I Never Quite Took to Him

This was Xie Xue's older brother. Xie Qingcheng.

Xie Qingcheng had once treated He Yu — served as the private physician for their family.

He Yu looked, to all outward appearances, perfectly normal. The impression he gave the world had always been one of warmth, courtesy, and quiet excellence. Yet The He Family harbored a secret that very few people knew: their enviable golden child, the boy every other parent held up as a model, had suffered from a rare psychiatric condition since childhood.

It was an orphan disease. Only four documented cases existed in the medical record. Each patient presented in much the same way: congenital deficits in the hormonal and nervous systems that, when dysregulated, produced violent shifts in personality. Day to day, these patients felt almost no pain — but when the illness flared, they became frenzied, bloodthirsty, with a powerful drive to destroy others or themselves. Textbook antisocial personality. Physically, episodes brought high fever and acute confusion, and each attack was worse than the last.

Clinicians called it Mental Ebola. It dismantled the mind by degrees, seized the body into stiffness and numbness — two deaths in one: first the self, then the flesh. The progression was relentless, like a malignancy. A patient who began as a fully autonomous adult was slowly reclassified as one of diminished legal capacity, and finally stripped of legal capacity altogether, reduced in the end to someone beyond reach of reason.

Case No. 1 through Patient No. 3 had each died from the torment before the disease reached full deterioration.

He Yu was number four.

His parents had taken him to prominent specialists at home and abroad, and nothing had helped. The consensus was that the only way to slow the disease was to place a dedicated medical attendant at He Yu's side for long-term supervisory treatment — to bring the frequency of episodes down.

The He Family, weighing a number of considerations, eventually found their way to Xie Qingcheng, who was twenty-one years old at the time.

That year, He Yu was eight.

Now He Yu was nineteen, and Xie Qingcheng was thirty-two.

Xie Qingcheng seemed steadier than before — colder, even, if steadier wasn't quite the word. Things didn't move him easily. So He Yu's sudden return to China earned no great display of surprise; Xie Qingcheng spent a few seconds looking him over from head to foot — this young man he hadn't seen in three or four years — and then dismissed He Yu's polite small talk without acknowledgment.

At his age, with his standing, he had neither the interest nor any reason to trade pleasantries with a boy who hadn't yet turned twenty.

He only asked: 'Why are you here.'

'I —'

'It's already this late. This is the women's faculty dormitory.'

He Yu smiled — he wanted to say, and what the hell are you doing here, then — but instead he said, with characteristic civility: 'I haven't seen Xie Xue in a long time. We lost track of the hour. I'm sorry about that, Xie — sir.'

'You don't need to call me that anymore. I'm no longer a doctor.'

He Yu, quietly: 'Sorry. Old habit.'

'...Oh, honestly.' Xie Xue had been watching the two of them stiffen up at each other and now moved to smooth things over. 'Gege, you don't have to look so severe about it... He Yu, sit down, don't be so tense — it's been ages since any of us have seen each other.'

Even as she said it, she shifted a little away from He Yu, keeping things politely measured — she often did this. Alone with him she was relaxed, her manner easy and warm, but the moment anyone else was present, and especially when Xie Qingcheng was present, she maintained a careful, courteous distance.

He Yu had a theory: she'd simply been drilled into it since childhood, afraid of her brother's corrections. That feudal-patriarch gege of hers was a specimen of male chauvinism in its purest form — the paternalistic, suffocating variety.

Men like that were acutely alert to any threat to the women in their care. When Xie Xue was small, Xie Qingcheng wouldn't let her wear a skirt that didn't reach her knees. Once, at a school showcase, Xie Xue performed a breakdance routine; Xie Qingcheng sat in the audience and watched his face go dark. The moment she stepped offstage, he was there with an expression like a closed door, asking why she'd joined a performance like that — and then draped his own suit jacket over her shoulders without waiting for an answer.

It was barely eight or nine in the evening, but Xie Qingcheng would almost certainly consider that very late — and a young man alone with his sister, in her quarters, would strike him as entirely improper.

Sure enough: Xie Qingcheng came inside, pulled out a chair, and sat. The lord of the house settled back, long legs crossed, unhurriedly loosening one cuff button while lifting his gaze to rest on He Yu without expression:

'Tell me. What a coincidence — that you'd end up at the very school where Xie Xue teaches, in the very subject she teaches.'

'...'

That posture. Pure occupational conditioning. He Yu felt for a moment exactly like a patient who'd come to a clinic for help, only to find the doctor in a foul mood, face flat as a wall:

'Tell me. Where does it hurt.'

He Yu thought this and almost laughed.

Xie Qingcheng watched him stay silent — was that even a faint trace of amusement at the corner of his mouth? — and his eyes went a degree colder. 'Nothing to say?'

'...'

No, he had it wrong. This wasn't a doctor with a patient.

This was a police interrogation.

He Yu let out a breath. 'No.'

'Then talk.'

'I found it hard to adjust abroad — I never quite managed Adaptation to life there — and I genuinely like the directing and screenwriting program. As for why it's such a coincidence, what do you want me to say?' He Yu kept his tone easy, patient to a fault. 'I'm not a fortune-teller.'

'You like directing and screenwriting?'

'Yes.'

Xie Qingcheng didn't press further, because his attention had been caught by the plate He Yu was holding — that 'ham-and-egg fried clump.'

Xie Qingcheng's brow furrowed. '...What is that.'

He Yu very much wanted to drop the plate directly onto that face of Xie Qingcheng's — the one permanently arranged as though the world owed him a hundred million yuan — and add, for good measure: what's it to you?

But with Xie Xue present, he gave her brother a polite, minimal smile and said: 'Yangzhou fried rice.'

Xie Qingcheng studied it for a few seconds, his paternal expression at full freeze: 'Take the apron off. I'll make a fresh batch.'

'...'

'How have you survived abroad all these years.'

'...Takeout.'

The look Xie Qingcheng gave him sharpened further, edged with something like reproach.

Under that gaze, He Yu felt, without quite knowing why, that it was exactly like the first time they'd met — on the freshly clipped lawn of the villa, Xie Qingcheng looking down at seven-year-old him, that piercing stare as if it could open his chest and examine whatever was inside.

That day had also been He Yu's birthday. A group of children were playing through the sprawling He Family villa, and when they tired of running around, they settled on the white sandstone path by the lake's edge to talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

'I'm going to be a star!'

'I want to be a scientist.'

'I'm going to be an astronaut!'

One chubby boy had no idea what he wanted, but refused to be left out. He looked around for inspiration and happened to catch sight of the butler leading a young doctor through the front courtyard.

Green lawn, sky scrubbed clean to a deep blue. The young doctor carried a bouquet he'd brought as a gift for the household — Endless Summer hydrangeas in full, extravagant bloom, wrapped in pale silver satin paper and arranged with pussy willow and double-petaled roses, the whole thing topped with a fine layer of decorative tulle.

Xie Qingcheng held the flowers in one arm; his other hand rested in his pocket with easy carelessness. He wore a clean, well-fitted lab coat, two ballpoint pens clipped to the breast pocket. Since he wasn't on official duty, the coat was open, showing the lead-grey shirt beneath and the long, even lines of his legs in slim-cut trousers.

The chubby boy stared. After a moment, he thrust out a short, fat sausage finger in Xie Qingcheng's direction and announced at full volume: 'I want to be... I want to be a doctor!'

Then a gust of wind came up — and whoever had wrapped that bouquet had done an absolutely careless job of it — because the gust caught the tulle right off Xie Qingcheng's flowers and sent it spinning up into the air above the lawn, where it drifted until the wind died and let it fall.

All the children tilted their heads back to watch it. It came down without deviating an inch and landed directly in front of the one child who'd shown no interest in any of this: He Yu.

'...' He Yu had no particular love for the doctors, pharmaceutical reps, and researchers who were always turning up at the house, but he'd been raised to be courteous. So he bent down, picked up the soft square of tulle, and walked over —

'Doctor, you dropped something.'

He looked up and met a pair of eyes: pale, remote, still.

Midsummer, and yet He Yu — who had recently been memorizing Tang poetry — found himself thinking, inexplicably, of a single line: 'snow-sound leans toward the bamboo.'

Xie Qingcheng bent to take the tulle, the lab coat shifting with the movement like the shed feathers of a white crane that had become something wilder and stranger.

'Thank you.'

And then He Yu caught it — drifting from Xie Qingcheng's cuff — the faint smell of antiseptic.

Research suggests that a large part of how we feel about someone is shaped by how they smell.

In other words: if a person happens to carry a scent you love, you're far more likely to fall for them on the spot. And if their scent makes you uneasy or afraid, the relationship probably has nowhere good to go.

He Yu did not like Xie Qingcheng's scent.

Cold and hard — it was the smell of every bitter pill he'd swallowed since he was small, the alcohol and iodine swabbed onto skin before a needle went in, the disinfectant that hung in pale and empty hospital rooms where no one sat with you.

He had something close to an instinctive dread of that smell. His brow creased before he could stop it.

Then the butler's hand came down on his shoulder, and the butler smiled and made introductions to this doctor who made his whole body want to retreat: 'Dr. Xie, this young gentleman is our employer's son.'

Xie Qingcheng's gaze, which had been about to move away, paused. Something deep and unreadable settled in his eyes as he looked at He Yu: '...So it's you.'

That look made He Yu think, for no clear reason, of a scalpel — unnervingly sharp, the kind that made him feel his chest could be opened and whatever was inside placed under a slide.

The young doctor said: 'First time we've met. Going forward, I'll likely be handling your treatment.'

He Yu feared doctors at the best of times; even the gentlest woman physician put him on edge. This one radiated severity and cold from every surface — a warden in a white coat — and the effect on an eight-year-old was immediate and total. He managed, for the sake of appearances, a strained smile, then turned and walked away.

His mother happened to catch the whole thing from the terrace above. That evening, once she'd finished her business, Madam Lü Zhishu had her son brought to the study. A cup of hot cocoa, temperature just right, sat on the malachite-green velvet tea table; she pushed it toward He Yu.

'That Dr. Xie — you've met him now?'

'Yes.' He Yu's upbringing was strict, and even in front of his mother he was measured, not particularly warm.

Lü Zhishu had long since given up on this strange eldest son of hers. She'd had her second child by then, and the younger one, though not as clever as He Yu, was at least adorable, sweet-tempered, and healthy — she was entirely devoted to the baby. With He Yu she had very little patience: 'His name is Xie Qingcheng. He'll be your private physician from now on. He'll come to the house every week. You are to cooperate fully. If anything feels wrong in your body, you can call him at any time.'

'Mm.'

Lü Zhishu looked at this eight-year-old boy — so composed it unsettled her — and, wanting to break the uncomfortable mood, sighed a little and tried to tease him: 'He Yu, Dr. Xie has signed something like an indenture with our family. If he fails to cure your condition, he becomes our household's permanent servant — no days off, no salary, no wife. Do you understand what that means?'

'Not exactly.'

'It means that if you don't cooperate — if your lack of cooperation undermines his treatment, delays his freedom, and costs him any chance at a wife — you'll be responsible for him. You'll have to support him for the rest of his life.'

He Yu was still very young then. Precocious as he was, eight was still eight, and this landed. He looked up at once: 'Can I cancel the contract?'

'No.' Madam Lü had spent the last few days binge-watching melodramatic Republican-era household dramas during her flights, and inspiration struck; she added an even more devastating line: 'And there's a chance that the way he'd want you to take responsibility is by becoming his wife. Look how pretty you are — a child bride suits you perfectly.'

He Yu at that age had zero curiosity about romance or the conventions around it, and didn't yet know that marriage on this particular stretch of earth was limited to a man and a woman. What Madam Lü said only deepened the shadow on his mind, and for a stretch of time, even his Nightmare featured Xie Qingcheng: 'No — I don't like you... I don't want to marry you...!'

That Nightmare wasn't broken until half a year later, when He Jiwei finally heard about it.

He Jiwei had turned on his wife first: 'What nonsense are you filling the child's head with?'

Then on He Yu: 'And you believed it when someone said that to get a rise out of you? Where's all that cleverness usually? You're male, Dr. Xie is male — what's this about marrying him and being responsible for him? How much Pacific Ocean water have you got packed into that skull of yours?'

He Yu had been miserable for months.

For that entire half-year, every time he imagined failing to cooperate — letting Dr. Xie fail to treat his condition, and then being taken on as a child bride by that cold-scented man — he had responded by deliberately making himself look stupid and hopeless in front of Dr. Xie, hoping to leave such a thoroughly bad impression that even if it ever came to that, the man would never develop any untoward interest in him.

What he hadn't anticipated was that after six months of sustained, dedicated self-humiliation in front of Xie Qingcheng, the conclusion he eventually received from his father was:

'Your mother was winding you up.'

If He Yu hadn't had such an ironclad grip on his own conduct, he might have let loose with something truly foul. But He Yu had been reined in too tightly for that — at eight years old, not just that kind of language but even a phrase as mild as 'you son of a tortoise' had never once entered his personal lexicon.

Still, whatever else could be said, through six months of persistent, unwavering effort — of relentlessly making a fool of himself before Xie Qingcheng — He Yu had more or less accomplished something remarkable: no matter how hard he tried, in the six or seven years that followed...

No — perhaps more than six or seven years. Even after he left Xie Qingcheng at fourteen. Even now, today. Perhaps in Xie Qingcheng's eyes, even still —

He Yu remained, in every dimension — capital letters, full three dimensions, breathing and alive — a complete and utter idiot.

And right now, the catastrophic fried rice sitting in his hands was, in Xie Qingcheng's estimation, the most compelling evidence yet that four years later, he was still a world-class idiot who couldn't even fry a bowl of rice.

He Yu set down the fried rice and handed the apron to Xie Qingcheng — impeccably suited, lord of the Xie household — his expression apparently composed, though underneath it something had gone dark: he'd miscalculated. He never should have cooked himself. He'd handed Xie Qingcheng a joke for free.