Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘To put up in the Square? How big will it be?’ Bai Ling was having a phone conversation, so couldn’t give her full attention to him and his friend. The phone she was using was a private line we’d set up for her. It was connected to a circuit we’d found in a metal box below one of the lamps in the Square.

‘It will be a replica of the Statue of Liberty. Not as tall of course, but it will still look very impressive.’

‘What do you think of the idea, Mou Sen?’ Bai Ling asked. ‘I think it could work.’ Her eyes looked red and sore. She’d been up two nights in a row, speaking on the phone to student leaders, intellectuals and academics across the country.

‘I love it!’ Mou Sen exclaimed, searching his pockets for a cigarette. ‘Artists always come up with the best ideas.’

‘Yes, it will be brilliant! You can put it right in the middle of the Square, directly opposite Mao’s portrait.’ Nuwa’s eyes sparkled as she clapped her hands with delight.

The other art student had a shaven head and was wearing a torn T-shirt. ‘Millions of people will flood to the Square to look at it,’ he said, ‘which will make a mockery of the government’s martial law edict!’

‘You were horrified when those guys from Hunan threw ink at Mao’s portrait,’ Tian Yi said to Mou Sen, ‘but you’re happy for these students to erect a Goddess of Democracy. What’s the difference?’

I couldn’t stay awake any longer, so I stamped on a couple of cardboard boxes and lay down on top of them. My clothes reeked of sweat. I didn’t dare remove my shoes because I knew my socks smelt worse. I hadn’t brushed my teeth for ten days. I hoped A-Mei wouldn’t turn up suddenly and catch me in this state. She was very particular about cleanliness. She could get through a whole roll of toilet paper in a day, using it to wipe dust from the furniture, windowpanes and cups. After she took a shower, she’d remove the water from her tummy button with a cotton bud.

Bai Ling sat down for a moment deep in thought. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘Let’s put up a statue then! Broadcast an announcement telling the students about the plan, then get Wang Fei and Old Fu back here to convene a meeting.’ When she stood up, her toes splayed out, making her bare feet look much wider.

If you travel a further 5, 490 li, you will see the god of Mount Zhu, who has the face of a human but the body of a snake. If you want to win his favour, bury a live cockerel and pig in the ground.

I can feel the grime of the hospital on my skin. This south-facing, first-floor room smells very different from the clean examination room downstairs. When people use the latrines next door, a sour scent of urine wafts into the room. In fact, I smelt urine the moment I was brought in here. The odour has permeated the wallpaper, together with the smells of fermented sunlight, herbal medicine, disinfectant and rotting fruit.

The lung cancer patient who’s moved into the bed next to mine is moaning in pain. His breath smells of the Sichuan-spiced noodles he ate an hour ago. He eats about six bowls of noodles a day. After each one, he lights a cigarette and spits onto the ground.

During the hour after lunch everything quietens down, but the rest of the time the corridor and stairwell are filled with the noise of shuffling feet. I hear people walking up the stairs now. It sounds as if there are three of them. The footsteps are hurried and confused. This cheap concrete building is an echo chamber. Every noise is amplified.

Someone taps a glass on my bedside table and suddenly my hand seems to want to touch it. It’s a tall, cylindrical glass, I think, half filled with tea that is probably lukewarm by now. I see my hand moving towards the glass through shards of light bouncing off the blue plastic tablecloth. When I touch it, the sensory receptors on the tips of my fingers inform my brain that it’s cold and hard. But perhaps the sensation I’m experiencing is a remembered one, and my fingertips haven’t touched the glass at all.

A nurse is cleaning my body with alcohol solution and sticking acupuncture needles into my pressure points. The director is sitting on a chair talking to my mother. ‘He has no awareness of the world around him,’ he says. ‘His brain has stopped processing new information. It’s like a piece of dead wood. I can’t bring it back to life. I had a terrible headache after the session I gave him the other day. The best hope for him now would be to put him on this 20,000-yuan treatment plan. It includes a weekly session of UV light therapy and a course of drugs imported from England. The 10,000-yuan treatment would still give him the UV therapy, but the drugs are from a Sino-Japanese joint-venture company, and aren’t so effective. This 6,000-yuan plan he’s on now gives him just five of my qigong sessions, an acupuncture session and a course of Chinese herbal medicine. It only lasts twenty-four days. There’s no way he will have come out of his coma by then.’

‘I like the sound of that 10,000-yuan plan, but he had a month of UV therapy in Beijing last year, and it didn’t seem to have any effect. Could you make up a plan for him that has the foreign drugs but no UV?’

‘If you want to alter his plan, we’ll have to get approval from each department then print out new documents, and all that will cost money.’

‘It won’t involve too much work, surely? How about we agree on an 8,000-yuan plan?’ My mother’s voice falters as she remembers how little money she has left.

Another doctor turns on the heartbeat monitor. ‘It’s a bit faster today,’ the nurse says. ‘Eighteen beats per minute.’

‘Insert a two-centimetre needle into his Mute’s Gate point. I can see that it’s not only his upper head that’s blocked. Both the Spirit Path and the Wind Pool points at the back and base of his skull are clouded too. That’s why the qi isn’t flowing smoothly through his body.’

‘The test you performed yesterday proved he is sensitive to sounds,’ my mother says.

The director stands up. ‘He probably only has very basic hearing abilities. Many of his bodily functions are in a vegetative state. Strictly speaking, he isn’t human any longer. He can’t process thoughts and his nervous system is very weak. If you want to see any real improvement, you’d better go for the 20,000-yuan plan.’

‘All right. But I brought him here for qigong. I didn’t bring enough cash to pay for all these extra treatments…’

I can hear the water in the electric cup begin to bubble. The relatives of the lung cancer patient lying next to me put it on to boil.

An announcement hisses from the radio in the room upstairs: ‘In December, a fire at the Friendship Theatre in Kelamayi, Xinjiang Province, took the lives of 323 people…’ The dial is turned to another station. ‘In this Year of the Dog, our canine friends have become a hot topic of conversation, especially since the Beijing government announced a strict ban on keeping them as pets… During a visit to a television factory in Shenzhen yesterday, Premier Li Peng said…’

Let your mind wither away, then lock its ashes in a box and watch the key slowly rust.

‘ Arise, ye toilers of the earth… ’ The Internationale woke me from my sleep before the sun had risen.

I glanced at my watch. I’d slept for almost two hours. Although my head was still pounding, at least I could move it from side to side now, and think a little more clearly. I turned over. Tian Yi and Nuwa were asleep on the camp bed next to me. Their bare feet were sticking out of the blanket. It was easy to tell whose feet were whose. Tian Yi’s had very distinctive big toes that curled up at the end. Nuwa’s feet were smaller. When I looked at them, I thought about her long, delicate fingers.