The Seventh Day Read Free Page B

know where to go. I was stricken with uncertainty, knowing I had died but not knowing how.
    I walked in a hazy, indistinct city, my thoughts searching for a direction to follow amid the densely intersecting paths of memory. I needed to track down the last scene in my life, I realized, and this final scene was bound to lie at the farthest end of one such path; finding it would mean I had identified the moment of my own death. Taking their cue from my body’s motion, my thoughts traversed a myriad of scenes that swirled in profusion like so many snowflakes before finally arriving at one particular day.
    This day seemed a lot like yesterday, or a lot like the day before, or perhaps it was today. The only thing I could be sure of was that it was my last day on earth. I saw myself walking down a road with a cold wind blowing in my face.

    I was walking, walking toward the square in front of the city government headquarters. About two hundred people were standing there, protesting against forced demolitions. They had not, however, unfurled protest banners and were not shouting slogans—they were simply swapping stories of personal misfortune. From what I could make out as I made my way through their ranks, they had all in various ways fallen afoul of recent demolitions. An old lady with tears running down her face was saying that she had just left her house to buy groceries and returned to find her house was gone—she had thought for a moment that she had taken a wrong turn. Others were relating the terror they had experienced during late-night demolitions, when they were woken from sleep by huge blasts, their house swaying back and forth as though in an earthquake; only when they rushed out in panic did they see bulldozers and excavators destroying their housing complex. One man was loudly relating an embarrassing experience: just as he and his girlfriend were making love, their front door suddenly opened with a crash and several fierce-looking men burst in, tied them up inside their comforter, and then carried them, comforter and all, into a waiting vehicle. It drove around the city the whole night, with him and his girlfriend scared out of their wits, not knowing where they were being taken. Only at dawn did the car return them to their place of departure; at that point their captors dumped them on the ground, untied the cord that bound them, and tossed them some items of clothing. Shivering, they hastily dressed, as passersby watched them curiously, and when they finally stood up and looked around they found that their home had been flattened. His girlfriend burst out wailing and vowed never to go to bed with him again—sleeping with him was scarier than watching a horror movie.
    With the house gone and his girlfriend gone, he told the people around him, his sexual desire had completely dried up. He stretched out four fingers. In an effort to cure his erectile dysfunction, he said, he had already spent over forty thousand yuan and consumed all kinds of Western and Chinese medicines and resorted to remedies both orthodox and unconventional, but down below, his plane was only capable of taxiing.
    “Does it start its descent just after taking off?” someone asked.
    “Oh, I wish,” he said. “No, it taxis only, no taking off at all.”
    “Demand compensation!” someone shouted.
    “The government compensated me for my demolished house”—he smiled grimly—“but not for my traumatized libido.”
    “Take some Viagra,” someone suggested.
    “I did that,” he said, “and it made my heart pound sure enough, but down below all I could do was taxi.”
    Much laughter followed this remark; it seemed to me that these people weren’t protesting so much as having a party. After crossing the square, I passed two bus stops; ahead of me was Amity Street.
    My life was at a low ebb by this point: my wife had left me long before, and more than a year earlier my father had fallen gravely ill. So as to pay for his treatment and