The Seventh Day (26 page)

Wu Chao nodded. The man beckoned with his hand, indicating he should follow him into the building. They went down a stained concrete staircase to the basement. The man opened a door, and the air was suddenly rank with the odor of stale cigarette smoke. By a dim light Wu Chao could make out seven people inside, sitting on beds, smoking and chatting. Wu Chao headed for the one unoccupied bed.

Wu Chao handed over his ID and signed an agreement to sell a kidney. He was given a medical examination and a blood sample was taken, then he was told to await the result. He began another underground life, sleeping under a greasy quilt, a quilt that looked as though it had never been washed, and that exuded foul smells accumulated from its many previous users. The man who had brought him to the basement visited twice a day, issuing to the men inside packs of cheap cigarettes and two meals—cabbage and potato for lunch, potato and cabbage for dinner. The room had neither tables nor chairs, so they all sat on their beds to eat, apart from two who squatted on their haunches. The fetid odor that wafted through the basement was held in check only when the men were smoking. When they slept, Wu Chao would wake up sometimes, oppressed by such a powerful stench he felt as though his chest were being squeezed.

The other men, all young, chatted idly as they smoked, exchanging notes about conditions at construction sites and factories and moving companies—it seemed they had worked in lots of different places. Making a pot of money quickly was now their goal: even if they were to slave away as coolies for years and years, they said, they would still not be able to make as much money as if they were to sell a kidney. They were looking forward eagerly to life afterward, when they could buy a smart set of clothes, an Apple phone, stay a few nights in a swank hotel, and eat some meals in an upscale restaurant. After indulging in these expectations, they lapsed back into anxiety, for none of the seven had yet received word that he had been successfully matched with an organ recipient, despite waiting here for over a month. One of them had already visited similar outfits in five other cities, and each time had been sent packing within a matter of weeks, on the grounds that nobody wanted his kidney. The kidney vendors would give him only forty-five yuan for traveling expenses, money he would use to buy his way to another kidney-selling operation. He said that he had not a penny to his name, so all he could do was try like a beggar to keep life and limb together, in one kidney-selling den after another.

This man had seen a lot of the world, and when someone complained how tedious the diet was here—just cabbage and potato—he said it couldn’t be considered bad, for here you at least got tofu once a week and chicken-bone soup once a week as well. He said he’d stayed in a kidney-selling den where for two months straight he ate disgusting food every day of the week.

Somebody raised a question about the safety of kidney surgery. There was, the kidney-racket veteran announced in a tone of authority, no simple answer to that—it was very much a matter of luck. Kidney vendors, he informed them, were an unscrupulous bunch—people with a conscience wouldn’t get involved in this kind of business—and to save money they didn’t hire professional surgeons, who would demand a high price for their services; kidney vendors would bring in veterinary surgeons instead.

When they heard it was going to be vets removing their kidneys, the other men were outraged, cursing the damn vendors for jeopardizing their health just so they could maximize profits.

This man took it all in stride, however, saying, “These days there’s no shortage of wicked people and outrageous behavior, is there? And besides, a vet still counts as a surgeon, and if he makes a habit of cutting out people’s kidneys, he will soon become an old hand and his technique might even be superior to that of a surgeon in a proper hospital.”

What outraged
him
was that nobody wanted his kidney. He said he’d had rotten luck the whole time, never once matched with a transplant recipient. Every year, he said, there were a million people suffering from kidney disease who depended on dialysis for survival, but there were only about four thousand legal kidney transplants. How was it possible that nobody wanted his kidney? There should be a million people who need it! The only explanation was that those sons of bitches responsible for matching patient and donor were failing to apply themselves properly to their work, with the result that his perfectly good kidney had gone neglected for almost a year now. If this time, too, he was given his marching orders, he said, he was going first to burn some incense in a temple and beg the bodhisattva to help him sell his kidney in double-quick time, and then get another train ticket and head off to the next kidney-selling den.

Wu Chao said nothing after arriving in the basement, but simply listened indifferently as the men gossiped about this and that, and even when he heard how veterinary surgeons performed the operations, he remained unmoved; it was only when he thought of Mouse Girl that his heart would ache. He prayed that he would be matched successfully as soon as possible, so that he could purchase a burial plot for Mouse Girl with minimum delay. But the seven men in the basement had already been waiting so long, and one had yet to be matched successfully even after almost a year, and this made him deeply anxious. He was stricken with insomnia; on his soiled and smelly bed he tossed and turned, unable to fall asleep.

On Wu Chao’s sixth day in the basement, the meal-delivery man appeared at a different time than usual. He opened the door and called, “Wu Chao!”

Before Wu Chao had time to react, the other seven men in the basement looked at each other and realized that none of them had this name—Wu Chao had to be the one who had said not a word since his arrival. “So soon!” they exclaimed.

“Wu Chao, you’ve got a match,” the man at the doorway said.

Wu Chao flung aside the greasy quilt and put on his clothes and shoes under the envious gaze of the other seven. As he walked toward the door, the man who had visited kidney-selling dens in five cities spoke up. “You’re a sly one,” he said.

Wu Chao followed the meal-delivery man up the stained cement staircase to the fourth floor. The man knocked on a door, and when it was opened, Wu Chao found a middle-aged man sitting on a sofa inside the room. This person greeted Wu Chao warmly and had him sit down next to him, then began to explain that the human body actually requires just one kidney, so the other is redundant—like an appendix, which you can keep or remove as you wish.

Wu Chao was not interested in these issues. “How much will I get for my kidney?” he asked the middle-aged man.

“Thirty-five thousand,” the man replied.

Wu Chao thought this sufficient for his purposes, so he nodded.

“We pay top price here,” the man said. “Other places pay only thirty.”

No need to worry about the surgery, he assured Wu Chao, for the doctors they used were all from big hospitals and were just taking on these jobs for extra income.

“They say that it’s vets who do the operation,” Wu Chao responded.

“That’s bullshit!” the middle-aged man said, looking displeased. “Our doctors are all fully trained surgeons, and we pay them five thousand for every kidney removal.”

Wu Chao moved into a room on the fifth floor. It had four beds, only one of which was occupied. The person there was a man who had already had a kidney removed, and he gave his new roommate a friendly smile, which Wu Chao returned.

This man’s operation had been successful, and he was able to prop himself up against the bedstead to talk with Wu Chao. He said he no longer had a fever and would be able to leave in another few days. He asked Wu Chao why he was selling his kidney.

Wu Chao lowered his head in thought. “For my girlfriend,” he said.

“Same as me,” the other man said.

He had a steady girlfriend back in the countryside, he told Wu Chao. He wanted to marry her, but her parents insisted he needed to have a house first. So he took a job in the city, but the money he made was pitiful—he would need to work nine or ten years before he’d have enough to build a house, and his girlfriend would have married someone else long before that. Selling his kidney was the quickest way to finance the house construction.

“This money comes easy,” he said.

He gave a laugh. That’s just the way it was back home, he said—if you don’t have a house, you can forget about marriage. “Is it the same where you’re from?” he asked.

Wu Chao nodded. His eyes suddenly got wet, for he thought of Mouse Girl and how she had stuck with him through thick and thin despite his poverty and failures in life. He bowed his head, not wanting his tears to be seen.

After a moment he raised his head. “Didn’t your girlfriend want to leave and get a job in the city as well?”

“She wanted to,” the man said, “but her father was bedridden and her mother was in poor health too. She’s their only daughter—they have no sons—so she can’t get away.”

Wu Chao thought of Mouse Girl’s fate. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

Life on the fifth floor was a complete contrast to life in the basement. There was no foul air and the quilt was clean. There was natural light. In the morning Wu Chao could eat an egg, a meat bun, and a bowl of congee; at midday and in the evening he ate boxed meals with either meat or fish.

Wu Chao woke up in sunlight and fell asleep by moonlight—
sensations long denied him, since for a year or more he had woken and slept in an underground world with neither sun nor moon. Now he appreciated their beauty, and even when he closed his eyes he could feel how they brightened the room. Outside his window was a tree that had turned dry and yellow in the winter cold, but even so, birds would fly over and rest on its limbs, sometimes chirping away, then flapping their wings and soaring over the rooftops. He thought of Mouse Girl and how she too had never experienced this kind of life during their time together. He couldn’t help but feel sad.

Three days later, Wu Chao followed the middle-aged man into a windowless room. A man wearing glasses who looked like he might be a doctor asked him to lie down on a crude operating table. A powerful light shone in his face, and even after he closed his eyes they still felt sore. With the anesthetic, he lost consciousness, and when he came around he found himself lying on his bed on the fifth floor once more. The room was completely silent, for the man who had been there was now gone and Wu Chao was the only occupant. Next to his pillow lay a bag of antibiotics and a bottle of mineral water. At the slightest movement he felt an acute stab of pain in his left side, and he knew he’d lost his left kidney.

The middle-aged man came by twice a day to make sure he took the antibiotics at the proper time. The man told him that he would be able to go back home in a week. Wu Chao lay alone in the room; his only other visitors were the birds. Some would flit past his window, while others would linger briefly on the branches outside, their raucous jabber sounding to his ears like idle chatter.

After a week the middle-aged man gave him thirty-five thousand yuan in cash, summoned a taxi, and sent two of his underlings to see him back to his home in the bomb shelter.

Wu Chao’s neighbors, seeing two strangers carry him in and lay him on his bed, knew he must have sold a kidney so that Mouse Girl could get a proper burial.

Wu Chao lay in bed. After a few more days he had finished all the antibiotics, but his high fever had not abated and on several occasions he lapsed into unconsciou
sness; when he came to, he felt that his body was on the point of leaving him. His underground neighbors came to visit him and bring him snacks, but he was able only to swallow a very little bit of congee or soup. Several neighbors said they should take him to the hospital, but he shook his head emphatically, for he knew that if he was admitted to the hospital he could say goodbye to all the money he made from selling his kidney. He believed he could get through this, but his confidence weakened with every passing day, and as the frequency of his fainting spells increased he knew he wouldn’t be fit enough to make the selection of Mouse Girl’s burial plot. For this he cried tears of frustration.