Narcopolis

They took him to a building that looked like the garrison headquarters; they took him to a cell and left him alone. Some hours later, two men came in and stripped off his clothes and beat him, very methodically, until he passed out. He was woken by pain. He knew he’d been unconscious for some time, minutes maybe, or hours; it was hard to tell because time had expanded. Every part of his body throbbed or burned. The pain slowed time and a single moment became something impossibly complex that took all his resources to endure. His pulse throbbed in his ears and hours passed between each beat. He slept and woke and slept again and he felt like a visitor to an unknown solar system where time speeded up and slowed down at random intervals. They gave him congee and he slept. And then the men returned and beat him again. This was how he knew a day had passed, two days, three and four days. He was settling into a kind of routine, he was beginning to focus his mind around the pain and he was preparing himself for worse, when, suddenly, a new set of abductors took over from the old. They opened the door of his cell and someone he hadn’t seen before said, Is this him? Yes, said Tung, whose hands were tied. The new abductors put Lee in a jeep and took him on a long drive. It was night-time and the stars were low in the sky. There were more stars than he had ever thought possible, so many stars that it was easy to lose himself among them, all he had to do was let his head loll back on the seat and look up at the infinite. There was a smell of eucalyptus and manure. He heard birds and wondered why they were awake in the middle of the night. Were they as confused as he by the hitherto unseen elasticity of time? The new abductors drove out of Wuhan and stopped on a dirt road that curved upwards into the hills. They didn’t beat him. They fed him and gave him a change of clothes and put a bandage around his ribs. They drove some more and stopped at an airfield, where they put him on a plane to Peking.

*

He made phone calls from the hospital and discovered that Pang Mei was no longer working in the commissariat or registered at the engineering hostel as a resident. He made more calls. He learned that a teacher he knew, one of his father’s old friends, had committed suicide. Others had simply vanished and were thought to be dead. He was still being treated for his injuries when Wei Kuo-ching came to see him.

‘The killers are barely out of their teens, rabid youths, so-called radicals who hunt in gleeful packs,’ said the usually dapper Wei, looking bedraggled, and was he smelling of wine? ‘Anything can happen to anyone at any time. Did you hear what happened to Commissar Hu?

A big-character wall poster appeared one day, said Wei, denouncing Hu as a “son of a landlord,” a “degenerate dog” and a “seller of scars”. Those kinds of names are thrown around a lot these days, so maybe he should have ignored it. But the poster also said Hu was guilty of sexual perversion with degenerate like-minded women. You know Hu or you don’t, but he’s not the kind of man who will take abuse without fighting back. He called a meeting. He said his accusers were reactionaries and rightists. They were a danger to the Party. He said they were cowards, hiding behind the anonymity of wall posters. He challenged them to come out into the open. The same night fresh wall posters went up accusing Hu of counter-revolution. The accusations and counter-accusations were noticed and the Party sent a Work Team to investigate. The Work Team banned the students from putting up any more posters, but it also reproved Hu, saying he should confess to some of his mistakes. Instead of restoring the peace, the team’s actions had the opposite effect. The students defied the ban and plastered posters all over the city. They mobilized student groups in other cities and they sent spokesmen to the highest levels of the party bureaucracy. The response must have been favourable because they stepped up their attacks. The next lot of wall posters gave details of Hu’s alleged perversions. Prostitutes. Group sex. Sodomy. Homosexuality. And it was at this stage that Hu made his terrible mistake. He denied all charges and then he said, so what if it is true? Even the Chairman isn’t a eunuch when it comes to sex. They came for him the next day. They put black paint on his face and paraded him through the streets. They put him in a cage and hung a sign on the bars, animal exhibition. They didn’t let him sleep or wash or talk. It took two weeks for him to confess that he had impugned the Chairman and that he was guilty of sexual and other crimes. Pang Mei testified that he had taken advantage of her and introduced her to foreign perversions. His own daughters were forced to denounce him. He’s being purged, said Wei. But the only question Lee could think of asking was, What happened to Pang Mei?

*