Beijing Coma (77 page)

‘This is a glass of his morning urine,’ my mother says. ‘I’ve kept it in the fridge for you.’

‘Do I look like a man of sixty?’ This man has come to drink my urine several times. He must have just arrived. I hear him dump his bag on the sofa then I hear the bag drop to the ground.

‘I first started drinking urine after reading a Japanese book called
Urine: The Cure for One Hundred Illnesses
.’

‘What are you doing reading Japanese books? The Chinese have been using urine therapy for more than a thousand years.’

‘I had shingles. My feet were in so much pain, I couldn’t walk. I drank my urine for a week, but nothing happened. But after just one cup of this guy’s urine, I’m completely cured.’

‘No, you drink this cup. I’ll have the next one. I’ve heard you’ve applied for authorisation to set up a urine drinkers’ association.’

‘His condition is stable now. I give him glucose and vitamin formulas every day. Please, help yourself.’

They continue to chat away as they sip. The telephone rings for a long time, but no one goes to answer it.

‘In the late Qing Dynasty, herbal medicines were infused in the urine of infant boys.’

‘It will take ten years off you, I promise. At ten yuan a cup, it’s a bargain.’

‘My appetite has improved so much since I’ve been drinking it. I had four steamed dumplings for lunch today, and a bowl of hot-sour soup.’

‘It’s very salty. It tastes like sea water.’

I picture a trail of my footprints in the snow outside. What does it feel like to stand upright? I stood for over twenty years, but still have difficulty remembering the sensation. I imagine walking along the snowy path, effortlessly raising my knees. The snow is unmarked now, apart from some paw prints leading to the dustbins. I walk faster and my body becomes as light as a sheet of paper. I start running in time with my panting breath. My feet leave the ground and I fly into a bright light. There are people chasing after me, shooting arrows at my back. Below me, I see a mountain valley and soft white clouds. The arrows are flying as fast as me. As they draw closer, they transform into hypodermic syringes. The needles are infected. My skin tightens and my pores dilate.

A glass falls to the ground. A few people move away while others kick the broken shards into the corner.

‘Hold the tube up for me,’ a man on my left says. He’s pouring milk into my feeding tube, hoping it will sweeten my urine.

‘Has the milk been boiled?’ a woman standing next to him asks.

‘I boiled it this morning,’ my mother says.

‘
I beseech you, Emperor
 . . .’ Someone has inadvertently turned up the volume of the television. The actor’s loud cry is followed by the high-pitched screech of a two-stringed lute.

I want to recite to myself another passage from
The Book of Mountains and Seas
, but my mind has gone blank. All I can see is a shallow river running through a flat yellow expanse . . . Now I see one of A-Mei’s leather shoes. I washed the yellow mud from the sole for her. The wrinkles in the leather resemble lines on the palm of a hand. The outline of her big toe is visible on the shoe’s scuffed tip. The two straps cross over the front at the same angle that she crosses her arms over her chest. Some of the holes in the straps are more elongated than others. Looking inside, I can see the shiny print her heel has made in the leather insole and the mysterious darkness where her toes rest. I remember holding her foot in my hand and gazing at her toes splaying softly between my fingers.

Where is she now? I see a faint smile spread across her lips. Whenever her image appears in my mind, a stream of pain pours into my heart through the inferior vena cava, then the left ventricle contracts and the pain is pumped into the rest of my body.

‘Look! His face has gone red! Did someone rub oil onto his eyelids, or are those tears I see?’

‘How long has he been like this?’ I haven’t heard this voice before.

‘Since 4 June 1989. He was shot in the head during the crackdown. He was studying for a PhD.’

‘Huh, this pager never stops bleeping. Can I borrow your phone, Auntie?’

‘Look at this article. It says that Mr Desai, the Prime Minister of India, drinks a cup of urine every day.’

A light flits through the darkness. My heart begins to beat faster. I look out of a train window and see yellow mudflats stretching to the horizon and the grey sky reflected in pools of rainwater. A-Mei pulls down the window, wipes the dust from her fingers and says, ‘I love the smell of the air after a rainstorm.’ As the wind hits my face, I catch whiffs of her lipstick, hair lotion, hand cream and the chicken in soy-bean sauce she ate in the dining car. The train is heading for Guangxi Province. A sheet of rain and mist flashes past in the distance.

The milk that was poured into me has coated the walls of my stomach and blended with my gastric juices. As the stomach walls contract, drops of the semi-digested liquid flow into my duodenum. The urine discharged by my kidneys collects in my bladder and flows through the prostate gland.

‘Does he never open his eyes?’ rasps a woman who has just come in.

‘If you poured some of his own urine down his tube, perhaps it might bring him out of his coma,’ another woman says, placing her clammy hand on my face.

My urine trickles down the urethra then drips into the glass cup. The mouse under my bed has been frightened by our visitors’ footsteps, and has hidden itself in the box my mother bought for my ashes.

‘He never fills more than seven glasses a day, I’m afraid,’ my mother says to the last woman to arrive. ‘Come again tomorrow. I’ll keep his morning urine in the fridge for you.’

I remember the dream I had last night. A doctor brought me a syringe and said, ‘Give yourself the injection. If you do it correctly, you’ll wake up from your coma.’ But when I took the syringe it turned into a bicycle chain which dragged me off into a glass corridor. I tried to scream for help, but no sound came out of my mouth. Outside the corridor lay a scorching desert. I flung myself against the glass walls like a trapped bird then slowly suffocated to death.

The Square was bustling again. Residents stood chatting with their friends, enjoying the cool of the evening. Children ran around playing hide-and-seek. Street hawkers pushed their carts along shouting ‘Ice lollies for sale!’ Further away, a column of marchers arrived waving red banners.

Mou Sen walked up. ‘So I hear you went out for supper in Qianmen,’ he said, fixing his intense gaze on me.

‘It’s Tian Yi’s birthday. I invited Wang Fei along too. You weren’t around.’

‘Bai Ling was there as well, wasn’t she? You know, Nuwa has guessed that Wang Fei’s having an affair with her. He seems serious this time. I don’t think it will last, though. Bai Ling has such a fierce temper. She’s a Shandong girl, after all. I might as well tell you. Nuwa and I are in love. It was she who chased after me, I promise you. Don’t tell anyone. At least, don’t tell Yanyan.’ His nose twitched awkwardly.

‘I see. “The lazy toad dares taste the meat of the swan”, as the saying goes!’ I looked down at Mou Sen and felt peeved that someone so much shorter than me could seduce a beautiful girl like Nuwa.

‘
You’re
the bloody toad, Dai Wei!’ he said, punching me in the chest.

‘All right, your secret’s safe. Hey, how are things progressing with your Democracy University?’ I didn’t want to discuss Nuwa with him. In my mind’s eye, I saw her tight denim skirt swaying from side to side, her bottom jutting out a little each time she shifted her weight from one leg to the other.

He told me that forty people had already signed up to join his Democracy University. I warned him I couldn’t help organise his preliminary meeting because my cousin Kenneth and his wife had arrived in Beijing, and I had to show them around.

‘The spirit of the Square is dying,’ Mou Sen said. ‘It’s up to me to bring it back to life!’

‘I really don’t understand you. You resigned from the Headquarters because you thought we should withdraw from the Square. Now you’re urging everyone to stay here and join your university. Have you gone mad?’

‘I just have a gut feeling that if we don’t do something dramatic now, our movement will collapse,’ he said, gazing into the distance.

‘I think the best plan is to withdraw from the Square on 30 May, as Han Dan is suggesting, then continue our campaign back on the campuses.’

As I was about to walk away, he grabbed my shirt, stared at me unblinkingly and said, ‘Dai Wei, if either of us is arrested, we must be strong and refuse to surrender.’

‘Don’t be so melodramatic,’ I said, pushing him away.

Sister Gao spotted us and came over. ‘The people on the streets were very cold towards us on the march today,’ she said. ‘They didn’t cheer or clap, or offer us any food.’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Dai Wei, there’s a press conference taking place on the Monument. Zhuzi’s looking for you.’

A refreshing drizzle fell from the night sky. Beijing residents were beginning to drift back to their homes. I wanted to find Tian Yi and ask her to go back to the flat with me, but I had no choice but to turn round and head for the Monument.

Han Dan was reading out a ten-point declaration. Yang Tao was standing next to him, holding up the megaphone. The journalists had stacked their tape recorders and microphones on the school desk in front of them.

‘We propose that the students withdraw from the Square on 30 May, bringing this stage of the movement to a close . . .’ Han Dan said. As soon as he’d delivered the declaration, he left before anyone had time to protest.

The
Democracy Forum
discussion that Old Fu began chairing in the broadcast station soon degenerated into an argument. Students and Beijing residents stormed into the tent, grabbed the microphone from the table and shouted their opposition to the proposed withdrawal. Old Fu ran away, fearing for his safety, leaving Chen Di and me to get rid of the intruders.

I searched for Tian Yi, and at last spotted her sitting by the trees near the Museum of Chinese History.

‘This is the first day of my twentieth year,’ she said, not looking up at me.

‘My cousin Kenneth and his wife arrived in Beijing today for their honeymoon. Will you help me show them the sights tomorrow? Your English is much better than mine. My mother wants us to go and see her tonight to discuss where we’ll take them.’ I caught a whiff of the scraps of discarded food rotting on the ground beneath the trees.

‘Seems like a strange place to spend one’s honeymoon. Don’t they know there’s a revolution going on here?’

‘Apparently they booked the holiday months ago and couldn’t change it. And anyway, neither of them has been to China before, so they’re very excited.’

‘Hey, did you see the National Opera Company’s orchestra?’ she said, as we headed for Changan Avenue.

‘No, where?’

‘They came here about an hour ago to show their support. They performed the final movement of Beethoven’s Eroica. Just there by the national flag.’

‘Was my mother with them?’

‘No, none of the choir came. Just the conductor and about thirty musicians.’

‘They played the Eroica, you said? I wonder what my father would make of that if he were alive . . .’

‘Looking back at the Beijing fashion trends of 1996, we’ve seen a big drift towards relaxed, casual clothing, with baggy shirts and short waistcoats . . .’ My mother switches off the radio then pulls out the syringe from my arm and lowers my hand onto the bed. Blood rushes to my fingertips. She places my right hand on my thigh and pushes me onto my side. She forgot to move my left hand out of the way, so my hip is now digging into it.

‘If only you could die in your sleep . . .’ she wheezes, wedging her knee behind my back. With all her might, she pulls me into a sitting position. When she’s confident I’m stable, she slowly rotates my head from side to side. It’s drooping down, so when it turns, the veins on my face become compressed and bulge out. But at least my blood is flowing smoothly through my back now.

Someone knocks on the door. My mother rests my head on the pillow. ‘Hello!’ she says, opening the front door. ‘You’re the first to arrive.’

‘Are you alone then, Auntie?’

‘What do you mean? There’s always the two of us in this flat.’

‘Of course. How thoughtless of me. I’m sorry. I came here straight from work. I thought I could help you out before the others arrive. Have one of these fruits I’ve brought you. They only grow in the south.’ It’s Mimi. She visited a few months ago. Perhaps Tian Yi told her to come today. She and my mother sit on the sofa.

A fly that has been trapped in this room for months buzzes around my head, then settles on my hair and lays eggs on my scalp.

‘Let me take a look at Dai Wei first,’ Mimi says, getting up and heading for my room.

There’s no sheet covering my naked body. My penis is resting on my thigh. She walks in and yelps.

‘Oh, I bet that frightened you!’ my mother says, rushing in and flinging a sheet over me. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot to cover him. I’ve just turned him over. He’s as thin as a rake, but he still weighs a ton. He needs to be turned over every day, like a leg of ham drying in the sun. Hold his arm, will you, and I’ll push him onto his stomach again.’

Mimi grasps my arm. I can feel her breath on my cheek. Her fingers are small and warm.

‘I turn him three times a day. Turn around, turn around . . . After Liberation, we were always singing: “
The poor of the world have had their lives turned around!
” But my life hasn’t turned round yet. See that bedsore on his shoulder. It was raw and infected for a year. It only healed over last winter.’