Chapter 20

二十

“Reactionary,” a stentorian voice bellowed at me the minute I walked into my apartment, and I saw there was a pile of letters strewn about my kitchen table.

The papers were yellowed with age. They were written in Chinese, in a smeared, dark red ink.

I sat down, looked them over. Used translation software on my phone to scan, translate them. They were a prison diary, written by Lily.

The diaries were mundane, showed the tedium of her death row existence. Every day was the same. She’d be awoken at dawn by fire alarm type bells. Then she’d wash up from a cold-water tap and sit on her bunk, eat a bowl of porridge.

Then she’d be forced to stand, for an hour, in her cell, in contemplative silence.

Afterwards, she’d be sent to labor. Her job: sweeping the floors. All day, she’d pace the cells, various parts of the prison, sweeping the floors. Made to wear a special red prison uniform that labeled her a death row inmate, she was avoided by other inmates, considered “unlucky.”

During the day she was only allowed two short breaks. One for lunch, which consisted of just a bowl of rice and small chunk of pork fat, and the other for dinner- another bowl of rice and a small piece of cabbage.

At dusk she’d be marched to group exercise in the yard, and then returned to her cell, where she’d be made to sit in silence for two hours with her 12 roommates, watching programming on a TV that’d be brought in on a rolling cart.

The programming was of the educational variety, often about Chairman Mao or the Anti-Japanese War or about Marxism.

She wondered why she’d need to watch politically bent programming when, after her conviction, she’d been stripped of all political rights for the rest of her life, or at least the remaining year of it, anyway.

Then at night, she’d stay awake. She didn’t want to sleep because she didn’t have much time left. So, she’d lie in bed, stare at the cockroaches crawling up the walls, or write in her diary. She’d wanted to write to her parents, old friends, but everyone she knew had cut off contact with her following her arrest, so she wrote to herself.

She wasn’t allowed a pen so she’d used her own blood as the ink. She’d written that she’d collected a cup of her blood, from her period, and dipped a bamboo stick in it, used it as her pen. The paper she’d swiped from an office she was cleaning...

How deeply impressed I was by her legerdemain...

Like her face, her writing didn’t convey much feeling. Until the last entry. It was the only part where she’d shown emotion.

The last entry was written the night before her execution. In it, she pondered who she could have been if she’d not been born poor. If she’d been her boss’s daughter. If she’d been related to a high-ranking member of the Party. If she’d been born in a rich country like Japan or in Europe or a person in a bootlegged movie she’d seen from America or Hong Kong, those movies that her and her friend would watch at an uncle’s house, on his VCR.

She wondered if she was free to have as many kids as she wanted, if she’d have two or three, so she could have both boys and girls. Or if she could live in a big house with the robot machines that washed clothes and dishes for you.

She wished she could have been someone else. Lived another life. She wondered if there’d be a Heaven or afterlife like she’d heard some people believed. If she’d see her aborted baby in Heaven. Who that baby would have been, a boy, a girl? A person like her?

“I’m not a monster,” she wrote, “I did what they’re doing to me. If it’s justice, it’s justice. If it’s murder, it’s murder. It’s whatever it is. It couldn’t have been worse... “I brought shame to my family. There’s nothing I can do to make up for that. But I believe my death will end much of their suffering, end much of their shame. For that, I’ll be happy to die tomorrow. I’m sorry to them, I’m sorry to my family that I couldn’t do better in school, land a better job, be in a better situation. That I’m a disappointment ... I am truly sorry to my parents. But I’m not sorry to anyone else.”

These words were the same as the final statement she’d made. I guess she’d prepared them in blood first.

(It struck me that death row inmates in their final hours were probably the only people in China with true freedom of speech, unafraid of the consequences their words would bring. I had trouble imagining anyone else in China speaking or writing publicly with such candor... )

It took most of the evening to read, translate the diaries. Once I finished them, I set the letters down. Then I went out to the street to buy some cold noodles for a fast dinner.

Sitting on a plastic stool beside the noodle stand, on the street corner, I used my wooden chopsticks to pick and twirl and slurp up the salty, spicy noodles. As I ate, I panned my gaze around the campus. It was late. Most of the students were back in their gender-separated dorms, ahead of campus curfew.

Off towards the manmade lake near the campus library’s clocktower, a few young couples were holding hands, strolling in the smoggy distance. In the square in front of the library, a large group of late middle-aged and elderly women were dancing, doing aerobics to repetitive techno music blasting from a distorted speaker. The women wore surgical masks as they danced. Some moved faster than others.

I wondered what would happen if all one billion people in China were to do aerobics at the same time. If it would push the Earth out of its orbit. I think I read about that somewhere.

My eyes started to burn again, but there were no skeletons, or at least any I could see. The smog was growing thicker in the distance, and I noticed that my chopsticks were two long, thin severed fingers and that my bowl of noodles was full of bloody human tongues.

I retched, cringed, and dropped the fingers, cupped my hands over my face. I drew in a deep breath, twitched, and lowered my hands. I cautiously looked back down and found that the bowl was empty, and the chopsticks were gone.

二十一

Walking back to my apartment, an icy rain trickled from the sky, burned and tickled my skin as it touched into me. The smog had picked up considerably, too, and there’d been a car accident, a pile-up, on the road nearby.

This had been common these days, with the smog, cars smashing into each other on the roads and highways due to lack of visibility, cars crashing into each other even more than usual.

Trudging up to my fifth-floor apartment, I felt a grunge. It was a gauze of grogginess not wholly unlike fatigue but more electric, stimulated. I looked left, but it was so hazy out that I couldn’t see anything from my apartment building’s stairwell windows, not a mere flicker of light shone from the chemical plant.

I stepped inside my apartment, pressed the heavy steel door shut, and flicked on the lights. As I turned on my heels, I gasped at the sight of Lily. The ghost, the beautiful murderess sitting on my couch.

Her lips sloped into a crooked smile, she sat with her legs crossed, arms spread wider than Jesus as she leaned back into the cushion. She was translucent as last night, but brighter than before, glowing, phosphorescently. This time she was clothed, in the white blouse and blue jeans she’d worn the day of her execution.

“They shot me dead. But you shot life inside me, dear,” she spoke, and a bluish mist puffed from her mouth, accompanied her words.

“Are you real?” I asked and a rattling, buzzing sound, like a saw, sounded off in the distance.

She frowned, looked at the floor and glumly told me, “When you die, you don’t really die, most of the time, until later. The spirits here, ones who died in jail, or were shot in the chest, they said they were still alive, their brains were alive, and they saw everything, but couldn’t speak or react. They didn’t really die until they were put into the crematorium. They felt a lot more pain being burned, they said. Not me, though, I was shot in the brain. I went out like a light. I saw my soul leave my body.

“As I said, dear, it was an orgasm, dying, such a euphoric rush,” she said, her tone rising, and went on, “and it is easier than being a body, just being a spirit. It’s fun, to travel around and play tricks on the living, move things, misplace keys. The living can be so stupid. Life is so totally wasted on them.

“But, yes, dear, I’m as real as you think I am. “I’m here. I’m always here ... I’d love to travel, but I’m confined to only the areas I lived, this town, this prison. There’s no invisible wall that keeps me from moving. It’s just that these are the only places I am.”

Lily reached over to my coffee table, tried to pick up a box of the civet shit coffee. The box went through her hand, which made her sigh, and she continued speaking with me, and I sat down next to her.

“I can’t always touch objects. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can’t. People, I’ve wanted to touch, talk with, but I never could. Until you. Why is that?”

“I wish I knew. But, sorry to say, I’m still not convinced you’re real,” I told her, looking straight at her, speaking loudly to reach my words over the sawing sounds.