Rania lay there, face paler than the wall, hair dishevelled. She looked as if she was being ripped apart. Her eyes remained closed. From the expression she wore it wasn’t obvious that she was enduring pain. She seemed calm and detached when the convulsions passed. Mengliu bent over and looked at her face, asked how she was, and what had happened. Rania opened her eyes no wider than a seam. They looked faint and scattered. She said nothing, but then her face suddenly tensed and her body doubled over. She did not make the slightest sound. He thought she looked like a giant shrimp, convulsing and then returning to stillness, and he almost laughed. Actually, he did laugh in his mind, but he stood still, waiting for her to finish convulsing, then asked again how she was. She didn’t try to open her eyes this time. It was as if she were dead.
At that moment, the tall nurse came in. She said that this sort of pain was normal after labour-inducing drugs had been injected, and that after a few more hours, after the foetus was out, things would be back to normal. Mengliu was shocked. ‘Induced labour? Who dares to tamper with this government-sanctioned child? This is illegal.’
The tall nurse took a document from the bedside table and handed it to Mengliu. It bore the red stamp of the Gene Department. The content of the file was quite lengthy, but the gist of it was that the data produced by the upgraded version of the machine showed that any offspring produced by a combination of Mengliu and Rania’s genes would create a child with an IQ of less than eighty, which did not meet Swan Valley procreation requirements and was contrary to genomic principles. To ensure a quality population, the pregnancy had to be terminated immediately.
Rania convulsed a few more times.
‘I am Head Nurse Yuyue. If you need anything, just press this.’ The tall girl pointed to a red button on the side of the chest of drawers. Her figure was slim but curvaceous, and checking her out required Mengliu to climb up and down some mountains. She looked quite naive, her bob-cut hair was black and smooth, as if covered in water drops. She took the file with her, and seemed to smile back at him as she left.
Mengliu gazed at the woman on the bed waiting for her contractions. The head nurse’s attitude showed that Rania’s ‘normal labour pains’ were hardly worth mentioning, and that pity would be wasted on her. If it meant bidding farewell to an unpleasant identity, then Rania’s pain was a positive thing. Mengliu thought of what he had read in the file. The clear implication was that he and Rania would soon be released from the bonds of marriage. Like someone who had been tied up for a long time and then released, his body was still numb, and he was not quite sure what to do with himself. He poked through the books on the shelf, picked up the one that seemed most interesting, and then sat down on the sofa beside the bed and flipped through it. He felt warm and comfortable, his blood resumed its smooth life-giving flow, and he became absorbed in the book. Occasionally he looked at Rania as she maintained the fixed rhythm of expression and convulsion, and noted nothing especially out of the ordinary.
In the dark room Rania’s face looked paler under the lights. She couldn’t eat anything. Even drinking water was a struggle. At seven or eight o’clock, Nurse Yuyue, lips shiny, returned to check on her, apparently satiated with dinner and complacent, as if she was doing everything on autopilot.
‘If you don’t eat, how will you have strength to carry on? You’ve got to force something down,’ she said to Mengliu in a professional, authoritative manner. She paused for a moment, then putting on a pair of rubber gloves, she told Rania to lie flat and began poking around inside her body with her fingertips. She wrinkled her brow and grumbled, ‘What’s this? You’re still not dilated.’ She took off the gloves and threw them into the rubbish bin, then went to consult the chief physician.
Before long, some people came in, led by an elderly man with fluffy white hair. It seemed he had been drinking excessively, for his face was flushed. Without a word he put on a pair of gloves and began his investigation. His face grew tense. A young intern clumsily repeated the same procedure. No more than five minutes after they had come in, they all left the ward. Rania was like a pile of refuse discarded there. Her convulsions continued. Sometimes she opened her mouth like a fish, but she didn’t cry out.
Yuyue told Mengliu that in order to maintain a peaceful cosy atmosphere in the hospital, they often needed to inject patients with sedatives. Howling was detrimental to human dignity, and the hospital would be turned into a place of terror. She wrote something on Rania’s chart, slotting it back into the clipboard when she was finished and returning her pen to her breast pocket. She said there were complications with Rania’s situation, but that he should rest assured she would be fine by the next morning. Yuyue sat down on a rotating stool and turned a full circle. Then she spread her legs and planted them firmly on the ground. Evidently she wanted to have a heart-to-heart chat with Mengliu. She took a small book out of a pocket in the side of her uniform. In it were the poems she had written over the past couple of years, more than a hundred of them. She had never let anyone see them before, but because he was a poet, she wanted him to be her first reader. She didn’t use words such as ‘ask’ or ‘edit’, assuming the pleasure would be all his.
He opened to the title page and saw a photo of her there. She was pure as jade, only eighteen years old. She wore faded jeans and a tank top. She was like a giraffe. He handed back the little book and said that he didn’t understand poetry, nor was he interested in it. He stood up and looked at Rania, and asked if there was any way to alleviate her pain more quickly. Yuyue put the poetry book back into her pocket, and explained that when it was really time to give birth to the child, the cervix would dilate to the width of five fingers. Her current pain was nothing, he shouldn’t worry, the foetus would certainly come out the next morning.
Mengliu said, ‘You mean she will has to suffer like this the whole night?’
Rania replied, ‘Everything is normal. You can go home and sleep. The nurses will take good care of her.’
Rania reached out for Mengliu, as if she was on her deathbed. Understanding her meaning, he nodded to indicate that he would stay, but he didn’t take her pale hand.
Rania’s continuing contractions grew dull and monotonous throughout the night. The hospital was lonely and silent, and there was a romantic orange light glowing outside the window. Mengliu read, but he felt drowsy and could not help dozing off. When he did finally sleep, he slept like a dead man, not even waking when Nurse Yuyue came in to check on the patient in the morning. Rania’s contractions continued. Her forehead was sweating and her mouth was open, as if she were dying.
When she came in again, Yuyue donned her gloves and checked Rania. This time, she looked puzzled. Rania’s cervix was still not dilated. She checked the time, and said the patient needed to eat something. Mengliu immediately got up and went to the hospital cafeteria to get breakfast. Breakfast was served buffet style, and there was a huge variety of options available — bread, cheese, smoked fish, porridge, steamed buns, dumplings, noodles, fruit, milk, coffee…A card on the buffet table read, Please do not waste food.