Beijing Coma (72 page)

‘
Arise, ye toilers of the earth . . .
’ The Internationale woke me from my sleep before the sun had risen.

I glanced at my watch. I’d slept for almost two hours. Although my head was still pounding, at least I could move it from side to side now, and think a little more clearly. I turned over. Tian Yi and Nuwa were asleep on the camp bed next to me. Their bare feet were sticking out of the blanket. It was easy to tell whose feet were whose. Tian Yi’s had very distinctive big toes that curled up at the end. Nuwa’s feet were smaller. When I looked at them, I thought about her long, delicate fingers.

‘The Workers’ Federation are going to hold a press conference outside the Museum of Chinese History at nine o’clock,’ Mou Sen said, waking up Nuwa. ‘They want Bai Ling to be there. I offered to go instead, but they wouldn’t have it. What shall I do?’

‘Well if they don’t want you, don’t go.’ Nuwa sounded different when she was lying down.

People had begun to gossip about Wang Fei and Bai Ling. They spent most of their time together now. Although Nuwa was upset, she tried not to let it show. When anyone asked her how she felt, she kept repeating that she and Wang Fei had never been more than good friends.

‘I saw Wang Fei and Bai Ling chewing from the same spare rib,’ Mou Sen whispered to her.

‘Are you jealous?’ Nuwa laughed, splaying out her toes.

‘No, I was just worried that
you
might be.’

‘Huh! No chance!’ Nuwa said, tapping Mou Sen’s hand, or perhaps his leg. Then either she pushed him, or he pulled her. When I saw her toes curl inwards, I looked away.

Yu Jin came over to speak to me. As I sat up, I saw Mou Sen drag Nuwa off the camp bed and lead her behind the wall of broadcasting equipment.

It made me uncomfortable to see them flirt. I knew Tian Yi would never be so fickle in her affections.

Chen Di came into the tent with Xiao Li, his binoculars hanging around his neck. ‘The marshals who were on night duty have returned to the campuses. There’s no one guarding the Monument.’

‘The whole security system has collapsed, so it won’t make any difference,’ I muttered.

Mou Sen walked out from behind the equipment. I could hear the click of a brass buckle as Nuwa fastened her belt. The Internationale had come to an end, so it was time for her to read out the morning news.

I stepped outside to have a smoke. The other guys joined me, so I handed them each a cigarette. During the night, Lin Lu had stormed into the station, hoping to enact a coup, but we’d managed to kick him out. The small victory had created a new sense of solidarity among us.

‘We haven’t had a moment’s peace since we took over this damn station,’ Chen Di said, lighting his cigarette. The strap of his watch had broken during the fight.

The Square was blanketed in dawn fog. Everything was quiet. The nights were much livelier. Boys would sit back to back drinking beer. Couples would huddle in quiet corners humming love songs to one another, then sneak off into empty tents to make love. It was like a huge party. When Yang Tao had come to the tent the night before and proposed that we leave the Square and go home for a couple of weeks, he was met with stony silence.

‘Lin Lu’s quite harmless really,’ I said to Chen Di. ‘He’s no spy. He’s just a megalomaniac. It’s government agents like Zhao Xian that we have to watch out for.’ Mr Zhao, the Central Television newsreader who’d delivered some newscasts for us, took many of our documents home with him. After rumours spread that he was a government spy, he vanished from the Square and never returned.

‘Can you give me a haircut, Dai Wei?’ Mou Sen said, grabbing a comb from Nuwa. I glanced at his head and said, ‘You’ve grown it out into a new style. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.’ But he’d already taken off his shirt and handed me some scissors.

‘They’re blunt,’ I said. ‘I can’t use them.’

‘Just give me a simple trim. It’s too hot to have shoulder-length hair.’

As I combed his double-crowned head, I smelt wafts of hair grease and shampoo.

‘Shave it off,’ Chen Di laughed, expelling a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘He thinks he’s so cool.’

I pushed Mou Sen’s head down to trim the back. ‘Careful,’ he yelped. ‘You cut my shirt collar last time.’

‘Shut up!’ I said. After a while, I noticed I’d taken too much off the right side, so I told him he’d look better with a crew cut. My hands were drenched in the sweat pouring from his scalp.

‘I’ll go to the toilets and rinse my head under the tap,’ he said after I finished. His eyes were red with tiredness.

‘Not so fast!’ I shouted. ‘Come back here and sweep up your hair before you go.’ I clapped my hands loudly, hoping that Nuwa would hear me.

The nurse packs away some medical appliances and grumbles to the lung cancer patient, ‘I told you to practise your deep breathing before the operation, but you didn’t listen to me.’

His right lung has been removed. When he breathes in, he sounds like a bicycle tyre being pumped with air. His money will only cover one more night in hospital, so he’ll have to go home tomorrow and wait to die.

‘No one told me you’d cut out the whole lung,’ he complains, panting noisily.

‘You stay here,’ my mother says to me. ‘I’m going downstairs to have some supper. Your drip bottle won’t need changing for another half-hour.’

She turns off the lights and everything goes black. As she shuts the door, I imagine myself crying out, ‘Get me some bananas, will you?’ I can smell bunches of them on the street stall outside.

The nurse who stuck acupuncture needles into me this afternoon said to my mother, ‘He probably can’t feel the needles go in. I’m stimulating his head and lung meridians. We’ve cured more than ten paraplegics with this treatment.’

I didn’t feel a thing. Apart from the first qigong session the director gave me, none of the treatments have had any effect.

I see a yellow blob floating in the darkness. Perhaps it’s a street lamp outside the window. I think once more about how it might feel to wake up from this coma. I imagine myself sitting up, opening my eyes, turning my head to the right, going to the door, pressing down the handle and walking out of the room.

Although I’m lying here like a silent ghost, the cancer patient’s dying breaths sound so clear, I know I must still be alive.

In the toilet next door, I hear an enamel bowl clinking against the sides of a ceramic sink and a toothbrush rattling inside a glass cup.

Further down the corridor, someone opens a door and asks, ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Yes,’ a man replies gruffly. The radio in his room is tuned to a discussion of today’s television schedule. ‘In tonight’s episode of the drama series,
Tender Darkness
 . . .’ I’m fed up with these banal details burrowing their way into my brain.

Without bothering to wash her feet, my mother lies down crossways at the end of my bed and prepares to go to sleep. This saves her the expense of renting a camp bed. As she dozes off, she grinds her teeth and mumbles, ‘Let them out, let them out . . .’

I presume she’s dreaming about the fire at the Friendship Theatre in Xinjiang Province which killed 323 people, 288 of whom were children. This morning my mother said the twenty-five officials in the audience had insisted on leaving the theatre before the children, and should be severely punished. But the lung cancer patient said the officials were VIPs, and it was their right to leave the theatre first.

The cancer patient yells out in pain, waking me from my doze. His brother switches on a torch briefly then turns it off again.

Someone slips into a pair of slippers and shuffles off to the toilets. Someone else is pacing up and down the corridor in a pair of rubber sandals. Two people in the room upstairs are playing Chinese chess. One of them slams a chess piece onto the wooden board then lets out a dry laugh.

These irritating distractions slowly fade away, allowing me to drift back to sleep.

The pre-dawn breeze smells of charcoal smoke. Occasionally, I hear a box being flung onto a flatbed truck, or something falling from the back of a moving cart.

Just before sunrise, the metal shutter that seals the hospital’s entrance is pulled up. The loud grating wakes my mother. She rolls onto her side and sits on the edge of the bed. She takes my hand, pulls the drip stand closer to the bed, then inserts the needle into my vein. My muscles contract for a second. Usually, she clicks her tongue at this point, but today she remains silent.

At eight in the morning, I hear doctors and nurses exchange brief greetings as they begin their morning shifts. The noises and smells in the building are less complicated at this time of day. I hear a bird, which is not a sparrow, chirping on a tree in the hospital’s backyard.

My olfactory receptors have become more sensitive. I can smell the fresh fish on the market stalls a few streets away. The tart, briny odour drifts through the air, leaving behind it a milder scent of the sun-baked sea.

Before the doctor walks in, my mother opens her handbag again. When she pulls out the plastic bag containing my medical records and bottles of pills, I smell the musty scent of the last hospital I stayed in.

‘How are you feeling this morning?’ the doctor asks the cancer patient. ‘You must keep doing those breathing exercises. You only have one lung now. You can’t rely solely on your oxygen canister. Oxygen is more expensive than rice wine, you know!’ When he hears that, the cancer patient immediately pulls the oxygen mask from his face.

The doctor moves to my bed and addresses my mother in a standard Chinese accent. ‘Remember to inspect his back every day for early signs of bedsores. They can be very hard to treat. The director is giving the mayor a course of qigong treatment. He’ll be back in a couple of days. We’ve upgraded your son to the 8,000-yuan treatment plan, as you requested. So we’ll need the extra 2,000 yuan by the end of the day, please.’

‘Poor Auntie!’ the nurse says sympathetically. ‘You’ll probably die from exhaustion before this son of yours kicks the bucket.’

‘Come in and have a cup of tea, Master Yao,’ my mother says, opening the front door for him. ‘It’s exhausting having to walk up here to the third floor.’

‘I’m used to it. I live on the fifteenth floor of a block of flats. The lift operator clocks off at 11 p.m., so whenever I get home late, I have to haul my way up thirty flights of stairs.’

‘Here’s some tea. It’s so hot today, isn’t it? I bet your flat has piped gas. The buildings in this compound don’t even have a proper electricity supply. As soon as the neighbours downstairs turn on their washing machine, all my lights go out. The local authorities are planning to pull this place down soon.’

‘He looks a little better than the last time I saw him.’

My mother and Master Yao are standing on my left. I can hear them breathing loudly.

‘He didn’t have any wrinkles when I brought him back from Sichuan. But these three lines have appeared since then. He looks like an old man now. Well, he’ll be thirty in a couple of years. How time flies!’ She puts her damp hand on my forehead. The two of them are blocking the breeze from the electric fan.

‘Let me look at his palm,’ Master Yao says, then takes a gulp of tea. ‘Here’s the sky line, here’s the man line, and here’s the earth line. They are clear and strong, which is auspicious.’

‘Oh, I forgot, would you like a canned drink?’ my mother says, rushing off to fetch a couple of cans from the kitchen. ‘They’re cold. This one’s a sports drink, and this is Coca-Cola. When you open them, a stream of bubbles comes out. Oh dear!’ The cans fall from her hands. I can smell sweet carbonated liquid spilling across the floor.

As she and Master Yao squat down to pick up the cans, they bump into each other. My mother fetches a cloth, then silently kneels down again and wipes the floor. Master Yao stands up.

After a while he says, ‘Your hair is still very black.’

‘You haven’t got many white hairs either.’ My mother probably averted her gaze when she said this. Although the electric fan is very noisy, it produces only a slight breeze. There’s a rustling inside my cochlea. An ant crawled into my ear last year and suffocated to death, and its corpse is still trapped there.

Master Yao grabs my hand and says, ‘I’ll give him a quick session,’ then sits on the chair my mother has pulled over for him.

My mother paid a nurse to give me an acupuncture treatment yesterday. Before the woman left, she said to my mother, ‘You must face the fact that your son might die at any moment, Auntie.’ After showing her out, my mother sat on the sofa for a moment then came into my room and said, ‘Just make up your mind. Do you want to live or die? I need to know. I can’t go on like this any longer. I don’t have the energy . . . I’m fifty-six years old now. No mother should have to bury her own son . . .’ She walked off into the sitting room in floods of tears, then went to the toilet and blew her nose noisily on a tissue as she squatted down to piss.

Since the month of qigong treatment I had in Sichuan last year, my health has fluctuated. Sometimes I glimpse the key that will reactivate my motor neurons, lying just out of reach. But sometimes my heart stops beating, and I feel as though I’m drowning in a dead sea. Whenever that happens, my mother quickly calls an ambulance then makes me perform sit-ups, pulling me up then pushing me down again so many times that she weeps with exhaustion.