Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘If we end the hunger strike, we can still stay in the Square and continue our struggle,’ Mou Sen said.

‘We could set up a rotation system, with each student fasting for just one day,’ Bai Ling suggested, furrowing her brow. ‘We mustn’t let the hunger strike fizzle out.’

‘The Square’s in such a filthy mess now,’ Old Fu said. ‘After yesterday’s rainstorm, it looked like a refugee camp.’

We continued to argue for a while until Lin Lu brought the discussion to a close and said that we should hold a plenary camp meeting in the morning.

Mou Sen went back to the tent to tell Chen Di and Nuwa to broadcast an announcement about Zhao Ziyang’s visit. The loudspeakers on the broadcast minibus hadn’t been correctly plugged in yet.

Seeing that the sky was getting lighter, I left the minibus and went to find Tian Yi. I wanted to tell her to end her strike and convince her that it wasn’t worth sacrificing her life just to get this bloody government to sit down and talk to us.

Tian Yi moves through your parietal lobe like transparent threads of mould spreading across the surface of a dank pond.

The noise of the fireworks outside causes a memory to resurface. Suddenly I recall the night Tian Yi came to this room to say goodbye to me before she left for America. How could I have forgotten that visit? I knew it was her, the moment I heard her measured tread on the stairs. My mother opened the door and said, ‘You’re covered in snow, Tian Yi. Come in and take your coat off. I’ll put it on the radiator for you.’

‘No, don’t,’ Tian Yi said. ‘It’s a wool blend. It will shrink…’

Psychologists believe that memories too painful to deal with are pushed into the subconscious by the brain’s self-defence mechanism. The information is never lost, it merely becomes inaccessible. But it seems more likely that my lapses in memory are due to my brain injury rather than repression.

‘I’ve brought you a wall calendar with photographs of the South Pole,’ Tian Yi said to my mother. ‘It’s this year’s most popular calendar.’

‘It’s beautiful. But where can I hang it? There’s no room left on this wall.’

‘Look, you can put it up there, next to that Châteaux of Europe calendar.’

They sat down on the sofa with their cups of tea and grumbled about rising prices. Tian Yi then told my mother that many of my old classmates had got in touch with her to ask about me. She’d brought a list of their names and addresses.

‘You remember Shao Jian?’ she said. ‘He works for a big Beijing internet company now. Mimi was in the same dorm as me. She’s opened a beauty parlour. If you have any problems, just get in touch with them.’

‘Yes, Shao Jian. He came here with another boy. Now, what was his name? I’m getting so forgetful. He told me he knew Professor Ding, the woman who set up Tiananmen Mothers.’

‘That must have been Fan Yuan from the Politics and Law University. Did he leave you his phone number?’

‘I don’t think so. But here’s Kenneth’s number. When you see him, don’t tell him about the police harassment I’ve had. And remind him not to mention politics in his letters. In fact, it would be best if he sent his letters to Dai Wei’s brother rather than to me.’

Tian Yi cracked twenty-nine pumpkin seeds between her teeth. I counted them. I imagined the empty shells hidden in the folded palm of her hand.

I try to remember what happened next, but my thoughts return to the moment I heard her ascending the stairwell. When she reached the landing outside our flat, I heard a thump followed by a long silence. I presumed she’d bumped her head on the leg of the stool perched on the tall stack of charcoal briquettes, and was glancing up to see what she’d hit. The landing is crammed with things my mother can’t bring herself to throw away. Everyone in the building keeps piles of scrap outside their front doors as well, but my mother’s pile is the largest. A moment later, I heard Tian Yi cough then knock gently on the door… I’ve lost the sequence again. My mind is so jumbled, it’s hard to untangle the threads. Since my memories of Tian Yi are quite recent, her image is floating in and out of focus in the central regions of my temporal lobes. But A-Mei has spread through the entire neural network of my cerebral cortex. I have thought about her so often these last years that she’s even entered my bone marrow.

Now I remember how Tian Yi’s visit ended.

‘Could I have a few moments alone with Dai Wei, Auntie?’ she asked. ‘There are some things I want to tell him.’

‘Yes, go in. I’ll close the door for you.’

At last we were alone together. The room was hot. I could hear mucus collect inside her nostrils, and sensed she was about to cry.

‘I have something to tell you, Dai Wei,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to wake up and not know what’s happened. I’m leaving the country. I’m going to America. For four years, maybe longer… I’ve brought you a tape. It’s Mahler’s Second Symphony — the Resurrection. I hope you’ll listen to it sometimes.’

I remembered we’d heard that piece on the radio. I’d told her I liked it and she’d made a note of its name in her diary. But I knew that if she’d played the tape, I probably wouldn’t have recognised it.

She slipped her hand into mine. After a while, I felt it move. She’d held my hand on her previous visit, but my mother had been in the room at the time, so she’d kept her fingers still. But this time she moved her thumb, slowly rubbing it up the palm of my hand to the mound below my index finger.

‘I may never see you again,’ she said, ‘but I will always think about you, and the times we spent together…’ Although I was locked deep inside my body, her voice sounded crystal clear. She began to sob quietly.

‘I’d always hoped we could go abroad together,’ she continued. ‘I never gave you a straight answer when you asked me to go to America with you, but I’d secretly made up my mind that if you went, I would go too. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to love another man…’

I knew that this separation was final. Even if I did wake up from this coma, I’d be a different person from the one she knew.

‘Fate brought us together and fate has torn us apart. If you wake up one day, it’s possible you might not even know who I am…’

She didn’t realise that the changes she’d caused to my neuronal synapses during our time together were irreversible and that I could never wipe her from my mind.

She placed her other hand over mine. Her fingers were cold.

I felt blood rush to my groin and my penis begin to harden. Unfortunately, Tian Yi didn’t notice this sign of life.

‘After that last time we made love, near the Great Wall, I fell pregnant. I kept the foetus inside me for five months. I only got rid of it after I was told there was little chance of you ever waking up from your coma. It was a girl. I’m so sorry, Dai Wei…’

Those words are still hovering in my temporal lobe. If I recall them a few more times, they will enter my long-term memory and become fixed in my mind for ever.

She left very abruptly. I seem to remember her placing her hand on my cheek. The skin on my face was still numb at the time, but my instincts told me that the slight pressure I sensed was her hand pressing down. Then I felt a second pressure. Perhaps it was her lips, because I could smell her breath this time. Her face was very close to mine when she whispered her last words to me: ‘Take care of yourself, Dai Wei.’

‘Auntie, do you have my three notebooks?’ she asked as my mother walked into the room. ‘I remember Dai Wei telling me he’d brought them back here.’

‘Oh, yes, there is a bag somewhere,’ my mother said, kneeling down and rummaging under my bed. ‘He came back one night to drop it off. He told me there were private journals inside, and I wasn’t to open it.’