The Seventh Day Read online

  I went to the morgue to pay my respects to Li Yuezhen. The reception room was lined on all sides with wreaths of flowers, a white ribbon inscribed “In deep mourning for Liu Xincheng” pinned to each wreath. I didn’t know who Liu Xincheng was, but with so many people dropping off wreaths, this person clearly had to be either of great wealth or of high rank. I did not see Li Yuezhen, and the rows of wreaths somehow made the reception room look bare and empty. I began to wonder if I had come to the wrong place.

  At this point I noticed a small chamber off to one side. When I entered its doorway, I found that a large white cloth had been laid on the floor, and the uneven contours of the cloth made me suspect there was a body underneath. I squatted down and pulled the cloth aside: there was Li Yuezhen. She lay in a white dress with a crowd of dead babies around her, as though she were their mother.

  Tears streamed down my face. This woman who had mothered me during my formative years lay there peacefully, her face still maintaining its familiar air. I gazed forlornly at her now-frozen expression and inwardly cried “Mom!” as I wiped away my tears.

  Late that night, a sinkhole suddenly opened up. Hospital staff on duty at the time, along with some patients and local residents, heard an almighty roar, and people rushed out in panic, thinking there had been an earthquake, to discover that the morgue had been sucked down a huge hole. The sudden appearance of this gaping pit inspired widespread panic. Fearful of being trapped indoors, patients and local residents crowded onto the streets; only those critically ill remained in their sickbeds, leaving their fate to the hand of providence.

  The evacuees, though still shaken, began to feel grateful to Old Man Heaven, saying he had a good eye, letting the morgue collapse but sparing the taller buildings nearby—if that sinkhole had moved a few hundred feet to one side or the other, a big building would have collapsed and the death toll would surely be horrendous. “Oh, thank you, Lord!” people mumbled, and one tearful old man added, “What could collapse did, and what couldn’t collapse didn’t. Old Man Heaven is really on our side.”

  Panic, after spreading the whole night through, began to recede with the light of day. The city government attributed the sinkhole—measured as a hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep—to excessive pumping of groundwater. Five inspectors were lowered into the hole by ropes, and an hour later they emerged to report that the interior of the morgue was still intact, but the walls and ceiling had developed cracks.

  Spectators arrived in throngs. They stood next to where the morgue had once been and admired the hole. “It’s practically a perfect circle,” they marveled, “as though drawn in advance with a compass! Even old wells are not this round.”

  It was a couple of days before people remembered that Li Yuezhen and the twenty-seven babies had been laid out in the morgue, but the inspectors said they had not found a single corpse. Li Yuezhen and the dead babies had mysteriously disappeared.

  A reporter interviewed the hospital staff member responsible for cleaning the morgue, and he said that when he left work that afternoon they were all still lying in that chamber. Had they been cremated? the reporter asked. The staff member said no, that the funeral parlor did not operate in the evening and no cremations would have been done. The reporter then went to the hospital office, and the people there could not explain how Li Yuezhen and the babies had vanished. It’s just too peculiar, they said: surely corpses can’t climb out of a hole and slip away by themselves.

  Hao Xia, just off the plane and in the throes both of grief and jet lag, came with her father to the hospital, hoping for a last glimpse of her mother, but the staff had to tell her they did not know where she was.

  News of the mysterious disappearance of Li Yuezhen and the twenty-seven babies spread throughout the city and appeared on the front pages of several websites. As interest grew, rumors flew, and on the Internet people freely speculated that there must be some awful secret lying behind all this. Although the local media kept silent, having been ordered to refrain from any reporting, media outlets based elsewhere were eager to make the most of this story, sending their reporters in by plane and train and car, and getting all set to provide saturation coverage.

  At a hastily arranged news conference, an official from the civil administration bureau announced that Li and the babies had been sent to the funeral parlor for cremation on the afternoon before the collapse.

  “Were the relatives informed?” a reporter asked.

  It had been impossible to contact the babies’ relatives, the official said.

  “What about Li Yuezhen’s relatives? Couldn’t you contact them?” the reporter asked.

  The official was lost for an answer. “Thank you, everyone,” he said. The news conference was over.

  Late that afternoon the civil administration official and a hospital representative delivered an urn to the Hao family, saying that they had made the decision to cremate because the weather was hot and Li Yuezhen’s remains could not be easily preserved. Hao Xia, though she had not slept for over thirty hours, still had her wits about her. “It’s only spring now!” she cried furiously.

  The morgue attendant then changed his story, claiming that Li Yuezhen and the babies had indeed been sent to the funeral parlor for cremation, and he himself had helped load them into the hearse. Soon, someone who said he worked for a bank put up a post on the Internet, disclosing that five thousand yuan had been deposited in the attendant’s personal account that day—hush money, he suspected.

  So as to calm such rumors, the city government asked the journalists to come to the funeral parlor to inspect a line of twenty-seven tiny urns, explaining that all the babies had been cremated and would shortly be buried. But with this matter apparently settled, a further wrinkle emerged, for somebody soon reported that the urns of Li Yuezhen and the babies were actually filled with the ashes of other people cremated on that same day. When the relatives of those cremated that day got wind of this, they rushed to open their urns and soon became convinced that a lot of ash was missing, even though they weren’t sure just how much ash was normal. One reporter made a point of going to the funeral parlor, hoping that someone there would be brave enough to stand up and admit that the ashes had been tampered with. But all the workers denied this categorically and their leaders dismissed it as Internet rumor. One joke making the rounds in cyberspace was that the funeral parlor workers were definitely going to get a jumbo-sized bonus this month.

  I disentangled myself from memories that were now growing tight and thick, as though threading my way out of a forest dense with vegetation. Weary thoughts lay down and rested, but my body continued to move through a boundless void, an empty silence. In the air no birds circled and in the water no fish swam and on the earth nothing grew.

  I continued to roam between morning and night, with neither burial plot nor cinerary urn, and no clear direction to a place of rest. There was neither snow nor rain, and all I saw was air in motion, like gusts of wind that blow this way and that.

  A young woman—another wanderer, by the look of it—walked past me, in the direction from which I had come. I turned and looked at her; she turned and looked at me. Then she walked back and scrutinized my face. Her voice was as fleeting and insubstantial as mist. “Where have I seen you before?” she said inquiringly

  That was my question too. I studied this vaguely familiar face. Her hair was fluttering, but I didn’t feel the swishing of the breeze—for I had noticed bloodstains around her ears.

  “I’ve seen you somewhere,” she said.

  Her question had become a statement, and in my memory her face began to look more recognizable. I tried to think back, but recovering things from my past had become more and more strenuous, like climbing a mountain.

  “The bedsit,” she reminded me.

  With relief I arrived at memory’s peak, and a broader landscape came into view.

  Over a year ago, soon after I moved into the bedsit, there lived next door a pair of young lovers, their hair dyed in gari
sh colors. They left early and returned late each day and I didn’t know their names and didn’t know what kinds of jobs they did. Their hair changed color practically every week: green, yellow, red, brown, multicolored—black was the only color I never saw. However their hair changed color, the two of them always had hair of the same hue—“sweetheart color” was what they called it. After a month I learned that they worked in a hairdressing salon. According to my landlord, they were not actual hairdressers, but simply hairwashers. During my third month at the bedsit, they moved out.

  I could hear everything they said and did in the next room, for the wall blocked my vision but presented little obstacle to my hearing. When they made love, their bed rattled and shook and I heard panting and groaning and yelling; almost every evening the room next door would resound with tumultuous noise.

  Their shaky finances often led to arguments. Once I heard the girl shouting through her sobs that she wasn’t going to go on living with a down-and-outer like him. She wanted to marry the scion of some wealthy family, for that way she wouldn’t need to work her fingers to the bone and could just play mahjong every day to her heart’s content. The guy said he’d had enough of living in penury with her—he wanted to be partner to some rich lady, live in a villa, and drive a sports car. Each went on and on describing his or her own brilliant prospects as a way of putting the other down, vowing to part company the next day, the sooner to embark on a glorious future. But the next morning they carried on as though nothing at all had happened, leaving their bedsit hand in hand, off to the salon for another long day at their tiring, low-paying jobs.

  In their most heated argument, the guy struck the girl. She had been talking about a girlfriend of hers who had left the countryside the same time she did. They were from the same village, it seemed, and this other girl worked behind the counter at a nightclub. When a customer took a fancy to her, she would charge a thousand yuan for sex or two thousand if she spent the whole night with him. She and the nightclub divided the proceeds sixty-forty, sixty percent to her and forty percent to the club, and thus she could earn thirty or forty thousand yuan a month. After three years in the game, she had accumulated a number of regulars who would call her up to arrange a session, and that way she didn’t need to share her earnings with the club and could make up to seventy thousand a month. The girl said that her friend had recommended her to the nightclub and the manager was ready to interview her.

  “Is that okay with you?” she asked.

  He made no reply. She said this was something she wanted to do. She could make a lot of money this way, and he wouldn’t have to work—she could support him. After a few years, she said, she’d have put away enough funds that she could quit the racket. They’d go back to his home district, buy a house, and open a shop.

  “That okay?” she asked again.

  Now he said something. “You’ll end up with syphilis, or AIDS.”

  “No, I won’t,” she said. “I’ll make my clients wear a condom.”

  “Scumbags like them—they’re likely to refuse.”

  “If they refuse, then I won’t let them do it. You’re the only man in the world who I’ll let do it without a condom.”

  “No way are you going to go through with this! Even if I have to starve, I’m not going to let you be a nightclub hostess.”

  “Well, you can starve to death if you like, but I’m not going to.”

  “If I say no, it’s no.”

  “Who do you think you are? We’re not married, you know—and even if we were, I could always get a divorce.”

  “I don’t want to hear another word about this.”

  “You’d better get used to the idea. My girlfriend has a boyfriend, and he’s willing to go along with it, so why aren’t you?”

  “Her boyfriend is a piece of shit.”

  “No, he’s not! One time she got bitten by a client, and her boyfriend tracked him down and cursed him as a pervert and beat the hell out of him.”

  “You have to be a real shit to let your girlfriend be a whore. He can curse the other guy as much as he likes, but he’s nothing more than a pimp himself.”

  “I don’t want to keep on living like this, I’ve had enough! When the iPhone 3 came out, my girlfriend got one right away, and as soon as the iPhone 3s came out, she immediately switched to that. Last year she exchanged it for an iPhone 4, and now she’s using an iPhone 4s. Look at this crappy cell phone of mine—I couldn’t even get two hundred yuan for it!”

  “I’ll get you an iPhone 4s, don’t you worry.”

  “You can’t even scrounge together the money for three meals a day! By the time you can afford to buy me an iPhone 4s, they’ll be selling the iPhone 40s.”

  “I told you I will get you an iPhone 4s.”

  “You’re not serious, are you? You’re just bullshitting me.”

  “I am being serious.”

  “I can’t be bothered to discuss this with you. Tomorrow I go to the club.”

  The next thing I heard was a series of loud slaps—bap, bap, bap.

  “Beat me, would you?” she sobbed. “Just beat me to death, why don’t you?”

  He started crying too. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  “How can you dare beat me?” she cried. “You’re always broke, but still I stay with you, because I thought you would treat me right. And now you beat me! You’re a brute!”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that!” he wailed.

  Again I heard a series of rapid slaps—it sounded like he was slapping his own face. Then there was the sound of a head hitting a wall—bang, bang, bang.

  “Don’t! Don’t do that!” she begged, sobbing all the while. “Stop, please. I won’t go to the nightclub. Even if I have to starve, I won’t go.”

  At this point, my memory paused. Looking at this young woman with her desolate expression, I nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen you before, in the bedsit.”

  She smiled faintly, but her eyes were anxious. “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “Three days.” I shook my head. “Maybe four.”

  Her face fell. “I’ve been here three weeks.”

  “You have no burial plot?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t. How about you?”

  “I don’t, either.”

  She raised her head and scanned my face carefully. “Have you done something with your eyes and nose?”

  “Yes, and my chin too,” I said.

  “The chin isn’t obvious,” she said.

  She noticed my armband. “You’re wearing that for yourself.”

  This took me aback. How could she know that? I wondered.

  “There are people over there who’ve done that too,” she said.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Let me take you,” she said. “None of them have burial plots.”

  I followed as she led me toward a place I’d never been. I knew her name now—not because she told me, but because my memory had caught up with the world that had gone away.

  A young woman named Liu Mei committed suicide by jumping off a building, distressed that her boyfriend had given her a knockoff iPhone 4s for her birthday instead of the real thing. This story got blanket coverage three weeks ago.

  For three days in a row, the local newspapers carried reports on Liu Mei’s suicide—in-depth reports, or so the papers said. The reporters ferreted out many details of Liu Mei’s life story, how she met her boyfriend when she was working at the salon, how they had two steady jobs in two years—as hairwashers in the salon and as servers in a restaurant, as well as several temporary jobs; how they rented five different places, at lower and lower rent, the last rental in a basement, a former bomb shelter built during the Cultural Revolution and later converted into as the biggest underground accommodation complex in this city of ours. The papers said that at least twenty thousand people were living in our city’s air-raid shelters, and they were known as “the mouse tribe,” for like mice they emerged from holes and crannies and afte
r roaming outside during the day would return at night to their underground nests. The papers published photos of the room where Liu Mei and her boyfriend had lived, separated from their neighbors only by a piece of cloth. The papers said that with the mice tribe cooking and going to the bathroom in the air-raid shelters, things got terribly filthy. To the reporters, the air was so heavy it didn’t feel like air at all.

  One discovered the log of Liu Mei’s space on QQ, the instant messaging service, and learned that her username was Mouse Girl. In the period leading up to her suicide, she had announced her receipt of a birthday present from her boyfriend. He said he’d spent over five thousand yuan to get it. The two of them had celebrated with dinner at a food stall, but the following day her boyfriend had to rush home to see his father, who was seriously ill. She got together with a girlfriend, the owner of a genuine iPhone 4s, and compared their two phones, discovering that the bitten-into apple on her own phone was a bit bigger than that on her friend’s, and that her phone was noticeably lighter in weight, although the clarity of the touch screen was similar. Only then did she realize that her boyfriend had tricked her—this phone was a knockoff, and couldn’t have cost more than a thousand yuan, tops. Someone who knew a lot about these things left a post on her log, noting that if the resolution of the touch screen was high, then it sounded like a Sharp product. He used the term “resolution” rather than “clarity” and corrected her use of the term “knock-off phone,” saying that if it had a Sharp touch screen it should be termed “a superior imitation” and it would have cost more than a thousand yuan.