The Spectators

Zheng Fuhai did not think of himself as a coldhearted man.

Before he retired he kept the gate at the textile mill on the east side of town, for a full thirty years, and came to know every face that passed. The year the mill closed he was fifty-three; he took the buyout money and moved to the gate of the county's Number One Primary School as a security guard. The days were thin and plain, yet every night before sleep he would run through in his mind the strange parents he had turned back, the children who had forgotten their book bags, calling them over like a roll call. His wife had died early; his son delivered takeout in the provincial capital and came home less than once a year. Fuhai lived alone, and did not find it bitter — rather, he found it quiet.

He knew of one failing in himself, though. Whenever there was a scene in the street, his feet took root.

In the early years the county had not been like this. Now the roads were wide and the cars many, and every few days there was a rear-end collision, a fall, two drivers leaning out of their windows to curse each other. At the sound of brakes Fuhai's neck would stretch first. He never made trouble; he simply stood far off, hands tucked in his sleeves, watched his fill, clucked his tongue, and moved on. Once a tricycle overturned at the vegetable market and romaine lettuces rolled everywhere; he watched a full ten minutes, and went home to tell Old Qian across the landing, "That driver's face went pure white." Old Qian laughed at him: "You take more interest than the people involved." He laughed too. When two dogs fought on the next street he could watch with his rice bowl in hand for half the morning, and pass judgment at the end: "The yellow one came off worse, his teeth aren't as even as the black one's." He saw nothing wrong in it. Watching a play — people had done it since ancient times.

The one who came to grief was Wu Changshun.

Wu Changshun kept a stall beneath the west gate bridge, selling seasonal vegetables and the pickles he cured himself. Two fingers were missing from his left hand — an accident at a brick kiln years back; the compensation had just covered his son's junior high school in the township, the son had failed the exams, gone out to work, and never been heard from since. Changshun did not complain; he called it fate. He set up before first light every day, and when he packed up he always swept the ground clean; when the city inspectors came he simply wheeled his cart away, never answering back, like a log that had grown used to being swept along by the current.

The day was hot, just after the Dragon Boat Festival. Two men in uniforms came and said no stalls beneath the bridge. Changshun did as he always did and tried to wheel away, but the tire was flat and would not budge. The younger inspector lost patience and with one shove overturned a basket of cucumbers; basket and all, they spilled across the asphalt, green juice flying. Changshun did not argue. He squatted down and made his two hands into a scoop, gathering the cucumbers back into the basket, gathering, pausing, gathering, and from his throat came a very small sound, like a cat whose tail has been stepped on.

That was when the people closed in.

Fuhai was among them. He had only meant to cross the bridge to buy tofu, but at the noise his feet took root again. He stood in the third row; not tall, he stood on tiptoe. In front of him a schoolboy with a backpack held up his phone to record; beside him a plump woman in a flowered jacket watched with a delighted smile and said to someone, "Last time on East Street it was the same show, livelier than this." Further out, a thin man made a bet with his companion: "I wager he won't dare hit back today — if he doesn't, you owe me a cigarette." A man on an electric bike stopped, backed up two paces with his phone raised, murmuring, "Film it, post it online, might just go viral."

No one went to right the basket. No one said a word of "enough." Even the two in uniforms stopped their hands and turned around, as if this play had been staged for them to watch. Changshun squatted on the ground, the chill of the cucumbers climbing up through his fingernails. He looked up and around at the ring of faces — all strangers, yet every one shone with a look he knew: like watching a hog slaughtered at the village entrance, like watching the clown on the opera stage, a delight edged with contempt, and in the contempt a kind of comfort, as if the suffering of the world, so long as it was not one's own, was still only a play.

Fuhai took all this into his eyes. He even thought, that Changshun, what's he squatting for, just get up and wheel away and it's done. He pulled out his phone and recorded a clip too. As his finger tapped down, he felt he was no different from the schoolboy in front of him.

In the end the men in uniforms left. The crowd ebbed like the tide and was gone in minutes, leaving Changshun alone, kneeling in the heap of cucumbers, picking the ones still usable back into the basket and wiping the rest with his sleeve into the roadside ditch. Fuhai left too. He bought his tofu, went home, stir-fried cucumbers for supper, bit into one, and suddenly found it tasteless.

At night he scrolled his phone and the video offered itself first. He opened it: Changshun squatting, and behind him a ring of upturned, laughing faces. He pinched to zoom, trying to find himself, and did not — he stood too far back. Yet he knew every beam of light in that ring of faces, because he too had contributed one.

He turned off the light and suddenly remembered a thing long past.

His brother Fuquan, seven years younger, slow in the head, had never married and had followed him sweeping the mill yard. One winter was especially cold; Fuquan went at dawn to dump the coal ash and slipped on the slope behind the mill, striking his head on the frozen channel's edge, his blood reddening the snow. The road was not empty of people, but just then the talk of "help someone and get framed" had newly caught on, and the passersby all walked around; some stood at a distance to watch, some watched and phoned home saying, "Something's happened behind the mill, don't you come." When Fuhai arrived Fuquan still had a breath; his hand grew cold in Fuhai's, slowly.

In those days Fuhai had hated those watchers through and through. Outside the mortuary he cursed: "All blind? All dead?" Yet today, at the bridge, phone raised, he was the same as them.

He turned over and buried his face in the pillow. The pillow gave him no answer.

The next morning Fuhai took his post at the school gate as usual. Rain had fallen all night and the stone steps at the gate shone with wet. An old man coming to fetch his grandson from school slipped, sat down full in the water, and cried out clutching his hip. Fuhai's thermos nearly dropped — his hand had already gone, by habit, to his phone, and stopped halfway.

He did not raise it.

He stepped across that line he had stood behind for years, the line of watching the fun, and squatted down, lodging the old man's arm over his own shoulder, and asked, "Can you stand? Let me help you up." The old man's hand was ice-cold, trembling, and clutched him. In that cry of pain Fuhai heard a thread of the breath that had rattled in his brother's throat.

Behind him some footsteps halted, watching from afar, but no one closed in. Fuhai knew they would still watch, still film, still forget by tomorrow. But this time, he had squatted down first.

The rain went on falling. He helped the old man to the guard room and poured a cup of hot water. On the steps outside the window a few parents waiting for their children had lined up in a small row, as if expecting some performance to begin. Fuhai did not look at them. He lowered his head and blew across the rim of the cup, and thought of Changshun's two hands made into a scoop, and thought: there will always be people to watch the play, but someone has to be the first to pick up the cucumbers from the ground.