something almost like a little private booth in an internet café.
"Old Tang, how long have you lived here?" Lu Mingfei asked while the game loaded.
Old Tang, who had been preparing to counsel his "patient," had the conversation taken out of his hands. After a moment's hesitation, he answered honestly. "Been here since I dropped out of high school. You know how it is, man. No parents. I've had to rely on myself."
There was a hint of easygoing pride in his words.
"Have you ever tried going back to find your family?" Lu Mingfei asked.
"I have. I went to China for work, but it was like looking in the ocean..." Old Tang stopped, apparently unable to recall the idiom.
"Looking for a needle in a haystack," Lu Mingfei said evenly.
"Right, right. A needle in a haystack." Old Tang slapped his forehead. "I started learning Chinese late. I don't remember those idioms and references very well."
"You don't remember anything at all from when you were little?" Lu Mingfei watched his expression and eyes closely.
"I was already in the orphanage by my earliest memories." Old Tang shook his head. "I've wondered whether there's a man and a woman somewhere else in the world searching everywhere for me. But all these years, not a single letter addressed to me ever arrived."
He failed to notice Lu Mingfei lowering his right hand. Beneath the chair sat the black case-brought over just now under cover of darkness.
He merely assumed Lu Mingfei's intense interest in his past meant his "mental issues" were acting up. Often, when someone with psychological problems confided in you, what they really wanted was a sense of connection. At times like this, you couldn't offer stiff lectures. You had to follow their train of thought and encourage them.
"Man, let me tell you something I've never told anyone." Old Tang composed himself and attempted a "weathered by life" smile. But his naturally cheerful face looked harmless when serious and rather goofy when he smiled. "It's nothing that big, really. I've been working all this time, but I still live in this run-down neighborhood and scrape by on my everyday expenses. Know why?"
Lu Mingfei shook his head.
"Because I regularly donate to the orphanage that took me in as a kid. My account has some international transfers that aren't exactly aboveboard, so I donate anonymously." Old Tang grew a little wistful as he spoke. The screen's light reflected in his eyes, as though a hazy mist had settled over them. "Nobody asked me to do it, and nobody knows. A guy who can barely feed himself trying to be a masked hero-isn't that kind of ridiculous?"
"No. How could it be ridiculous to the children you help? You lived there yourself. You should understand better than anyone." Lu Mingfei shook his head.
Now Old Tang was at a loss. He scratched his head, feeling as though Lu Mingfei was counseling him instead. He glanced at Lu Mingfei's impassive face in the glow of the monitor and realized he couldn't outdo this newly "mystical" version of him at sounding profound. So he simply poured out everything he had prepared to say.
"What I really wanted to tell you is, man, people like us really did start out pretty useless. We can't compete with people from good families or people with talent. But, how do I put it? Me, your buddy here, I figured it out a long time ago! No matter how lowly or incapable we are, we're still alive, right? As long as we're alive, we have our own lives. Maybe our jobs aren't steady. Maybe we live in dark, cramped rentals. Maybe we don't know where our next meal's coming from. Maybe we'll never stand at the center of the world and shine. But so what? Who doesn't end up closing their eyes and getting buried in a hole? All we experience is the journey, and maybe that journey means nothing at all. So screw it. We can still play StarCraft. We can still ride Greyhound together across the United States. We can still be anonymous heroes. That's fucking awesome! If I drop dead someday, someone out there will still remember the good I did. In his imagination, I'll be handsome, suave, tall, and mighty!"
Old Tang rattled off so much in one breath that he was panting by the end, his eyes full of relief. Perhaps he had intended to take those words to his grave. Somehow, tonight, he had poured them out to a boy much younger than himself.
"That's a defeatist outlook," Lu Mingfei remarked. "Nothing is predetermined. If you want to shine, you should work for it."
"So all that talking was just me getting carried away with my own speech." Old Tang rolled his eyes. "Must've lost my mind in the middle of the night, telling you all this. A guy like you needs games to cure him!"
Lu Mingfei leaned against the back of his chair and folded his arms. "You play. I'll watch."
"Then watch closely. Your buddy paid for these skills with his life." As soon as Old Tang entered the game, he perked up.
Perhaps on all those countless nights, Old Tang had kept these words bottled up, enduring yet enjoying his own anonymous hours in an aging building tucked into a corner of New York.
Chapter 55: The Journey
The next day, Fingel kicked Old Tang awake.
He couldn't remember how late he had played the night before. He had only a vague recollection of Lu Mingfei helping him lie down on the bed, followed by loud snoring beside his ear.
Then, that morning, Fingel woke from a nightmare and lashed out with a savage kick, jolting everyone awake at once.
So even as they washed up, Fingel was still apologizing to Old Tang. "Sorry, buddy. It's an old problem. Next time, sleep behind me. I'll kick the wall!"
"It's fine." Old Tang graciously forgave him.
They had breakfast at the restaurant downstairs from Old Tang's apartment. The owner was Puerto Rican and warmly welcomed his first customers of the day.
Afterward, they collected their luggage and waited by the road for a taxi.
The ride from Old Tang's place to the station cost sixty dollars. The hulking Fingel sat in the front passenger seat chatting with the driver, while Lu Mingfei and the other two squeezed into the back. The breeze through the open windows barely relieved the stuffy heat of their cramped quarters. Fingel hit it off with the driver along the way, and when they got out, the older man even promised to invite him over sometime. The driver was a local farmer. He said his farm was large enough to ride horses on, and he had handed it over to his eldest son to run. Now he drove this old Crown Victoria as a taxi. If he wasn't in the mood, he simply stayed off the road and found a bar to drink in all day.
Once they were out, the old driver floored the accelerator, and the car from the nineties roared away. An old man living that freely might have spent more on modifying his car than he earned from several years of driving a taxi.
"Now that's living." Old Tang watched the exhaust trail with longing. "One day I'll land a big job and buy a farm to retire on."
"No, no, no. That's outdated." Fingel disagreed. "A modern farm should be set up like a tourist attraction." He then launched into an elaborate discourse on flowers and fruit trees, animal enclosures, gazebos, picnic areas, cafés, social media promotion, and selling organic fruit and vegetables.
Old Tang listened in stunned admiration. He hadn't expected the unreliable-looking Fingel to have such a head for business.
But a moment later, Fingel's face took on a lecherous, shifty look. He said that if they finished by giving the farm a romantic name and putting the house in front of an enormous swimming pool, they could admire the curves of all the pretty girls it attracted without ever leaving their doorstep.
Old Tang connected all those carefully designed, tasteful farm amenities in his mind and understood at once. "Fucking brilliant."
From his expression, he had clearly thrown all thoughts of beer, farming, and pastoral living out the window... no, perhaps not the beer.
The two like-minded prospective farmers kept discussing the details all the way into the waiting hall, finally hammering out a comprehensive retirement plan.