The blood around my wound begins to oxidise and coagulate… I see my skeleton walking down the street now. I’m walking behind it. Our feet touch the ground at the same time. I am my own shadow. The road we’re walking along looks familiar. The trees lining the pavement have been bleached white by the sun. There are stone steps on my left. I climb them. This is the route home I used to take after school. There’s a deep ditch in front of me. I jump across it and walk towards the entrance of the opera company’s dormitory block. I’m in the corridor now. It’s very dark. The skeleton has disappeared.
‘What’s this book doing here? Throw it out!’
‘It’s called China Can Say No. It’s a bestseller. It’s about how we must learn to stand up to the United States.’
‘Everyone ready now? Cut it, then! Good! Leave enough length on it.’
My kidney is pulled out from its warm, fatty cocoon and whisked away. In a few seconds, it will sink like a submarine into the body of the wealthy colliery boss.
‘It looks a bit smaller than the receiver’s kidney we just removed.’
‘Careful, don’t drop it.’
The hole is empty now. At last my soul can leave my body. But just as it’s about to slip out, a nurse quickly sews up the incision. Death eludes me once more. My heartbeat returns to normal. This heap of living flesh refuses to let me die.
‘Make sure you’ve removed all the clamps before you finish sewing it up!’
I keep seeing myself chasing after my father then falling into a ditch. The fluorescent light in operating rooms makes the faces of dead people, or of people who are about to die, look flat and mundane. It’s impossible to feel a sense of transcendence here, or gain an intimation of a higher realm. In these rooms, both life and death appear sordid and banal.
‘The operation went well. Just wait outside. We’ll call you if we need you.’
‘Oh…’ My mother seems to want to ask a question, but before she has a chance to, the door is shut in her face.
You drift through an ocean of thoughts like a silent submarine. No one can hear you breathing.
‘A mob stormed in here and shoved a flannel in my mouth,’ Wang Fei panted. ‘Then one of them said, “Sorry mate, it’s not you we’re after, it’s her!” Luckily, we managed to break free and run away.’
‘Dai Wei, you’re supposed to be in charge of security,’ Bai Ling said, straightening her collar. ‘We were nearly kidnapped just now. How did they know we were sleeping in this tent?’
‘Sorry. I had a beer and dozed off. What happened to your bodyguards?’
‘I told them to get some rest and come back in the morning.’ Wang Fei was wearing nylon shorts. His skinny legs looked very pale.
A few hours before, Yu Jin and I had escorted Bai Ling to this secret tent so that she could get some sleep. Chen Di and Dong Rong were in the science students’ tent behind it, so I thought it would be safe. Yu Jin bought some beer and dried tofu. He and I downed a couple of bottles then fell asleep. No one outside our group knew that Bai Ling was in the tent. I wondered how the mob had tracked her down.
‘Did you see their faces?’ Dong Rong asked. He never took his designer sunglasses off, even at night. During the day, he spent most of his time showing his girlfriend the sights of Beijing. She came from a small town in Zhejiang, and wore tight clothes and heavy make-up.
‘One of them was about thirty,’ Wang Fei said, taking out a cigarette. ‘He looked like a factory worker.’
‘Someone’s cut the cables of our loudspeakers on the Monument,’ Chen Di said, flashing his torch about nervously. The bright beam illuminated his scuffed white trainers.
‘We must hold a press conference,’ Wang Fei said, lighting his cigarette then taking a puff. A voice came over his walkie-talkie: ‘Zhuzi, Zhuzi. If you can hear me, pick up… We have an emergency situation. There are thirty empty army trucks parked on the street and the local residents want to set fire to them…’
‘There’s no need for a press conference,’ Bai Ling said, passing a comb through her short hair. ‘Let’s just keep this episode to ourselves.’
‘They must have heard your walkie-talkie going off, Wang Fei!’ I said. ‘That’s how they found you.’
Yu Jin strutted into the tent like a proud little rooster, his open shirt flapping at his sides like wings. ‘Many of the leaders seem to have scarpered,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen Han Dan, Yang Tao or Pu Wenhua since last night. Or Zhou Suo and Fan Yuan, for that matter. We need to get everyone back here. I’ve just circled Beijing on my bike. There’s a huge banner outside Jianguo Hotel that says “Oppose bourgeois liberalism, support the great Chinese Communist Party!” It doesn’t bode well…’
No one had made any broadcasts that night. It felt as though our movement was fizzling out.
A voice shouted through Wang Fei’s walkie-talkie again. ‘There’s a crowd of about a hundred guys here. They’re dressed like civilians, but I suspect they’re PLA soldiers in disguise. They’re holding chopping knives and metal rods, and they’re heading for the Square…’
The morning races towards noon, while you still cling to the shadows of your past.
‘It stinks in here!’ my mother grumbles, opening a window. Immediately a current of warm evening air flows through the window of her bedroom, moves into the sitting room, picking up smells of burnt food, brushes past my nose and escapes through the window of the covered balcony.
She wanders off to the toilet. I haven’t heard the plastic flyswatter that hangs from the doorknob rattle, so I know she hasn’t shut the door. It saves her having to turn on the light.
I wonder if the toilet has been redecorated. When I last saw it, there was a carcass of a half-eaten fly suspended in a spider’s web above the door. The toothbrushes and toothpaste were kept in a ceramic cup on a wooden shelf, next to a small tub of scouring powder. It had been so long since I’d used the toothbrush that it was caked in dust. The mirror above the shelf was splattered with water and toothpaste residue and still had a rectangle of glue in the corner where a sticky label had been. I looked out of the tiny window. There was an electric cable hanging out of a window of the building behind. When the cable moved, its shadow moved too.
My mother spoke to Tian Yi on the phone yesterday. I heard her say, ‘The police took us on our “annual trip”. They remove us from Beijing each anniversary of the crackdown and lock us in a hotel in the suburbs for a few days. They say it’s part of their yearly “cleansing of the capital’s political environment”… Huh, it’s not Dai Wei they’re afraid of — he hasn’t the strength even to fart — they just want to make sure I don’t talk to any foreign journalists… No, there’s still no sign of any improvement. I doubt he’ll wake up before I die… You’re coming back to China? You must come and see him, then. I warn you, he’s not a pretty sight. He’s so skinny, you can see his heart and veins pumping under his skin. He’s like one of those transparent watches they sell in the markets now…’
In the summer heat, my skin has become as putrid as a hemp sack of rotting rubbish. My back smells the worst. The medicinal powder my mother sprinkled over it a few days ago has soaked into the raw bedsores, which now smell as caustic as insecticide.
‘Apparently scientists have developed a new drug from cows’ brains that can help repair damaged neurons,’ my mother said to Tian Yi. ‘I know I shouldn’t raise my hopes… Tian Yi, you’re an adult. You understand that everyone needs money to get by in life. Well, I ran out of cash a while ago and had to sell one of his kidneys. But the money I got for it only paid for three months’ worth of medication. I can’t afford to buy him proper medicine now, so I go to the country markets and buy antibiotic solutions that have passed their sell-by date. They’re cheaper, but the quality’s unreliable. Sometimes when I inject them into him, he breaks out in red blotches… Oh, if only he’d just hurry up and die…’