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“Wang Yibo,” he said to me once as we laid in yet another anonymous hotel room, a gleam of late morning sunlight lying across the bed. “Don’t you ever think about the future?”
“Should I?” I asked. I knew what he was saying, really. It wasn’t about the future. He was saying that I shouldn’t be here with him, that we shouldn’t be here, that perhaps this should be the last time that we were ever here. But his hand was warm on my chest and his face was against my neck and I knew, too, that what he said and what he thought were two different things.
“You should,” he said, lips moving against my skin. “Because it’s getting nearer. We’re together now, but soon enough, we won’t be.”
I turned to him then. Pulled him even closer, even though we were already as close as two people could be. I drew him so tight against me that his skin seemed to be my skin, that there were no ends and beginnings, only a continuous flow of one being. Only this warm body that I loved better than my own. “There’s a future beyond the one getting nearer. Beyond not being together. The future when you come back to me. That’s the future I think about, Zhan-ge.”
He smiled but his eyes looked distant, as though he was still peering into that near future. “That’s not a future. It’s a fantasy.”
He could not dampen the mood of this morning. It’d been forever since we saw each other. It would be forever before we saw each other again. These hours that we had together were meant for better things than gloomy predictions. “Well,” I said. “Some fantasies are worth having.”
He chuckled at that. I’d won it out of him, this hard-earned laugh, this resulting pliancy. I maneuvered him between my legs, pulled his unresisting mouth down to mine. He’d be safe with me for a couple of hours yet. That was what I kept my thoughts to, in those days.
Wang Yibo wakes up at ten the next morning. It’s two hours later than his usual waking time. He can’t remember when he slept the night before, but when he drags himself out of bed, his whole body feels sluggish and achy and slow, as though all it wants is to go back to sleep.
He tries to remember whether he has any performances scheduled today, but his mind feels like it’s been hit by a sledgehammer. Attempting to think of anything is like sifting through heavy mud. He gives up and goes out into the combined living room and kitchenette to get his day started.
The apartment looks out of shape. It’s usually neat, almost compulsively so because Yibo likes things to be in order, but this morning the floor is littered with sofa cushions and used towels. Upon further inspection, an empty bottle of lube is lolling on the coffee table. So. All the signs of a romp right there in the living room. The aches are starting to make sense.
But the thing is, Yibo doesn’t do hookups. He’s never slept with anyone who wasn’t his boyfriend, and he hasn’t been in a relationship in over three years. Countless people have thrown themselves at him, but he doesn’t consider going to bed with any of them; he doesn’t even have lube in the house. His life is all about his work - teaching dance, rehearsing dance, performing dance. When he isn’t dancing, he’s skateboarding, or climbing, or racing with friends. He doesn’t go to bars or clubs or social gatherings where there might be strangers.
So how could he have brought someone back home last night? He doesn’t remember going out. He does remember coming back home after work, like any usual day. He couldn’t possibly have gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and found some mystery guy he liked enough to have a one night stand with.
His fridge looks strangely empty, too. He could’ve sworn that he had some cut fruits in there, half a scallion pancake that he’d been intending to reheat, and at least one packet of sandwiches that he’d picked up from the bakery a day ago. All he sees now is frozen dumplings and a cardboard box of leftover pork. His mystery hookup had evidently been hungry, as well as horny.
He sends a message to his best friend in the city, Seungyoun. Hey. Did we go out last night?
Seungyoun replies within seconds, as he always does as though he’s waiting by his phone for someone to text him. Nope????
My apartment looks like I brought someone back. But I can’t remember who or how or what we did. My lube is finished. Got gross towels on the floor. Fridge was raided. It’s fucking weird. I don’t get it.
Wellllll at least it sounds like you had a good time HAHA
It does, but Yibo just wishes he could remember it. It’s too unsettling not to. If only the mystery hookup guy had stuck around - but then again, perhaps it was better that he hadn’t. Yibo’s not very good with strangers, and especially not one who’d apparently been invited into his sanctuary and gotten something that Yibo gives only to the very, very, very few people he loves and trusts.
Frowning, he starts putting his apartment back in order.
When I was a kid, my nai nai brought me once to an old seaside town about four hours from our city by plane. I could only remember impressions from that holiday; the feeling of the sand sifting between my toes, the warmth of the sea, the roughness of the blanket in our cheap hotel. Nai nai sitting around for hours with other grandmas at an open air eatery in the evening, fanning themselves and drinking endless cups of tea. A couple of kids and I kicked a ball about. Nai nai shouted at me to be more careful when I tripped and fell down. It was nothing. Knees barely scraped.
One of the kids had a skateboard. I wanted it badly. Asked nai nai if I could get one. She said we had no money for it. My parents hadn’t left us much to live on.
It had been eleven years since that hazy holiday. The eatery was gone, though I’d walked up and down the shore looking for it. The cheap hotel was gone too, replaced by a glittery, mega chain hotel so tall it blocked out the sky. And nai nai was gone. For years and years, almost as long as I could remember, it’d just been me and nai nai in our tiny apartment, nai nai pestering me to study as she fried garlic in the kitchen, nai nai hanging clothes out the window on hot summer afternoons, nai nai shouting good-naturedly to neighbours walking downstairs, nai nai switching on the sports channels to watch basketball and motorbike racing with me on weekends. Now that she was gone, you could say that I was all alone in the world.
But I had him with me for three whole days in this crowded seaside town, transformed over eleven years from a small backwater resort for older folks into a fashionable summer retreat for the young and well-heeled. There were such big crowds of tourists here that we were practically anonymous, just another two guys in shorts weaving through laughing people on the streets towards a small guesthouse perched in a quiet corner off the main beach.
“Do you remember any of this?” he asked me.
“No,” I admitted. “It all looks totally different.”
“That old town that you came to with your nai nai can be preserved in your memories then,” he said. “This whole new town will be for us.”
We went out to the sea on that first day. We raced each other, chased the waves. I was a better swimmer than him, but we were both decent. After the third race, panting and laughing, he put his arms around me. His mouth tasted of seawater salt. He had a five o’ clock shadow on his jaw, rasping against my face, and I pushed him away, said, “Shave when we get back to the hotel!”
When he came out of the sea the last time, he was laughing, flicking damp hair over his eyebrow. Head cocked to one side, waist enticingly small, skin wet and shining. I couldn’t believe that the polished, sophisticated guy I’d met at my friend’s engagement party, the one everyone hankered after, the one everyone said was untouchable, the one who took me six months to persuade into my bed, was here with me now in this open, alive, unfiltered way. It felt like a dream that could be taken away without warning.
“Hey, Wang Yibo,” he said. There was something coying about his tone, for all it was so casual. “Want to get an ice cream?”
I hadn’t had an ice cream for what felt like years. I didn’t like sweet things, as a rule. Never had. Even as a child, nai nai said I would take a bite of chocolate and throw the rest of the bar on the floor.
He returned with two cones, one chocolate, one strawberry. I took the chocolate. He leapt lightly onto a railing, balancing himself on the top rail with his feet gripping the second, looking me over as he licked. The ice cream was far too sweet. I swallowed it anyway.
“Why can’t we see each other more often?” I asked. “And why do we only meet in hotels?”
Instead of answering, he pointed to my cone. “This side is melting.”
“Come to my place,” I said, licking up the melted ice cream from the cone. His eyes flashed. “When we get back to the city. Come spend the nights with me, in my apartment. It’s been three months now. We can take that step, don’t you think?”
He put the last of the cone into his mouth and held open his arms, pulling me in. We were nestled together, his legs firm around my hips, his mouth, sweet and sticky, pressing kisses along the side of my face. We weren’t making love, but we could be. If we were in our room, door locked behind us, I’d be stripping him now, sliding my mouth over his chest and belly and even further, down into that hot core of him. “Yes,” he said at last. “We can take that step.”
He shook his head then as a wayward breeze tossed hair into his eyes. Behind him, the sea sparkled under a cloudless, brilliantly blue sky. The busy, laughing, chattering, yelling world around us seemed inconsequential enough to be forgotten. We could be all alone, just the two of us.
What I remembered clearly was this, the rasp of his stubble, the exact tone of his voice when he said, “You’re worth the risk, Wang Yibo.”
One week after the mystery hookup, as Yibo calls it to Seungyoun, he receives a notification from CogniCorp. They’re requesting - courteously - to pay him a visit at his earliest convenience.
Requests from CogniCorp are as good as orders. Yibo can’t conceive of what they could possibly want of him - the first and only time he’d ever gone to CogniCorp was to erase his memory of his parents’ accident when he was a child, and it had been a standard procedure done by the book - but he replies with a date and time, and settles down with some trepidation to welcome these super terrestrial beings from CogniCorp into his humble abode.
When the two men arrive, they’re dressed simply in office shirts and pants, the first button open at their necks. It’s a midsummer afternoon, after all; Yibo shouldn’t have been expecting tailored suits. They are officious, but not impolite. They do not barge in. They sit in the living room and accept with thanks the under-brewed tea that Yibo serves them. They compliment him on his most recent stage performance that’s been making the rounds on social media.
Then one of them, an older man with greying hair at his temples, says, “It may seem strange to you that we’re here. We do apologise if we have startled you in any way. In fact, we are not here for you. We’d just like to ask you some questions about an ex-employee of CogniCorp.”
“Okay,” says Yibo sturdily. “I don’t know anyone who works at CogniCorp, though.”
“Do you remember anything about a man named Xiao Zhan?”
Yibo considers for a moment, then shrugs. “Don’t think I know him.”
The other man, who’d introduced himself as Li Hongsun, shows him a photo on his phone of a tall man, slender to the point of thinness, delicately-featured. Yibo shakes his head again. “I don’t recognise him, sorry. What led you to me?”
“We have reason to believe that he may have performed memory manipulation on you,” says Li Hongsun.
Suddenly, Yibo thinks of the sofa cushions on the floor, the used towels, the empty bottle of lube, his utter lack of memories from that night. “Wouldn’t you have it in your records, then?”
“We have checked it, as a standard procedure,” the old man says. “You have no records of memory manipulation or erasure in the last fifteen years.”
“So you’re saying… if he did perform memory manipulation on me, he did it without recording it officially? Why would he do that? And how? I haven’t met him before and I definitely haven’t been near any CogniCorp office in years.”
“We suspect he may have performed it on many people, for motivations that we’ve not yet confirmed,” Li Hongsun explains. “We’re still investigating how he did it, too, and we’ve been tracking down his activities. If it’s not too much trouble, we’d like to invite you to do a test, for us to confirm if your memories have been manipulated or not. You won’t have to come to our headquarters; just your local CogniCorp branch would be sufficient.”
“How long will it take?”
“You’ll be in and out in no more than half an hour. We will compensate you for any taxi fare you might incur.”
“Okay,” Yibo says. “But I’ll make it clear that I’ve never bribed anyone to manipulate my memories, and I’m against any illegal form of memory manipulation. In fact… I’ve never even thought it was possible.”
“After our investigation concludes, it will be impossible,” says Li Hongsun firmly. “We will make sure of it.”
Yibo’s city, the northern capital as it’s known, is a tightly jammed, overbuilt, sprawling city metropolis that struggles to house and feed the tens of millions of people both within the city and out in the surrounding countryside. The city is so overwhelmed that it’s not just a single city on land, but a city split into three levels. The underground level is where the menial workers live; the surface level is where most of the middle-class like Yibo live; and the sky level, built atop hundreds of skyscrapers, is where the wealthy live. The senior management leaders of CogniCorp, it’s said, live in lavish penthouses in the sky level.
In recent years, young people have been moving out en masse to the next biggest city in the country, a city by the sea known for its milder climate, better town planning, open spaces and more affordable housing. Yibo should consider moving there, too. As he skates towards his local CogniCorp branch office, music jammed in his ears, the northern capital seems like it’s bursting at the seams. Cars are jammed on the roads; the trains are crowded to capacity; the travelators are screeching under the weight of its passengers. Yibo hates it, actually. The press of humanity all around him is stifling, almost suffocating. But he can’t leave. It’s a simple, rooted conviction in him: he has to stay here, until -
Until?
Engrossed, he sails past his friend Seungyoun, waiting outside a cafe for him.
“Oi!” Seungyoun yells after him. It cuts through his music. Yibo stops the board and turns around.
“Sorry,” he says, taking the buds out of his ears.
“Knew there’d be a day when you would skate right past me and not see me,” Seungyoun grumbles, but he’s smiling.
“Thanks for coming with me today.”
“Hey, of course. My best friend has been summoned by the almighty CogniCorp for an investigation, how can I not come along to be nosy?”
Tucking the skateboard under his arm, Yibo falls into step with Seungyoun, walking to the end of the street where CogniCorp occupies the top five floors of a mid-rise office building. Seungyoun will be allowed to wait for him in the reception area in case Yibo experiences any disorientation after the memory test - though, as the CogniCorp customer service officer has assured him several times, this is highly unlikely. Yibo’s not afraid, not exactly. He genuinely doesn’t remember anything about this employee they’re investigating, he hasn’t bribed anyone, and he hasn’t had any dealings with CogniCorp in fifteen years. They’ll test him and release him once they confirm that.
But it’s a comfort to have a friend with him. To know that he won’t just enter a building and not come out, without anyone knowing where he’s gone.
Seungyoun looks slightly nervous too. In this country of theirs, CogniCorp is equally revered and feared. CogniCorp had been the head of a group of powerful corporations that had, three generations ago, overthrown the previous government and installed a new one in its place to create, as the party manifesto said, a technology-first society.
CogniCorp is acclaimed for its breakthroughs in mental science, the most lucrative of which is its patented memory manipulation capabilities - the ability to erase or redesign people’s memories according to their wishes. Almost everyone in the country has used CogniCorp’s services one way or another, whether for therapy, recovery, or simply to forget and move on. Of late, memory implants have become popular, too; people can pay CogniCorp to implant memories into their heads of grand holidays, adventures, lovers, as long as the memory they want is approved by the law. CogniCorp, ever quick to react to their audience, has made it easy with a list of pre-approved memories. One just has to go into its online store and click through the options.
But for all its benefits to society, it’s feared for the rampant rumours of its political influence, its mysterious leaders, top secret scientific experiments and technological advancements. Nobody really knows who runs CogniCorp. Nobody knows the extent of what they’ve discovered or invented. There is no evidence to show that CogniCorp is anything other than what it presents itself to be - a smart company devoted to the science of the mind, that does everything by the law and well above board - but the very nature of its business makes it the evergreen topic of footpath news and rumours passed from group chat to group chat.
“It’s just gonna be a quick test, right?” Seungyoun says as they enter the lift.
“That’s what they’ve told me,” Yibo says.
CogniCorp doesn’t, as far as Yibo knows, run random investigations and summon people to their offices. There’s more to this employee memory manipulation case than they’re letting on, but Yibo doesn’t want to know anything more about it. He just wants to go in, get his test done, and get the hell out.
They don’t make him wait. At three p.m. to the minute, he’s brought into a small room with big windows and a recliner. A smiling man dressed in a lab coat introduces himself as Dr Tang. “It will be very fast and you won’t feel anything other than warmth,” he says. “We will just be looking for indicators that you’ve experienced memory manipulation; these usually show up as blanked out gaps in your memory bank. I believe that you have also signed the form giving us consent to scan your memories for indicators of our ex-employee Xiao Zhan?”
“Yes,” says Yibo. “But you won’t be looking into the actual memories, right?”
Dr Tang shakes his head. “That is not permitted without your consent. CogniCorp does not look into actual memories unless the patient explicitly requests that we do so, for erasure or redesign.”
“Okay,” says Yibo doubtfully.
“If you’ll lie back, please.”
They draw the blinds down over the windows and put a pair of dark shades over his eyes. Dr Tang says to the nurse, “Ten seconds.”
Yibo falls into a sort of stupor. He’s aware that something is happening to him, and aware that his head feels warm in a tingly, pleasant sort of way, but he’s mostly just napping, not thinking of anything at all. He feels lulled and safe. He could be back in his bed at home, taking a leisurely afternoon nap.
Then the warmth disappears and instantly he’s alert again, blinking in the bright mid-afternoon sunlight that pours into the room when the nurse rolls up the blinds.
“Well?” he asks.
Dr Tang is smiling. “There is nothing abnormal about your memories at all. We found the indicator of your childhood memory erasure, but nothing else.”
“Nothing about Xiao Zhan?”
“Nothing at all.”
“So I’m free to go?”
“You’ve always been free, Mr Wang. But yes, we won’t be disturbing you any further.”
Yibo is following the nurse jauntily through a few long corridors of rooms towards the reception when suddenly his heart jumps. The door of one of the rooms is ajar, and inside he sees Ye Yin, a colleague of his at the dance studio. Ye Yin is lying on the recliner, clearly waiting to undergo the same test that Yibo had just done.
Is it just a coincidence that Ye Yin has been summoned as well? Yibo had thought that he was randomly picked out from a list, but if both he and Ye Yin have been called for testing, does this mean that he might actually have a link to this Xiao Zhan through the dance studio?
An unease starts in his gut that doesn’t go away even after he’s left the building with Seungyoun, heading to the nearest park to skate off his anxieties.
We rarely met more than once a week. His work consumed his days and nights, and it took precedence over everything else in his life. Two months ago, it took three weeks before he found time to meet me again. We had a fight about it and I told him to get out of the flat since he didn’t want to be with me anyway, but he stayed and slept on the sofa and in the morning I came out to him making eggs in the kitchen, and we kissed and had the most spectacular make-up fuck. From then on, he made sure that we met at least once a week.
On a day like today, when he was free to meet and we had a whole night and day stretching before us with nothing to do but fuck, eat, and sleep in that order, he’d be waiting for me at a cafe two streets away from my studio. He liked a simple black coffee with no sugar, said he’d once been obsessed with flavoured coffee but now he’d lost his taste for sweet coffee. He’d be reading a book borrowed from the library, old books written before the new country from authors like Wan Fang and Paul Rand. If it was summer he’d be in an oversized shirt, and if it was winter he’d be in a turtleneck pullover. At all times, he looked like the most stunning man on earth.
And this most stunning man on earth would put away his book and coffee when he saw me, walk through the five streets back to my apartment and close the front door behind us and tumble me into bed, saturating my mouth with the taste of his sweet mouth, trailing kisses all over my chest, licking down to my belly and thighs and cock and finally, finally, fucking me hard and deep like I’d been craving all week, knocking me out of myself with every intense thrust.
I wound my fingers through his hair after. In winter it was fine and soft and well-behaved; in summer it was unwieldy, each strand sticking up like it didn’t want to be part of the greater mass of his hair. He sighed and snuffled a little into my chest. These quiet moments between us ending and starting again had a beauty all their own. I could hold him fully against me, the long length of his body pressed against every inch of mine, my leg resting on his calf, his soft cock lying on the inside of my thigh. I stroked his cheek.
“You could come to the studio sometimes,” I said. “I want to introduce you to my crew. Ye Yin’s great, you’ve already met him once before, remember? He was at the party where I met you.”
At that, he suddenly stiffened. Drew himself up to his elbows and looked down at me, eyes sharp. I tried to pull him back down, but he resisted. “You haven’t said anything about me to them, right?”
“No,” I said. “Nobody knows about us.”
“Good,” he said, relaxing. He laid back down on me, head pillowed on his arm.
“But how much longer do you want to keep us a secret? It’s been over half a year.”
He was silent for a moment, thumb stroking my hip. He loved me. I knew he did. I saw it in the way he looked at me, felt it in the way he touched me. He loved me the way I loved him, almost to the exclusion of everything else. But while I’d opened myself fully to him in a way I’d never done before with anyone, unearthing all my secrets and oddities and vulnerabilities and pouring them trustfully into his keeping, he’d kept a part of himself hidden from me. It was that part that kept him from seeing me too often, that had been the real root of the fight we’d had.
“Come here,” I said, nudging him. “Kiss me, you bastard.”
He kissed me yearningly, desirously. It was an intimate kiss. A kiss of love and want. I knew it. But he was hiding from me. He moaned into my mouth and lifted his arm, groping among the pillows for the lube. I found it and put it in his hand.
“Do you trust me?” I asked. His fingers, slick, probed at my entrance. I shifted my hips against his and stroked him in a long caress from neck to back to ass.
“I trust you more than anyone else I know,” he said. His voice was low and rough.
“Then trust me. Stop hiding from me. Tell me what I need to know.”
“But trusting you,” he said, “means asking too much of you. I shouldn’t even be with you. I tried to keep away, but in the end…I wanted you too much. I’ve never wanted someone like this before.”
Eyes fixed on his, I reached down and worked him gently into position. He slid in again, slotting easily into the space that he’d been earlier, like it was where he was meant to be. Coming home. A long, lingering kiss. I licked the corner of his mouth. “Trust me,” I said again. “Xiao Zhan. I’m yours. You’re mine. Trust me.”
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too.”
“No, you don’t understand. I love you. You mean so fucking much to me, Yibo. I can’t put you in any danger. Not this kind of danger. It’ll kill me if anything happens to you.”
“And it’s safer for me not to know anything at all?” I questioned then, even as our bodies strained together, even as he reached a place so deep inside me that I could barely breathe, let alone speak. “Slow,” I panted, “slow down, slow…”
He slowed, gasping, and we calmed down, still joined, still fucking, but slower now, returning to ourselves. His throat worked; he cradled my face in his hands. The words were stuck in his mouth, but he managed to get them out in time. “I’m with the resistance,” he whispered. “I’ve been on an assignment for three years.”
And just like that, it all fell into place. The long, unexplained absences, the refusal to meet any of my friends or to have me over, the trysts in anonymous hotels, the insistence on meeting me two streets away from my studio. I was with someone who couldn’t, shouldn’t, be with me. He was placing me in danger; he was placing himself in danger. The resistance was an invisible and lethal force in this country. Rumours of it had started circulating one generation after the installation of the new government, and it was whispered now, two generations later, that it had grown into a powerful force that could tear apart the strictly imposed order of the country if it wanted to. The corporations were constantly on the hunt for resistance members, but few had ever been caught. Nobody knew who the leaders were, where they met, or what they did. The resistance members had no ties that they could be traced to, bound or threatened with; that was their prerequisite. The success of their work rested on their isolation.
But now, he’d broken the cardinal rule. He’d bound himself to me. If we had any sense at all, we would break up right now, this instant, and never come within reaching distance of each other again.
But I held him in my arms instead. Wrapped my legs around him. Pressed him close as he came inside me, as he opened himself and put his deepest secret into my keeping, as though through mere touch I could keep him safe, and I said, softly into his ear, “You’re worth the risk.”
Ye Yin agrees to come to Yibo’s flat, because the studio isn’t a great place for discreet conversations. He looks cheerful and unconcerned when he bounces in, full of his usual vim, and Yibo’s heart settles a bit. He pops two cans of beer open and ushers Ye Yin to the living room, where they sit on the floor around the coffee table.
“It was over so fast,” says Ye Yin, shaking his head. “Did you feel sleepy, too?”
“I think I actually did sleep, a bit.”
“Weird, huh? It was so weird. You know, I’ve never done this memory thing before. You?”
“I did it once, as a kid. I don’t remember it much. Did they find anything?”
“Nope. All good, all clear. My memories are untouched. But come on, as though Xiao Zhan would ever do something like illegal memory manipulation…”
At that, Yibo freezes. “You know Xiao Zhan?”
Ye Yin peers at him quizzically. “Yeah. Don’t you know him? I thought you’d met him too.”
“No.”
“Well, I guess it was a while ago, you’ve probably forgotten about him,” Ye Yin says, frowning. “It was two… three years ago? He was at Xingxing’s engagement party. He was her university friend or something like that, I think. I had a couple of beers with him, he was a great guy. Real easy to talk to. You were there too!”
“But I don’t remember him at all.”
“Maybe you didn’t talk to him.” Ye Yin shrugs. “But I can tell you, he’s a good guy. He won’t go around taking bribes from people to do illegal shit on them.”
“Did they ask you about him, then? Since you know him?”
“Yeah, but not much. They only found two memories that had him in it, and both of them were from the engagement party. I haven’t seen him since. I couldn’t tell them anything other than that I thought he was a good guy. Oh, but I did ask why they were testing me. Like, didn’t the guy have better friends than someone he met two or three years ago at a friend’s party? And you know what they told me? Apparently not. He didn’t have any close friends. He had a bunch of acquaintances, like me, but no actual regular friends. It’s bizarre. He seemed completely normal. No, scratch that, he was completely normal.”
Yibo frowns. “So they’re tracking down anyone and everyone who had even the slightest contact with him?”
“Yeah. And it’s not a lot of people. He seems to have been a bit of a loner. Spent most of his time at work.”
“What about his family?”
“Doesn’t have one. Crazy, huh? The things you find out about people.”
“Yeah,” says Yibo, and leans back against the sofa. He should be feeling good about all this. Ye Yin barely even knows Xiao Zhan, and Yibo doesn’t know him at all, so both of them are exonerated and cleared of any further investigation. He can go back to his day to day routine without worrying any further about this weird thing that just popped out of nowhere.
But for some reason, he can’t settle. Uneasiness seems to be prickling at him, working its way deep beneath his skin, and he can’t even figure out why. It’s not a sense of foreboding; he doesn’t think or believe that he’s in any danger. But he’s uneasy. Nervous. Worried.
He wishes he knew more about Xiao Zhan. He’d barely glanced at the photo that Li Hongsun had shown him on the phone, and had dismissed it almost as quickly as he’d glanced at it, but now he can’t get the face out of his mind. Xiao Zhan. Xiao Zhan’s face is outstandingly, arrestingly beautiful. He remembers it so clearly; the exact shape of his unusual eyes, the straight line of his nose, the small mole beneath his mouth.
Oh. Perhaps that’s why. Yibo’s just infatuated, that’s all.
“I hope he’s okay,” sighs Ye Yin. “I did like him.”
“Yeah,” says Yibo. “From what you’ve said about him, I don’t think he’s a bad guy. Hope that they’ll find out what really happened.”
“I guess we won't hear about him ever again,” Ye Yin says. “It’s too bad.”
Ye Yin is wrong.
Three days later, when Yibo’s dumping his clothes and bag into his locker at the dance studio, he hears a loud exclamation outside. Ye Yin rushes in a beat later, followed by Yang Kai, another colleague who leads the breaking class.
“Look!” Ye Yin gasps, thrusting a phone in his face.
Headlines blare at him: COGNICORP EMPLOYEE ON THE RUN. Under the headline, the photo that Li Hongsun had shown him: Xiao Zhan, tall and slender, dressed in the nondescript attire of white office shirt and black pants, posing against a neutral background for a corporate headshot.
The story is brief, saying that Xiao Zhan, memory designer and four-year-employee of CogniCorp, has been found guilty of carrying out unauthorised memory manipulation in return for bribes. CogniCorp estimates that he has carried out fifty procedures over a period of two years. He’s now on the run, and the authorities have set up a nationwide manhunt for him. Anyone who sees him has the legal obligation to report it to the nearest police station, and anyone caught hiding him will face heavy fines or imprisonment.
Yibo’s hands shake so badly that he drops the phone. In the midst of the resulting fuss over picking up the phone and examining it for damage, he drops down onto the nearest bench, holding his head, breathing in hard and fast to work oxygen into his lungs and stop himself from choking. Xiao Zhan, his mind screams, Xiao Zhan, Xiao Zhan, Zhan-ge!
“Fuck, Yibo,” he hears Yang Kai shouting, as though from a distance. “Yibo, what’s happening? Are you okay? Yibo!”
They bundle him into a blanket and deposit him onto the sofa in a corner of the pantry. Momo makes him hot tea, which he manages to drink. It feels warm and comfortable inside him and he irrationally hates that it makes him feel better, puts it away and pushes the blanket off him and just lies there in his hoodie, staring up at the ceiling. He feels cold and shivery, and his mind says, good, you shouldn’t be lying here safe and comfortable when he’s out there, when you don’t even know where he is.
His heart feels like it’s dripping blood inside him, and the word ‘safe’ is the dagger that’s stuck into it.
“But why does it matter?” he says out loud, suddenly, harshly. “Why the fuck does it matter to me?”
Ye Yin’s anxious face fills his vision. “Hey, Yibo, feeling better?”
“Yes, yes,” Yibo snaps, pushing himself up. “I’m fine.”
“Uh, okay. Listen, I told Lulu about this and she said that you can go home if you aren’t feeling up to it today, I’ll take over your classes no problem…”
“Lulu.” A shard of light pierces into his mind. “Lulu’s here?”
“Yeah, she just came in.”
Yibo pulls himself up to his feet. “I’m going to talk to her.”
“You sure you don’t want your tea?” Ye Yin coaxes, but Yibo merely shakes his head and leaves the pantry in search of the staff office.
Xuan Lu is the owner of the dance studio. She’s a trained ballet dancer, kind and intelligent with a good head for management and figures, and the instructors generally stay with her for many years; Ye Yin and Yang Kai have been with her for ten years, Yibo for five. She’s good friends with most of them and hosts small dinner parties almost every week. Yibo rarely joins them; he likes Xuan Lu and gets along with her in a group setting, but doesn’t personally have much to say to her.
But when he stands at her desk, looking at her jotting down the week’s performances and bookings in her calendar, he says, in a low and confiding tone that he doesn’t recall ever using with her before, “Do you know where he is?”
Xuan Lu looks up sharply. “Not here, Yibo. We’ve made that clear.”
He meets her eyes. Strange. She looks - not afraid, but apprehensive, unhappy. He doesn’t know why, not really. He doesn’t know anything much about her at all. She’s just his boss. But he says, “Please, Lulu. I need to know about him.”
“Not now. Tonight,” she says. “I’ll send you an address. We’ll talk there.”
And then she dismisses him, as though he’d only been asking for permission to take the day off.
The address that Xuan Lu gives him is in the sky level, which requires Yibo to take an elevator eighty floors up from the ground. The elevator speeds up the side of the building, revealing more and more of the northern capital’s cityscape and Yibo stands by the edge, watching the glimmering lights shine out from the tightly clustered residential blocks, office buildings, shopping malls, and roads on the surface level. When he passes the sixtieth floor, the view changes to the city above the city.
The sky level is made up of a huge cluster of interconnected skyscrapers, each towering over a hundred floors. The sixtieth floor is where the ‘ground’ of the sky level exists; an intricate network of bridges and corridors that link the skyscrapers into ten miles of gardens, shops, cycling paths, trees, a fast tram service, even a small river that snakes through the landscape. At night, the whole of it is lit up by street lamps and fairy lights; it looks utopian. Yibo has never been to the sky level before. The elevators require special codes to operate that only sky level residents can give to the residents of the surface and underground levels.
As he looks at the sprawling spaces and greenery of the sky level, the graciousness of the landscape, he thinks, how hard we work to maintain all this wealth that isn’t ours.
The apartment that he’s meant to find is a ten minute walk from the elevator lobby. He winds through a leaf-laden bridge overlooking the ‘ground’ and finds his way to Building WE4, entering a luxuriously decorated corridor. Each apartment door is set far apart, and the address points him to the third door.
Xuan Lu opens the door at his first knock. “Did you have trouble finding your way here?”
“None at all,” he says.
She nods and leads him in. It’s a huge penthouse, too big to take in at a glance, and he catches a tantalising glimpse of the night view through the large floor to ceiling windows before she whisks him into what looks like a study.
“Lulu, you live here?”
“Of course not,” says Xuan Lu. “This is my friend’s place. He has nothing to do with any of this, and he’s from a powerful family, so nobody will question his visitors. You won’t meet him tonight. But as far as you’re concerned, we’re here for a dinner party. You’ll have to stay here for at least two hours. My friend has gotten food prepared for us.”
Yibo sinks down into an armchair. “I’ve already eaten.”
Xuan Lu nods, puts a couple of canapes on her plate, and sits opposite him. “Look, Yibo, it’s probably easier if you just ask me questions and I answer them.”
The first thing he asks is, “Do you know Xiao Zhan?”
But she frowns at that, cocking her head to the side. “What kind of question is that?”
“I thought you said you’d answer!”
“No.” She puts up a hand. “Let me get something straight first. Do you remember anything about me and Xiao Zhan?”
“No, I don’t!” He’s frustrated now, words pouring out of him. “I don’t remember anything about you and Xiao Zhan, or me and Xiao Zhan, or even anything about Xiao Zhan himself. He’s a complete stranger to me! The first time I heard of his name was when some CogniCorp goons came to my place to question me about him! They’ve assessed me and confirmed that I know nothing about Xiao Zhan. But there’s something that can’t settle in me, I feel weird and jittery and I keep thinking about him, and I feel as though I know exactly what he looks like, I even have a feeling that…” he pauses for a moment. “That I know what he feels like. I know what his skin feels like. I know how he smells. And I know that you know him.”
Xuan Lu’s quiet, head bent over her plate of canapes. She looks distressed, and Yibo’s heart drops like a stone.
“Lulu, please,” he says. It comes out as a plea. “Is he dead?”
“No,” she says, and he begins to breathe again; “I’m certain he isn’t. CogniCorp wouldn’t have put out that newspaper article about him if he was. But Yibo…I can’t really tell you anything.”
“Why not?” he demands.
“Because you don’t remember him. You aren’t the same person as you were when you knew him. You’re an unknown entity to me now. What’s keeping you safe is that CogniCorp has confirmed you know nothing about him. If I tell you anything, and if they launch a second investigation and question you again, they’ll find out that you do know him, and you’ll be in danger.”
Yibo digs his fingers into his palm. The bite is steadying, keeping his head clear. “Listen, Lulu,” he says, and his words are clear and distinct in the silence. “I don’t know who he is or what he is to me. But things are slowly starting to come back to me. I know that he knows you. I know that I once knew him, and that he’s important to me, and that I may even have loved him. Do you know how weird that is to me? To know that I love someone, without knowing who that someone is? When I saw the news today, it felt like something was choking me. I couldn’t even breathe. And yet I don’t know him. It’s the worst possible feeling. I’m suffering for something I don’t even know anything about. If you can’t tell me any secrets, you could at least tell me who he is to me. And if CogniCorp questions me again, at least I can bear it if I know who I’m doing it for. Help me, Lulu. Help me get through this until he comes back to me.”
He says the last sentence without thinking. When he hears it, shocked, because why would he have said that? How would he know that Xiao Zhan is to come back to him?, something deep inside him suddenly loosens, breaks, and he’s crying, huge heaving sobs that feel like they’re wrenching him, and he still doesn’t know why he’s crying. He knows only that he can’t stop it. This is his body’s grief. His mind doesn’t remember, but his body knows what it’s grieving for.
Xuan Lu says, quietly, when the sobs have lessened, “Okay, Yibo. I’ll tell you. Not everything, but a little…at least for you to know who he is to you.”
“Please tell me.”
“You loved each other,” she says. “I don’t know if you were boyfriends exactly and in any case, it’s strange to use that word for what you both had. So let’s just have it as, you loved him, he loved you. You were very close. But you had to keep your relationship secret for reasons - I can’t tell you what they are - so nobody knows about you and him. I’m the only one who knows, because I’ve been Xiao Zhan’s friend for many years, and I know you, too.”
Yibo lets out a breath. “How long were we together?”
“Close to two years, maybe? I’m not sure. By the time you told me, you’d already been together for a while. I did try to dissuade you both, and I gave him a big telling off, but he was stubborn. He said he couldn’t let you go, and that he’d keep you safe. You told me the same thing, too. That you’d keep him safe. The pair of you!” She shakes her head. “He was putting himself in great danger by being with you, Yibo. From both sides. He had to keep you a complete secret. They’d have killed him if they knew he was carrying on an affair with you…and you’d have been killed if…anyway, I think he succeeded. Both of you succeeded.”
“Is it true that he performed illegal memory manipulation on people? He was most likely the one who wiped my memories.”
“No,” says Xuan Lu firmly. “That’s just an excuse that CogniCorp cooked up. He would never, ever, have done anything like that, you have to believe me. If he wiped your memories, he did it to protect you.”
“Then where is he now? Why is he missing?”
“I don’t know. That’s the truth. I didn’t have any time to talk to him about what happened, and anyway, he couldn’t tell me. I drove him to the mountains and dropped him off. If he managed to get to headquarters, he’s safe now. They’ll have hidden him somewhere. But Yibo, I don’t know when he’ll be able to come back.”
Yibo digs his fingers into his palms again. “Is there any sign…any way of knowing?”
“Only one way.” Xuan Lu takes a deep breath. “If CogniCorp is dissolved…you’ll know that he’s on his way back to you.”
The thought of it is so monstrous that Yibo gapes. “That’s impossible. CogniCorp will never be dissolved. The new country was formed because of CogniCorp. They’re like the government. They’ll always be there.”
“Like I said,” Xuan Lu says, “it’ll be the only sign.”
Yibo attempts to gather his skittering thoughts, but he can’t. The only things that stand out to him are that Xiao Zhan is in danger, and Xiao Zhan is some sort of agent for the resistance, and Xiao Zhan would’ve been killed if anyone had found out about his relationship with Yibo, and that Xiao Zhan could, at this very present moment, be lying dead somewhere. Yibo would never know. Would never have any concrete sign besides waking up one day in the future and knowing, with an animal instinct, that he is dead.
“So I should move on from him,” he says. “He’s probably dead by now. He left more than two weeks ago. He won’t be coming back.”
Xuan Lu swallows hard. “You should move on,” she says at last. “That’s the best thing you could do for yourself.”
“What is he like?”
There’s a long pause as Xuan Lu tries to put her friend into words. “He’s driven and smart. The best of us all. And more than that, he’s caring. He gets along well with people, but because of his work, he had to be emotionally alone. He really shouldn’t have fallen for you…but he did, and he loved you like you were everything to him. And you know, you probably were. He lost his family when he was little more than a child. You became his family.”
“How did he lose his family?”
“They died,” says Xuan Lu briefly.
She doesn’t explain, and Yibo doesn’t ask further. Instead, he says, “Why didn’t CogniCorp investigate you?”
Xuan Lu just smiles and gestures to the richly furnished apartment around them. “I have friends in powerful places. There are many of us, Yibo. Everywhere, and in higher places than many would think. Xiao Zhan is one of a huge network - the best, but just one. And they can’t trace any of us to someone else, either. Even if you were to go to CogniCorp tomorrow to tell them that you suspect me, they wouldn’t be able to trace anything or anyone from me.”
“You’re scary,” Yibo says suddenly.
“I am,” Xuan Lu says, still smiling. “But not to you. Because he loves you. So you will never need to fear me.”
“You believe he’s alive, then?”
“Yes, Yibo. I do.”
“You believe he’ll come back to me?”
“I believe he means to.”
“But you believe that I should move on?”
Xuan Lu looks away. Later, Yibo wonders if she’d done it so that he wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes. “Yes, Yibo,” she says. “I do.”
Three hours after our introduction, after we’d spent half the party sequestered in a corner talking, gazing, flirting, connecting as though we’d known each other for decades, he said, “You’re dangerous to me, Wang Yibo. I can sense it.”
I said, “So what? How can you ever have fun if you avoid danger?”
“Do you think it’s worth risking yourself for a moment of fun?”
“Yes,” I said. “Because you won’t gain anything by being safe.”
He smiled then, his eyes turning up. He was perfectly turned out, impeccable, the picture perfect good boy that everyone dreamed of marrying, but there was something beneath the polished surface. Something lurking and alive. It showed in the way he moved his eyes, the way he turned his head, the way he walked, the way he smiled. I wanted him from that moment.
I said, “I daresay you think it’s worth it, too.”
“I think you’re right,” he said.
Yibo saves a screenshot of the newspaper article on his phone, if for nothing else but the photo of Xiao Zhan. He doesn’t have any other photos of him. He’s gone through years of his phone gallery, even hunted in his computer and among old albums of actual printed photos just in case, but found no trace of Xiao Zhan ever having been in his life. It’s an absolutely clean erasure; no pesky photos, no forgotten toothbrushes, no friends who might unwittingly bring up memories.
Even Seungyoun, as it turns out, had no idea that Yibo had been seeing anyone for two years. “You’ve never said a word about this guy,” he says, chugging down beer in consternation as they lounge in Yibo’s tiny living room, legs propped up on the coffee table, staring at a table tennis match being broadcast on the sports channel. “Two years? Yibo, I hang out here with you a couple of times a week! How’s it possible that you could’ve dated someone without me knowing? And not just anyone, but someone this hot? What the hell, Yibo.”
“We kept it secret,” Yibo says. “You have to keep it secret, too.”
“Why?”
“For our safety. He erased my memory so that I would be cleared if I was investigated.”
“How could he have done that on his own without bringing you into a CogniCorp office? And how did he keep it out of the records?”
“I don’t know. But I can trust you, right?”
Seungyoun knocks his beer against Yibo’s. “Hey. You know you can.”
They drink companionably. On TV, the top ranked player in the country loses the set to the eighth ranked player. If she loses the entire match, it’ll be instant headline-worthy news. She doesn’t look like she’s willing to be headline fodder; she’s glaring at the ball as though she could drive it right through her opponent. Seungyoun says, “How does it feel to know that you have a secret boyfriend whom you can’t remember?”
“Had, have, I don’t know.” Yibo puts his beer down and stretches. “Not gonna lie, it’s weird as hell. He’s a total stranger and yet - it’s as though my body reacts differently from my brain. When I look at his photo, it doesn’t mean anything to me but my heart speeds up. When I think of him in danger, I start panicking. Sometimes I cry for no reason. It’s crazy.”
“It sounds crazy,” Seungyoun agrees. “I don’t know how you’re dealing with it.”
“Honestly, I’m not dealing very well. It wasn’t like this when I did the memory erasure of my parents’ accident. That was a clean wipe. This one feels like emotional baggage that I’m lugging around without knowing why.”
“What are you gonna do about it? You know, I think you should just move on. Even if he comes back, you still won’t remember him. When he erased your memory, he basically erased the history of the two of you. It’s effectively a breakup.”
Yibo’s silent, staring blankly at the TV screen.
Seungyoun nudges his knee. “Come on. You can easily get anyone you want. I guarantee you, if we go to a bar you’ll have half the people there falling over themselves to get to you. You don’t have to become a monk for this guy, you know.”
“He’s probably dead by now,” Yibo mumbles. “It’s been more than three weeks since he left. And CogniCorp has been hunting him down. How high are his chances?”
“Low,” says Seungyoun briefly.
The TV explodes into cheering as the top player wins the next set. The audience is full of her supporters; nobody really wants to see the eighth ranked player win. There’s one more deciding set to go, but the eighth ranked player is rattled by the crowd support. Yibo switches channels to some loud, laughing variety show and throws the remote control onto the sofa behind him. Three weeks ago, the sofa cushions had been on the floor. He and Xiao Zhan had lain here in this very living room and made love before Xiao Zhan left. They’d squeezed so much time out of every single remaining minute that Yibo hadn’t even cleaned up after; had woken up, instead, the next morning, to see his living room scattered with signs of love that he could no longer remember.
This living room where they had once been together, entwined and concealed from the knowledge of the world.
“It sounds mad,” he says, “but I want to wait for him.”
Seungyoun goggles at him. “Yibo! You can’t be serious.”
“I feel that he’ll come back to me. Somehow.”
“But you won’t remember anything even if he does.”
“Does it matter?” Yibo asks. “If my body…my heart…remembers him, does it matter if my head doesn’t?”
Seungyoun shakes his head. “I don’t think anyone can answer that.”
“I’ll wait to find out,” says Yibo.
“But Yibo…what if he never comes back? Are you going to wait forever? Why don’t you give it six months, or say, a year instead, and if he still doesn’t contact you after that, you should think about giving someone else a chance.”
“I’ll wait,” Yibo repeats firmly. “And if someone else comes along, well, we’ll cross that bridge if we get to it.”
Seungyoun sighs, leaning his head on Yibo’s shoulder. “He leaves without a word and you’re still going to give him a chance. He doesn’t deserve you.”
Yibo cracks a grin, hitting Seungyoun’s head affectionately. “Hey, wouldn’t you wait if you had a boyfriend out there who looked like this guy?”
“Probably,” Seungyoun acknowledges. “But even so. I just want you to be happy.”
“I think I was,” says Yibo. “With him.”
That night, led by a strange impulse, Yibo digs into the drawer containing his socks. They’re rolled up neatly and lined up in rows, and he’s annoyed at himself for messing them up, but he continues searching until he comes upon it. A pair of thick grey socks that don’t belong to him. His breath hitches.
He takes them out, turning them over in his palm. They’re unmarked and clean, smelling of laundry detergent that isn’t his. When he presses his fingers into them, something crackles inside.
Carefully, he pushes his hand into the sock and brings out a small piece of paper, folded neatly twice over. When he unfolds it, heart pounding, the few scribbled words swim so much in his vision that he has to take a deep breath to be able to read them.
You were worth the risk. Thank you for keeping me alive.
One cold early winter night, when we were wound around each other in my bed, warm and sated, I asked, “What were you like as a kid?”
He pursed his mouth, thinking. “Resentful.”
“Tell me.”
“I was orphaned at eight. My parents were victims of a drug launched by PharmaCorp promising to prevent cancer. PharmaCorp recruited ‘volunteers’ for the drug testing; they didn’t have a choice. The drug killed them in a year.”
“Fuck,” I breathed.
“The whole thing was covered up. A lot of these cases have been covered up, you know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh yes.” He smiled humourlessly. “The general population doesn’t know it. Just last year, a group of them sabotaged an experiment by PharmaCorp to add an ingredient into flu drugs that will cause heart failure in those aged sixty and above. The government is looking for ways to deal with the overcrowding.”
“I thought they were prolonging life expectancy!”
“For the sky level, yes. The surface and underground levels? It depends on your luck, I guess.” He was quiet for a moment, brooding. “After my parents died, I was sent to live with my uncle in the underground. I hated it there. No sunlight, no hope, barely anything to eat. A few months later, when the resistance sent someone to recruit me, I ran away from home.”
“They recruited you?”
“They recruit children who are orphaned from PharmaCorp’s experiments. It’s smart, really. Most of us have nowhere to go. We’re young and we’ve just lost our family. The resistance becomes our home. They feed us and train us up. And when we’re old enough, we’re sent out on assignments.”
“And what’s your assignment now?” I asked, daring.
He laughed a little, turned to me and kissed me full on the mouth. “If I wasn’t so sure of you, I’d suspect you were an undercover cop.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I’ll just tell you this,” he said. “CogniCorp is the most powerful of all the corporations because they have power over people’s minds. When people go in for simple procedures like memory erasure, they’re giving their mind to CogniCorp. They come out with a different set of memories and they don’t even know it.”
“Zhan-ge…”
“That’s all I can tell you,” he said.
“I hate to think of you being mixed up in all this shit.”
“Someone’s got to be mixed up in this, Yibo,” he said gently. “Why not me?”
I understood what he was saying. The resistance wasn’t a mythical organisation of robots; it was made up of people, human beings, and he was one of those human beings. He’d been trained by them. He’d pledged himself to this assignment. His life belonged to his work. And it was important work.
But he was also mine. And the fear of losing him clogged up my throat.
“If you were resentful as a kid,” I said, attempting to focus on something lighter, “what were you like as an teen?”
“Still resentful,” he said. “I was resentful until the day I met you. Then I realised there was more to life than resentment.” He pressed the tip of his finger into my mouth and I closed my lips around it, caressing it with my tongue. “I realised that I had it in me to care for someone.”
We were silent then, looking into each other’s eyes. I thought of him as a resentful child. A resentful teenager. A resentful adult. And then of the man I’d met who’d worked his way under my skin in three hours and looked at me with eyes so deep that I tracked him down afterwards and clung to him and refused to be sent away because I knew that we were meant to belong to each other. It was a knowing that was absolute and final.
“What guarantee do you have of making it out of this assignment alive?”
He stroked my face. “No assignment comes with guarantees.”
We said little else after that. I held him tight. But the night was very cold.
Months pass without incident. Autumn turns to winter, and then to spring. Yibo scores a gig as a choreographer and backup dancer for one of the country’s most popular singers, Hangeng, and starts touring with him in summer. They visit eight cities, doing two to three concerts in each location.
It’s mostly good fun. Hangeng is even-tempered and considerate of his crew, paying for drinking nights after every last stop. He takes a liking to Yibo, asking for informal lessons in some hip hop moves, and Yibo is happy to oblige.
“I’ve seen your videos online,” Hangeng says after one practice session, splayed out on the floor getting his breath back. “That dual dance you did with Bouboo? Incredible. One of the best routines I’ve ever seen.”
“Thanks,” says Yibo, chugging down water. “We’ve got more videos coming up.”
Hangeng watches him through the mirror. There’s something keen and assessing about his look. “You know,” he says casually, “you came to my place last year.”
“What?”
“Xuan Lu invited you over. You were in the study with her.”
Hangeng has turned his head away to massage his calves, so Yibo takes a moment to school his face into neutrality. “Ah, I didn’t see you there.”
“Yeah, sorry, I meant to come say hi, but I got caught up in a last-minute thing. She said you had a good chat, anyway. Pity she didn’t get to show you around the house.”
Just then, Hangeng’s assistant pokes her head into the practice room. “Boss, are you ready to leave yet?”
Hangeng nods, getting up. “Give me a minute. I’ll meet you at the entrance.”
She vanishes, and Yibo watches warily as Hangeng picks up his bag and stretches his neck. “Quick one,” he says abruptly, voice low. “He’s alive.”
“Who?”
Hangeng gives him a knowing grin. “Lulu hunted down news through the grapevine. He’s hidden, we don’t know where he is or what condition he’s in. But he’s alive.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Yibo says, affecting confusion.
“My mistake then,” Hangeng says, clapping his shoulder. “Good work today. See you tomorrow morning, yeah?”
“Yeah. Good night.”
Yibo lets out a measured breath when he hears Hangeng’s footsteps getting distant. His pulse is hammering in his throat. Almost unthinkingly, he scrabbles for his phone and opens up a chat window with Xuan Lu, but just as he’s about to type, he stops.
Hangeng seems genuine. Yibo hasn’t worked with him before this tour, but the other dancers have, and they’re all fond of him. He appears completely unconnected to any of the corporations, aside from admitting during a drinking night that he’d gotten the memory of his high school sweetheart erased because the break up was too painful to remember. He’s thoughtful and brotherly. Yibo likes him as much as he’s ever liked any celebrity he works with.
But he doesn’t know anything about Hangeng, not really. He doesn’t even know if it was really Hangeng’s place that he’d visited. In this country, it’s easy enough to be tracked and not have any inkling of it.
He puts his phone away and slings his bag over his shoulder, taking a deep breath. He will not be elated. He will not ask Xuan Lu to verify Hangeng’s story. If Xiao Zhan is alive, he will reappear in Yibo’s life again.
He walks out of the practice room and into the night air of the southern city that they’re in, just an ordinary dancer going back to his hotel.
At ten p.m., he sent me a voice message which he deleted when I replied. “I’m coming over now,” his voice said. “Fifteen minutes.”
It had been a while since he came to my apartment. He said the time was getting near for him to leave, so he had to be careful about going repeatedly to the same place. Over the past few months, we’d met in various hotels instead, booking two rooms, arriving at different times, taking the elevator to different floors. I had to knock twice, short and sharp, before he would open the door to let me in. We would put on the safety lock, draw the curtains, and curl up under the quilt together, warm and naked, his leg between mine as we muffled our moans in case the walls were thin.
Love. Desire. Yearning. Fear. Trembling, straining, yielding, taking, gasping, plunging. All these words had been mere words before. They were more than words now, they were meanings etched into our very skin.
Fifteen minutes later, he was at my door. Two short knocks. I let him in.
I’d imagined this day often enough. When we were in sunlight, I forced myself to put it away, but at night, lying alone in my bed, aching for him, I saw it clearly: the shape of his back as he walked away from me to a future that neither of us could predict, and these moments when we were together, these frantic graspings of time, would become a thing of the past.
We are together would become we had once been together. And neither of us knew if there would be a we will be together again.
But he wasn’t walking away from me yet. For now, for this present moment, this very second, he was kissing me, his mouth hot and soft and everything I’d ever wanted, kissing and kissing and kissing until I leaned over him and pulled off his shirt and mapped the terrain of his body with biting kisses. Bites on his neck, on his waist, the inside of his thighs. Bites that would stay with him for days.
“I love you,” he said, over and over. “I love you.”
Sometime that night I straddled his lap and took him into me and we fucked, bodies plastered together, kissing as though we simply could not pull away, as though we had sunk completely into each other. And perhaps we had. His touch was my touch, his moans were my moans, his very breath was mine.
But there inevitably came a time when it ended. Dizzy, chests rising and falling, still clutching, we separated, inch by inch and breath by breath.
“I have to leave tonight,” he said. “Lulu is sending me as near as we can get to the headquarters by road. I’ll make my way on foot from there. There’s a mountain path.”
“Will you be safe? Is anyone after you?”
“No one’s after me. They won’t be for a few days yet. I’ve covered myself, I’ll be safe as long as I can get to headquarters. It’ll take me three days, which is why I have to leave tonight.”
“Can you send me any sign when you’ve reached headquarters? Can Lulu tell me anything?”
“No. She won’t know anything after she drops me off.”
I cradled his face in my palms then, looking at every line on his face, every curve and dip. His mouth was turned up slightly, and I stroked my finger along his lips. There was no point in memorising his face. I would soon forget it all. But I examined every last detail anyway.
“Take some food with you,” I said.
He let out a bark of laughter. “I don’t need your food! I’ve packed everything I need.”
“Take it anyway,” I insisted.
He didn’t argue. He put out his hand, instead, and cupped my cheek in his palm. His eyes were soft. “Listen, Yibo,” he said. “In my line of work, we’re prepared to die whenever it is needed. Many of us take on assignments knowing that it’ll most likely lead to death. We’re careful, of course, and we don’t like to lose our agents, but we are prepared to die as long as we can pass on our information to someone else. But for you, I will do everything I can to come back to you. I will survive for you. If there’s a chance to live, I will take it. You will keep me alive.”
“And you’re a survivor,” I whispered.
“I am. And I’ll make sure that you survive this, too.”
It was time to forget him.
“There’s something you should understand about memory manipulation,” he said, unpacking an instrument that looked like a pair of headphones. “Most people, when they come to CogniCorp asking for memories to be erased, they want to forget. Psychologically, they’re willing to forget. But you aren’t. And so, you won’t forget me, not absolutely.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your body will remember me. And maybe you might get flashbacks. Or something might seem familiar to you.”
I held on to his hands. “So when you come back to me, you won’t feel like a total stranger.”
“No,” he said. “You’ll remember me, somehow.”
“Give me something to hold onto. I can’t let you leave without anything at all.”
“Oh, Yibo,” he said, and his eyes were again so soft that perhaps, perhaps, there were tears in them.
He gave me a pair of socks. Common, ordinary socks, nothing distinguishable, socks that could well be mine. If CogniCorp came - if anyone came - and found those socks, they’d think nothing of it. But for me, it would be the only thing I would have left of him.
He slipped the instrument over my head and we took one last look at each other.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll barely feel like anything. You’ll fall asleep when it’s over. I’ll put you to bed and leave.”
I kissed him and said, “Xiao Zhan.”
That was the last thing I said. His name. I wanted to have it in my mind as our days together started to vanish from my memories: our first meeting, our hours in scattered hotel rooms, our trip to the seaside, our late night conversations, our fears, our desires, our longing, our farewell, right here.
We would be together again, someday. I would know him when he came back to me. That was something I had to believe.
He tapped something on a screen and looked back at me.
“I love you,” he said. And then, “Five seconds.”
Yibo wakes up at seven. It’s an hour earlier than his usual waking time. He wakes up because of a loud, rattling sound, and when his mind manages to work its way out of the sleep fog, he realises it’s his phone, vibrating madly on the shelf above him. He reaches backwards, scrabbles around blindly for the phone, and connects the call.
“Yibo,” says an urgent voice. It’s Seungyoun. “Have you seen the news?”
“What? What news?”
“Look it up, man. It’s big. Huge. I think your Xiao Zhan is mixed up in it.”
At the sound of Xiao Zhan’s name, Yibo wakes up immediately. “Is it something to do with CogniCorp?” he demands.
“Yeah. Put me on speaker and look it up online.”
Yibo’s fingers are trembling when he opens up the country’s state news site. The headline blares at him. COGNICORP DISMISSES ALLEGATIONS AS FAKE.
The article states that CogniCorp has been implicated in a leak of evidence alleging a series of illegal dealings with memories that CogniCorp has been engaged in since the overthrow of the old government. The details are not released, but the article insists that the documents are fabricated, and that CogniCorp’s chief executive officer has stepped forward to dismiss the allegations as ‘untrue’ and ‘harmful’, and warn that they will pursue legal action against all those spreading the rumours.
Yibo sucks in his breath sharply.
“It’s all over social media,” Seungyoun says over the line. “There are screenshots of the evidence…documents, videos, plans. The posts are being taken down as fast as they’re being put up but I’ve seen some of them. It’s huge . Apparently CogniCorp has been storing erased memories to sell them to other corporations. And they’ve been helping the government implant fake memories into people’s heads. No one knows where the evidence is from. How much do you bet that Xiao Zhan is behind all this?”
“They have to be,” Yibo breathes. “It has to be linked to him, somehow.”
“Didn’t your boss say that the only way to know if he’s alive is if CogniCorp is dissolved? Yibo, this might be the start of it.”
Yibo thumbs through as many news articles as he can, searching for news covered by media outside the country, but while they vary in positioning the allegations as true, none of them state where the evidence is from.
Still, when he finally clicks out of the last news website, his heart is thudding so hard in his chest that he can barely breathe. His whole body is shaking.
“He’s coming back to me,” he hears himself say. “Seungyoun, I believe he is.”
“Fuck,” says Seungyoun. “I believe he is, too.”
The news doesn’t stop with CogniCorp’s denial. For days, weeks, months, the country is crippled as more and more evidence gets leaked. The state media attempts to hush it up, but photos and video clips sneak their way onto the internet and are captured for resharing within seconds. People voraciously share leaks about the secret mind experiments and dirty dealings that CogniCorp have carried out for over a hundred years; the way they’ve blackmailed top-ranking government officials, stored and sold memories that their customers thought were erased forever, designed fake memories and implanted them into people’s heads to influence political votes. They learn that all erased memories can be triggered back into their minds; that CogniCorp steals all memories from a person’s head when performing memory erasures or implants; that many of their own memories may not actually be true. They learn that the overthrow of the old government had been largely brought about by memory manipulation.
They learn that, for all intents and purposes, CogniCorp runs the government.
And then the protests begin and go on for months. WHICH OF MY MEMORIES ARE REAL? A sign says. REMOVE MY FAKE MEMORIES, says another. DOWN WITH COGNICORP, says a dozen.
Seungyoun and Yibo huddle over hundreds of news articles and videos in Seungyoun’s living room, watching the unimaginable scenes unfold. Thousands of CogniCorp customers are demanding refunds and investigations into whether their minds have been manipulated without their consent; over a hundred CogniCorp employees resign over the controversies, claiming that they will not be involved with a corporation like this; and five months after the initial leak, one of CogniCorp’s leaders is found dead in his penthouse apartment on the sky level. Wrongful murder, screams the state media. Suicide, claims the independent papers.
“Fucking state media,” Seungyoun growls. “I can’t believe they’re still trying to brainwash us into believing that all this is fake.”
“No, they’re not,” Yibo says, scanning a news article. “You have to read between the lines. Outwardly it looks like they’re trying to deny everything, but they’re not. Look - the headlines claim that Ma Hongzhe’s death was murder, but if you read the actual article, it implies that the evidence actually points to it being suicide. Seungyoun, I think…I think the state media journalists might be from the resistance too.”
“How on earth do you figure that?”
“State media was the first media to release the news and they’ve been fuelling the flames for months.”
“I can’t believe this,” Seungyoun mutters. “Who are these resistance agents and why are they everywhere?”
“Xiao Zhan may be behind all this, but he isn’t the only one,” Yibo says, mind whirling. “He’s just one of them. There are lots of them. And they’ve been planning this for years. Getting their people in place, gathering evidence, waiting for the right time.”
“I can’t even imagine what’s gonna happen next.”
Yibo pauses at a photo, enlarges it, and then shows it silently to Seungyoun. It’s a photo of a woman leading the protest in the eastern side of the country, holding up a banner that says COGNICORP IS CRIMINAL.
“What?” Seungyoun asks.
Yibo points to the woman. “That’s Xuan Lu,” he says.
Two more high-ranking CogniCorp executives are found dead. The government opens up an official inquiry into the CogniCorp controversy; one week in, three ministers are dismissed for bribery and corruption. CogniCorp employees continue fleeing the corporation without even handing in official resignations or serving out notice periods; they simply stop coming in to work.
Then, seven months after the initial leak, the resistance shows up.
They enter CogniCorp’s headquarters one night, infiltrate the R&D departments, and dismantle every equipment in the laboratories. Huge databases of memories destroyed. Software corrupted. Computers taken apart.
The country wakes up the next morning to the announcement that CogniCorp has been permanently paralysed from any further activities, and that the president of the country has been taken into custody for evidence of illegal dealings with CogniCorp. Vice-president Song Jiayong takes over in his absence and heads up the inquiry into CogniCorp.
Daily life goes on as it always has. Yibo makes his regular daily commute to the dance studio, teaches his usual classes. Performances continue. Public transport continues running; restaurants and retail shops remain open. But there’s a definite sense of renewal in the country, an excitement of change that consumes all conversations. Yibo listens to the speculations of the identities of the resistance agents who had been working on the inconceivable collapse of CogniCorp for decades; the rumours that Song Jiayong is a resistance agent himself and will be setting up a new cabinet staffed with officials loyal to the cause; and one lone whisper that springs up about an agent who’d been hunted down and killed by CogniCorp for orchestrating the leak of the evidence against them.
That agent could be anyone, so he doesn’t dwell on it. He continues waiting.
One afternoon, it may have been a Thursday because Yibo vaguely remembers teaching an early class at eight a.m., Xuan Lu calls him into her office after his last class ends at four. They’ve talked generally in the months following CogniCorp’s collapse, carefully vigilant not to talk about anything beyond their work, and Yibo enters the office expecting a discussion about his class schedule or, perhaps, hopefully, a pay raise.
She isn’t alone. And when Yibo registers the person standing beside her, tall and elegantly dressed, arms folded across his chest, hauntingly familiar face turned towards him, his entire body screeches to a halt.
Xiao Zhan. Tired eyes beneath tousled hair, thinner than anyone ought to be. Ten times more beautiful in person than the photo that Yibo keeps in his phone. And ten times more terrifying.
“Hi, Yibo,” Xiao Zhan says. His voice is mellow, lighter in tone than Yibo had imagined. “I’m Xiao Zhan.”
Yibo tries to speak and finds his voice strangled.
“Let’s all sit down,” Xuan Lu proposes. “Yibo looks like he’s going to fall.”
She comes around her desk and urges Yibo gently into a chair, which he half-falls into and then continues staring dumbly at Xiao Zhan, who, with a slightly awkward smile, pulls up a chair and sits down opposite him.
“I guess you’re wondering who I am…or what happened to me,” Xiao Zhan says carefully, as he would to a small animal that he’s afraid of scaring away. “I…I do have something that could help us…”
“It’s too soon to bring that up, Zhanzhan,” says Xuan Lu gently, sitting down. “Let’s have a chat first. Yibo, I know this is a shock, but I didn’t know either that Xiao Zhan would be showing up today, so I couldn’t warn you in advance. He’s been hiding out in the mountains for the past year, moving from camp to camp to throw CogniCorp off his trail. He came close to getting caught once…didn’t you, Zhanzhan?”
Xiao Zhan smiles bleakly. “Close, but I didn’t get caught. That’s what’s important.”
“You did get shot in the arm.”
“No big deal.”
Yibo speaks for the first time. “You got shot?”
Xiao Zhan gives an almost guilty start. “It wasn’t anything much!” he insists. “Just a graze, I swear. It’s completely healed now.”
“You’re…safe…now?”
“Safer than I’ve ever been,” says Xiao Zhan. “Everyone who was after me is gone. The last one was eliminated last week. That’s why I can appear before you now.”
“Eliminated? You mean killed? What did you do? Who the hell are you?”
Xiao Zhan flinches, but Yibo’s coming back to himself now, head clearing up from his shock. His heart is still thumping hard, his breaths are coming out faster than usual, but he’s thinking, he’s lucid, and he’s - angry. Yes. Angry. “You couldn’t have found a way to get word to me? I’ve been left in this crazy state of knowing that I somehow know you but also that I don’t know you at all, and I don’t know why or how you erased my memories. It’s been so insane, and now you’re suddenly here and you’re telling me that you’ve killed people. It’s a lot, Xiao Zhan. You know, you’re actually a stranger to me.”
“I know,” says Xiao Zhan quietly. “I’m a stranger to you now.”
There’s a note of desolation in his voice.
“But you see,” he goes on, “there is a way to…to return it all to you. During my time working undercover in CogniCorp, one of the projects I was working on was how to erase memories without actually erasing them, so that they could be triggered back when needed. When I erased your memories, I didn’t erase them, exactly. I put them in a, I guess you could call it, a locked room within your mind. That’s why CogniCorp couldn’t trace it when they ran the test on you. The thing is, I can unlock those memories. And you’ll remember everything about me again.”
Yibo stands up, pushing his chair back so violently that it hits the wall. He doesn’t notice Xiao Zhan’s rising panic. He’s saying, instead, loudly, “So the first thing you want to do after coming back is to fuck with my mind again? I thought better of you.”
“Yibo…” Xiao Zhan starts, but Yibo’s turning around, walking away as fast and as far as he can from his past.
He doesn’t go very far, after all.
He’s sitting on a bench in a small plaza beside his dance studio, moodily glaring at the ground, when a shadow falls over him. He doesn’t need to look up to know who it is.
“Can I?” Xiao Zhan asks, subdued.
Yibo shrugs.
Xiao Zhan sits down beside him, careful to maintain distance. He clears his throat a couple of times, uncertainly. It has to be hard for him, coming back to someone who doesn’t remember him. But Yibo keeps his eyes stubbornly locked on the ground.
“I started all wrong,” Xiao Zhan says at last. “I panicked and rushed things and I made you feel unsafe with me. I guess realising that you don’t remember me at all is different from knowing it…but Yibo, I promise you now, I’ll never do anything to you that you don’t want. If you don’t want me around, I will let things be. I won’t come near you again.”
Yibo waits, but Xiao Zhan doesn’t seem inclined to say anything further, so he says, a little resentfully, “It’s not that I don’t want you around. It’s that I’ve been waiting for you for ages and I don’t even know what for. I don’t know you.”
“Can I tell you about me?” Xiao Zhan says. “About us?”
Yes , Yibo’s mind screams. Tell me! Convince me! Make me fall for you again!
“Yeah,” he says briefly.
When he chances a glance at Xiao Zhan, Xiao Zhan’s smiling softly at him. “Well,” he says, “we met at Xingxing’s engagement party. Someone at CogniCorp had cottoned on to the loner life I was leading, and they weren’t suspicious as much as surprised, but Lulu and I felt that I had to appear to be social and have friends, like a normal person. So she introduced me to Xingxing, and I went to the party. I saw you first. Couldn’t take my eyes off you. But you approached me first.”
“I approached you?”
“Yeah,” says Xiao Zhan. “It wasn’t until later that I realised how uncharacteristic that was of you. I got really, really lucky with you. I might never have talked to you if you hadn’t come up to me first. I had to avoid getting into relationships, you know. But I just couldn’t keep away from you.”
Yibo leans back on his hands, studying Xiao Zhan’s face. A deep sort of yearning takes over his heart. I believe it, he thinks. I can believe that I couldn’t keep away from you, too.
“Tell me more,” he says.
Two hours later, they walk the five streets to Yibo’s apartment from the dance studio. It’s close to seven and the evening crowds are starting to get hectic, milling closely around them and forcing them apart in some narrow areas, but they manage to find each other quickly. Yibo points out a store across the road to Xiao Zhan. “They sell great beef noodles here.”
“Shall we get a takeaway?” Xiao Zhan says, and Yibo agrees.
They also get a few street snacks to go along with the noodles. Xiao Zhan seems ravenous, wanting everything that he lays his eyes on, and when Yibo asks if he’s always this hungry, he confesses that this is the first day since he left that he’s felt hunger.
Yibo’s apartment isn’t in a mess, not exactly, but there are clothes on the floor. He kicks them aside and Xiao Zhan just shakes his head and laughs.
“I’m not messy,” Yibo says defensively.
“No, I’m the messy one,” Xiao Zhan says.
“Did I know that?”
“No, not really. We didn’t live together. And I only ever spent a day or two with you at a stretch. You didn’t have the chance to find out how messy I can be. You might kick me out after you know.”
“It seems like there’s a number of things I didn’t know about you.”
“No,” says Xiao Zhan, “but at the same time, you’re the person who knows me best in the world.” He pauses for a moment, then amends, “Knew.”
Yibo busies himself with getting out bowls and chopsticks. “Put the food out. I don’t have a dining table, so we’ll eat in the living room.”
Xiao Zhan doesn’t make any comment on that. Of course, Yibo realises. He knows that already.
It should be odd, maybe even unsettling, being with a semi-stranger who’s so obviously familiar with his habits and home. But as Xiao Zhan deftly pours the soup and noodles out into bowls and arranges the cutlery on the living room table in exactly the spot that Yibo would sit in, Yibo feels only the comfort of being known.
He’d never thought that he was suitable to be in a relationship. Couldn’t imagine opening himself to another person or wanting to have someone in his space every day. But there’s something immensely familiar and non-intrusive about Xiao Zhan, something that has little to do with the residue of his memories and more to do with two like-minded souls recognising each other instantly.
“What’re you going to do now?” he asks while they eat. “Are you going to take on another assignment?”
Xiao Zhan blows on his soup to cool it. “No. I’m not with the resistance anymore.”
“They let you go?”
“I’ve wrapped up the CogniCorp assignment, so there was no reason for them not to let me go. It’s not a lifetime contract, you know.”
Yibo puts down his chopsticks to survey him. “What are you going to do then?”
“I was well-paid by CogniCorp during my time there,” says Xiao Zhan matter-of-factly, “and the resistance gave me a good payout, too, when the assignment ended. I’m going to use some of my savings to take up a course and start a business.”
“What, in design?”
Xiao Zhan laughs. “Do you think that just because I was a memory designer in CogniCorp, I’d want to be a designer now, too? I’m done with all of that. No more design work for me. I only did it because I had to, anyway. No. I’m going to study baking.”
“Baking,” Yibo deadpans.
“I’ll start a bakery.”
“A bakery.”
“You don’t think I can do it?”
Yibo looks at his bright, determined face, chin tilted up defiantly, eyes sparkling with challenge. He has a sudden, overwhelming urge to cup that face in his palms, press their mouths together. It would be an immensely natural thing to do. He says instead, “You’ll have to bake something for me first before I can have an opinion about this.”
“So I will,” says Xiao Zhan, smiling back at him. “I’ll bake something for you tomorrow.”
“In my kitchen,” Yibo specifies. “So that I know you didn’t just buy it from somewhere.”
“Yes, yes,” Xiao Zhan says with forbearance. “In your tiny, awfully equipped kitchen.”
“Excuse me, it’s not awful,” says Yibo, offended. “It’s got an oven, okay? But I don’t know if I’ve got baking tins and whatever else you need for baking.”
“You do have baking tins,” says Xiao Zhan. “I bought them for you soon after we started seeing each other. Didn’t you notice them?”
Yibo shrugs. “Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. Either way, I don't know what they look like.”
“Well, I’ll introduce them to you tomorrow. Be friends with them and they'll be good to you.”
“Were you this weird, before?” Yibo demands.
“Yes,” says Xiao Zhan. “But so were you.”
Xiao Zhan is very, very good at baking.
Late in the afternoon, they laze in the living room drinking tea to wash down the amount of cake they’ve ingested. It’s raining outside, big fat noisy drops of water hitting the window, and there’s a great deal of honking on the roads as cars get jammed up. Yibo usually hates days like these but today he’s content, lying on the sofa with his feet touching Xiao Zhan’s thigh. He asks, “Did you bake for me, before?”
“Mm,” Xiao Zhan murmurs, head tipped onto the back of the sofa. “You don’t like sweet things, but you really liked my walnut cookies. I made them for you a few times.”
Yibo makes an affirmative sound. “You’re right, I don’t like sweet things.”
“But other than that,” says Xiao Zhan, “you eat mostly everything. You’re not picky. You just don’t eat much.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t like eggplant.”
“Did I know that, before?”
“Yeah.”
“We knew a lot about each other, huh? Even if we didn’t spend all that much time together.”
Xiao Zhan flashes him a grin. “It’s amazing how much there is to talk about when you’re in bed together.”
Yibo hits him with his feet. “We’re not talking about sex yet.”
“Ah. Sorry.”
Xiao Zhan’s still grinning, so Yibo hits him again. “We’re not going to talk about it until tonight.”
“Tonight,” echoes Xiao Zhan obediently, but his eyes rake over Yibo’s body with a hunger that makes Yibo shiver with anticipation. Tonight, he tells himself firmly, and then as Xiao Zhan lifts his feet and props them properly on his lap, he thinks, earlier than tonight wouldn’t hurt.
“Listen, Yibo,” says Xiao Zhan, his voice turning serious. “We don’t have to do anything that you’re not comfortable with. Not sex, not unlocking your memories, nothing. It’s enough for me just to be here with you. And if you want to be with me too…we can take our time. We do have time, now.”
The last little core of stubbornness in Yibo finally succumbs and crumbles. This is Xiao Zhan, the man he’d loved and now knows, beyond any doubt, that he will love again. Through time and distance and erased memories, they’ve found their way back to each other, and he knows, with an absolute and final knowing, that they’ll be okay. He sits up and leans in to take Xiao Zhan’s face in his hands. “I do want to be with you,” he says. “But if I don’t want you to unlock my memories…ever…how would you feel about that?”
Xiao Zhan holds his gaze steadily. “It is your choice, Yibo. If you don’t want to unlock the memories, we’ll just make new ones.”
“I don’t want anyone touching my mind again, even if it’s you. And I don’t want you to get into trouble for it too, since all that memory manipulation stuff is illegal now. I wish I could get back those vanished days…but they’re not entirely lost. You’re here, and you can tell me about them, just as you’ve been doing.”
Xiao Zhan nods.
Yibo continues, “We can start afresh without any of the baggage from the past. You’re not who you used to be anymore. The world isn’t what it used to be anymore, because of you. And I’m still going to be me, regardless of what I remember. We can get to know each other again on these new terms.”
“Anything,” Xiao Zhan says, “as long as it’s with you, Yibo. And I want you to tell me about you, too. We spent one year apart. I know some of it from Lulu, but I want to hear about it from you - what happened to you, what you did, what you remembered about me. And now that we can, there’s so much I want to do with you, and so much I want to see. I want to hold you and feed you and go to the ends of the earth with you. I want to welcome the first snow in winter and fly kites in summer and eat strange street foods and watch scandalous sex shows and drink wine with you by the sea.”
“Well then,” says Yibo with satisfaction, “we’ve got a lot of doing to do. Let’s start. Hi, I’m Wang Yibo.”
Xiao Zhan’s lips quirk up into a smile. “Hi, I’m Xiao Zhan.”
“I'd like to get to know you better, Xiao Zhan. I think we might have a chance at making a go of it together. Willing to take the plunge with me?”
“Yes,” says Xiao Zhan. He reaches up and Yibo’s eyes flutter shut as the softness of his finger trails a line down from his eyes to his nose and lips. An intimate, knowing, reacquainting touch. “Always. You’re worth the risk, Wang Yibo.”
The next morning, my new life with him began.
end