Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

I tried to remove the aluminium box from the hob, but it was too hot to pick up.

‘Quick, hide it under my bed,’ Tian Yi said, yelping as the tips of her fingers touched the box.

‘Let’s find a lighter first, so we can see what we’re doing,’ I said. She tutted impatiently, grabbed the lunch box and put it on the ground. Then she kicked it under the bed and there was a horrible metallic noise as it grated across the concrete floor.

People outside were shining torches onto the building. By now, Tian Yi had managed to hide both the lunch box and the hob under her bed. ‘Get a match,’ she whispered to me, blowing on her scorched fingers. I groped for some matches on the table behind and knocked over a lamp.

‘I can’t find any,’ I said, afraid to continue my search.

She pressed a hand on my shoulder and got up. I heard a fumbling noise, the flick of a match, then saw a flame of light.

She was standing in front of me. She lit a candle, pushed it into the mouth of an empty bottle then sat back down on the edge of her bed.

I touched her hand, but she pulled it away saying, ‘My fingers are burnt!’

‘I’ll put some soy sauce on them for you.’

‘Does that work?’

A girl in the corridor was singing, ‘ Don’t be sad, it’s not that bad …’

Another girl walked by with a radio that crackled and hissed.

‘Don’t worry. The fuses go out all the time here. And I’m not the only one who has an electric hob. Four girls in the dorm next door have one.’ She dangled her index finger above the candle flame and said, ‘Look, a souvenir of your birthday!’ The big red blister on the tip of the finger didn’t seem real.

I grabbed her other hand, rubbed her warm palm and found a strand of bamboo she must have torn from her sleeping mat. Tian Yi was always clutching something in her fist. Maybe it made her feel more secure.

I squeezed each finger, each knuckle, and pressed the pressure points on her palm. She sighed anxiously. When I pulled her close to me and put my hand on her breast, she trembled and sighed again. I reached into her skirt and touched her soft stomach. She pushed my hand up towards her hip. The skin felt colder there. I ran my hand down over the mounds of her buttocks, then slowly slipped my fingers into the cleft in between. As I moved my fingers in deeper, I felt the warm dampness that I’d been longing to touch…

After I came, my fingers were still in the same place, but motionless. ‘Take your hand away,’ she whispered.

‘I love you, Tian Yi,’ I murmured into her hair.

For a while she didn’t say anything. She just shuddered and intermittently sighed. Then her body stiffened. At last, she pulled her legs away from mine, and muttered, ‘Why does everything always slip out of my control?’

I thought for a moment, and said, ‘When it comes to our biochemistry, we can’t control anything. All we can do is stand by and watch.’

‘I feel like I’ve fallen into a black hole.’ She turned her face towards the wall. I wrapped my arm around her and we lay in silence for a long time.

We were the only people in the room. There was an unspoken agreement in the dorms that if someone was visited by a member of the opposite sex, everyone else would leave within ten minutes, saying that they needed to borrow a book from the library or collect a parcel from the post office.

Suddenly, we both caught a whiff of burnt rubber. Tian Yi jumped off the bed, crouched down and pulled out her sandals. They’d been blackened by the heat of the electric hob.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy you a new pair.’

‘What do you know about shoes? These were made in Italy.’

‘Well, we’ll go to Shenzhen next holiday, and I’ll get you the best pair of imported shoes I can find.’

‘With clothes, it doesn’t matter if you wear imported ones or Chinese knock-offs — they feel pretty much the same against the skin. But shoes are different. You can never lie to your feet.’ She took her sandals over to the candle and inspected them more closely.

Her face looked very bright in the candlelight.

‘Your birthday’s been a bit of a disaster, hasn’t it?’ she said. ‘How did you spend it last year?’

‘At home with the Southern University crowd — Wang Fei, Mou Sen, Yanyan… and my mother, of course.’

‘Did you get any nice presents?’ she asked softly.

‘They clubbed together and bought me a front basket for my bicycle. But the bike was stolen a few weeks later, so I didn’t get much chance to use it.’

‘And does today feel any different from last year?’

‘Of course it does — I’m with you.’ I felt uncomfortable. I wanted to tuck some tissues into my pants to mop up the sperm. I presumed that she hadn’t realised I’d ejaculated.

‘We’re like trees that grow new branches every year,’ she said, stroking the nape of my neck. ‘Each time a birthday comes round, we need to prune them back if we want to grow any taller.’

‘Did you know that no two branches in the world are the same shape? Each one is unique.’ I’d probably picked that up from Mou Sen.

‘If we stay together, you’ll lean against me,’ she said, ‘and as you grow, your trunk will bend. Then, one day, when there’s a storm, you’ll break in half and die.’ She rubbed her shoulder against my arm.

‘But I need you,’ I said, inhaling her breath. ‘You’re my sunlight and soil.’

‘You’re too old-fashioned,’ she said. I looked at her blank face, took a drag from my cigarette and felt my spirits begin to sink again. ‘We’re very different people, you and I,’ she continued, turning to me. ‘You can see from our faces that we could never be man and wife. Your face is square, mine is round. Your eyelids have creases, mine are smooth… Sorry, I shouldn’t speak like this. It’s your birthday.’ She reached out to touch the flame of the candle. ‘You’re so normal. But I’m different. Everything always looks grey to me.’

I opened the window to get rid of the smell of burnt rubber. The air blowing in from the campus smelt of dry leaves.

Tian Yi looked out of the window and said softly, ‘The leaves will soon fall from the trees, then they’ll lie on the ground and become yellow and brittle.’

She was convinced we weren’t right for each other.

I didn’t tell her that according to a book I’d read on the traditional Chinese art of face-reading, we were in fact a good match. Taoist monks claimed that facial dissimilarities indicate emotional compatibility, because a good relationship depends on the harmonious union of yin and yang. I had reason to believe this theory, because A-Mei and I looked quite similar but our relationship lasted only a year.

The lights suddenly came back on. All the girls in the dorm block screamed, just as they’d done when the lights had gone out, but this time Tian Yi and I screamed too.

It was nice to be able to see things properly again. I stared at the shadow under Tian Yi’s chin.

‘Tell me what your wish is for this year,’ she said, moving onto the bottom bed of the opposite bunk.

‘That you’ll come travelling with me,’ I answered.

‘All right. I agree.’ Her voice sounded strange. It was a sheep-like bleat.

‘We could start our journey at the source of Red River,’ I said enthusiastically, ‘then travel to all those other places mentioned in The Book of Mountains and Seas : the River of Golden Sands, Yalong River, Mount Measureless and the Mountain of the Sorrowful Dungeon. I saw some pictures of the area in a photography magazine. It’s full of beautiful green mountains with terraced fields and small minority villages. It looked like an earthly paradise.’