I manage to get off at Nanjing University, where I am a special student but where I have yet to attend a class. I go to the correct tower, take the elevator up and find the suite I share with Xiao Chen.
"What did the doctor say?" he asks in English, either for practice or out of deference to my condition.
"That I'm sick," I say, and go to bed.
I sleep for twelve hours and wake up feeling human. Whatever they gave me has worked wonders. I emerge wan but without fever, my mind burned clear. Everything feels new, amazing. Colors are wonderful, not feeling as if I am going to throw up is wonderful, people do not know how lucky they are. Xiao Chen and I go downstairs to get something for breakfast. I don't know him yet, we have only been roommates for a week and I've been sick all that time. I know he's from Singapore and he speaks Mandarin, Singapore and Singapore-English (augmented) and is learning to speak English (augmented.) He seems nice enough, moon-faced and dark. I keep telling him he should learn Japanese but he is studying scientific history and all of the important stuff from the 20th and 21st century is in English.
He convinces me that I should have hot rice cereal for breakfast, that it's bland. I'm not really hungry but it smells nice. Standing in line I drop my spoon and bend over for it, when I stand up I see stars and things go black for a moment because all the blood has rushed to my head, except that my ears start roaring and my vision won't clear. I grab for the counter in front of me, for Xiao Chen's arm, although I'm not sure where he is, the world is turning or I am falling.
And that's the last thing I remember for three days.
I wake in a perfect little room, very clean. I am jacked in, the unit on my left wrist is heavy. I'm comfortable, it is just difficult to work up the energy to do more than turn my head. On the windowsill is a bright yellow spray of forsythia. I have vague memories of dreams.
The doctor comes in, crisp and businesslike in her dark red tails. She sits and jacks in. "I am Dr. Cui. We'll speak English, I think you have quite enough to worry about without trying to speak Mandarin." Her English is dictionary perfect in the style of someone who is augmented but either her system is very good or her English isn't bad on its own because she doesn't hesitate for translation time.
"When you came in on Friday the practitioner saw that you had an infection and gave you standard treatment." She glances over a flimsie, obviously my medical print-out. "We gave you a virus to combat the infection."
"Pardon me?" I say.
"You don't do that in the West?" she asks, perfect eyebrows rising. She is a very polished woman, I feel as if I can trust her. "The virus we gave you carries RNA which uses your body's own immune system to tell it what cells are infection cells." She gestures with manicured hands. "Your cells learn to identify a disease by the pattern of it's outer layer and then creates antibodies that are templates for that outer layer, that fit the offending cell. Do you understand?"
I nod, although I am not really sure.
"All right, the virus we gave you 'learns,' so to speak, to identify a bad cell from reading the cells of your own body and then alters itself to attack those cells."
Okay. So why am I in a tiny clean room?
"Unfortunately, once in a while something goes wrong. In your case most of the virus did what it was supposed to do, but a small portion of the virus mis-identified. That is why you became so ill on Saturday, and Saturday and Sunday you were a very ill man. This is Tuesday, you have been here for three days."
"Am I okay now?" I ask.
She smiles benignly, "You are recovering nicely, tongzhur. However I am afraid you will be here for a few weeks until your new kidneys are mature."
"You have to give me new kidneys?" I ask.
"Oh no," she says, "you already have them, we just have to wait for them to come on-line, so to speak." She smiles, dimples a little, "That is all right to say, isn't it? 'On-line'? In a sense, what we have done is infect you with new kidneys, we have implanted naïve kidney cells, cells like fetal cells, to piggyback on your old kidneys. The naïve cells are also anonymous, which means that they have no identification at all and your body doesn't recognize them and so attack them. The unit on your wrist is monitoring your condition and stimulating your new kidneys to grow. Is that clear?"
"I think," I say, and smile back.
"All right," she says, "lie still a moment, I want to check you out."
I have no desire to do anything else. She concentrates for a moment, frowning at the air. She sees a display but I don't, I'm not jacked into her system.
"Everything looks fine," she says after a moment. "Go to sleep."
It's as if she has tripped a relay, because I do.
Occasionally I am half awake, when Dr. Cui comes to see me I am fully awake, but mostly I am not. Dr. Cui explains that since my left kidney has ceased functioning and my right is badly damaged, they are keeping me as nearly suspended as possible. There is a fine line, she explains, between too much activity which would overwhelm my system and too little which would mean that the new kidneys would not grow. I take all of this placidly.
"Dr. Cui," I say, "you are controlling my moods, aren't you."
She pats my hand, the first time she has touched me that I remember. "Of course, you are new here, alone, ill. If we didn't you would be frightened and depressed. The unit," she indicates my weighted left wrist, "is feeding back into your nervous system. In a sense, you are not jacked into it, it is jacked into you. That's how we control your moments of consciousness, as well as your moods and stimulate the growth of your new kidneys. They are vascularized nicely, by the way. In a few days they will begin to take over. Your old kidneys will shut down and eventually will atrophy and be absorbed by your body."
How exciting. I find it hard to maintain interest in what she is saying, or in anything. Back to nothing.
After three weeks I am released. I have lost seven kilos and my pants don't fit. My kidneys, my new kidneys that is, are functioning well, but I have been instructed to avoid things like beer and alcohol and to watch my salt intake. October, only a few days after October 1, National Day, the day the People's Republic of China was founded and here in the city the windows of some of the shops are still decorated in red and gold. I am assaulted by noise. Nanjing dialect, Mandarin, I am washed in Chinese. The people on the street are all well dressed and healthy looking. Everywhere, elegant men in black and red business tails, or casually dressed in coveralls. Women with sprays of light in their hair. Light displays hang suspended in front of windows, light sticks refract into images whenever I turn my head, characters flash across the backs of my eyes.
I stand waiting for the bus. I feel dizzy again, but it's not physical. I put my hand against the signpole. The bus coasts to a stop in front of me.
Xiao Chen is at the suite, and he has friends over.
"Zhang!" he says, then beaming to the others, "See? I told you he existed." I collapse into a chair, worn out from the effort of getting to the dorm. His friends begin the obligatory, 'You must be tired,' and I shake my head, no, no, please do not leave. "Beer?" Xiao Chen asks in English, proud of himself.
"No," I say politely in Mandarin, "I cannot, new kidneys."
They ask me how I am and Xiao Chen describes my spectacular collapse in the dining hall. He describes things I do not remember, says that when I came to I talked to him, but that my back hurt very badly and that I was very brave, He tells about medical coming and putting me out.
"I don't remember," I say.
"I to hospital go, see you," he says in clipped Singapore English, "They say you sleep. I send to you flowers, they come not come?"