H HAD OLD YAO NOT MADE up all those rumors about me, he could have been a sweet old man. His face was red and plump, covered in a coat of peach fuzz, tender as the nation’s flowers. White stubble of varying lengths sparsely populated his chin and jaw. This person wore a cloth hat all year round with a pair of white-rimmed glasses saddling his nose as he would creep around campus looking for thieves. There were plenty of thieves at our school but he never caught a single one. Most security departments of most organizations had a hard time actually catching criminals. They were mainly there for intimidation purposes. But Old Yao didn’t intimidate anyone. In fact, he became their prime target. When he put down his guard for even a moment, his face towel would somehow end up in the public shower, where everyone used it to wipe their feet. When Old Yao got it back and washed it before using it again, he ended up with athlete’s foot on his face. The one who stole his towel was his assistant Wang Gang. Wang Gang had no sense of decency. After Old Yao fell, he didn’t even bother to visit. He said his mother-in-law was visiting Beijing, so he had to go see her. In fact, his mother-in-law had been in town for half a year; he was just making up an excuse.
When Old Yao couldn’t catch any thieves himself, he enlisted the help of the people. Whether it was an all-campus meeting, a department meeting, or even a meeting within a specialized field, he would make himself heard. Everyone had to be on high alert and do everything to assist him in catching thieves. He was such a wastebasket of words that even after an hour, he had still not gotten to his point. So everyone tried to avoid having him at meetings. When the core departments met, we often hid in the basement and appointed people to keep watch. As soon as someone saw Old Yao approach, we would disperse immediately. He put up a dozen suggestion boxes everywhere, but no one ever submitted anything, except once in the men’s room, someone wrote in an ancient style, “Yonder Old Yao by the ditches of defecation; the trash bin empties.” What blasphemy against the elders!
Those were his problems, not mine. I only blame him for making up rumors about me when he couldn’t catch any culprits. Whenever something went missing at the school, he always suspected one of the young janitors. It wasn’t entirely ridiculous since he was working off the police station’s data: 80 percent of the crimes committed in the city last year were committed by the rural youth, followed by young factory workers; our school didn’t have any rural youths. He narrowed down his list of suspects, circling in on the rougher-looking young plumbers who worked in the boiler room. Every time something went missing, he blamed those guys. Do you really think they were going to remain silent about it? What happened was, a toilet was clogged and they couldn’t clear it out with a bamboo rod, so the brothers dug up the ground and solved the mystery. They pulled up a ball of condoms, several dozen at least. They took the bamboo rod with the condoms, stuck to it over to the security office, and slapped it on a desk, splashing juices everywhere. They demanded the culprits be found immediately or else the next time the toilet clogged, it would be Old Yao doing the digging. So Old Yao had to solve the case of the condom ball. Who knows how he got it into his head that there was a biology lab on campus where he could get me to analyze the evidence. The moment he came through the door, he heard me joking with Xu You, saying how my condoms were probably somewhere in that ball as well. That was the trigger, Old Yao took it literally and went around bad-mouthing me to everyone. Rumors are as hard to take back as water out of a bucket. Until this day, I remain the scapegoat. Any given moment, I would have loved nothing more than to strangle him to death, and yet now I was going to the hospital to be his night guardian. I think I must have taken the wrong pill or something.
I went to the hospital reception to ask about Old Yao. They said they had no record of such a person, maybe he had already been discharged. I knew the hospital had a dubious reputation, but to have Old Yao bureaucratically eliminated in one afternoon seemed a bit extreme, even for them. I tried to get more information. They asked me when he was brought there. I said that very morning. The guy asked me if I personally knew any doctors or administrators. I said I didn’t. He said in that case, the emergency ward was probably the place to look. I was advised to find someone who knew someone at the hospital or else the patient might just lie in the emergency ward indefinitely. I looked for the emergency ward but the signs took me in circles. Somewhere near the back of the hospital, I found a door with the Emergency Ward sign, which was strange because I was clearly in the morgue. As it turned out, the emergency ward was being renovated so the patients had to squeeze in with the dead. Anxiously, I paced back and forth at the entrance. My heart pounded like it was my first time talking to Little Bell.
The first time I had spoken to her, I made up all sorts of excuses to approach her, but none of them really covered up my ultimate aim of wanting to do her; back in those days, had it not been for this need, boys and girls could have lived their entire lives without ever having talked to one another. In the same way, I had no way to appear like a truly kind person in front of Old Yao without revealing my ultimate aim of upward mobility. We weren’t family or even friends. In fact, I usually felt nothing but resentment toward him. So what was I doing there?
Ever since elementary school, I liked to mock the Goody Two-shoes, but now was the time to forget about all those wicked prejudices. I needed to get off my high horses because everything mean I had said about other people was now true of me as well. What if I just walked away? No! That would have been even worse.
I began putting together my story. “Old Yao, the president asked me to look after you.” It sounded like something the groom said to the bride back before the revolution. He would have felt shy being in a room with an unfamiliar female so he would have said, “By the will of father and mother, and the wisdom of the matchmaker …” Notice how innocent he appears, yet in a moment, he would fuck her. The words of a groom are the words of self-deception. My words were also self-deceiving. It wasn’t as if there were armed policemen escorting me to the hospital. If I was unwilling to do this, I didn’t have to!
I could have also said, “Old Yao, I heard that you were sick with no one to watch over you, I felt worried. Us young men who grew up in the 80s have a duty to start taking care of the elderly.” Beautifully said. Sadly, it was too out of character for me. I could have said it in a slightly different way, “Old Yao, we work together and I’m younger than you, so it seemed only right.” Why wasn’t it Wang Gang there saying those words? I was overthinking it. I decided to walk in first and figure out what to say later.
Upon entering the emergency ward, I was shocked. A mercury lamp lit up the room like a skylight. Its purple-green light made everyone beneath look like feral zombies. Countless patients lay stiffly on uneven two-foot-wide beds, resting on precariously thin boards. They were such familiar beds! When I was a kid living in the hospital, I had often explored the basement. Once, I found my way into the morgue and saw those same beds.
One summer, I had seen a young woman lying on one of those beds. Yellow beads of oil oozed out of her pores like fresh pine sap. Nothing in the emergency ward now looked nearly as beautiful as she was, especially not the big lady in the middle of the room. She looked like a deflated balloon saddled across two adjoining beds. Her body was so swollen that it was becoming translucent. Her eyelids were like two tiny bags of water. A striped hospital gown covered the upper half of her body, leaving her lower half naked. She sat over a bedpan with her white bush hanging out like an oily cotton ball. The old lady hummed as she poured her kettle. Her flesh looked like it was ready to explode, but she was still connected to pipes and IV drips; the sight of it all made me weak in the knees. But thank goodness for the splashing sound coming from under her. Regardless of whether it was pee or poo, at least it let people know she was still alive. The room was filled with bodies of various shapes and sizes, but one thing they all had in common was that none of them looked like they were going to be alive for long.
The smell in the room was awful. One sniff of it would have been enough to last a lifetime. Piss, shit, decaying flesh, rotten apples, moldy oranges, I can only assume that the blend of all those odors would not please anyone. The sounds weren’t as remarkable, just a few sighs and hums here and there. The worst by far was the sound of excretion. I found a young lad keeping watch by a bed near the door, so I asked him if he had seen a red-faced old man with a broken leg. He said he was in the back. I got on the tips of my toes and looked. Indeed, Old Yao and his wife were in a back corner. It must have smelled even worse back there. I wasn’t in a rush to see him yet so I had a little chat with the lad. I offered him a cigarette and when he saw that it was a Double Nine, his eyes lit up.
“Where did you get these?”
“At the Yunnan Shop. Who is it that you’re watching over?”
“My grandma, throat cancer, no hope. Bro, where’s the Yunnan Shop?”
“Dashilan, ask around when you get there. Damn, this place is the worst, why don’t you take her home?”
“Got my woman at home; she’s afraid of dead people. This room is probably full of nearly dead people who don’t have enough space in their homes. When they were brought to the hospital, there was nothing that could be done, so they ended up here, waiting for their last breath. We’re almost done. That’ll free up some space so you guys can scoot closer to the door. The air is much better here.”
The grandmother suddenly opened her eyes and gestured. Her body was as red as a brick. Her mouth emitted the foul stench of cancer and oozed a dark red fluid as it opened and closed like a catfish; judging from the shapes it formed, she was asking to be taken home. The young lad lowered his head and said to her, “Grannie, hang in there, they have this thing here (he squeezed the oxygen tube connected to grandma’s nose), it makes you feel better!”
The old lady’s mouth twitched, as if to tell us that she had heard everything we said. She wanted to make a sound, to scold her impious grandson, but all she could do was stare angrily. She turned her vengeful gaze toward me and I fled immediately. I looked around the room and thought about all the death-fearing wives who had banished these people from their own homes. I felt the need to point fingers! Wives, oh wives!
When I got close to Old Yao, I tried to think of something to say; but Old Yao’s wife was one step ahead of me.
“Are you the one the school sent for night watch? What took you so long! Old Yao broke his leg watching over your school every night, and this is how you repay him? Let me be straight with you: no good! Get him into a hospital room immediately!”
Her pressure tactic annoyed me, “Mrs. Yao, talking to me won’t do you much good, why don’t you ask our president?”
“I will go to him tomorrow and ask for an explanation! Does your school even have any standards? Old Yao is a Party Committee member and when he gets hurt you send him to the dog pound?”
What she said was reasonable. If I was sick or hurt, I wouldn’t want to end up in this dog pound either. I supported the idea of Old Yao’s wife raising hell in front of the president. I said, “Go ahead and make some noise. In this day and age, if you’ve got guts, you get fat; if you have got no guts, you starve. If you can stir something up, maybe the school will move Old Yao to the Peking University Hospital.”
She left. Old Yao glanced at me out of one eye and closed it again. He and I had nothing to talk about. I tapped his leg and said, “Let me know when you need to pee!” before resting my eyes. Sometime later, I was struck by a terrible sound and smell. I opened my eyes and saw a person being carried out. An old man, with nothing left but skin and bones, had passed. I wanted to go out for some air but Old Yao grabbed me. In a hoarse whisper, he said, “Don’t go! I’m afraid to be alone in here!”
Just my luck. As I sat down, I thought about a famous line by Li Si:1 “Men are no different from mice!” This was something the venerable elderly man learned when he was the manager of a grain silo. He explained that there were two types of mice. The granary mice ate as much as they pleased. Government granaries opened their gates only once every few years. The mice in there were practically living in luxury resorts, free to party and gamble when they pleased. But then, there were the toilet mice who ate shit. Whenever a person went in to do their business, the mice had to screech and flee. Heartbreaking, but that was why he said, men are no different from mice. The successful ones are like the granary mice, the losers are like the toilet mice. What a courageous thing to say! Christians like to say that people are the sons and daughters of the Almighty. Li Si said, the same rules apply to mice and men. By comparison, it seemed like our ancestors wrote better papers, got more to the point. I always believed that people were what they made of themselves. Clearly, I had never considered the problem from the lofty heights of a mouse. Facing the scene before my eyes, I was forced to reconsider. Calling this place a shithole would not have been a metaphor. Had I been in my waning hours, lying on a wooden plank listening to a fat old lady pour her kettle next to me, how would I have felt? Even if I were a poet, and could reimagine the sound as raindrops trickling from the leaves (there is an impossibly beautiful guitar tune like that), I still would not have been able to outwit the bouts of torrential excretions accompanied by a fog of stench. Every breath would have felt like trying to swallow an iron ball. My head would have hurt like I was standing on the deck of a ship in a Category 8 storm. With all those sounds and smells, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have even been able to gulp down my last breath. My Erniuzi (her hair would have been white) would have lain on top of me pouring buckets of tears. The sight of my pitiful state would have made her want to put me out of my misery by stabbing me with a knife, but she wouldn’t have been able to do it. That wasn’t the kind of future I wanted to think about, so I tried something else.
In fifty years, Wang Er is the top engineer in some university department as well as an academic consultant to half a dozen other departments. The hospital bed this Wang Er lies in is in the VIP ward of the capital’s finest hospital. Like a corpse, I can’t speak or even move a pinky. The sofa bed is submerged in a dark green ambient light. The pillow is gently sloped. There is fancy machinery behind a glass window. I can see my pulse beeping on the heart rate monitor.
A female nurse walks in, fully made-up, with a fine face. She is the strong kind of woman, with breasts like mountains, and muscular arms. She unties my pajama and yanks it off my body. Oh, Wang Er, what have you become! My chest is wrinkly and my belly sunken. Legs, oh my legs, are like a pair of logs rotting deep in the woods. My puff of pubes has only a few dark strands left. The thing is as soft as an overcooked noodle. I wonder how exactly a 1.9-meter person shrinks to such a size in old age. The female nurse flips me over with one finger and proceeds to massage my back and arms. My heart races but my body is as stiff as a board. My urethra feels a warm tingling and a single drop of fluid squirts out. When she finishes the massage, she notes that my body is behaving strangely. Hee-hee, that’s what she gets for touching me. Wang Er isn’t dead yet after all. The woman gets a wad of cotton and dries my turtlehead before gracefully flicking it into a waste basket. Wang Er, you’re done for! I can’t even blush, I am so old. After dressing me, she walks out. I suddenly have this feeling that I have lived long enough and am ready to die. The heart rate monitor stops beeping, an alarm sounds. White-gowned warriors charge in and stick needles in my arms, my legs, and my chest. They strap an oxygen mask over my face but it’s no use! The red light on the machine turns on. A clock records the time. Several men in woolen Mao suits enter and take off their hats to pay their respects. At twelve fifty-seven and twenty-seven seconds, the great scientist, social activist, star of the Chinese scientific world, Wang Er, has fallen. The cadres exit. A bunch of nurses work together to undress me, flip me over, part my butt cheeks, and stuff a big cotton ball deep into my innards. So that’s what that feels like! Then, they flip me back and spray me with perfume. It no longer matters that the perfume is cold; they are no longer worried about me catching a cold. A pretty young nurse straightens out my thing and tucks it into a jockstrap while several others begin padding my stomach with foam. They set my body upright and dress me in suit and tie. Hey! That’s not how you tie a tie! Are you trying to lasso a cow? Is that how you tie your husband’s tie? Of course, my screaming from the beyond has no impact on them. Then enters a middle-aged guy with a suitcase. He gives me a shave and stuffs cotton balls in my mouth. That’s not pleasant. Hurry! Rigor mortis is setting in! They smother on some lipstick and glue on some fake eyebrows. A casket arrives. A bunch of people pick me up and place me inside. Western-style coffins sure are nice, comfortable, and spacious. In my breast pocket is a flower and resting on my chest is a ceremonial hat. In my hand is placed a cane so that I can beat people with it in the afterlife. At last, Wang Er has got style! Comrades, this is what we call service! Now I’m ready for that memorial service!
My head banged against the wooden bed and I woke up. I was so exhausted I wanted to shove Old Yao off his cot and sleep in it myself. I looked around and noticed that just about everyone was asleep. Even the fat lady had fallen asleep on her bedpan. In the short time that I had been dozing off, several people had disappeared from the ward. The young lad by the door who smoked a cigarette with me was gone and so was his granny. That woman must have already gone to heaven. I couldn’t sit still anymore so I went out for some air.
The black sky had a purple tint to it; the stars were tiny white dots. Little Bell and I often scurried through sorghum fields on the outskirts of Beijing, so we knew more about the night sky than most. This was a solemn night sky. Its mood was as tense as a drumhead and as dense as a jungle. My hairs stood on ends.
Nights like these, one couldn’t help but ponder death and eternity. Death was always at your back, an infinite darkness coming to swallow you. I felt minuscule. No matter what I did, I would still be just as minuscule. But so long as I could walk, I could outrun death. In that moment, I was a poet even though I had never published a line of poetry. For that reason, I was an even better poet. I was like those traveling poets who spoke poetry to themselves on horseback just to get through the cold night.
I had long transcended mouse-hood, so I wasn’t dreaming about any granaries. If I could choose my death, I would choose something bloody and glorious. I would want to be tied to a tank and paraded around. When they would drag me to the gallows, the executioners of my choosing—beautiful young girls clad in black leather dresses—would approach me and offer me wreaths and sweet kisses. The girls would strap me carefully to the scaffold and circumambulate the platform a few times. They would use sharpening rods to sharpen the sabers hanging from their belts until the blades gleamed. Then, to the sound of a cannon shot, they would step forth and deliver to me their blade tips along with their sultry smiles. I would rise from earth to the cheer of a massive crowd.
I returned to the emergency ward and dozed off on a stool. At eight o’clock in the morning, Old Yao’s wife woke me up. I was still feeling sleepy and home was too far away, so I rode my bike to the school, hoping to take a nap in the laboratory.
The wide street was confused with traffic, with everyone looking for ways to push ahead. I thought about how thirty-three years ago, when I left my father’s body behind, I was also in the middle of crowded rushing traffic. That time, I charged ahead with everything I had. I took first place among my billion compatriots and grew from a microorganism into a hulk. Trying to get ahead on that wide street was like trying to grow another few hundred million times bigger, into a more macroscopic world. But did it even make sense to compare the race of life to the pursuit of fame and fortune? The truth was, my desire to go on the straight and narrow path was nothing more than the desire to die with a cotton ball stuffed up my innards.
I didn’t need to be doing what I was doing. I didn’t really even need that cotton ball. Even if I did, I could always stick it up there myself before my last breath and quietly die thereafter. Isn’t there pleasure from just doing things for yourself: when I lay down on Xu You’s stinky bed, I thought: if I really wanted to think this through, I would need a lot of time. I didn’t have the time yet, but perhaps I would when I got old. In any case, I had to do it before I died.
1 Li Si was a calligrapher, philosopher, writer, and politician of the Qin dynasty.