The Tether

Zhou Dayong had rarely set foot in the city, yet it was the city's moon that drove his son Xiaojun mad.

So said the idle men at the village mouth, and they were not entirely wrong. At nineteen Xiaojun had followed a fellow villager's crew chief to the provincial capital to paint walls. He worked two years, then one day fell silent, and soon laughed at everyone he met - laughed, and then hurled a brick through the glass. The crew chief returned his wages and stuffed him onto the long-distance bus. For the first half year home he was himself; then he began burning his own schoolbooks at night, saying insects inside the pages were crawling out. The county hospital looked him over and named a sickness that needed medicine for life, a month's dose costing Zhou Dayong half a month of hauling cement. Zhou could not haul that much, and the medicine stopped.

Three years after the medicine stopped, Xiaojun was a different man. He chased schoolchildren down the street, tore Granny Wang's drying quilt into strips, and walked the village lane barefoot at midnight calling for his mother. The village was afraid. Granny Wang added an iron grille to her door and stepped around Zhou Dayong when she saw him. The village secretary came once, sat on the threshold, smoked half a cigarette, and said, "Dayong, this disturbs the village's good name. You must find a way, so the neighbors can sleep."

Zhou turned the problem over many nights. He had asked about the proper mental hospital: over three thousand a month, deposit on top, more than three years of his wages could fill. He knelt at the door of the county hospital's psychiatry unit, but it kept a single doctor, and the slots were booked to next month; the medicine was all out of pocket, the new rural insurance covered almost nothing. He went home and locked Xiaojun in the west wing, with a padlock on the outside.

The wing was dark. By day Xiaojun beat his head against the wall; by night he moaned. Zhou listened, and drank more harsh liquor. The liquor was the cheapest in town, a pound for a bit over a yuan; it burned the chest, and burned away two hours of sleep.

The turn came through his neighbor Erguai. Erguai's distant cousin ran a "Loving Recovery Home" on the town's edge, taking in exactly these "troublesome ones" - food, lodging, and discipline, fifteen hundred a month. "Better than locking him at home," Erguai said. "They have rules. They tie them well. No fuss." Zhou counted his freshly paid wages three times, kept two hundred for himself, and sent the rest.

The home hid in a stretch of wasteland beyond the town. Its wall was piled from broken brick; at the iron gate a smell of swill mixed with urine met him. The woman who took people in squinted at Xiaojun and said, "This kind costs extra. He's labor." Zhou added fifty; only then did she relent and shove Xiaojun inside, and the iron gate clanged shut.

The first month Zhou brought food and saw Xiaojun sitting quiet through the bars, no fuss, as if cured. He rejoiced and hauled cement three extra days. The second month the boy was thinner, his eyes blank, not answering when called. The third month, through the bars, Zhou saw his son tied with a cotton rope to the bed leg, trousers wet, lips cracked, no longer knowing his father.

"What happened to him?" Zhou asked.

The keeper chewed his cigarette, not lifting an eyelid. "He's obedient now. Tie him or he'd tear the place down. Your son's sickness, this is how you cure it."

Zhou opened his mouth and found no words. He remembered locking the west wing, and now a thicker rope bound his son in a farther room. He asked if he could take the boy home; the man held out a hand. "Settle the three months, plus two hundred feeding fee, and he's yours." Zhou pulled out the last seventy from his pocket.

The day Xiaojun came home he was skin and bone, the sturdy frame gone to kindling, his mouth only humming ah, ah. Zhou settled him back in the wing and found an old cotton rope, one end to the bed foot, the other wound round his own wrist - fearing the boy would slip out at night, and fearing that he himself might sleep too deep and the boy starve inside.

When night fell quiet, from the wing came the thud of a body against the wall, muffled, like someone beating on a door that would not shut. Zhou lay wide-eyed; the rope at his wrist tightened and slackened with the boy's struggling. He understood, suddenly, one thing: he had tied his son, but the other end of the rope was tied to himself. When he grew old and could no longer haul cement, who would undo it? When he died, to whom would Xiaojun go? Someone must always hold the rope - and the one who holds it is never free to let go.

The moonlight was fine outside the window, a pale wash on the ground, falling on the wing's iron lock, on the rotten leaves in the yard, and on the peaceful dreams of the whole village. Zhou Dayong thought: in this world, just which of us is truly mad, there is no telling yet. He drew the rope at his wrist a little tighter, closed his eyes, and waited for dawn, and for the next truck to the town to haul cement.