Chapter 4 : Beetles

The first real conversation happened because Haojun engineered it, which he felt only slightly bad about.

After breakfast, Shen Guowei disappeared to his study. Haojun's mother went upstairs. The house settled into its daytime quiet, and Haojun drifted toward the library because he'd been wanting to look at it since yesterday and also because, based on available data, it was the most likely place.

Muze was already there.

He was in the chair by the far window — of course he was, the far window — with a book open in his lap. He'd pulled his feet up onto the chair. His socks were slightly mismatched: dark blue and dark gray, close enough that it probably looked intentional until you looked directly at them.

He looked up when Haojun came in.

Haojun said, "Oh," like he hadn't been walking toward the library on purpose. "Hi again."

Muze said, "Hello," and waited.

“Sorry about earlier,”

Muze looked up eyes blinking, “What for?”

“You got scolded because of me.”

Muze was titling his head then focusing at  the book he was holding, “Okay.”

He waited with the complete patience of someone who had learned not to assume a conversation would continue unless it proved itself. Haojun sat down in the chair nearest the door — not the closest one, not crowding — and looked at the bookshelves, which were actually very good bookshelves.

"What are you reading?"

Muze considered whether to answer. It was a visible consideration, brief but there. Then he turned the book around and held it up.

It was a nature encyclopedia. The big illustrated kind, the ones that were more picture than text, with full-page photographs and diagrams with arrows pointing at things. This one was open to beetles — an enormous glossy photograph of something iridescent green, and beside it a diagram of a beetle's anatomy with labels Haojun could read from across the room.

"Beetles," Haojun said.

Muze turned the book back around and looked at it. "The green one is very shiny," he said, with great seriousness, like he was reporting a finding.

"It is," Haojun agreed. "Very shiny."

"It says—" Muze frowned at the text beside the photograph, the small-print kind that was clearly giving him trouble. His finger moved under the words slowly. "It says it lives in— I don't know this one." He pointed at a word without looking up.

Haojun got up and crossed the room. Leaned over to look. Rainforest.

"Rainforest," he said.

Muze's finger moved on. "In South A— Amer—"

"America."

"South America." Muze nodded like this was being added to a file. He turned the page. This one had a photograph of a beetle the size of a hand, horned and improbable, and beside it a diagram showing it next to a human hand for scale. Muze looked at this for a long moment.

"That is very big," he said.

"That's very big," Haojun agreed.

"I don't want to touch it."

"I also don't want to touch it."

Muze looked at him, checking that this was genuine, and apparently decided it was, and looked back at the beetle. His expression was the completely honest expression of a seve-year-old looking at something impressive and alarming in equal measure. Haojun had seen this expression before, on the faces of children he'd observed from a distance in his old life, the unguarded look that existed before children learned to curate themselves. Muze had version of it that was smaller than most — more compressed, not as freely displayed — but it was there. The beetle was big enough to get through.

"It says here—" Muze started, frowning at the next line.

"Do you want me to read it?"

A pause. Short. "Yes," Muze said, which cost him something, Haojun thought, though he wasn't sure exactly what.

He sat down on the arm of the opposite chair — not close enough to be strange, close enough to see the page — and read the caption. The beetle was called a Titan beetle. It was one of the largest in the world. The horns were for fighting other males. The grubs, before they became beetles, lived underground for years eating dead wood.

"Years," Muze said, when he got to that part.

"Years," Haojun confirmed.

Muze looked at the diagram of the grub, which was pale and soft and frankly upsetting to look at. He looked at the photograph of the grown beetle, shining and armored and enormous.

"That's weird," he said. "That they become that."

"Yeah," Haojun said. "Pretty different."

Muze was quiet for a moment, still looking at the page. His feet were tucked under him and the book was heavy across his knees and he had a small ink stain on the side of his left hand from something earlier, or possibly yesterday. He looked, in this moment, like a child looking at a picture book, which was what he was — and Haojun had a strange feeling in his chest that he filed under complicated and did not examine further.

Muze turned the page. More beetles. He looked at the pictures first, systematically, before attempting the text. When he got to the words he went slowly, and when he got to a word he didn't know he said it out loud, sort of, under his breath, and Haojun filled it in, and Muze nodded and kept going.

They did this for about forty minutes.

It was not a conversation, exactly. It was more like existing in the same space while a seve-year-old worked through a book about beetles with occasional assistance from a seven-year-old who was, technically, a twenty-four-year-old in a seven-year-old's body, which added a layer of absurdity to the whole thing that Haojun was choosing not to dwell on. He found a book about birds on the shelf near his chair and read that while Muze read beetles, and when Muze ran into a word he just said it quietly into the air and Haojun said it back and they kept going.

At some point Muze's feet came off from under him and dangled off the edge of the chair instead, the unconscious sprawl of a child who had stopped monitoring their posture because they'd forgotten to. He'd forgotten to monitor himself. Haojun noticed this and noted it and said nothing.

When Aunt Chen came to tell Haojun that lunch would be ready in twenty minutes, Muze looked up from the book like he'd surfaced from something. His finger was still on the page marking where he'd been.

"Okay," Haojun said to Aunt Chen.

Muze looked at the book. Then carefully closed it — marking his page first with a small slip of paper he'd had tucked in the back, specific page, specific spot, which was the action of someone who had been reading this book for a while and intended to continue — and set it on the side table.

He looked at Haojun.

Haojun looked back.

"The grub one was the weirdest," Haojun said.

Muze considered this seriously. "Yes," he said. "The grub one was the weirdest."

He got up and went to put the encyclopedia back, carefully, spine aligned, on the shelf where it came from. Then he left, quiet-footed, without saying goodbye, which was — Haojun was realizing — just how he left rooms. Not rudeness. Just the habit of someone who had learned their departures didn't require announcement.

Haojun sat in the library for another few minutes after he was gone.

The grub one was the weirdest.

Four words. Genuine ones.

He put that in the same place as yes, it is kind of insane — filed both of them somewhere careful — and went to find lunch.

Shen Guowei came to find him after.

"Come," he said, with the easy authority of a man who had never had to ask twice. "I'll show you the garden properly."

The garden was large, which Haojun already knew, but different with Shen Guowei narrating — the man talked about his property the way people talked about things they were genuinely proud of, almost charming about it. The east-wall trees planted by his father, thirty years old. The fish in the pond, a particular variety, fed a particular feed. The pavilion where his father had taken morning tea.

Haojun listened and asked the occasional question and was, by any measure, a good audience.

Shen Guowei was trying. That was the honest thing. He'd decided Haojun mattered and was following through on that decision and the effort was real, the warmth was real, and none of that was nothing. He was a man who expressed care through showing, through here is a thing I value and I am letting you near it, and he'd extended that to Haojun.

He was also a man who had things he didn't look at.

They stopped at the fish pond. Large orange fish, entirely unbothered. Shen Guowei explained their variety, the oldest one in the corner — twelve years, he said, longer than most of the staff.

"Muze used to feed them," he said. Casual. Footnote. "He'd come down every morning for a while. We had to stop him — he was giving them too much."

Past tense. Used to. Haojun looked at the fish.

"Overfeeding is bad for them," he said. Neutral.

"Too much is as bad as nothing." Said the way people said things they believed were wisdom. "He doesn't come down much anymore."

Natural progression. Things ran their course. The child stopped coming and the fish were fine and this was not a sentence worth looking at too closely.

Haojun looked at the water.

He thought about a smaller Muze — three, maybe four — coming down every morning with too much feed. Fish crowding to the surface. The particular happiness of that, probably, the uncomplicated kind that seve-year-olds had access to and then stopped having access to, at some point, for some reason. The being stopped. The not coming back.

He thought about Muze in the library an hour ago, feet dangling off the chair, finger tracking slowly under words he was working out, the ink stain on his left hand.

"Can I feed them?" he asked. "The fish. Is that allowed?"

Shen Guowei looked pleased. "Of course. Aunt Chen will show you the right amount."

Haojun nodded. He'd ask Aunt Chen. He'd find out what time worked, and what the right amount was, and whether the right amount of fish food was enough reason to be in the garden in the morning. Whether there was any particular reason two people couldn't feed fish, if they happened to both be awake and nearby.

He was going to be patient about this.

He was seven. He had time.

The fish moved in slow circles under the surface, and the old one drifted past without looking up, and the garden was quiet, and Haojun stood next to Shen Guowei and looked at the water and made his plans.

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