The Seventh Day (17 page)

At this point, my memory paused. Looking at this young woman with her desolate expression, I nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen you before, in the bedsit.”

She smiled faintly, but her eyes were anxious. “How long have you been here?” she asked.

“Three days.” I shook my head. “Maybe four.”

Her face fell. “I’ve been here three weeks.”

“You have no burial plot?” I asked.

“No, I don’t. How about you?”

“I don’t, either.”

She raised her head and scanned my face carefully. “Have you done something with your eyes and nose?”

“Yes, and my chin too,” I said.

“The chin isn’t obvious,” she said.

She noticed my armband. “You’re wearing that for yourself.”

This took me aback. How could she know that? I wondered.

“There are people over there who’ve done that too,” she said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Let me take you,” she said. “None of them have burial plots.”

I followed as she led me toward a place I’d never been. I knew her name now—not because she told me, but because my memory had caught up with the world that had gone away.

A young woman named Liu Mei committed suicide by jumping off a building, distressed that her boyfriend had given her a knockoff iPhone 4s for her birthday instead of the real thing. This story got blanket coverage three weeks ago.

For three days in a row, the local newspapers carried reports on Liu Mei’s suicide—in-depth reports, or so the papers said. The reporters ferreted out many details of Liu Mei’s life story, how she met her boyfriend when she was working at the salon, how they had two steady jobs in two years—as hairwashers in the salon and as servers in a restaurant, as well as several temporary jobs; how they rented five different places, at lower and lower rent, the last rental in a basement, a former bomb shelter built during the Cultural Revolution and later converted into as the biggest underground accommodation complex in this city of ours. The papers said that at least twenty thousand people were living in our city’s air-raid shelters, and they were known as “the mouse tribe,” for like mice they emerged from holes and crannies and after roaming outside during the day would return at night to their underground nests. The papers published photos of the room where Liu Mei and her boyfriend had lived, separated from their neighbors only by a piece of cloth. The papers said that with the mice tribe cooking and going to the bathroom in the air-raid shelters, things got terribly filthy. To the reporters, the air was so heavy it didn’t feel like air at all.

One discovered the log of Liu Mei’s space on QQ, the instant messaging service, and learned that her username was Mouse Girl. In the period leading up to her suicide, she had announced her receipt of a birthday present from her boyfriend. He said he’d spent over five thousand yuan to get it. The two of them had celebrated with dinner at a food stall, but the following day her boyfriend had to rush home to see his father, who was seriously ill. She got together with a girlfriend, the owner of a genuine iPhone 4s, and compared their two phones, discovering that the bitten-into apple on her own phone was a bit bigger than that on her friend’s, and that her phone was noticeably lighter in weight, although the clarity of the touch screen was similar. Only then did she realize that her boyfriend had tricked her—this phone was a knockoff, and couldn’t have cost more than a thousand yuan, tops. Someone who knew a lot about these things left a post on her log, noting that if the resolution of the touch screen was high, then it sounded like a Sharp product. He used the term “resolution” rather than “clarity” and corrected her use of the term “knock-off phone,” saying that if it had a Sharp touch screen it should be termed “a superior imitation” and it would have cost more than a thousand yuan.

Mouse Girl’s boyfriend’s cell phone had its service suspended because money was owed on the account, so she couldn’t reach him directly, and all she could do was sit in an Internet cafe, calling him on her QQ space for five days in a row and demanding that he get his ass back right away. By the fifth day her boyfriend still had not responded, so she cursed him as a spineless coward, then announced that she wanted to die, and made public the time and place of her intended suicide: noon the next day, on one of the bridges over the river. But someone on the Internet urged her to think of some other way, since it was midwinter and the river was so cold it would be excruciatingly painful; she should find a warm place to commit suicide, for you need to be good to yourself even when taking your own life. She asked for suggestions, and this person recommended that she buy a couple of bottles of sleeping pills, swallow them all at one go, wrap herself in her comforter, and dream away happily until she died. Other commenters thought this a lousy idea, because her doctor would give her at most a dozen or so pills for each prescription, and if she wanted to get two full bottles’ worth she would need to postpone her suicide by a good six months. She was not going to delay her suicide, she declared; instead she had decided to throw herself off a building—the apartment building opposite her underground home. When she named the location, two residents asked her not to die just outside their front door, for this would bring them bad luck. One of them suggested she find a way to climb up onto the roof of the city government headquarters and jump off from there, arguing that this would really make a statement, but others ruled that out, since there were military policemen guarding the entrance to the city government headquarters and they would detain her as a suspected petitioner before she even got through the front door. She decided in the end to make her leap from the Pengfei Tower—at fifty-eight stories the tallest building in town. This time no netizen opposed her plan—indeed, some praised this as an excellent choice, saying that before dying she could enjoy the stunning view. The last line that she left in cyberspace was addressed to her boyfriend. “I hate you,” she said.

Mouse Girl killed herself in the afternoon. I happened to be at the Pengfei Tower just at that time, carrying my university diploma in my pocket, because I had learned that several companies handling English tutorial services were based in the Pengfei Tower, and I wanted to see if I could find a position as a tutor.

There was a huge crowd out in front. Police cars and ambulances were there too, and people had their mouths hanging open as they gazed up at the skyscraper. This was right after the first heavy snow of winter; the snow gleamed in the bright sunshine, under a blue sky. A tiny figure could be seen some thirty stories up, perched on a wall. Before long the glare of sunlight became uncomfortable, and I had to lower my gaze and rub my eyes. Others did the same, craning their necks and then lowering their heads and rubbing their eyes, before looking up once more. Amid a clamor of commentary, I heard that the girl had been standing there for over two hours.

“Why is she standing there?” someone asked.

“She’s going to jump off,” another said.

“Why does she want to do that?”

“She’s tired of living, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Hell, that’s not so hard to figure out, is it? So many people these days are tired of living.”

Petty tradesmen and street vendors arrived on the scene, squeezing in and out among the throng, flogging wallets and bags, necklaces, scarves and whatnot, all knockoff versions of name brands. Some were selling “happy oil.”

“What’s happy oil?” somebody asked.

“A quick rub and you’ll have a hard-on” was the reply. “Firm as iron, hard as steel, more virile than Viagra.”

Some were offering spying paraphernalia. “Do you want a bugging device?” they asked in a low voice.

“What would I do with one of those?” someone asked.

“You can check whether your wife has taken a lover.”

Another vendor was selling sunglasses. “Ten yuan a pair!” he shouted, and recited a little jingle for good measure: “You can see far, you can see high, no need to fear the sun in your eye.”

Some people bought sunglasses and put them on right away, so they could focus more intently on the tiny figure high up on the Pengfei Tower. I heard them say that they could see a policeman sticking his head out of a window next to the girl. He must be trying to talk her out of it, they said. A minute later, the spectators wearing the ten-yuan sunglasses began to shout: “The policeman is sticking his arm out!” “And the girl is sticking hers out, too!” “She must have changed her mind.” But almost immediately there was a uniform chorus of “Ah!” and then a sudden hush, and moments later I heard a heavy thump as the girl’s body hit the ground.

The last sight that Liu Mei left in that world was a spurt of blood from her mouth and ears. And the force of the impact split the legs of her jeans wide open.

“You can still call me Mouse Girl,” she said. “Were you there when I fell?”

I nodded.

“Someone said I was a terrible sight, with blood all over my face. Is that true?”

“Who said that?”

“Someone who came over later.”

I said nothing.

“Was I really that scary?”

I shook my head. “When I saw you, it was as though you were sleeping, meek and mild.”

“Did you see any blood?”

I hesitated, reluctant to mention it. “Your jeans split open,” I said.

She gasped with surprise. “He didn’t tell me that.”

“Who didn’t?”

“The man who came later, I mean.”

I nodded.

“My jeans split open,” she murmured. “In what way?”

“They split into strips.”

“What do you mean?”

I thought for a moment. “A bit like the strips of a cotton mop.”

She looked down at her pants, a pair of long, wide pants—men’s pants.

“Somebody has changed my pants,” she said.

“They don’t look like yours.”

“You’re right,” she said, “I don’t have any pants like this.”

“Some kind person must have done that for you,” I said.

She nodded. “How did you come over?” she asked.

I thought back to that last scene in the Tan Family Eatery. “I was eating noodles in a restaurant and reading a newspaper when the kitchen caught on fire. There was an explosion, and I don’t remember anything after that.”