I felt my body stand up. It took me and left the waiting room.
Once more I placed myself in the enveloping fog and swirling snow, but I didn’t know where to go. I was stricken with uncertainty, knowing I had died but not knowing how.
I walked in a hazy, indistinct city, my thoughts searching for a direction to follow amid the densely intersecting paths of memory. I needed to track down the last scene in my life, I realized, and this final scene was bound to lie at the farthest end of one such path; finding it would mean I had identified the moment of my own death. Taking their cue from my body’s motion, my thoughts traversed a myriad of scenes that swirled in profusion like so many snowflakes before finally arriving at one particular day.
This day seemed a lot like yesterday, or a lot like the day before, or perhaps it was today. The only thing I could be sure of was that it was my last day on earth. I saw myself walking down a road with a cold wind blowing in my face.
I was walking, walking toward the square in front of the city government headquarters. About two hundred people were standing there, protesting against forced demolitions. They had not, however, unfurled protest banners and were not shouting slogans — they were simply swapping stories of personal misfortune. From what I could make out as I made my way through their ranks, they had all in various ways fallen afoul of recent demolitions. An old lady with tears running down her face was saying that she had just left her house to buy groceries and returned to find her house was gone — she had thought for a moment that she had taken a wrong turn. Others were relating the terror they had experienced during late-night demolitions, when they were woken from sleep by huge blasts, their house swaying back and forth as though in an earthquake; only when they rushed out in panic did they see bulldozers and excavators destroying their housing complex. One man was loudly relating an embarrassing experience: just as he and his girlfriend were making love, their front door suddenly opened with a crash and several fierce-looking men burst in, tied them up inside their comforter, and then carried them, comforter and all, into a waiting vehicle. It drove around the city the whole night, with him and his girlfriend scared out of their wits, not knowing where they were being taken. Only at dawn did the car return them to their place of departure; at that point their captors dumped them on the ground, untied the cord that bound them, and tossed them some items of clothing. Shivering, they hastily dressed, as passersby watched them curiously, and when they finally stood up and looked around they found that their home had been flattened. His girlfriend burst out wailing and vowed never to go to bed with him again — sleeping with him was scarier than watching a horror movie.
With the house gone and his girlfriend gone, he told the people around him, his sexual desire had completely dried up. He stretched out four fingers. In an effort to cure his erectile dysfunction, he said, he had already spent over forty thousand yuan and consumed all kinds of Western and Chinese medicines and resorted to remedies both orthodox and unconventi
onal, but down below, his plane was only capable of taxiing.
“Does it start its descent just after taking off?” someone asked.
“Oh, I wish,” he said. “No, it taxis only, no taking off at all.”
“Demand compensation!” someone shouted.
“The government compensated me for my demolished house”—he smiled grimly—“but not for my traumatized libido.”
“Take some Viagra,” someone suggested.
“I did that,” he said, “and it made my heart pound sure enough, but down below all I could do was taxi.”
Much laughter followed this remark; it seemed to me that these people weren’t protesting so much as having a party. After crossing the square, I passed two bus stops; ahead of me was Amity Street.
My life was at a low ebb by this point: my wife had left me long before, and more than a year earlier my father had fallen gravely ill. So as to pay for his treatment and look after him better, I had sold our apartment, handed in my notice, and bought a little shop near the hospital. Later, my father left without saying goodbye and disappeared in the endless sea of people, so I gave up the shop and moved into a cheap rental, searching for my father despite all the odds stacked against me. I had roamed through every corner of the city, scanning men’s features wherever I went, but my father’s face always eluded me.
With the loss of work and apartment and shop, my determination flagged. As my savings dwindled, I needed to find a way to support myself, for I was only forty-one, with plenty of time ahead of me. Through an agency involved with extramural education I found a job as a tutor.
Amity Street was where my first pupil lived. When I initially placed a call to her father, from the other end of the line came a hoarse and hesitant voice. The girl’s name was Zheng Xiaomin, her father said; his daughter was a good student, now in fourth grade. He and his wife worked in a factory, for a low income, so it was difficult for them to afford my proposed fifty-yuan-an-hour fee for tutoring their daughter. Hearing a helplessness in his voice that sounded a lot like my own, I suggested he pay me thirty yuan an hour instead, and after a moment he said “Thank you” three times.
We arranged that I would teach the first lesson at four o’clock in the afternoon. I got my hair cut, then went home and had a shave, changed into clean clothes, and put on a cotton overcoat. My overcoat was old, and so were the clothes I wore underneath.
I arrived on Amity Street, in an area I knew well. I knew where up ahead there was a supermarket and where to find Starbucks, McDonald’s, and KFC, where there was a street lined with fashion boutiques and where to go for Chinese food.
After I passed these businesses, everything suddenly became unfamiliar. The three six-story apartment buildings that used to overlook Amity Street were now just a heap of ruins. The apartment that I was due to visit for the tutorial session would have been in the second block.
The three buildings had still been standing when I passed this way a few days earlier, with laundry hung out to dry on the balconies and white banners hanging from some of the windows. In big black characters the banners read: “We firmly resist forcible demolition,” “We are opposed to violent demolition,” and “We will defend our homes to the death.”
As I gazed at the ruins, I could dimly make out a few items of clothing caught among the tangle of steel rods and broken concrete. Two excavators and two trucks were stopped nearby, along with a police car in which four policemen sat with the engine running.
A young girl in a red down jacket was sitting alone on a concrete slab, from which severed steel rods jutted out in twisted shapes at both ends. Her satchel was resting on her knees and a textbook and exercise book were lying open on her lap; she was bending down to write something. She had walked out of her own building when she left for school that morning, but it was gone when she came back at the end of the day, and there was no sign of her parents. She sat in the ruins waiting for them to come home, doing her homework and shivering in the cold.
Swaying awkwardly on the debris, I made my way over to where she was. When she raised her head, I saw a face scoured red by the wind.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.
“Yes, I am,” she replied.
I pointed at the KFC nearby. “It’ll be warm inside,” I said. “Why not do your homework there?”
She shook her head. “My mom and dad wouldn’t be able to find me when they come back.”
She lowered her head again and went back to doing her homework on the table she had made with her legs. I scanned the ruins.
“Do you know where Zheng Xiaomin lives?” I asked her.