Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘The Workers’ Federation are going to hold a press conference outside the Museum of Chinese History at nine o’clock,’ Mou Sen said, waking up Nuwa. ‘They want Bai Ling to be there. I offered to go instead, but they wouldn’t have it. What shall I do?’

‘Well if they don’t want you, don’t go.’ Nuwa sounded different when she was lying down.

People had begun to gossip about Wang Fei and Bai Ling. They spent most of their time together now. Although Nuwa was upset, she tried not to let it show. When anyone asked her how she felt, she kept repeating that she and Wang Fei had never been more than good friends.

‘I saw Wang Fei and Bai Ling chewing from the same spare rib,’ Mou Sen whispered to her.

‘Are you jealous?’ Nuwa laughed, splaying out her toes.

‘No, I was just worried that you might be.’

‘Huh! No chance!’ Nuwa said, tapping Mou Sen’s hand, or perhaps his leg. Then either she pushed him, or he pulled her. When I saw her toes curl inwards, I looked away.

Yu Jin came over to speak to me. As I sat up, I saw Mou Sen drag Nuwa off the camp bed and lead her behind the wall of broadcasting equipment.

It made me uncomfortable to see them flirt. I knew Tian Yi would never be so fickle in her affections.

Chen Di came into the tent with Xiao Li, his binoculars hanging around his neck. ‘The marshals who were on night duty have returned to the campuses. There’s no one guarding the Monument.’

‘The whole security system has collapsed, so it won’t make any difference,’ I muttered.

Mou Sen walked out from behind the equipment. I could hear the click of a brass buckle as Nuwa fastened her belt. The Internationale had come to an end, so it was time for her to read out the morning news.

I stepped outside to have a smoke. The other guys joined me, so I handed them each a cigarette. During the night, Lin Lu had stormed into the station, hoping to enact a coup, but we’d managed to kick him out. The small victory had created a new sense of solidarity among us.

‘We haven’t had a moment’s peace since we took over this damn station,’ Chen Di said, lighting his cigarette. The strap of his watch had broken during the fight.

The Square was blanketed in dawn fog. Everything was quiet. The nights were much livelier. Boys would sit back to back drinking beer. Couples would huddle in quiet corners humming love songs to one another, then sneak off into empty tents to make love. It was like a huge party. When Yang Tao had come to the tent the night before and proposed that we leave the Square and go home for a couple of weeks, he was met with stony silence.

‘Lin Lu’s quite harmless really,’ I said to Chen Di. ‘He’s no spy. He’s just a megalomaniac. It’s government agents like Zhao Xian that we have to watch out for.’ Mr Zhao, the Central Television newsreader who’d delivered some newscasts for us, took many of our documents home with him. After rumours spread that he was a government spy, he vanished from the Square and never returned.

‘Can you give me a haircut, Dai Wei?’ Mou Sen said, grabbing a comb from Nuwa. I glanced at his head and said, ‘You’ve grown it out into a new style. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.’ But he’d already taken off his shirt and handed me some scissors.

‘They’re blunt,’ I said. ‘I can’t use them.’

‘Just give me a simple trim. It’s too hot to have shoulder-length hair.’

As I combed his double-crowned head, I smelt wafts of hair grease and shampoo.

‘Shave it off,’ Chen Di laughed, expelling a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘He thinks he’s so cool.’

I pushed Mou Sen’s head down to trim the back. ‘Careful,’ he yelped. ‘You cut my shirt collar last time.’

‘Shut up!’ I said. After a while, I noticed I’d taken too much off the right side, so I told him he’d look better with a crew cut. My hands were drenched in the sweat pouring from his scalp.

‘I’ll go to the toilets and rinse my head under the tap,’ he said after I finished. His eyes were red with tiredness.

‘Not so fast!’ I shouted. ‘Come back here and sweep up your hair before you go.’ I clapped my hands loudly, hoping that Nuwa would hear me.

As your thoughts expand in the fermenting pool of your brain, you glimpse your cadaverous face reflected on the surface.

The nurse packs away some medical appliances and grumbles to the lung cancer patient, ‘I told you to practise your deep breathing before the operation, but you didn’t listen to me.’

His right lung has been removed. When he breathes in, he sounds like a bicycle tyre being pumped with air. His money will only cover one more night in hospital, so he’ll have to go home tomorrow and wait to die.

‘No one told me you’d cut out the whole lung,’ he complains, panting noisily.

‘You stay here,’ my mother says to me. ‘I’m going downstairs to have some supper. Your drip bottle won’t need changing for another half-hour.’

She turns off the lights and everything goes black. As she shuts the door, I imagine myself crying out, ‘Get me some bananas, will you?’ I can smell bunches of them on the street stall outside.

The nurse who stuck acupuncture needles into me this afternoon said to my mother, ‘He probably can’t feel the needles go in. I’m stimulating his head and lung meridians. We’ve cured more than ten paraplegics with this treatment.’

I didn’t feel a thing. Apart from the first qigong session the director gave me, none of the treatments have had any effect.

I see a yellow blob floating in the darkness. Perhaps it’s a street lamp outside the window. I think once more about how it might feel to wake up from this coma. I imagine myself sitting up, opening my eyes, turning my head to the right, going to the door, pressing down the handle and walking out of the room.

Although I’m lying here like a silent ghost, the cancer patient’s dying breaths sound so clear, I know I must still be alive.

In the toilet next door, I hear an enamel bowl clinking against the sides of a ceramic sink and a toothbrush rattling inside a glass cup.

Further down the corridor, someone opens a door and asks, ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Yes,’ a man replies gruffly. The radio in his room is tuned to a discussion of today’s television schedule. ‘In tonight’s episode of the drama series, Tender Darkness …’ I’m fed up with these banal details burrowing their way into my brain.

Without bothering to wash her feet, my mother lies down crossways at the end of my bed and prepares to go to sleep. This saves her the expense of renting a camp bed. As she dozes off, she grinds her teeth and mumbles, ‘Let them out, let them out…’

I presume she’s dreaming about the fire at the Friendship Theatre in Xinjiang Province which killed 323 people, 288 of whom were children. This morning my mother said the twenty-five officials in the audience had insisted on leaving the theatre before the children, and should be severely punished. But the lung cancer patient said the officials were VIPs, and it was their right to leave the theatre first.

The cancer patient yells out in pain, waking me from my doze. His brother switches on a torch briefly then turns it off again.

Someone slips into a pair of slippers and shuffles off to the toilets. Someone else is pacing up and down the corridor in a pair of rubber sandals. Two people in the room upstairs are playing Chinese chess. One of them slams a chess piece onto the wooden board then lets out a dry laugh.

These irritating distractions slowly fade away, allowing me to drift back to sleep.

A corpse appears every night, its hands, legs, chest, head and teeth scattered across a field. Apparently it is the corpse of the murdered herder, Wang Hai.