The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  ‘Be as rough as you need to be. Make sure the water is cold.’

  The shower got Wang functioning again, putting one foot in front of the other and moving in the direction that he was told.

  During the medical check-up Wang did not answer a single question. Clinical depression, diagnosed the doctor. A high suicide risk. Owing to his deteriorated mental state, 21-year-old Wang sat out in the waiting room as, in hushed conspiratorial tones, his father and doctor determined his fate.

  ‘What’s your madness?’ The elderly man peered at Wang through the opalescence of his eyes.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Wang said. ‘Dr Fu has it in his notes.’

  A frozen wind gusted through the wrought-iron bars of the window, and Wang smelt the sourness of the old man’s estrangement from water and soap. The old man squinted his cataract-clouded eyes at Wang. ‘Neurasthenia,’ he decided. Then he shuffled away, remarking loudly to the empty hall, ‘His mother was here once. She pretended to be a cat and peed on the floor. What a hiding the nurses gave her.’

  Wang was leaving his room for the first time that day, holding his breath as he passed the urinals on the way to the common room. He stared through the doorways into the other dorms. Six iron bedsteads and one wardrobe per room. The walls empty, no photographs or calendars to count the days. Not even a potted plant on the sills. The patients huddled under blankets, or stared about with the idleness of nothing to do.

  The illness of some of the men in the common room was evident in their smiles. Others were deceptively sane-looking as they watched the TV news bulletin, wearing long johns and mildewy jumpers coming apart at the seams. It was 1997. The year Deng Xiaoping died and Hong Kong returned to the motherland. Wang was certain that neither historical event had even for a moment shaken the patients out of their lassitude.

  Eleven o’clock was personal-grooming hour. A nurse clipped an old man’s nails, nagging him to keep his splayed and liver-spotted fingers still. Another nurse was cutting a patient’s hair over sheets of the People’s Daily spread under his chair. Wang saw some electric clippers on the table and asked her to shave his head. The nurse refused. Skinheads were against regulations. Why not go for a short back and sides? Wang scratched his head.

  ‘My scalp is itchy. I’ve got lice.’

  He sat before the nurse and bowed his head. The buzzing clippers vibrated against his skull, tremors descending vertebra by vertebra down his spine. Wang felt like a sheep being shorn. Fleeced. Afterwards he rubbed his hand over the stubble, waving away the nurse’s offer of a mirror. The palm of his hand had told him all he needed to know.

  The clinic was a low building with wrought-iron bars over the windows. Kindness, Friendship, Tolerance, said the breeze-fluttered banner stretching across the entrance. Sometimes Wang stared out from between the bars at the suburbs of Beijing. Fields of poorly irrigated crops, fertilized by sewage. The dust-blown sign of the near-empty-shelved corner shop creaking in the wind. A bus stop where a bus from the city stopped twice a day. ‘A temporary stay,’ Wang was told. ‘A month or two at the most.’

  The world shrank to the hospital grounds. Restricted, regimented, confined. Bells rang at six. Yawning, the patients trudged to the canteen at quarter past. Breakfast was rice porridge. Tea. On Sundays a hard-boiled egg. The day nurses yet to arrive, the Level One patients struggled to put spoons in their mouths, dribbling the porridge back out. At seven they washed and brushed their teeth in the bathroom of Ward B, spitting in the scum-filthy sinks. There were no mirrors, and as he dragged the toothbrush about Wang stared at the cracks in the wall.

  Eight o’clock, outdoor exercises in the yard. Thirty patients in padded winter jackets followed the tracksuited Dr Fu as music played on a cassette-player. Hands to toes. Hands on head. Jumping jacks. They queued for medication at eight thirty. Otherwise speech-stunted patients were fluent in the language of pharmaceuticals, the polysyllabic names of psychotropic drugs – chlorpromazine, perphanezine, trifluoperazine, clozapine and diazepam – rolling with ease from tongues. Eight fifty-five, Wang swallowed his anti-depressants. Nine o’clock was cleaning time. Wang swept and mopped on automaton, changed the bedsheets soiled by incontinents in the night. Ten o’clock, a mid-morning nap until lunch. After lunch, a nap until dinner. Another dose of medication. Television. A cigarette smoked in the yard. Bells ringing at eight thirty. Lights out. Bed.

  Within weeks Wang felt as though he had been a patient for years. There was no rehabilitation or occupational therapy, but the lack of meaningful activity did not bother him. All he wanted was to sleep around the clock. And at the clinic, he got away with this, almost.

  Bells rang at eight thirty. Lights out. Sleep quotas met during the day, the patients were untired at the scheduled hour for sleep. Each night Wang lay awake in his cot, his blanket pulled over him, listening to the voices of his roommates in the dark.

  ‘Look closely at the pills they give you,’ whispered Gao Ling in bed two. ‘Are they different in size, colour or shape? Spit them out if they are. The doctors are testing out new drugs for pharmaceutical companies. They are experimenting to find out which ones make our brains haemorrhage. Don’t be a lab rat. Spit them out.’

  ‘Down with Gao Ling!’ chanted Wei Hong in bed four, ‘running dog of the Guomingdang!’

  Wei ‘Serve the Red’ Hong had been sacked from his job as an elementary-school teacher after making his class of seven-year-olds write ‘Thought Reports’ to expose their anti-Maoist thoughts then leading a struggle rally against a little girl, encouraging the rest of the class to slap her and smear her with black ink.

  ‘You know the Cultural Revolution ended twenty years ago, right?’ called Gao Ling. ‘You know Mao Zedong is dead?’

  ‘Stinking capitalist!’ Wei Hong shouted. ‘Chairman Mao will live for ten thousand years!’

  ‘Quiet now,’ scolded Old Chen. ‘People need to sleep.’

  Old Chen in bed three was not mentally ill but a homeless vagrant swept up by the police in a street-cleaning campaign before the National Day parade of 1989. Institutionalized for eight years, Old Chen was glad of the shelter, regular meals and medication for his Parkinson’s and, not in any hurry to return to the streets, he faked an episode of dementia at every threat of discharge. ‘After eight years of living with the insane,’ he confided to Wang, ‘I impersonate them well.’

  In the spring Wang came out of hibernation and went out in the yard, where the patients gathered and spoke of their pasts. They spoke of husbands and wives, sons and daughters. They spoke of careers as schoolteachers, bus drivers, post office clerks and engineers.

  ‘I was somebody once,’ they insisted, ‘before they put me in here.’

  Wang came to know of many kinds of madness. The madness of those who thought they had magic powers and could levitate. The madness of disciples of religious cults who communed with their leaders through emissions of alpha waves. There was the madness of those arrested for running naked through the streets. The madness of the woman who chased the head of her Neighbourhood Committee with a frying pan. There was the madness of those who opposed the government. The madness of petitioners who had come to Beijing from other provinces and queued at the Bureau of Petitions to lodge complaints about the seizure of land by local officials or a husband beaten to death by hired thugs. Some of the petitioners lived in a shanty town near Beijing South railway station and, clearly suffering from psychosis, went to the Bureau of Petitions every day. They were a threat to public security. The police rounded the worst of the psychotics up for the mental home.

  There was the madness of those who had lost the ones they loved (the wife who left for another man, the child killed in a hit and run), and there was the madness that had caused the loss of the ones they loved. Qi Rong, a schizophrenic with razor-scarred wrists, showed Wang a photo album of her 27-year-old son. Photos of her son as a baby. Photos of his graduation in mortar cap and gown. Photos of her son and his pregnant wife.

  ‘He’s now a chemic
al engineer for Sinopec,’ Qi Rong boasted of the man who three years ago dumped her in the home of demented, broken souls and has never visited – not even to introduce her to her grandson. ‘I’m so proud of my boy. He was always the cleverest in his class. Not like his crazy old ma!’

  There was the madness of the president’s mistress, who danced about the hospital yard, spinning round and round in the arms of an invisible partner, her skirt flaring up and showing her pale, varicose-veined legs. As she danced she recounted a life of banquets and private jets, giddy as a sixteen-year-old girl.

  ‘Jiang Zemin and I waltzed together in a Russian ballroom,’ she called out to Wang, ‘when he took me to meet President Yeltsin in Moscow. We drank champagne, and oysters slipped down our throats.’ The president’s mistress then grinned, showing the black holes where her teeth used to be. ‘He’s coming for me,’ she whispered to Wang, ‘any day now he will come and whisk me away.’

  Later that day she saw her lover on TV, touring a factory in Shandong province. She walked up and touched him tenderly on the screen, deaf to the other patients shouting at her to get out of the way.

  Aware of Wang’s privileged background and prestigious education, white-coated Dr Fu was more deferential to him than to other patients. He smiled warmly at Wang from across his desk, considering him one of the few patients to be treated with respect. Potted plants trailed vines from the window ledge and on his desk was a thousand-page edition of the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders, scuffed with the overlapping ring-marks from hundreds of cups of tea. Serve the Patients, instructed the needlepoint hanging on the office wall.

  ‘How have you been feeling lately, Wang Jun?’ Dr Fu asked.

  ‘Tired,’ said Wang. ‘Low.’

  The doctor nodded sympathetically.

  ‘But you have improved. When you came here in November you barely ate or spoke and spent most of your time in bed. You are much more sociable now. I see you out in the yard every day, chatting with the other patients.’

  Wang shrugged.

  ‘There’s not much in the way of intellectual stimulation here, is there?’ continued Dr Fu. ‘Don’t you want to return to university and finish your education? You have been here for four months. Wouldn’t you like to try, Wang Jun?’

  Wang’s gaze hardened. ‘I am not ready to be discharged,’ he said. Then, after a pause, ‘Can I go?’

  Before Dr Fu could nod his consent, Wang had scraped back his chair and stood up. Though the doctor was offended, he did not insist Wang stay and discuss the matter further. As well as paying the monthly fee, Wang’s father was making generous donations to the hospital and would continue to do so as long as his son was resident there. Progress meeting adjourned.

  ‘Toothpaste?’

  Wang looked at Zeng Yan in his vest, silver dog-tags and faded jeans, holding his forefinger out. He grudgingly squeezed some toothpaste out of the tube on to Zeng’s finger and Zeng grinned and rubbed the toothpaste on his teeth. Wang ignored him. He leant over the sink and washed his face.

  Wang hadn’t spoken much to Zeng, but knew of him. The boy from the south who had chased his dreams of pop stardom to Beijing, only to end up selling his body in karaoke bars. Zeng was handsome enough to be on magazine covers and TV, but Wang had heard him singing Faye Wong ballads and knew his ambitions of becoming a professional singer wouldn’t amount to much. ‘Stop torturing us! You can’t sing!’ some of the patients yelled.

  ‘What do you madmen know about singing?’ Zeng yelled back. Though they were the same age, Wang hadn’t gone out of his way to make friends with Zeng. Wang didn’t know much about homosexuals, but had heard they had AIDs and other diseases and thought it safest to avoid him entirely.

  Zeng gargled and spat in the sink. He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and said, ‘I heard you’re a rich kid. That your father is a Communist official.’

  Wang shrugged.

  ‘Why didn’t your father send you to a proper clinic then?’ asked Zeng. ‘Somewhere they actually treat patients so they get better, instead of drugging them and locking them up?’

  ‘He is punishing me,’ Wang said.

  ‘For what? He must really hate you,’ said Zeng. ‘If I were you I’d get the hell out of here. Run away.’

  Wang countered, ‘Why don’t you run away?’

  Zeng laughed. ‘After they arrested me, I was lucky to be sent here and not to Re-education Through Labour. Run away and I’ll end up in prison. But you should get out, Wang Jun. The police won’t go looking for you.’

  Wang rubbed his face with the towel. Arrested for what? he wondered. Sodomy? Singing in public? Zeng leant his hip against the sink, tilted his peroxide-dyed head to one side and watched Wang with interest.

  ‘Why are you here anyway?’ asked Zeng. ‘You don’t seem ill to me.’

  ‘I had a breakdown at university.’

  ‘Didn’t you go to Beida? You must be a genius. I heard the cleverest people in China go there.’

  Wang thought of his classmates and laughed. ‘The richest,’ he corrected. ‘The ones with the best guanxi. The ones who are good at passing exams.

  Students at Beida spend a lot of time in the library.’

  ‘Yeah? How much time did you spend in the library?’

  ‘Seven hours a day,’ said Wang, ‘more during exams.’

  Zeng hooted. ‘No wonder you went fucking crazy!’

  The bell rang for lights out, and Zeng sauntered out of the bathroom, shaking his head and laughing: ‘Seven hours a day!’ And Wang had to admit he had a point.

  Wang had never had a friend like Zeng before. At university Wang’s friends were similar to him, studious and hard-working, the passing of exams the focal point of their lives. They lost control sometimes – spraining an ankle during a drunken fall or getting in trouble for sneaking a girl into the dorms. But never to the extent that it wrecked their lives, or even got in the way of their handing an essay in on time.

  Zeng, in contrast, was as out of control as a car skidding on ice. He had dropped out of school at fifteen when a sleazy older boyfriend convinced him he didn’t need a high school diploma to succeed. The boyfriend then pimped Zeng out, exploiting him for over a year. When they split up, Zeng went to work as a host in a Guangzhou nightclub. He bragged to Wang of how desired and sought after he was there, and of the money and extravagant gifts his patrons had showered him with: leather jackets and stereos, gold chains and rings. A millionaire from Hong Kong had even rented a luxury apartment for Zeng to live in as his ‘second wife’ (an arrangement that ended after six weeks, when the Hong Kong millionaire came home unexpectedly to catch Zeng and his boyfriend in the jacuzzi together). Zeng boasted of his rich and powerful clientele, hoping to impress Wang. But Wang saw nothing to envy in the career of a prostitute.

  Zeng told Wang he was six when he knew he was gay. ‘I was in the acupuncturist’s waiting room with my father, and there was a diagram of a man on the wall. The male body. Full-frontal, back and sides. I stared and stared at that diagram, and I have always known, since that day . . .’

  When he was a teenager Zeng’s mother had attempted to cure him of his effeminacy. She had crushed up herbal pills and sprinkled them into his meals behind his back. ‘I had an upset stomach and diarrhoea for months. I didn’t know what was wrong, until I caught her one day, stirring the pills into my soup. She wasn’t sorry. She said I was abnormal. She said I had too much yin and not enough yang, and the medicine would even me out. She said I had to stop being such a girly-boy, or I’d never find a wife. I told her straight. “Ma,” I said, “I will never marry.” She lost her temper and screamed that I was an unfilial son. That I would dishonour our ancestors by not continuing our family line.’ Zeng rolled his eyes. ‘I said, “Fuck our ancestors, Ma. They are dead in their graves. What do they care if I walk like a girl?”’

  Before Zeng, Wang had never spoken of his past. ‘Boring,’ he said, when friends asked what his childhood was like. ‘Just a hous
ewife,’ he said, when they asked about his mother. The past had a power over Wang, silencing him and crippling him with shame. But there was no need for censorship with Zeng. He was the first person Wang confided in about his mother’s breakdown. The first person he told about his father wrenching his shoulder out of joint. As he recounted his father’s abuse, Wang became panicky and short of breath. But then he looked up and saw Zeng, listening on the end of his bed, and the power of the past was somehow lessened. Zeng had been through this stuff too. Zeng’s mother had drunk a bottle of weedkiller when he was twelve. His father had beaten him and thrown him out on the streets when he found out he was gay. Zeng spoke of these incidents dismissively, laughing at his parents and the damage they’d done, and encouraging Wang to do the same.

  ‘What were you arrested for?’ Wang asked.

  They were sweeping the yard on a breezy morning in March. The Secretary-General of the United Nations was on the bench in his pyjamas, waving his hands about as he chaired a summit on Third World hunger. Two young women had abandoned cleaning duty for ping pong, giggling as they missed the ball, over and over again. Zeng leant on the handle of his broom.

  ‘I burnt down a shed in an alley in Dongcheng.’

  ‘Why?’ Wang asked.

  ‘I saw my ex, Dragon, moving about behind the windows. So I poured lighter fluid on the door and struck a match. By the time the firemen got there the shed had burnt to the ground.’

  Wang was shaken by this. ‘Was Dragon in the shed?’

  ‘No. He was in Shenzhen. I just imagined it.’

  ‘But you started the fire because you thought Dragon was there? You wanted to burn him to death?’

  Zeng’s brow knotted. ‘I knew Dragon was in Shenzhen,’ he decided, ‘but he was on my mind when I started the fire . . . I was mad at him, and setting fire to the shed was something to do . . . like a release . . . I regret it now.’

  Wang was disturbed. People didn’t go about starting fires for ‘a release’. Zeng looked down at his mutilated forearm. The scars were deep and destructive, as though repeatedly slashed with a knife, and he stroked them with a masochistic pride. Though they had broken up years ago, Zeng still wrote letters to Dragon, which he bribed a dishwasher in the kitchen to smuggle out and post to the Shenzhen nightclub where he was a bartender. Two weeks ago, when they were queuing for medication, Zeng had shown one of the letters to Wang. The letter listed his ex-boyfriend’s crimes: the times he’d cheated on Zeng, the money he’d ‘borrowed’ and the lies he’d told. Then, near the letter’s end, Zeng swung from hate to love. Dragon was his soulmate. His love for Dragon, like the tattoo on his arm, would never fade.