EGRV 19 | Color

【A truly youthful, easy, and triumphant smile, the kind that says you’ve got the whole world under your feet.】

For a full week after that incident, Liang Muyi didn’t contact Chi Yu again.

He was indeed quite busy. First, he went back to Liang Jiansheng’s house and played cards with him for a while. Liang Jiansheng’s luck was good that day, and as he was leaving, he actually made good on his promise, calling his real estate agent to take Liang Muyi to see the downtown condo he had bought for him. In addition to that, he tossed another key into the envelope—the keys to his rarely driven, top-of-the-line Mercedes-AMG SUV, for Liang Muyi to use during his month or two in Canada.

The license plate was clearly a custom job, with the word “LIANG” hidden in it. It was a grand gesture from Liang Jiansheng’s third midlife crisis. Liang Jiansheng loved cars as he loved women; the mileage hadn’t even reached four digits before he grew tired of it.

After leaving Liang Jiansheng’s place, he bought a bouquet of flowers and went alone to the nearby cemetery to see Liang Yichuan, talking to him for a while.

Mid-week, Zheng Chengling from Summit Climbing arrived in Canada with several Summit-sponsored Chinese climbers. To facilitate their climbing training, they had rented a small cabin in Squamish for over a month. These guys were decisive; without even getting over their jet lag, they drove straight to their destination the next morning.

And the first thing Liang Muyi did after getting the car was go to a tire shop to get a set of snow tires. Afterward, he too headed straight for Squamish, borrowing Zheng Chengling’s personal camera and Cheng Yang’s unused tripod to do some test shots.

Before heading into the mountains, he even made a special trip to a supermarket to buy some liquor he remembered Zhong Yanyun liked, but surprisingly, Zhong Yanyun hadn’t come with the main group. Zheng Chengling explained that he had a three-and-a-half-year-old kid at home, and his wife was also away leading a tour group. With no one to look after the child, he would be a few days late.

Liang Muyi was quite surprised. He hadn’t been in touch with Zhong Yanyun for so long that he had no idea the man had gotten married and had a child.

With all this going on, not only did he not have time to go skiing, but he also forgot to reply to Chi Yu on WeChat. The picture and message Chi Yu had sent him that night had long been pushed several pages down.

Later, it was Cheng Yang who brought it up. He was hosting brunch for a few friends at his house over the weekend. When he heard that Liang Muyi had actually driven Chi Yu to Whistler last week to help a friend lost in an avalanche and had even waited at the base of the mountain for him all night, he lamented why he never got such chances to be a hero.

Liang Muyi just told him, “Next time something like this happens, I’ll tell you. You can go.”

Cheng Yang asked him, “What’s wrong?”

Liang Muyi said it was nothing, just that it was pointless. Making friends also depends on fate.

This left Cheng Yang at a loss for words. So he said, “Good thing I don’t want to be his friend. I want to be his boyfriend.”

Liang Muyi burst out laughing. He tried to imagine what Chi Yu would be like in a relationship, but all he could picture was the man standing in a daze in front of his own house with his head down.

If I were his boyfriend, he thought, I would probably have opened the door, pulled him inside for a hug, and told him not to stand in the cold. But he was a million miles away from being his boyfriend. At that moment, he had been a street away calling a cab, pretending not to have seen Chi Yu’s desolate state. What was behind that door, whether there was someone with a light on waiting for him to come home, he had no idea.

“Every family has its own troubles,” Cheng Yang said. “Chi Yu hasn’t had it easy.”

Liang Muyi thought of the old magazine he had found in the car. A corner of an inside page was folded. It was a photo of Chi Yu with his arm around a blond teenager, taken in the snow at the base of Mont Tremblant. A line of small text underneath, all in French, which Liang Muyi half-guessed, meant something like: Max Willard & Yu Chi, 2012, The North Face Challenger Cup for junior freeride, first and second place.

Amidst a vast expanse of white, the camera shutter flashed, capturing two promising teenagers. Chi Yu’s left arm was around his competitor and friend, his right hand raised in that same “Rock on” gesture, a mischievous, rebellious smirk on his face.

Liang Muyi thought back carefully. By some twist of fate, he had spent quite a bit of time with him these past two weeks. But whether it was during lessons, meals, or drives, he had never seen Chi Yu with that expression again. A truly youthful, easy, and triumphant smile, the kind that says you’ve got the whole world under your feet.

Two days later, Cheng Yang had a lesson with Chi Yu. Unexpectedly, halfway through the lesson, Chi Yu took the initiative to ask him, “Is Muyi still in Canada?”

Cheng Yang said of course he was and asked him what was up.

This time, Chi Yu was evasive. “It’s nothing.” When Liang Muyi left that day, he took my snowboard and bindings, and also a set of clothes from my trunk. Saying that would be too intimate. The words reached the tip of Chi Yu’s tongue but he didn’t say them.

Cheng Yang had a pretty good idea of what was going on. He guessed the two had had a small falling out on the mountain that day. Chi Yu wanted to contact him but didn’t dare to take the initiative, while Liang Muyi was annoyed that Chi Yu didn’t treat him as a friend and couldn’t be bothered to contact him.

So Cheng Yang played the mediator. “He’s busy this week. If you need to talk to him, just give him a call.”

Chi Yu was stubborn. “It’s nothing.”

Cheng Yang smirked, thinking to himself, If it’s nothing, why are you asking about him?

But he still patiently relayed this conversation to Liang Muyi. The latter thought about it; he wasn’t really bothered. Not being friends didn’t mean he wouldn’t continue with the lessons. He was just two lessons away from being able to carve, so of course, he would continue.

He had just picked up his phone, planning to message Chi Yu to schedule a time, when he felt it vibrate.

Surprisingly, it was Chi Yu who had messaged him first.

Instructor Chi had mulled it over for three days and finally came up with a suitable excuse. He sent it out in a burst of impulse: “By the way, your board needs waxing.”

Followed by another message: “Bring it to the shop tomorrow, I’ll do it for you.”

Liang Muyi asked him, “How many times do I need to ride before it needs waxing?”

Chi Yu just said, “It’s about time anyway.”

With things put that way, it was hard for him to refuse, so he agreed to bring it to the shop the next day.

Because it was a weekday afternoon, when he arrived at the shop, he saw that Chi Yu wasn’t very busy and was leaning against the counter drinking a Coke. He looked different from usual. Liang Muyi got closer to greet him and realized he had cut his hair a bit shorter and was wearing a tight-fitting Nike long-sleeve shirt.

Chi Yu usually liked to wear clothes a size too big for him. His short-sleeved shirts were street skate style, and his hoodies were all loose and baggy. When he was skiing, he always wore a brightly colored, thin down mid-layer with a larger-sized snow jacket over it, making it impossible to tell his build. But today was different. He was still wearing those gray sweatpants with the drawstring that were worn almost to the point of having holes, but the black, tight-fitting, quick-dry top revealed his great physique.

An ordinary person wouldn’t dare wear something like this; it would expose all their flaws. But the muscles from Chi Yu’s shoulders to his arms were well-defined. The killer was his waist, which tapered sharply from his broad back muscles, making his butt look very shapely. Chi Yu spent his years in high-latitude regions, and the black fabric made his skin look even fairer. Even Liang Muyi couldn’t help but stare a few extra times.

They chatted for a bit, then Chi Yu came over and opened the side door of the glass counter, gesturing for him to come in to talk more easily. He also turned around and placed a small sign on the counter that read, “Back in 10 minutes.”

Chi Yu took the board, placed it on the workbench, and, as if from nowhere, produced a screwdriver and began to unscrew the screws on his bindings. Liang Muyi stood by and watched.

“Been up the mountain this week?” Chi Yu asked him again.

“Went once. Cheng Yang introduced a couple of friends to go with us.” Liang Muyi knew what he wanted to ask and added, “We left pretty late, so we didn’t ask you beforehand.”

Chi Yu’s right ear was still bare. He gestured for Liang Muyi to stand on his left side so he could hear him better.

After asking his question, he focused on his work. Chi Yu was extremely fast at loosening screws, a quick touch here and there, his technique steady, precise, and sharp, leaving Liang Muyi’s head spinning.

Liang Muyi asked curiously, “Do you have to take them all off?”

“There’s a slight indentation where the screws meet the base, you can’t see it with the naked eye, but it won’t absorb the wax properly later. You don’t have to take them off, just loosen them.”

Chi Yu then picked up what looked like a metal file and began to run it along the board’s edge.

“You usually do this yourself?”

Chi Yu nodded, concentrating on tuning the edges. After one pass, he pressed his finger against it, then went over it again with a finer file. Only after he was finished did he speak. “Big mountain riding is hard on boards. Race wax should be applied after every ride, and the edges need to be tuned every day too. I’m used to it. This board is pretty new, so the wear isn’t too bad. But—you’ve hit some rocks, haven’t you?”

He could clearly feel the dents and nicks on the edge with his fingertips. Like a magical psychic, with one touch, he knew the roads you’ve traveled.

Liang Muyi remembered that after Yichuan’s accident, he was the one who sorted through all his belongings in Beijing, including his snow gear in the basement storage room. From childhood to adolescence, Liang Yichuan went through boards like shoes; he must have had dozens of snowboards of different lengths, widths, and specs. It’s just that the dirty, tiring work of maintaining snowboards was done by specialists at the ski resort. The last time he remembered was when he was driving his all-black Land Rover Defender, all the back seats folded down, taking Liang Yichuan and his seven or eight snowboards to get tuned and maintained.

On the way, he had asked Liang Yichuan, “Why do you like skiing?”

Liang Yichuan said, “To be number one. To compete in the Winter Olympics.”

Liang Muyi asked him, “And then? After the rankings, after the Olympics, what’s next?”

Liang Yichuan had been stumped by his question at the time, a bit embarrassed. Later, Liang Muyi thought that such a question was probably too metaphysical for a sixteen or seventeen-year-old, so he let it go. Why do a sport? The answer to that question is ever-changing. Liang Muyi himself felt his own answers were different at ten, twenty, and thirty.

It’s just that, in the last few years, a whole Pacific Ocean separated them, and they saw each other less and less. Liang Yichuan was always traveling abroad with Liang Jiansheng for training and competitions, and his own schedule was packed year-round—hiking in the spring and summer, climbing in the fall and winter, not a single gap. He never had the chance to ask again.

After learning of Liang Yichuan’s accident, his childhood teammates from the youth team each came and took a snowboard to keep in their own homes as a memento, leaving Liang Muyi with many single boards. Last winter, he finally made up his mind, removed the bindings from every board, had a carpenter custom-make a rack, and in the storage room, he pieced together a wall of the various single snowboards. He hoped his world would always be full of color.