Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

The pre-dawn breeze smells of charcoal smoke. Occasionally, I hear a box being flung onto a flatbed truck, or something falling from the back of a moving cart.

Just before sunrise, the metal shutter that seals the hospital’s entrance is pulled up. The loud grating wakes my mother. She rolls onto her side and sits on the edge of the bed. She takes my hand, pulls the drip stand closer to the bed, then inserts the needle into my vein. My muscles contract for a second. Usually, she clicks her tongue at this point, but today she remains silent.

At eight in the morning, I hear doctors and nurses exchange brief greetings as they begin their morning shifts. The noises and smells in the building are less complicated at this time of day. I hear a bird, which is not a sparrow, chirping on a tree in the hospital’s backyard.

My olfactory receptors have become more sensitive. I can smell the fresh fish on the market stalls a few streets away. The tart, briny odour drifts through the air, leaving behind it a milder scent of the sun-baked sea.

Before the doctor walks in, my mother opens her handbag again. When she pulls out the plastic bag containing my medical records and bottles of pills, I smell the musty scent of the last hospital I stayed in.

‘How are you feeling this morning?’ the doctor asks the cancer patient. ‘You must keep doing those breathing exercises. You only have one lung now. You can’t rely solely on your oxygen canister. Oxygen is more expensive than rice wine, you know!’ When he hears that, the cancer patient immediately pulls the oxygen mask from his face.

The doctor moves to my bed and addresses my mother in a standard Chinese accent. ‘Remember to inspect his back every day for early signs of bedsores. They can be very hard to treat. The director is giving the mayor a course of qigong treatment. He’ll be back in a couple of days. We’ve upgraded your son to the 8,000-yuan treatment plan, as you requested. So we’ll need the extra 2,000 yuan by the end of the day, please.’

‘Poor Auntie!’ the nurse says sympathetically. ‘You’ll probably die from exhaustion before this son of yours kicks the bucket.’

When you stand on Mount Sublime, you will see Mount Immortal in the north, Love Marsh Lake in the south, the Hill of the Battling Beasts in the west, and the River Deep in the east. The Tree of Man grows on the mountain. Its fruit have supernatural qualities. If you eat them, you will become obsessed with the desire to continue your ancestral line.

‘Come in and have a cup of tea, Master Yao,’ my mother says, opening the front door for him. ‘It’s exhausting having to walk up here to the third floor.’

‘I’m used to it. I live on the fifteenth floor of a block of flats. The lift operator clocks off at 11 p.m., so whenever I get home late, I have to haul my way up thirty flights of stairs.’

‘Here’s some tea. It’s so hot today, isn’t it? I bet your flat has piped gas. The buildings in this compound don’t even have a proper electricity supply. As soon as the neighbours downstairs turn on their washing machine, all my lights go out. The local authorities are planning to pull this place down soon.’

‘He looks a little better than the last time I saw him.’

My mother and Master Yao are standing on my left. I can hear them breathing loudly.

‘He didn’t have any wrinkles when I brought him back from Sichuan. But these three lines have appeared since then. He looks like an old man now. Well, he’ll be thirty in a couple of years. How time flies!’ She puts her damp hand on my forehead. The two of them are blocking the breeze from the electric fan.

‘Let me look at his palm,’ Master Yao says, then takes a gulp of tea. ‘Here’s the sky line, here’s the man line, and here’s the earth line. They are clear and strong, which is auspicious.’

‘Oh, I forgot, would you like a canned drink?’ my mother says, rushing off to fetch a couple of cans from the kitchen. ‘They’re cold. This one’s a sports drink, and this is Coca-Cola. When you open them, a stream of bubbles comes out. Oh dear!’ The cans fall from her hands. I can smell sweet carbonated liquid spilling across the floor.

As she and Master Yao squat down to pick up the cans, they bump into each other. My mother fetches a cloth, then silently kneels down again and wipes the floor. Master Yao stands up.

After a while he says, ‘Your hair is still very black.’

‘You haven’t got many white hairs either.’ My mother probably averted her gaze when she said this. Although the electric fan is very noisy, it produces only a slight breeze. There’s a rustling inside my cochlea. An ant crawled into my ear last year and suffocated to death, and its corpse is still trapped there.

Master Yao grabs my hand and says, ‘I’ll give him a quick session,’ then sits on the chair my mother has pulled over for him.

My mother paid a nurse to give me an acupuncture treatment yesterday. Before the woman left, she said to my mother, ‘You must face the fact that your son might die at any moment, Auntie.’ After showing her out, my mother sat on the sofa for a moment then came into my room and said, ‘Just make up your mind. Do you want to live or die? I need to know. I can’t go on like this any longer. I don’t have the energy… I’m fifty-six years old now. No mother should have to bury her own son…’ She walked off into the sitting room in floods of tears, then went to the toilet and blew her nose noisily on a tissue as she squatted down to piss.

Since the month of qigong treatment I had in Sichuan last year, my health has fluctuated. Sometimes I glimpse the key that will reactivate my motor neurons, lying just out of reach. But sometimes my heart stops beating, and I feel as though I’m drowning in a dead sea. Whenever that happens, my mother quickly calls an ambulance then makes me perform sit-ups, pulling me up then pushing me down again so many times that she weeps with exhaustion.

‘I can feel him absorb a small amount of my qi,’ Master Yao says quietly. But the truth is I haven’t felt anything yet.

Despite the nutrition I receive from the IV drips and the liquid formulas poured into my feeding tube, my weight never rises above seventy kilograms. I’m very weak. The nurse was right. If I contracted a bacterial infection, I wouldn’t have the strength to fight it.

Master Yao tells my mother to switch off the fan, then starts massaging my feet. He rotates them slowly then presses his hands into the arches. I feel a shot of electricity run up my legs. My body tingles and becomes warm. This is the second time this month that I’ve felt a connection to my body. His ten fingers send hot electrical waves to the motor cortex of my brain. Even my hair seems to be quivering in the current.

‘The problem isn’t only in his brain,’ Master Yao says, pausing for a break. ‘His blood isn’t circulating smoothly and he has excessive levels of negative qi.’

My mother lowers a fresh cup of tea onto the cabinet, trying not to make any noise, but the lid still clinks. Master Yao places his hands above my head then moves them down my body all the way to my feet. It feels as though a hot thermos flask is rolling over me.

‘Yesterday you performed the Grab of the Immortal Hand. What qigong set are you doing today?’

‘This is called the Rejuvenating Hand of Buddha. I’m trying to push his negative qi downwards. Just now I performed the Devil’s Palm exercise to locate the root of his sickness.’

A ball of heat trapped somewhere close to my navel is dispersing through my body. The nerves between my lumbar vertebrae and coccyx begin to shudder. I suddenly feel as though I’ve been plunged into a wok of hot oil, and that I will soon twist and contract like a deep-fried dough stick. But just as I sense I’m about to stretch out my legs, Master Yao pulls his hands away.