Beijing Coma (82 page)

‘That drama series
Black Screen
last year had a corrupt city mayor.’

‘We’re surrounded by corruption these days. All the new casinos and nightclubs that are springing up everywhere are financed by the expense accounts of corrupt officials. They’re packed with high-ranking cadres, blowing away public money on expensive food and drink.’

They stop talking for a while and crack melon seeds between their teeth.

When we demonstrated against official profiteering in 1989, only a few cases of corruption had come to light. But now the problem seems to have become endemic.

My mind turns to Wen Niao again. Two weeks after she made love to me, she stopped visiting. During Spring Festival she telephoned my mother to wish us a happy Chinese New Year and said she couldn’t make the next appointment because she was going sales shopping at Guiyou Department Store. Perhaps she’s already moved into the staff apartment building her institute has built beyond the third ring road. She’s been allocated an eighty-square-metre flat. She said it’s close to the ring road, so it’s very noisy, but she can see the White Dagoba Temple from the windows, so she believes it’s her karmic destiny to live there.

On her last visit, she said to me, ‘I was on a train one night. The other passengers around me were sprawled over the wooden seats fast asleep. I got up and walked to the end of the carriage. When I looked out of the back window and saw the moon floating above the black horizon a terrible sadness came over me. I finally accepted that I’d been reborn as a woman and the lamas would never come to fetch me . . . When I was fifteen, I went to Tibet and visited all the monasteries, but never found the one my previous incarnation died in.’

She’s about the same age as me, so her previous incarnation would have died in the late sixties. He couldn’t have died in a monastery. By that time, all the religious buildings in Tibet had been destroyed by the Chinese army, and any incarnate lama would have been languishing in jail or toiling in the fields.

She wiped my face with mineral water and said, ‘Then I visited the Forbidden City a few years ago, and I knew I’d once lived there too. I saw the comb I used, the pillow I rested my head on. I tell you, everything looked so familiar to me. I leaned against a pillar and cried my heart out. I didn’t want to leave the palace compound. When they closed at five o’clock, the stewards had to drag me out. I did a little research, and realised that I was Empress Wencheng in a past life. She died in Tibet, which explains why I was later reincarnated as a Tibetan lama . . . The spirits of my past lives often visit me, and tell me I must achieve something great. But what can a frail woman like me hope to achieve? My policeman boyfriend was a Buddhist. When I first met him, I knew at once he’d worn the dragon robes of an emperor in his previous life. I realised my role in this incarnation was to make sure he became President of China. I thought that with the power of all my past lives to propel him forward, he was bound to succeed. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a playboy. I had to break up with him. He went to nightclubs and saunas almost every night . . .’

She wrapped her fingers in muslin, then rubbed each of my teeth individually and wiped my tongue clean. It felt wonderful. When my mother scrubs my teeth with cotton earbuds she always makes my gums bleed.

I wish Wen Niao would walk through the door again and bring me some sunlight and fresh air. But I doubt she’d want to repeat what some people might consider a perverse sexual act. She probably thinks her behaviour that afternoon was caused by a temporary lapse of sanity.

She once said to me, ‘Everyone out there is sick in the head. Who knows, perhaps you’re the only sane person left in this city.’

It’s been thirty days since her last visit. My mother tried to reach her on her pager last week but she never replied.

I can hear my mother grumbling, ‘What did we do to upset Nurse Wen? Why doesn’t she come round any more? Was it because I asked her to empty the urine bottle last time she was here? But she’s a trained nurse. She’s had to do many worse things than that.’

When the telephone rings, she rushes to the sitting room. A few days ago, a buyer was found for my kidney. A provisional price of eight thousand yuan has been agreed, with the middleman taking a thousand-yuan cut.

‘All right . . . You can come and do the blood test tomorrow. When will he hand over the cash? I was wondering if he might be able to give me a bit more . . .’

The voice on the other end says, ‘The transplant won’t be happening for at least two months. The middleman must make sure your son is compatible with the patient before he can confirm a date. And as for the price, I think you’ve already got a very good deal. If you’d sold just before Spring Festival you probably wouldn’t have got more than two thousand yuan. That’s when most of the prisoners are executed, so there’s always a glut of available organs . . .’

‘I’ll need to warn the police station that I’ll be away for a while, or they’ll presume I’ve gone on the run.’

‘I’ll get the middleman to have a word with them. They have strong connections with the police. That’s how they manage to get hold of the lists of prisoners on death row.’

My mother has told me she can’t do anything more for me, and that my body will have to fend for itself from now on. I hope that I die during the operation. How wonderful that would be.

Although I know Wen Niao will never return, I’m still wallowing in the blissful memories of her visits. Every word she said soothed my nerves. When she leaned over me and I smelt on her shirt collar the scent of grilled chicken livers from the street stall she’d passed on her way to the flat, I almost fainted with pleasure.

She won’t come back. She’s sitting in a room somewhere in this big city, unaware that my body yearns for her to make love to me again so that I can die in one last burst of ecstasy.

A Bangladeshi boy is singing ‘Beautiful Lake Tai’ in a televised song competition for foreign students. Just as the final round is about to begin, An Qi arrives with her invalid husband. He’s been here once before. He’s able to walk up to the third floor with the aid of crutches. The cigarettes he smokes smell of hospital wards.

‘You should ask your foreign relatives to make enquiries for you,’ he says in his native Beijing accent. ‘Perhaps they can track down some specialists who are researching conditions like Dai Wei’s. If they carry out research on him, you wouldn’t have to pay any medical fees.’

‘He’s always coming up with good ideas,’ An Qi says proudly.

‘Why didn’t I think of that before?’ my mother says. ‘I should ask my son Dai Ru to see if he can find any specialists in England.’

On the telephone yesterday, my brother said he wouldn’t be able to return to China until he graduates. He’s working part-time in a Chinese restaurant, and is going out with an English girl. In his half-hour conversation with my mother, he never once asked about me.

They’re sitting on the sofa now, drinking tea.

‘We made contact with another victim of the crackdown yesterday,’ An Qi’s husband says. ‘He was shot in the head, just like Dai Wei. He’s paralysed from the chest down. He spends all day in bed. We sat beside him for half an hour and asked him questions, but he didn’t say a word. When we came out, his wife told us that last year he tried to kill himself by swallowing sixty sleeping pills.’

‘It can’t be easy for you two, tracking down all those injured people. How many have you found so far?’

‘Forty-nine, if you include the ones that Professor Ding found . . .’

‘He’s in great pain but he insists on continuing the search,’ An Qi chips in. ‘His pelvic inflammation flared up again last month. The old wound became septic. If we had some money, we could pay for him to have steel rods inserted into the damaged joints so that he could walk unaided.’

‘I move faster with these two crutches than I did on my own two feet!’ he says, tapping his crutches on the ground. ‘And besides, if I could throw them away, I might go out to nightclubs every night, and you wouldn’t be happy about that!’

‘Don’t talk nonsense! You’ve no idea what those places are like now. Those young women from Sichuan smother themselves with make-up, then prance around in tiny bikinis that leave nothing to the imagination. It’s so crude.’

‘Sounds like a lot of fun to me!’ he laughs, tapping his crutches on the floor again.

‘We’ve taken up Falun Gong too, now,’ An Qi says. ‘But we still haven’t felt the Falun wheel of law spinning in our abdomens. Hey, next time Master Li Hongzhi gives a public lecture, you should go along and ask him to install a Falun wheel inside Dai Wei.’

‘If you persevere with the meditation exercises, your wheel of law will eventually be awakened,’ my mother says. ‘When it spins clockwise it will absorb energy from the universe, and when it spins anti-clockwise it will dispel bad karma and illness from your body. You’ll never have to waste money on expensive medication again. When you go to hospital these days, the doctors force you to have hundreds of unnecessary blood tests and X-rays, trying to get as much money as they can from you before you leave.’

‘They work on commission. They need to prescribe three thousand yuan’s worth of medication a day to get a bonus at the end of the month. And if you don’t settle your bill every morning, they kick you out onto the street. You can’t reason with them.’

‘They don’t care about saving lives. All they care about is money.’

I suddenly remember an ancient copy of
The Book of Mountains and Seas
I leafed through in a second-hand bookshop in Guangzhou. It had a fold-out map at the back. When I tried to open it, it crumbled into pieces.

‘Only forty people have enrolled so far,’ Mou Sen said to Tang Guoxian as he drafted his speech for the Democracy University’s opening ceremony. ‘We need at least four thousand. If you can’t recruit that many, I’ll have to find a new admissions officer.’

‘Don’t talk down to me like that,’ Tang Guoxian said, not looking up from the list of contacts he was copying out. ‘You just wait and see. One day I’ll be more famous than any of you!’ He’d been sacked from the Provincial Students’ Federation the previous week for supporting Han Dan’s proposal to withdraw from the Square.

‘Can you help us out, Dai Ru?’ Tian Yi said, handing my brother some name cards. ‘Phone these people and see if you can persuade them to enrol.’

My brother seemed distracted. Earlier that day, he’d asked if I had any spare red armbands. We’d run out of them, so I gave him some baseball caps instead. I didn’t ask him what he was up to. My mother had stopped interfering in his life, so I thought I should too.

It was stiflingly hot inside the broadcast tent. I’d made a hundred posters publicising the opening ceremony. Xiao Li and Zhang Jie took them from me and went to paste them up around the Square. Everyone was working hard to ensure the Democracy University would be a success.

‘I heard your father telephoned you and begged you to leave the Square,’ I said to Tian Yi.

‘Did you say “father”? That word sounds very unfamiliar to me.’

‘Can’t we move into another tent, Dai Wei?’ Nuwa said. ‘It stinks in here.’

‘There isn’t another one as big as this,’ I said.

‘It wouldn’t smell so bad if you lot stubbed out your cigarettes in a cup rather than in those ink pots,’ Tian Yi said, glaring at Mou Sen.

‘Who dropped those dumplings?’ said Shi Ye, the bespectacled girl who used to share a dorm with A-Mei at Southern University. ‘They’ve been trodden into the ground now. It’s disgusting!’ She’d arrived in Beijing a few days before. She was waiting to take Mou Sen to meet a student delegation from Hong Kong. She spoke Cantonese, so was going to help translate.

‘Be quiet everyone,’ Nuwa said, wiping beads of sweat from her brow. ‘The Voice of America is broadcasting a news story about us. Shall we relay it to the Square, Mou Sen?’

‘You seem to have forgotten I’m not in charge here any more,’ he said.

‘. . . Fear has descended on the Chinese capital. Liberal intellectuals and progressive Party leaders who discussed democratic reform with such excitement two weeks ago are nowhere to be seen. Beijing citizens are avoiding contact with foreigners. Those with passports are beginning to flee the country. The dissident astrophysicist Fang Li and his wife are believed to have gone into hiding in the outskirts of Beijing . . .’

‘What does he mean “fear has descended on the Chinese capital”?’ Tang Guoxian said derisively. ‘What crap!’

‘Did you hear what he said? A million people in Taiwan linked arms and formed a 400-kilometre human chain across the island. And in the pouring rain, too!
Fantastic, fantastic!
’ Nuwa said, exclaiming the last words in English.

‘The world is watching our every move,’ my brother said excitedly. Then he and a couple of his friends walked over to Tang Guoxian and said conspiratorially, ‘You really should join forces with us.’

‘Do you have anything to eat, Dai Ru?’ Tian Yi asked. ‘I’m famished.’

‘I never keep snacks on me,’ he said, turning to her. ‘When we were kids, Dai Wei would always rifle through my pockets and steal whatever he found.’ Whenever I heard my brother speak, I’d always be reminded of the musty smell of our flat.

I suspected that my brother was attempting to form a new national student organisation, so I tried to dampen his zeal. ‘I had a chat with a plain-clothes policeman this morning,’ I said, glancing at him. ‘He told me that students who cause disturbances are usually sent to a re-education camp for two years, but our protests amount to a counter-revolutionary rebellion, and he thinks we’ll get locked away for at least ten. None of us will be able to escape. They have the names and photographs of every student who’s stepped into the Square.’