ni shi wo de biao zv - Mandarin. "You are my bitch".

Wo cao ni ba bei zi zu zong - Mandarin. "Fuck eight generations of your ancestors".

---

Nobody ever really knows how the visions work, least of all Xi-Wang Cheng, but he's the only one with front-row seats to what happens when his brain flips over so he's a little more personally mystified himself. Sometimes he just thinks that his brain fucked up like a television that you have to hit to get the channels right, that life is one long parade of snowflakes followed up with something fucked-up when he hits the antenna - wired to the future, sometimes the little blots of the commercials of tomorrow, then the dreary soap opera of next month. Sometimes it's just a case of wandering in and kind of sort of telling G-Force which engine she better take a look at half an hour before the thing seizes up, or telling Helen two floors down that she better give Bobby vitamins now and tell her damn husband to quit smoking, and sometimes it's just the two-second sidestep before some dickhead drops something up off the stairs instead of carrying the parcel all the way down. It's hell of a hard business hitting King Zombie with anything. He can use that to creep out the kids. It's what he's there for.

Sometimes he thumps it and the static goes to a channel he sure as shit didn't want. The future's bullshit. So's the past. Sometimes he gets shown things fucked up, an Escher painting, out of definition, like suddenly seeing reruns of shit you haven't seen since you were a snot-nosed kid. Sometimes Xi knows his brain hates him.

"Jiangxi," says Brian Haddock, shitty string vest and ripped-up punk jeans that he never wore but Liang did, complete with the naked lady tattoo right on his arm obscured by all those pretty golden lights. "Stoned out of your tiny little mind, hungry as hell, not knowing how the tinker's hell you got the bus from Fuzhou to Nanchang. Right before you boys made it big. You went home to Taiwan and got the contract call, didn't you? But right now - wait for it, wait for it, wait for it - "

Xi falls to his knees by the blind night river in the depths of China and throws up spectacularly, hears running water and dunks his head in ice cold and the rocks after the puke's all run away to toss his head back. Long hair. Long hair, bad mascara, stupid bandanna and he's seventeen all over again. His hands do that slow blind wander up the pillar of his neck to his mouth, tracing the lines, the callous giving way to the short bluntness of his teeth and the bridge of his nose. Brian comes and sits by the rocks as Xi very nearly gropes himself, splashes water and catches it on his tongue, slicks his hair back over his forehead and looks up at the sky.

It is unbearably dark. Nothing is ever so dark as the provinces out in the boonies, not like Taiwan where you only reach out and there's a lightswitch. There are no lightswitches. There are no stars.

"Dark as hell," Brian says, with nothing even to catch the light off him. "This kind of night could eat you alive."

"You never saw this shit," Xi says, voice unbearably young. "You were a city boy every damn day of your life."

"Yeah." Comfortable. He's always comfortable. There's a thin sugar moon tonight; if Xi squints, he can see oozing holes in the white shirt from Brian's ever-bleeding gunshot wounds. "This is your head trip, masochist boy. Thought there'd be a lot more ladies in the naked."

"You wouldn't know what the hell to do with a naked lady if you saw one, kid - "

"I could bleed on her," Brian says, "in attractive patterns."

Both of them are sniggering now. The light's just enough so that he can see the other man open his mouth up to taste the air, green hair all slicked back with too much gel like Liang used to use, still glowing faintly like a firework ember in the godforsaken dark. There's only just an outline, if he looks out the corner of his eye, a piece of newspaper slowly taking to a match and curling at the edges. Xi is aware that he's profoundly stoned. "You could tell her you're a scenic route - "

"I'm necrophilia in action, Zombie."

The sniggers wear off as they dabble their feet in the cold water and get the seats of their knockoff American jeans wet on the rocks. "So," Xi begins, "give you a dollar if you tell me who - "

"You don't get how this works, genius." Pyrite's head is tilted back like he's catching the moonlight. "I know what you know and only a little of what you don't. Don't ask me who shot me. I'll have to make it up. Let's see, what screwed-up metaphorical answer d'you want tonight?"

"The one that makes me feel better."

"Get a puppy filled with Baby Tylenol. Let's spin the wheel. Tonight, you did it in the study with the revolver. It'd be funny, wouldn't it?"

"Shut up."

"Nobody would ever suspect King Zombie. So troubled, so dentally disabled, but if they did, they'd ask - "

"Shut up."

" - was it because he wanted to fuck Turandot, or was it because he wanted to fuck Pyrite himself - "

"Shut up. You're not Brian."

" - or was it both? Yeah, that's a mental image, your pwecious little Emily in kinky coitus with you and me. No fuss, no muss, just your Emmy-gray-eyes, your best friend, no guilt. You got a weird way of showing people you love 'em, don't you? You want to swallow them all up like the big bad wolf. You want to give it all away. Hell, you'd fuck out Meli's eyeteeth just to show her how much you love her, take off her little Cajun panties, skinny hips like bull bars and blonde pubes. Nice girl, wish I'd met her. Or you'd bend over Evan and squint and think, wish, hope, pretend it was me, pretend it was Emmy, pretend it was anyone - "

"You're not Brian. He'd never say fuck. He'd wash his mouth out and have a little happy-clappy prayer to Jesus Christ just in case he went to hell. That always used to piss me the hell off, you and Emmy were exactly like the friggin' Cleavers. You kept me sexless. Kept me nice."

"You could've just eaten us up with a spoon, old man, we're all you ever had and ever will have."

"Wo cao ni ba bei zi zu zong - "

"Ni shi wo de biao zv," Brian says, "and face it, Sundance, you always will be."

They sit together, side by side, toes stuck in the river cold as metal teeth, invisible and slick. The goldscaled mutant puts his hand on Xi's, like it's comfort, colder than the river.

"Let's say it was Emmy," he says. "Bang bang bang, she wanted you instead. Or I tried to leave her and she went nuts and gave me bullets as a parting gift. Okay, never mind, she'd hold the wrong end of the gun and squeak at it."

"She'd shoot you now, for being an asshole, right in your ghostly dick. Who was it?"

"Amanda," he says. "She came into Chicago same time that I copped it, you never know what the hell Kogoejini's stakes are, do you? What she's done or what she'll do in the future. Seven neat little holes, just to make sure I was dead. Thorough lady."

"Who was it?"

"Meg," he says. "I was sleeping with Nidhi, touching her in all her deaf prepubescent naughty places. No jury would convict her."

"Who killed you?"

"A crazy hobo," Brian says, "Santa Claus, the Man, me, you, Colonel Mustard, the butler, the whole wide world - "

"Pyrite - "

"It was nobody, Xi, nobody, nobody who matters, nobody who you'll ever care about. Nobody who means anything, nobody who'll haunt you, nobody who you should spend another minute whipping yourself over. Nobody who was worth it. Nobody who could hurt me. Nobody, nobody. Go wake up, brother, o ever my brother, lover, friend- you're gonna piss yourself."

And then:

"I never wanted to hurt you."

The channel whites out, the program ends, he wakes up without having slept. He walks into the door, he walks into the door, he walks into the door until Brigitte in the bathroom asks him what he's doing, and he ties away his face, and he still doesn't know how the hell anything works but only wishes it didn't.

Sometimes Xi knows his brain hates him.