Cixin Liu - Death's End

The crowd around Tianming dissipated, but he remained where he was, his hand pressed against the glass. He wasn’t looking at the lifeless body lying within. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at all.

“There was no pain.” Dr. Zhang’s voice was so low that it sounded like the buzzing of a mosquito. Tianming felt a hand land on his left shoulder. “It’s a combination of a massive dose of barbitone, muscle relaxant, and potassium chloride. The barbitone takes effect first and puts the patient into a deep sleep, the muscle relaxant stops his breathing, and the potassium chloride stops the heart. The whole process takes no more than twenty, thirty seconds.”

After a while, Dr. Zhang’s hand left Tianming’s shoulder, and Tianming heard his departing footsteps. Tianming never turned around.

He suddenly remembered how he knew the doctor. “Doctor,” Tianming called out softly. The footsteps stopped. Tianming still didn’t turn around. “You know my sister, don’t you?”

The reply came after a long pause. “Yes. We were high school classmates. When you were little, I remember seeing you a couple of times.”

Mechanically, Tianming left the main building of the hospital. Everything was clear now. Dr. Zhang was working for his sister; his sister wanted him dead. No, wanted him to “conduct the procedure.”

Although Tianming often recalled the happy childhood he had shared with his sister, they had grown apart as they grew up. There was no overt conflict between them, and neither had hurt the other. But they had come to see each other as completely different kinds of people, and each felt that the other held them in contempt.

His sister was shrewd but not smart, and she had married a man who was the same way. They were not successful in their careers, and even with grown children, the couple couldn’t afford to buy a home. Since her husband’s parents had no room for them, the family had ended up living with Tianming’s father.

Tianming, on the other hand, was a loner. In career and personal life, he wasn’t any more successful than his sister. He had always lived by himself in dormitories that belonged to his employer, and left the responsibility for taking care of his frail father entirely to his sister.

Tianming suddenly understood his sister’s thinking. The medical insurance was insufficient to cover the expenses for his hospitalization, and the longer it went on, the bigger the bill grew. Their father had been paying for it out of his life savings, but he had never offered to use that same money to help Tianming’s sister and her family to buy a house—a clear case of favoritism. From his sister’s point of view, their father was spending money that should be hers. Besides, the money was being wasted on treatments that could only prolong, but not cure, the illness. If Tianming chose euthanasia, his sister’s inheritance would be preserved, and he would suffer less.

The sky was filled with misty, gray clouds, just like in his dream. Looking up at this endless grayness, Tianming let out a long sigh.

All right. If you want me to die, I’ll die.

He thought of “The Judgment” by Franz Kafka, in which a father curses his son and sentences him to death. The son agrees, as easily as someone agreeing to take out the trash or to shut the door, and leaves the house, runs through the streets onto the bridge, and leaps over the balustrade to his death. Later, Kafka told his biographer that as he wrote the scene, he was thinking of “a violent ejaculation.”

Tianming now understood Kafka, the man with the bowler hat and briefcase, the man who walked silently through Prague’s dim streets more than a hundred years ago, the man who was as alone as he was.

Someone was waiting for Tianming when he returned to his hospital room: Hu Wen, a college classmate.

Wen was the closest thing to a friend from Tianming’s college days, but what they had wasn’t friendship, exactly. Wen was one of those people who got along with everyone and who knew everyone’s name; but even for him, Tianming was in the most peripheral ring of his social network. They had had no contact since graduation.

Wen didn’t bring a bouquet or anything similar; instead, he brought a cardboard box full of canned beverages.

After a brief, awkward exchange of greetings, Wen asked a question that surprised Tianming. “Do you remember the outing back when we were first years? That first time we all went out as a group?”

Of course Tianming remembered. That was the first time Cheng Xin had ever sat next to him, had ever spoken to him.

If she hadn’t taken the initiative, he doubted if he ever would have gotten the courage to speak to her for the rest of their four years in college. At the outing, he had sat by himself, staring at the broad expanse of the Miyun Reservoir outside Beijing. She had sat down next to him and begun talking.

While they talked, she tossed pebbles into the reservoir. Their conversation meandered over usual topics for classmates who were becoming acquainted for the first time, but Tianming could still recall every word. Later, Cheng Xin had made a little origami boat out of a sheet of paper and deposited it on the water. A breeze carried the boat away slowly until it turned into a tiny dot in the distance….

That most lovely day of his time in college held a golden glow in his mind. In reality, the weather that day hadn’t been ideal: There was a drizzle, and the surface of the reservoir was filled with ripples, and the pebbles they tossed felt wet in the hand. But from that day on, Tianming fell in love with drizzly days, fell in love with the smell of damp ground and wet pebbles, and from time to time he made origami boats and placed them on his nightstand.

With a start, he wondered if the world in his peaceful dream had been born from this memory.

But Wen wanted to talk about what had happened later in the outing—events that did not make much of an impression on Tianming. However, with prompts from Wen, Tianming managed to recall those faded memories.

A few of Cheng Xin’s friends had come by and called her away. Wen then sat down next to Tianming.

Don’t be too pleased with yourself. She’s nice to everyone.

Of course Tianming knew that. But then Wen saw the bottle of mineral water in Tianming’s hand and the conversation shifted.

What in the world are you drinking?!

The water in the bottle was a green color, and bits of grass and leaves floated in it.

I crumpled some weeds and added them to the water. It’s the most organic drink.

He was in a good mood and so he was more loquacious than usual.

Someday I may start a company to produce this drink. It will surely be popular.

It must taste awful.

Do you think cigarettes and liquor really taste that good? Even Coca-Cola probably tasted medicinal the first time you tried it. Anything addictive is like that.

“Buddy, that conversation changed my life!” Wen said. He opened the cardboard box and took out a can. The outside was deep green, and on it was a picture of a grassland. The trademark was “Green Tempest.”

Wen pulled the tab and handed the can to Tianming. Tianming took a sip: fragrant, herbal, with a trace of bitterness. He closed his eyes and was back at the shore of the drizzly reservoir, and Cheng Xin was next to him….

“This is a special version. The mass market recipe is sweeter,” Wen said.

“Does it sell well?”

“Sells great! The main hurdle now is cost. You might think grass is cheap, but until I can scale up, it’s more expensive than fruits or nuts. Also, to make it safe, the ingredients have to be detoxified and processed, a complicated procedure. The prospects are fantastic, though. Lots of investors are interested, and Huiyuan Juice wants to buy my company. Fuck them.”