The Seventh Day

THE FOURTH DAY

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 garish 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 after 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.

Mouse Girl’s boyfriend’s cell phone had its service suspended because money was owed on the account, so she couldn’t reach him directly, and all she could do was sit in an Internet cafe, calling him on her QQ space for five days in a row and demanding that he get his ass back right away. By the fifth day her boyfriend still had not responded, so she cursed him as a spineless coward, then announced that she wanted to die, and made public the time and place of her intended suicide: noon the next day, on one of the bridges over the river. But someone on the Internet urged her to think of some other way, since it was midwinter and the river was so cold it would be excruciatingly painful; she should find a warm place to commit suicide, for you need to be good to yourself even when taking your own life. She asked for suggestions, and this person recommended that she buy a couple of bottles of sleeping pills, swallow them all at one go, wrap herself in her comforter, and dream away happily until she died. Other commenters thought this a lousy idea, because her doctor would give her at most a dozen or so pills for each prescription, and if she wanted to get two full bottles’ worth she would need to postpone her suicide by a good six months. She was not going to delay her suicide, she declared; instead she had decided to throw herself off a building — the apartment building opposite her underground home. When she named the location, two residents asked her not to die just outside their front door, for this would bring them bad luck. One of them suggested she find a way to climb up onto the roof of the city government headquarters and jump off from there, arguing that this would really make a statement, but others ruled that out, since there were military policemen guarding the entrance to the city government headquarters and they would detain her as a suspected petitioner before she even got through the front door. She decided in the end to make her leap from the Pengfei Tower — at fifty-eight stories the tallest building in town. This time no netizen opposed her plan — indeed, some praised this as an excellent choice, saying that before dying she could enjoy the stunning view. The last line that she left in cyberspace was addressed to her boyfriend. “I hate you,” she said.

Mouse Girl killed herself in the afternoon. I happened to be at the Pengfei Tower just at that time, carrying my university diploma in my pocket, because I had learned that several companies handling English tutorial services were based in the Pengfei Tower, and I wanted to see if I could find a position as a tutor.

There was a huge crowd out in front. Police cars and ambulances were there too, and people had their mouths hanging open as they gazed up at the skyscraper. This was right after the first heavy snow of winter; the snow gleamed in the bright sunshine, under a blue sky. A tiny figure could be seen some thirty stories up, perched on a wall. Before long the glare of sunlight became uncomfortable, and I had to lower my gaze and rub my eyes. Others did the same, craning their necks and then lowering their heads and rubbing their eyes, before looking up once more. Amid a clamor of commentary, I heard that the girl had been standing there for over two hours.

“Why is she standing there?” someone asked.

“She’s going to jump off,” another said.

“Why does she want to do that?”

“She’s tired of living, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Hell, that’s not so hard to figure out, is it? So many people these days are tired of living.”

Petty tradesmen and street vendors arrived on the scene, squeezing in and out among the throng, flogging wallets and bags, necklaces, scarves and whatnot, all knockoff versions of name brands. Some were selling “happy oil.”

“What’s happy oil?” somebody asked.

“A quick rub and you’ll have a hard-on” was the reply. “Firm as iron, hard as steel, more virile than Viagra.”

Some were offering spying paraphernalia. “Do you want a bugging device?” they asked in a low voice.

“What would I do with one of those?” someone asked.

“You can check whether your wife has taken a lover.”

Another vendor was selling sunglasses. “Ten yuan a pair!” he shouted, and recited a little jingle for good measure: “You can see far, you can see high, no need to fear the sun in your eye.”

Some people bought sunglasses and put them on right away, so they could focus more intently on the tiny figure high up on the Pengfei Tower. I heard them say that they could see a policeman sticking his head out of a window next to the girl. He must be trying to talk her out of it, they said. A minute later, the spectators wearing the ten-yuan sunglasses began to shout: “The policeman is sticking his arm out!” “And the girl is sticking hers out, too!” “She must have changed her mind.” But almost immediately there was a uniform chorus of “Ah!” and then a sudden hush, and moments later I heard a heavy thump as the girl’s body hit the ground.

The last sight that Liu Mei left in that world was a spurt of blood from her mouth and ears. And the force of the impact split the legs of her jeans wide open.

“You can still call me Mouse Girl,” she said. “Were you there when I fell?”

I nodded.

“Someone said I was a terrible sight, with blood all over my face. Is that true?”

“Who said that?”

“Someone who came over later.”

I said nothing.

“Was I really that scary?”

I shook my head. “When I saw you, it was as though you were sleeping, meek and mild.”

“Did you see any blood?”

I hesitated, reluctant to mention it. “Your jeans split open,” I said.

She gasped with surprise. “He didn’t tell me that.”

“Who didn’t?”

“The man who came later, I mean.”

I nodded.

“My jeans split open,” she murmured. “In what way?”

“They split into strips.”

“What do you mean?”

I thought for a moment. “A bit like the strips of a cotton mop.”

She looked down at her pants, a pair of long, wide pants — men’s pants.

“Somebody has changed my pants,” she said.

“They don’t look like yours.”

“You’re right,” she said, “I don’t have any pants like this.”

“Some kind person must have done that for you,” I said.

She nodded. “How did you come over?” she asked.

I thought back to that last scene in the Tan Family Eatery. “I was eating noodles in a restaurant and reading a newspaper when the kitchen caught on fire. There was an explosion, and I don’t remember anything after that.”

“You’ll hear the rest of it from one of the later arrivals,” she said knowingly. “I didn’t really want to die,” she added. “I was just angry.”

“I know,” I replied. “When the policeman stretched out his hand, you stretched out yours.”

“You saw that?”

I didn’t, but the people with the ten-yuan sunglasses did. I nodded all the same, to confirm that I saw it.

“I’d been standing there a long time, and the wind was so strong and so cold, I maybe just got frozen stiff. I wanted to grab his hand, but my foot slipped — I might have stepped on some ice….There was saturation coverage in the papers, I’m told.”

“For three days,” I said. “No more than that.”

“That’s still a lot. What did the papers say?”

“They said your boyfriend gave you a knockoff iPhone, not a real one, and so you killed yourself.”

“That’s not right,” she said. “The thing was that he deceived me, claiming it was a real iPhone when it was a fake. If he hadn’t given me anything, I wouldn’t have got mad. I just couldn’t stand him lying to me. The papers are just making things up. What else did they say?”

“They said that after giving you the fake iPhone your boyfriend went back home to tend to his father.”

“Well, that was true.” She nodded. “But I didn’t kill myself over some fake merchandise.”

“The journal you had on your QQ space was published in the papers too.”

She sighed. “I wrote that for him to read, and wrote it that way on purpose, because I wanted him to come back right away. I would have forgiven him if he had just apologized.”

“But instead you climbed to the top of the Pengfei Tower.”

“He never had the guts to respond to me. The only thing I could think of was to climb the Pengfei Tower. That would make him show up, I thought.”

She paused for a moment. “Did the papers say anything about him being upset when I died?”

I shook my head. “They had no news about him.”

“The policeman told me my boyfriend had rushed back and was down below, in an awful state.” She looked at me, perplexed. “That’s why I reached for the policeman’s hand.”

I hesitated for a moment. “He didn’t come, I don’t think. At least, none of the papers said he had.”

“So the policeman lied to me too.”

“He said that to save you.”

“I know.” She gave a little nod. “Did the papers mention him later?”

“No.”

“He kept his head down the whole time, the little creep,” she said bitterly.

“Maybe he never heard,” I said. “Perhaps he never went online and never saw what you wrote in your journal. He wouldn’t have seen our papers where he went.”

“That’s true,” she admitted. “He can’t have known.”

“He must know now,” I said.

I walked with her a long way. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’d like to sit down on a chair.”

The open land on all sides created an enormous emptiness around us, and the sky and the earth were all we could see. There were no trees in the distance and no river flowing; we heard no rustle of breeze through the grass and no sound of footsteps.

“There are no chairs here,” I said.

“I’d like to sit down on a wooden chair,” she continued. “Not a concrete one or a metal one.”

“You can sit down on whatever kind of chair you like,” I said.

“I already have the chair in mind,” she said, “and I’m already sitting on it. It’s a wooden bench. You have a seat, too.”

“All right,” I said.

As we walked, we sat on the wooden bench that we had imagined. She seemed to be sitting at one end and I at the other, and I felt her looking at me.

“I’m tired,” she said. “I feel like leaning on your shoulder….Forget it, you’re not him. I can’t lean on your shoulder.”

“You can lean on the back of the bench,” I said.

As she walked, she leaned back. “I’m leaning against the back of the bench,” she said.

“Do you feel better now?”

“Yes, I do.”

We walked on in silence, and it seemed as though we were relaxing on a wooden bench.

A good deal of time seemed to pass, and in her imagination she rose from the bench and said, “Let’s go.”

I nodded, and together we left the bench of our imagination.

It seemed as though we were walking on at a more rapid pace.

“I’ve been looking for him all this time,” she said morosely. “But I can’t find him anywhere. By now he should know what happened to me. He won’t be lying low any more, surely. He must be looking for me.”

“The two of you are separated now,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s there and you’re here.”

She bowed her head. “That’s true,” she said.

“He must feel terrible,” I said.

“He’s bound to,” she said. “He loved me so much, he must be looking for a burial plot for me now, so I can have a good resting place.”

Saying this, she gave a sigh. “He’s got no money,” she went on. “And his friends are just as poor as he is. How will he work up the money to buy me a burial plot?”

“He’ll think of something.”

“That’s true,” she said. “He’d do anything for me, and he’ll figure it out.”

A smile of relief appeared on her face, as though she had recovered a sweet memory from that departed world.

“He used to say I was the prettiest girl in town,” she murmured. “Is it true that I’m pretty?”

“You’re very pretty.” I was sincere.

She smiled happily, but then a vexed look crept over her face. “I’m worried,” she said. “Spring is coming, and then summer. My body will rot and then I’ll just be a bunch of bones.”

“He’ll get you a burial plot soon,” I reassured her. “That way you’ll have a resting place before spring arrives.”

“You’re right.” She nodded. “That’s what he’ll do.”

We walked on in silence, the silence of death. We said nothing more, because our memories made no further progress. Those memories of a departed world were of many colors, empty but also real. I felt the silent motion of the desolate young woman by my side and sighed over the heartache that other world had left her with.

Then it seemed we had reached the end of the open country. She came to a halt. “We’re here,” she said.

To my amazement I now saw another world, one where streams were flowing, where grass covered the ground, where trees were thick with leaves and loaded with fruit. The leaves were shaped like hearts, and when they shivered it was with the rhythm of hearts beating. I saw many people, some just bones, some still fleshed, walking back and forth.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“This is the land of the unburied.”

Two skeletons sitting on the ground playing chess blocked our path, as though a door were in our way. We stood in front of them as they argued, each accusing the other of trying to take back his move. The sounds of their quarrel continued to escalate, like flames that rise higher the more they leap.

“I’m not playing with you anymore!” the skeleton on the left said, making a gesture of tossing aside the pieces.

The skeleton to the right made an identical gesture. “Well, I’m not playing with you!”

Mouse Girl spoke up. “Stop quarreling, you two! You were both trying to change your moves.”

They stopped arguing and looked up at her, opening their empty mouths. That must mean they’re smiling, I thought. Then they noticed there was someone else next to Mouse Girl, and two pairs of empty eyes began to take stock of me.

“Is this your boyfriend?” the one on the left asked.

“Your boyfriend’s too old for you,” the one on the right said.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” said Mouse Girl. “He’s not old, either. He just got here.”

“I could tell that from the flesh on him,” the one on the right said.

“You must be in your fifties, right?” the one on the left said.

“Forty-one,” I answered.

“Impossible!” said the one on the right. “You must be at least fifty.”

“No, I really am forty-one,” I said.

“He knows our story, right?” Left Bones said to Right Bones.

“He ought to, if he’s that age,” Right Bones said.

“Do you know our story?” Left Bones asked.

“What story?”

“Our story over there.”

“There are lots of stories over there.”

“Yes, but ours is the most famous.”

“What story’s that?”

I waited for them to tell me their story, but they stopped talking and concentrated on their chess game instead. Mouse Girl and I took a step over the gap between them, as though we were stepping over a threshold.

Mouse Girl and I walked forward together. I looked around me as I went, and it felt as though the leaves were beckoning, the stones were smiling, the river was saying hello.

Skeletal people approached us from the river, from the grassy slopes, and from the woods. They nodded to us gently, and though they brushed past without stopping, I could see their attitude was friendly. Some greeted us warmly, one asking if Mouse Girl had found her boyfriend, another asking if I had just arrived. It was as though their voices had meandered about before coming to my ears, bringing with them the moisture of the river, the freshness of the grass, and the swaying of the leaves.

Now once more we heard an argument erupt between the chess players. It exploded in the air like a firecracker, but it sounded empty, like a quarrel and nothing more.

Mouse Girl told me they were both unreasonable when playing chess, constantly retracting their moves as they played, then getting into a row. Over and over again they would vow to abandon the game, go off to get cremated, go off to their respective graves, but neither of them had ever once stood up when saying this.

“They have burial places?”

“Yes, they both do,” Mouse Girl said.

“Why don’t they go?”

All Mouse Girl knew was that they had been here for at least ten years. The one surnamed Zhang had been a policeman. He wouldn’t get cremated, and wouldn’t go to his burial place, because he was waiting for his parents over there to secure the title of “martyr” for him. The other one, surnamed Li, wouldn’t get cremated or be buried either, because he wanted to keep Zhang company. Li said that once Zhang got approved to be a martyr, then the two of them together — close as brothers, since they were — would proceed to the crematorium oven and each would move on to his own resting place.

“I heard that one of them killed the other,” Mouse Girl said.

“I know their story,” I said.

More than ten years earlier, after my birth parents arrived from that northern city to claim me and the tale of “the boy a train gave birth to” had come to a satisfying conclusion, another story had begun. During “Operation Thunderclap,” a police-led crackdown on vice in my city, one of the prostitutes caught in the net proved to be a man. Surnamed Li, he had dressed up as a woman to troll for customers.

A young policeman named Zhang Gang, just graduated from police academy, took part in “Operation Thunderclap”; he conducted the questioning the night when Li was brought in. Li showed not the slightest remorse over either his cross-dressing or his flesh-peddling and even showed a fulsome pride in his ingenious technique. According to him, he was a past master at handling those clients of his, and if the police hadn’t caught him not a single john would ever have discovered that he was a man. Unfortunately, he had focused too much of his energy on attending to his clients and not taken enough steps to guard against the police. That was how he ended up tumbling into the sewer, he said.

In this, his first-ever interrogation, Zhang Gang was in no mood to be lenient. This fake prostitute was not only failing to be humble and meek, but even had the gall to display the supercilious pride Zhang Gang had thought only instructors at the police academy possessed. Zhang Gang was already seething with righteous indignation, and now, when police custody was compared to a sewer, his patience was pushed beyond its limits. He raised his boot and planted a vicious kick in Li’s groin. Li clutched his groin and screamed in pain, rolling around on the floor for minutes on end. “My balls!” he cried. “You’ve crushed my balls!”

Zhang Gang was unimpressed. “What do you need your balls for, in the first place?”

Li was held in custody for fifteen days, and after his release he began what was to become three years of protests. At the start he would appear at the main entrance to the public security bureau every day without fail, rain or shine, gripping a handwritten sign that read “Give me back that pair of balls!” To make clear that these appendages were not just ornamental but had practical application, he would emphasize to passersby that he used his earnings to sleep with call girls.

Someone pointed out that it was rather crude to write the word “balls” on the sign. He cheerfully accepted this correction, changing it to read “Give me back that pair of testicles!”

“See, I’m using cultured language,” he explained to passersby.

Li’s prolonged protest created an enormous headache for the public security bureau director and his deputies. It was a real nuisance to see Li holding his sign up outside the front gate every day, especially when their superiors dropped in for an inspection and inquired, “What’s all this about testicles?”

After holding a meeting to discuss what to do, the director and his deputies transferred Zhang Gang out of the bureau and into a local police station. Li and his testicular complaint followed him there. A year later, it was the police station commander and deputy commanders’ turn to squeal, and they got into the habit of running over to the public security bureau at least a couple of times a week to pour out their woes and present gifts to the bureau chief and his deputies, claiming that it was impossible for their station to operate normally. The chief and his deputies showed due solicitude for their subordinates’ predicament, transferring Zhang Gang to the detention center, where he was soon followed by Li and his “pair of testicles.” After two years of tearing their hair out, the detention center’s chief and deputies brought their story before the bureau chief and his deputies, reporting that every day that pair of testicles was hanging around outside their office, destroying all semblance of legal dignity. They had put up with this for a full two years, they said, and it was high time the “pair of testicles” were moved somewhere else. The bureau chief and his deputies agreed that the detention center had really had a hard time of it and that Li and his “pair of testicles” indeed ought to find an alternative home. But there wasn’t a single police station that was willing to accept Zhang Gang, for everyone was aware that the minute he arrived, so would his unsightly shadow.

Zhang Gang knew that the detention center wanted to get rid of him and that no police station would take him. For his part he was not keen on staying in the detention center, so he went to see the public security bureau chief and applied to transfer back to the bureau. After hearing him out, the bureau chief found that one scene kept coming back to haunt him — that of a “pair of testicles” hanging around there at all hours. He thought things over briefly and asked Zhang Gang if he’d considered changing his profession. Zhang Gang asked what he had in mind. The chief proposed that he resign and open a little shop or something. Once he was no longer a policeman, the chief suggested, that “pair of testicles” might well get off his back. Zhang Gang smiled thinly and told the chief he had only two choices ahead of him: one was to kill Li and be done with it; the other was to stand outside the front door, next to the other protestor, and hold up a sign demanding he be allowed to return to the public security bureau. Tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke. The chief sympathized with Zhang Gang’s situation and in any case was about to retire, and once retired he wouldn’t care in the least if that “pair of testicles” loitered outside the entrance. He rose to his feet, walked up to Zhang Gang, and patted him on the shoulder. “Come on back,” he said.

So Zhang Gang returned to the bureau, but Li, strangely, failed to follow him. Even after Zhang Gang had been working in the bureau for a month, people in other departments still assumed he was just visiting. Why was he always coming by the bureau, they wondered — what had happened over at the detention center? He had been transferred back, Zhang Gang told them. They were amazed, asking why they hadn’t seen that “pair of testicles” at the entrance. The bureau chief and his deputies found this startling too, for that matter, and once during a meeting a deputy chief blurted out, “How come those testicles are not there at the entrance any more?”

Even in their absence, Zhang Gang remained on tenterhooks, and at the beginning and end of every workday his eyes were inevitably drawn to the entrance. Only when he was certain that Li had not appeared was his mind put at rest. At first he was concerned that Li might simply be ill, and that as soon as he recovered he would again come and loiter outside the building. But three months passed, then six, and there was still no sign of that “pair of testicles.” Zhang Gang breathed a sigh of relief, feeling at last he could focus on work and resume normal life once more.

It was over a year before Li reappeared, by which time everyone in the bureau had completely forgotten about him. This time he no longer held up a sign that read “Give me back that pair of testicles!” but strode in with a black bag on his back. The guard at the entrance noticed a figure brush past as a van was leaving the compound, and he barked out a challenge. The visitor answered without turning his head, “I’ve got business.”

“Come and sign in,” the guard called.

But by then Li was already inside the main building. In the hallway he asked a policeman where he’d find Zhang Gang. After answering his inquiry, the policeman began to sense there was something familiar about this visitor, but didn’t make the connection to the notorious “pair of testicles” of four years earlier. Li didn’t take the elevator, fearing he might be recognized, and took the stairs up to the fifth floor. When he entered room 503, there were four policemen sitting there. Li recognized Zhang Gang immediately and opened his black bag as he approached. “Zhang Gang,” he said.

Zhang Gang raised his head from the file he was writing in and recognized Li. As he looked at him in confusion, Li pulled out a long knife from his bag and slashed Zhang Gang’s neck. A jet of blood spurted out, and Zhang Gang put a hand to the wound, leaning back weakly into his seat. He hardly had time to groan before Li plunged the knife into his chest. Only now did the other three policemen react, charging at Li, who pulled the knife out of Zhang Gang’s chest and flailed out at his attackers. They could only use their arms to defend themselves and were soon gashed and bleeding heavily. Fleeing to the corridor, they cried, “Help! There’s a killer!”

The fifth floor of the public security bureau was thrown into chaos. Swathed in blood and panting heavily, Li slashed away at anyone within reach. Policemen rushed to the scene from other floors, and it was only when twenty of them set on Li with electric cattle prods that they managed to subdue him. By that time he was leaning against a wall and too weak to put up further resistance.

Zhang Gang died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Li was executed six months later.

This case immediately made headline news. Everyone was talking about it, saying how the police like to throw their weight around, but when it comes down to it they are all useless, even a man who’s got no balls can slash one of them to death so easily and wound another nine, two seriously. If it had been a crowd of men with balls, they could surely have massacred the entire public security bureau. Hearing these comments, the policemen refused to concede they were at fault, arguing that had they known Li planned to kill people they would have overwhelmed him from the start. People who arrive at the public security bureau with backpacks are normally there to deliver bribes, one policeman pointed out — who could have known that this guy would pull out a knife, rather than a gift?

For over ten years Zhang Gang’s parents made efforts to see that their son was awarded the title of “martyr.” The city public security bureau objected to this, on the grounds that Zhang Gang did not die in the line of duty. His parents then embarked on a long petitioning effort, appealing first to the provincial public security bureau, then taking things up to the public security ministry in Beijing. The city public security bureau was driven to distraction by the parents’ campaign. One year, as China’s two major political congresses were being held in Beijing, Zhang Gang’s parents unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square, demanding that their son be recognized posthumously as a martyr. The authorities in Beijing were infuriated, and they subjected their colleagues in the provincial and city public security bureaus to scathing criticism. The city public security bureau changed its tack, submitting a request that Zhang Gang be awarded martyr status. The provincial authorities passed this request on to Beijing, but were stonewalled. Zhang Gang’s parents persisted in their appeals, making a particular point of boarding a train to Beijing when the two big meetings of the Communist Party Congress were in session, but they would always be intercepted en route, then held in custody in one small hotel or another and not released until the meetings were over. Once the story of Zhang Gang’s parents’ petitioning campaign was publicized on the Internet, the city stopped sending agents to intercept and detain them, and changed its tactics. During every sensitive period when the meetings were in session or the Party Congress was on, they would send people to escort Zhang Gang’s parents on sightseeing excursions instead. Every year, the parents ended up enjoying the kind of expense account tourism that only Party leaders normally get to enjoy. After all this fruitless petitioning, their despair gave way to a taste for novelty, and every time a sensitive date approached, they would make a point of asking what famous scenic spot remained to be seen, meaning they would like to go and see it. The city government was at its wits’ end — it was said that it must have spent a million yuan on Zhang Gang’s parents during these ten years.