Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘No, we should have a rule that girls are only brought back to the dorm on Sunday nights,’ Old Fu said.

‘But there are eight of us. If we take turns to bring a girl back on Sunday nights, we’ll only get some action once every two months.’ Wang Fei wasn’t happy.

‘What is this, a brothel?’ I shouted, unable to restrain myself. ‘It’s one o’clock already, for God’s sake!’ My throat burned as I swallowed a sip of water.

The cells in your temporal lobes begin to vibrate once more. Neurons spread their dendritic branches, allowing warm memories to flow to your thalamus.

‘Dai Wei! Can you hear me? It’s your mother… My God! His eyelids are moving. They’re really moving. I haven’t been wasting my time. All those injections have paid off. My God! Let me put another pillow under your head!’

I too sense that I’m emerging from a deep sleep. I can feel my four limbs, the head that my mother is propping up, the drip attached to my arm. A strong smell of disinfectant charges into my brain. I can tell that my body is intact and lying flat on the bed.

Perhaps everything is all right now. Perhaps I can return to the world.

‘You’re a survivor, my son,’ my mother says. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll do my best to get you out of this country. Listen, I’ll sing you a song. I used to sing this to you when you were a baby. As soon as you heard it, you’d stop crying at once… “ Pick up your pen and use it as a sword! The Party is our mother and father. Whoever dares criticise the Party will be banished to the depths of Hell! ” Oh dear, you won’t like those lyrics. Never mind. So long as you can hear your mother’s voice… Today is 23 April, 1990. You’ve been back from hospital for a few months now. Although you probably had no idea you were there. The doctor said that people who sink into comas like yours are usually dead within six months. But look, you’re still alive. I told you not to get involved in the student movement. Oh God, you’d be better off staying in your coma. The police said that as soon as you wake up, they’ll come up and arrest you.’

My ears transmit the noise of my mother’s sobbing and sighs to my temporal lobes. Then images and conversations that have passed through my mind slowly return to me again: Mao Da sitting opposite the drifter, chewing peanuts… ‘Beat him up, I say! What an insult to the Chinese people!’… ‘Not many science students have turned up. Did you bring the banner?’… ‘Stick out your tongue and swallow these pills’… A-Mei’s reflection in the mirror staring me straight in the eye… ‘I’ve arrested lots of hooligans like you before, and they all get a good beating…’

The real world seems to grow distant once more.

There are no blue skies now, no bright universes. All the exits are blocked.

The bullet struck me in the head. I remember a line of soldiers holding guns, and A-Mei walking towards them. When the guns fired, she knelt on the ground. Then my head cracked open. That’s how it happened.

So, is A-Mei still alive? Was it really her I saw? Did Tian Yi visit me in hospital the night I was injured? Yes, she stood by my bed. My skin remembers the touch of her hand. But what happened before the shot was fired? Was Mou Sen struck down? Did Wang Fei die too in a pool of blood?

Images dart through my mind. I see Wang Fei’s bloodshot eyes. He opened the door to my dorm and shouted, ‘I’m going to make some posters to commemorate General Secretary Hu Yaobang! His death is a terrible loss for the Chinese democracy movement!’ He’d just picked up the news of his death from Voice of America. His headphones were dangling from his neck.

THE MAN WHO SHOULDN’T HAVE DIED HAS DIED, WHILE THE MEN WHO SHOULD BE DEAD STILL LIVE, he scribbled in chalk over the walls and tables of the dorm. Then he bit deep into his finger, and with the blood that dripped from the wound wrote THE PEOPLE…

‘Damn!’ he said as the flow dried up. ‘Why’s there so little blood?’ Recently, Wang Fei had fallen for a trainee pathologist at Beijing Union Hospital. She’d gone out with him once, rather against her will, and had then left his calls unanswered.

‘You’re a cold-blooded animal, that’s why.’ Chen Di was lying on his bed reading a magazine.

‘Shut up! Some of us are trying to have a nap!’ I shouted. Since the incident in the Old Summer Palace I’d been tense and irritable. Although Tian Yi was speaking to me again, she wouldn’t let me touch her.

‘If you lot hadn’t taken to the streets and demonstrated in 1987, Hu Yaobang wouldn’t have been forced to resign from his post,’ Mao Da said. ‘And now the poor man is dead.’

The room fell silent after that, but I was still unable to sleep. In low spirits, I decided to call Mou Sen to ask how the students at Beijing Normal were taking the news of Hu Yaobang’s death.

He said the news had startled them. He was sure the death would spark a new round of student protests.

When I left the science lab later that day, I felt like a shower, so I walked back to my dorm block to fetch my towel and soap. The white blossom of the locust trees lining the path filled the air with a sickly perfume. For some reason, this scent, when combined with the various odours from the dorm blocks’ open windows, always made me want to masturbate.

‘Have you finished class?’ Ke Xi asked, walking up to me with a bundle of damp laundry in his arms. ‘The Triangle’s boards have been covered with eulogies. Go and have a look!’

‘I’ve seen them,’ I said. ‘Someone’s hung up a memorial couplet in the graduate hall already. It’s sad that he’s dead, but we really can’t start demonstrating again.’

‘You’re wrong — this is the perfect time to remobilise,’ Ke Xi said, placing his left hand on his waist. ‘We can’t let this opportunity slip.’

As we approached our dorm block I said, ‘I still feel guilty about the 1987 protests. We didn’t achieve anything, other than push liberals like Hu Yaobang out of their jobs…’

Your breathing becomes steadier. Oxygenated blood moves into your pulmonary vein and is carried up to your left atrium.

I long to speak, but the language centres of my cerebral cortex are damaged, and the words won’t come out. I believe the medical term for this is ‘expressive aphasia’…

I can see that single red brick which jutted from the lawn outside the lecture hall. Every time I came out of class, I’d give it a sharp kick. It had never tripped me up, so my hatred for it was unjustified. Still, I always longed to find a spade and dig it out.

The telephone rang as I walked into the entrance of my dorm block. The caretaker handed me the receiver.

It was my brother calling from Sichuan Province. He said that students at Sichuan University of Science and Technology were pasting up eulogies to Hu Yaobang, and that even members of the student union had got involved.

I told him that eulogies had been going up at Beijing University as well, but that our activities hadn’t spread beyond the campus walls. Apparently, the students of Qinghua University and the Politics and Law University had already staged a memorial march through Beijing.

‘Do you think this is the beginning of a new student movement?’ he asked in the slight Sichuan accent he’d developed.

‘No, of course not. Don’t get overexcited. If you do anything that draws attention to yourself, you’ll be the first to suffer when the police clamp down.’ I glanced nervously around me. There were spies planted in every dorm block now. They’d report any subversive activity they noticed to the authorities and, in return, would be promised a job in Beijing after graduation. Everyone in our dorm suspected the quiet, reserved guy, Zhang Jie, of being an informer. Before he came to Beijing University, he’d been groomed for high office by the provincial government of Henan.