He had entered all but the last two digits when Shan snatched a syringe and jammed it into the man’s thigh, slamming down the plunger. For one brief instant the orderly began to rise, began to protest, then his legs and voice collapsed. For good measure, Shan injected another syringe into the man’s bicep and he sank back, unconscious.
Shan worked fast, first deleting the number typed on the screen, then pulling the man’s blue uniform off and donning it himself. Slipping the man’s security card lanyard from his neck and draping it over his own, he quickly hid the limp form under the desk, stuffed another of the syringes into his pocket, then scanned the papers beside the computer screen. The list he was looking for was tacked to the wall beside it. He was only looking for a name, he told himself, and then he would leave, for every minute he lingered increased the likelihood of his capture. But the tide of emotion when he found the name was so sudden, so overpowering, it almost brought him to his knees. Shan Ko, it said, Hall Five. His son was alive.
Five minutes later he stood outside the door of the room marked for his son, a locked ward with six beds. Shan glanced up and down the empty corridor and looked down at his shaking hand. He closed his eyes a moment to calm himself then slid the card through the electric lock mechanism and pushed open the door.
The room reeked of urine and vomit. The first two inmates lay comatose on their metal frame beds, their skulls shaved and wrapped in bandages. Two others, older men, stared blankly at walls, another sat against the wall between two beds drawing with a pencil on a pad of paper, surrounded by sheets torn from the pad, all covered with precise penciled triangles, hundreds of triangles. The last inmate was tied to a corroded metal armchair facing the small, dirty window. Shan’s heart raced as he approached the chair and looked past the ragged, tangled hair. His son was alive, his son was intact. And completely oblivious to Shan and everything else in the chamber.
Ko stared, unfocused, toward a snowcapped peak on the horizon.
Shan tried to speak his son’s name but could summon only a hoarse moan. He put his hand on Ko’s arm. His son did not react, did not even blink. He began to untie the tethers, latex tubes knotted at his wrists and ankles, then reconsidered and only loosened them. Lowering himself onto one knee in front of the chair, he saw for the first time the fresh bruise that ran the length of Ko’s jaw, the work of a baton to the face, and two broken fingers crudely bound with duct tape, a tongue dispenser used as a splint. He rolled up Ko’s sleeve. The skin inside his right elbow was perforated with syringe holes. A long ugly line along his forearm showed where one of his veins had collapsed. His chin was caked with dried salvia and grime. Shan wiped it clean and stroked his son’s cheek.
“It’s your father,” he whispered after scrubbing a tear from his own cheek. “I am here.” Words were useless, words were ridiculous. He found himself examining Ko’s body again, finding more bruises, old and new, checking his pulse, his fingernails and toenails. It could be worse, he told himself. If he had to be tied, Ko must still have use of his arms and legs, must still have some dim spark left that flared up from time to time. He found a plastic crate in a corner and sat on it beside his son, draping Ko’s limp fingers over his own hand, looking out with him through the smudged window to the same distant peak. Images flashed in his head of Ko as a laughing infant. This wasn’t how he had imagined it would be when he had strolled with his baby son through Bei Hai Park in Beijing.
He fought to stay in the moment, pushing away the world, but an incessant voice inside kept shouting that the alarms would sound at any moment, that he would never be able to help Ko if he was captured and tethered to another chair. There was a bus, he had been told, a shuttle bus that took workers through the gate, into town. He had to find the bus and board it using the stolen identity badge, before they discovered its true owner.
Shan rose and checked the empty bed beside Ko, finding another plastic crate under it with his son’s possessions. A worn denim prisoner uniform. A comb. A stick of plastic with a few bristles at one end, the remains of a toothbrush. A pencil. A red book of the sainted Chairman’s teachings, issued by the prison system, with several pages ripped out. In the pocket of the pants was another pencil, its end built into a bulge with layers of tape and paper. Shan recognized the device. It was used by diehard prisoners to vomit up drugs.
He rinsed out a tin cup at the small metal sink in the corner, filled it with water, and held it to Ko’s lips. His son did not react at first but when Shan tipped it, letting some of the moisture spill onto his lips, Ko reflexively swallowed and drank half the cup. His eyes wandered, still unfocused, but did not find Shan.
“I have had a pleasant visit in the mountains,” Shan heard himself say in a whisper. “There is a place I will show you, with waterfalls and butterflies. You will come stay with me in my cottage in the hills by that snow-topped mountain you look at. Little birds fly in my window.” At first he wasn’t entirely sure why he lied, then he realized it was simply because he couldn’t bear to tell the truth.
“From the Red East rises the sun,” Ko suddenly said in a wooden voice. “There appears our Mao tse-tung.” He rocked back and forth. His fingers began to tremble. He repeated the words, putting them to a feeble melody. He was singing the Party’s favorite anthem, The East is Red.
Shan shuddered then gently placed two fingers on his son’s lips to silence him and bent closer to his ear. “Living water needs living fire to boil,” he whispered. “Lean over the fishing rock and dip the clear, deep current.” The words of the ancient poet Su tung-po came out uninvited, but he did not cease speaking them when he recognized them, a thousand-year-old poem that was one of his father’s favorites:
Store the spring moon in a big gourd, return it to the jar Frothy water, simmering, whirls bits of tea Pour it and hear the sound of wind in pines.
His son’s eyes blinked and he turned in the direction of the sound. For a moment Shan thought he might have seen a flicker of recognition in Ko’s eyes, then his son looked away, staring in confusion at Shan’s hand, entwined with his own. Shan repeated the poem again, all of it this time. Ko cocked his head toward the sky and a vacant grin crossed his face.
One of the many old lamas Shan had known in his gulag camp had, like Shan, been a rare survivor of such a knob medical facility. They had spoken about it once, on a frigid winter night as they watched the stars. Shan had confessed that he could not explain how he had survived, could not even find words to explain how he had felt, only that when he was released he had been amazed to find only sixty days, and not ten years, had passed.
“Those soldier doctors had no feeling for the truth of what they do,” the lama had explained. “They think they can destroy you by breaking your body. It isn’t like that.”
Shan had always known better than to ask questions of such men. He had stayed silent, pointing out a shooting star.
“There are many levels of hell,” the lama went on. “They don’t exist to test your body or mind but to test your soul. I realized that the doctors were but smiths at the forge who push the iron into the furnace, then pound it with hammers. The only thing of any importance is going on inside the iron. You drift in and out of consciousness. You live in dreams and nightmares all day and night, in the furnace, under the hammer. What brings you back are the moments when you wake and find a little shard of reality. That’s what keeps you anchored to the real world, so you don’t entirely drift away. A monk with me had a hummingbird feather, another a tiny piece of sacred wood. I had a small turquoise pebble my mother had given me as a boy. I kept it in my mouth for days at a time.”