Breakfast for Three

The world holds its breath.
I rush on the public e-bike, the tears already starting. But you can’t cry on an e-bike—not in Chinese traffic. Crying is for later. For safe places. So I sniffle. I wipe my eyes with the palm of my hand. I push.

I rush to the gate of the apartments—the guard blocks me.
”My friend lives here,” I say, stumbling through my phone, through my words.
那个老外？That old foreigner?
”Yes, yes.”

My Chinese is awkward—sharp corners and wrong tones. Even a few words give me away. He knows I am a foreigner too. He lets me through. I have been there before. Many foreigner friends have.

Slap. Slap. Slap.
My slippers on the quiet morning pavement of Kunming. A heavy running, a heartbeat running.

On my shoulder, a backpack full of mangoes and strawberries, round and heavy, little balls of hope. A handful of plain food: crackers for crunch, instant milk tea for sweetness, chamomile tea for calm, honey for the throat. A knife to peel the mangoes.

And in my right hand, swinging, the big pack of KFC breakfast: rice porridge, hard-boiled tea eggs, fried dough, soy milk.

Breakfast for three. A bag of promise from months back.

I take the lift up. Then, my fist on the door. A frantic knocking, a bird beating against glass.
Adam opens.

Inside, a heap on the floor. A thick mesh of white hair—Bill always had so much hair. A lion’s mane on the ground. But the rest of him had gotten small. Shrunken.

We know he is gone. The spirit has left, butterfly light. What remains is a shell. Emptied of Bill. He’s gone somewhere else.

I break. Too late.
Not just with the breakfast. Too late in so many ways.

“I’m sorry, Bill,” I mutter to the husk, to the air. “I’m sorry I’m too late.”
It is Tuesday. I was supposed to see him on the weekend, but I postponed. In my last messages I promised him Thursday. My birthday. I was going to bring cake.

But there is no time for this. Not yet.

Alex, who lives a few floors up, is talking with the rescue service. He presses the phone into my hand. He thinks my Chinese will do better.

I hate talking on the phone in Chinese. The language is difficult enough without a device in between. No face to read. Only a voice.

The voice asks how the person is. Something bad has happened to someone—that much has been established.

I realise the procedure is to try. 抢救？I scramble for the dictionary on my phone. Rescue?

But can we move him? My mind races for words taught in another life, in a classroom with flashcards and easy questions. A flash of panic—hot and sharp. To think that a life—this life—could hinge on how much I paid attention in class.

Move him to the living room. Hands on chest. His hands or ours? Do we resuscitate him? But his body is already stiff. I don’t have the words for this. More frantic typing—searching for characters to bridge the gap between her world of procedure and my world of loss.

So many instructions. None of them possible.
How do you say in Chinese: his body is stiff as a statue, stubborn as he was in life?

A few English words seep through. Clumsy and kind. From her side. I can feel her too—reaching back through a foreign language taught in a classroom, formal, rarely used.

不行啦？she finally understands. It isn’t possible.
The simplest way to say, a man is too far gone. I learn it now, in this room. 不行。Not possible.
My friend is dead.
The textbooks have no chapter for this. No vocabulary list to prepare me.

Desperate to do something—anything—I ask the guys to cover him with a blanket. A final dignity. Then the woman’s voice on the phone, a lifeline: The ambulance is here.

I run down to meet them, the phone still pressed to my ear. She asks for my number to give to the doctor. I write the digits in the air as I translate. She hangs up. Silence.

My own phone rings. The doctor asks which building we’re in. And then I see it: a white van with bright lights, crawling between the high towers. A special allowance—cars can’t usually get in here.

A team pours out of the ambulance, a swarm of uniforms carrying boxes and strange contraptions. We rush up to the 18th floor. A slow climb to the sky.

“Is he sick?” they ask. There’s no past tense in Chinese.
”Yes, heart disease. No, no.” My mind scrambles. “Lung disease.” Lung. One of the few organ words that I know.

We rush into the apartment, and I see Tina stand in the middle. A Chinese friend is here. Her Chinese, smooth and sure, meets theirs. A weight lifts from my shoulders. A world of half-remembered words I don’t have to carry anymore.

The rest is a blur. A wave of questions. Uniforms checking the pulse, the heartbeat. A checklist to be ticked. The Chinese way. They say they need our help to turn the body. I don’t understand why. Is this another box to be checked?

So Adam takes the legs. Together they turn the husk. The limbs stay jagged, wooden. The first time we see his face—an old painting, frozen in time. Murmurs of solemn confirmation. A clicking of tongues. Too long, too long. The police arrive. Another wave of questions. All flowing to Tina now.

In the commotion, my eyes wander the room. The balcony door he never closed. Two bowls of noodle soup, half-finished. An open cup of yoghurt, the lid curled up, the white lake barely touched. A box of bottled drink—the guys’ effort to get some electrolytes in.

Adam and Wesley were here last night—that was when I heard Bill hadn’t been eating. A half-eaten Mars bar. The last thing he ate, they said. He hated Mars bar. Ate it with disgust, but ate it anyway. His body was rejecting food, but his spirit was defiant. I’d heard that when someone is dying, the body begins to refuse. As if it knows. Food is no longer needed where it is going.

But Bill wanted to live. Had been insistent on living. Age be damned. Illness be damned. We had promises. Taiwan. Malaysia.
“Yes, of course. I’ll go with you, Bill,” I’d said. “When you’re well enough, we’ll go,”
That’s what I loved about him. And that’s what makes this so hard. So what if he was eighty-three? So what if he had COPD?

I forgot he was in pain. That every breath was shards of glass in his lungs. The jokes, the winks, the humour he wore like armour every time I visited. He made us believe that he’d hang on for months more. For years.

In our little bubble, we built a world of make-believe. When you get well, Bill, when you’re well. So many promises. None of them kept. Now only a string of broken things.

I turn to Robert—an older American man from San Francisco. “I was supposed to see Bill last weekend, but I postponed.” A few words in and I am sobbing again. I’ve only just met Robert. Until now, he didn’t exist in my world.

So many people I’ve met through Bill like this. Chance encounters in the hospital rooms, at his home. All kind people. Strangers pulled into orbit by the gravity of one man. We are a miniature solar system, all of us revolving around the sun of him.

Robert told me he came every day to change the dressing on Bill’s leg. A small, stubborn wound that refused to heal. That morning, he was supposed to take Bill for a haircut.

He assures me Bill had plenty of friends. “If he’d gone back to the States,” Robert said, “he would’ve died lonely. He was happy here.”

Happy.
I just hope—I wish—I believe, that in his last moments, he did not feel lonely. The guys had offered to stay the night. Insisted one of them stay. But Bill refused. Sent them away. Stubborn like that. I’ve heard people want to be alone when they die. Exiting the world is a private affair.

We believe it was peaceful. Like he got tired. Wanted to rest on the floor for a couple of minutes to gain his strength. Then just slept.

My last message to Bill was that I would see him in two days.
“That’s great”, Robert says, a grin breaking through. His laugh is a sharp contrast to my tears.
He died with a calendar full of friends.
Isn’t that a great way to die?

I nod, laughing and crying at once. A storm of contradictions.

More friends trickle in, until we are seven. A quiet constellation in the room. Together, but also separate, each floating in our own thoughts.

And on our phones, in the thirty-person WeChat group called Bill Help, more friends watch and wait. The group began more than half a year ago, when Bill first fell ill. An improvised circle of care. Haphazard, imperfect. Juggled between our jobs, our lives. Our love. Like a homemade cake—icing lopsided and messy, but covered generously in hundreds and thousands.

Finally, people begin to disperse. The funeral people say it will take time. Adam leaves for the police station to give statements; he was the first person to find the body. Tina goes with him to help translate.

As we file out, my eyes catch on a stack of Bill’s books. I gather them instinctively. Always save the books.

Outside, I find Robert and Wesley. I offer them the KFC breakfast, as we find a bench to sit on. The food is still warm—the porridge, the fried dough, the soy milk.
Breakfast for three, shared at last.

We talk of Taichi and San Francisco’s Chinatown, of the sprawling seafood markets in Guangdong. Robert has lived most of his life in China. In the US, he lived in Chinatown. Wesley is Chinese but speaks with a thick American accent, dreaming of life across the ocean. They are a perfect fit—each a fan of the other’s world.

I later hear from Adam that he and Tina returned to the flat. They saw the funeral people arrive with a body bag. No trolley—just a large, dark sack carried between two men. They shared the lift down with the residents. A body bag at their feet. On the floor. Limbs still jagged inside.

Adam had brought a full watermelon. He was going to blend it into juice for Bill. We were determined to make him eat that morning. I came with two bags of little things; he came armed with a planet of a watermelon. His heart is big and his love is simple like that.

He ended up carrying the watermelon everywhere—to the police station, back to Bill’s, then back home. A literal weight. Kilos of hope then, now just a sack of heavy heart.

I go home with my own heavy backpack of fruits and dry food—all of it intact. As if nothing ever happened. As if a nuclear bomb hadn’t gone off in our world while this one stayed perfectly still.

I slump onto the couch. The exhaustion crashes over me.

Morning, and already a lifetime has passed.

Author’s note: This is a true account of my friend Bill’s passing in Kunming. I began The Noodle Jar the day after, and a month later, this became its first story. It was the end of a life, and for me, the beginning of another journey—of a different sort.

Breakfast for Three is the first piece in the Between Worlds series. Read the next pieces in the series: