Ms. Huang Qiuhong, who accompanied her husband through the last ten years in New York, also came from the United States, dragging her suitcase. I held her arm and stood in front of the bed, and suddenly I couldn't help myself: An old friend from New York is here. In the past, every time I went to Qiuhong's house where my husband stayed, I would see Michael Mu waiting at the door from a distance. In front of the first step --- Mr. Qiu Hong is not aware of Qiu Hong's arrival now, and he is sleeping soundly. Because the bronchoscope has been used, there is a light blue plastic tube across his nose, and he looks like he is depressed and angry.
"Come...Daniel Chen." On the 29th, the day I first entered the ward, my husband had already sat up. It was the first time I heard him call me in a loud voice like before. He tapped the edge of the bed and gestured to come closer. His face was full of smiles. With a cruel self-deprecating smile, he said the only words he ever fully woke up from:
"Oh...it's a big disaster this time!" He showed the old man's silly smile that I haven't seen for a long time, "So it turned out to be like this... Embarrassing! Embarrassing!...You sit, you sit."
This is what we usually say straight to the point. I loudly exaggerated my excitement with foul language, not wanting to miss this moment of vanity. Sure enough, the moment he woke up just now exhausted all his strength---since the children told him that I would be arriving in the afternoon, he concentrated his mind and waited for me---the head of the bed shook down, and he He began to sleep for a long time again... On the third day, the will and the trust were settled, and he fell asleep. When he woke up, he obviously completely forgot about the signing at noon, and murmured:
"Is this possible?"
"What's possible?"
"Are they coming to arrest me?"
"Nonsense!" I yelled at him.
The husband felt relieved, remained silent for a moment, and said leisurely:
""A Dream of Red Mansions"...has a profound meaning."
"Do you remember "A Dream of Red Mansions"?"
"Remember." He looked at the ceiling. "God made a mistake...I don't write this type."
"What genre are you writing?"
"I...have already written it."
This is a topic that can be captured. I leaned closer to him and asked for a confession: "Do you remember what you wrote!?"
"Remember..."
"No Walking Tomorrow" and "Reflections of Colombia", do you remember them?" I asked fiercely. He looked away and looked at the east wall, his voice trembling slightly and becoming high-pitched:
"...well written...great!"
Snow has fallen in Wuzhen, as thin as raindrops, drifting slowly and diagonally, like the slowing down of a very light and very light melody. At the end of 1994, my husband came alone to his hometown after nearly fifty years. He wrote a letter saying that when he got on the bus in Tongxiang, it was raining and snowing, and he mingled with the crowd and eavesdropped on the long-lost local accent. Last year, when people from New York came to take pictures, there was snow suddenly, and the courtyard was suddenly white - "He wrote about snow! How well he wrote!" The teacher praised Lu Xun's "At the Restaurant" several times - --That day he obeyed us, put on his suit and hat, and with a cane, I helped him walk around the garden in the snow. When I saw that video in New York, it was the last walk my husband and I took, less than five minutes.
It's snowing, Wanqing is building a small courtyard.
At four o'clock, the nurse came in and put a suction device on his mouth. My return flight is at six o'clock. The car is waiting downstairs. Dylan reminded me that I must go to the airport. When I went downstairs and got into the car, Dylan called me and said that my husband was looking for me to continue talking. I hesitated, holding up my phone. To be cruel, you don't need to be cruel. You only have a temporary thought: I want Dylan to ask the husband what he wants to say. Not long after, the reply came: The teacher said, "We need to talk about programmatic issues. Without a program, we cannot live."
Later, Dylan confirmed my cruel guess: Mr. fell asleep immediately and forgot his program when he woke up. If I were around, he would keep talking. This was the last time I talked to Michael Mu on December 1st. A few days later, he was pushed to the intensive care unit and began to fall into a full-time coma.
From mid-November to mid-December, my memory was chaotic. Traveling through all kinds of busyness, between different places and affairs, I suddenly saw Tongxiang: Ward No. 11, where time was long and stagnant. When I am away, the children are by my side day and night. The husband stopped waking up and kidney failure began. After being admitted to the intensive care unit on the second floor on December 5, his life was maintained by infusion. To avoid infection, visiting hours are shortened to half an hour in the afternoon every day. Everyone stayed together, and someone on duty was sleeping on a bench, ready to listen to critical reports at any time. On December 6, my husband's heart rate and blood pressure dropped sharply. After a short rescue, the data recovered. After that, he relied entirely on machines for breathing. When I was there at the beginning of the month, a senior respiratory doctor from Hangzhou came for consultation. The conclusion was almost the same, but the report was more rigorous and detailed. how long? I asked, still harboring a dishonest hope that my husband could sleep until spring. One day, I suddenly opened my eyes... "Do you want me to answer such a difficult question?" The doctor smiled bitterly and raised his eyes. Looking at the people surrounding him, they began to cite cases that had been delayed for a long time.
Yes. The husband has now become a case, and countless numbers have been imported. He is no longer the author of "Immediate Judgment" and "Balong", but a set of data monitored on the small video screen beside the bed.
On December 14th, I finished my chores in Shanghai and waited for the bus to take me to Tongxiang in the afternoon. The collector of my husband's paintings, Fried Gordon, a New Yorker who has lived in Shanghai in recent years, came to meet me. In autumn, he went to Wuzhen to visit his husband. He begged me if I could send Michael Mu back to Wuzhen and die at home. He himself hired doctors to come to his home to watch over his dying mother. I told him that the situation in China is a little different. He then told how he said goodbye to his parents. As I listened, I suddenly felt violently sad. I don’t know what my relationship is with my husband. Now that he is about to die, the person who asked me to send him back home is an American old man.
Xiao Jiang arrived. Driver of Wuzhen Tourism Company. We were picked up and dropped off by him several times. On the way, he talked about his grandfather, who had been stubborn all his life. When he was seventy-nine years old, he was still working in the fields during the day. After dinner, he solemnly put away a pair of bowls and chopsticks and carried an umbrella. He actually said Go home and walk out the door. The children pushed him over and dragged him in and out three or five times--"My grandpa is so strong, Teacher Chen." Xiao Jiang was only ten years old at that time---he did it until late at night, the old man Finally he lay down and died the next morning.
This is the story Mr. likes to hear. It is simply a legend of the Tang and Song Dynasties. He would also say that it was Tolstoy's favorite countryman's fable...
At three o'clock sharp, on the second floor of Tongxiang Hospital, I bumped into a crowd of peasants visiting the patients outside the critical ward. The crowd was noisy. The guards were tight and I was pushed around, like a prison visit described in Tolstoy's "Resurrection." Familiar faces appeared one after another in the crowd: Wesley Wang, Xiao Dai, Xiao Yang, Qiu Hong, Hazel Huang, Quentin Zhong, Xu Xiaoqi... I seemed to be seeing a group of fellow refugees. Several other strange young people also crowded over and surrounded me. In the chaos, I realized that they were the readers who had come to look after my husband in the past ten days or so: Liu Zhengwei from Qingdao, his girlfriend Zhang Runlin, Hu Fangui from Guangxi, Mao Xiaogang from Wenzhou, Kuang Wenbing from Hubei...and then we were crowded out again. Xiao Yang pushed me through the crowd and squeezed into the corridor inside the door. He hurriedly put on the plastic hat, shoe covers, mask and breastplate distributed by the administrator. As soon as I turned the corner, a huge ward opened up, with twenty or thirty beds filled with patients. I followed Xiao Yang quickly towards the closed cubicle that was blocked by a curtain along the wall. The husband was in the left room, covered with a white sheet, lying on his back in a coma.
Everyone stood there, not knowing what to do. Standing from the left: Huang Qiuhong who came from New York, Qingdao reader Liu Zhengwei and his girlfriend, Jiangsu poet Quentin Zhong, Guangxi reader Hu Fangui, Hazel Huang who was appointed by the town to take care of his husband; the person sitting on the right in the front is Xiao Dai.
This is my first time visiting an intensive care unit. The room is full of equipment that I can’t identify, like strange instruments of torture. Looking around at all the shiny and new parts, I shuddered: not because of the dying teacher, but because of the modernity of those devices. There is no way out. The gentleman is in dire straits. His foolish words were absolutely correct: the memory of his imprisonment forty years ago brought him here, and he was "imprisoned" in solitary confinement again, unable to get out again.
The doctor on duty, a kind middle-aged man, came to talk to me and reiterated clearly that doctors have no right to go out to practice medicine (of course, patients also have no right to leave here). If you insist on sending the elderly home, yes, after all the intubations are removed, the patient will die within ten minutes at the earliest (what an eloquent technology). As if just for Fried's plea, I considered my words and tried my best to defend myself, while imagining my husband being carried through the cold wind outside, stuffed into a car, and transported back to Wuzhen... The doctor looked at me calmly, obviously knowing My husband has no children, so I was the one who made the decision: the next step was to cut the larynx and trachea and directly suck out the accumulated phlegm.
The ward on the twelfth floor is so tender in my memory at this moment. We went in and out day and night and talked. There were fruits, thermos bottles, and flowers on the small table. My husband’s watch and a change of underwear were stored in the drawer... The intensive care unit was absolutely isolated from the human world. , there are no daily necessities except machines.
"A Dream of Red Mansions..." Mr. murmured more than ten days ago. Now I called him close, no longer expecting a response. His dentures had been removed, his philtrum and chin were shrunken and sunken, and his protruding lower jaw had sprouted messy white beards, rising and falling imperceptibly due to his weak breathing. In addition to the thin plastic tube inserted into his nostrils, his open mouth held another thick tube that I had never seen before. It was fixed by two crisscrossed white tapes. The two ends of the tapes crossed his cheeks and touched both ears. . His shoulders were bare, and I suddenly realized that there was only body under the sheets that could be directly probed by instruments. I looked down at him, unable to do anything. I would wait for at most five minutes before giving way to other young people waiting to visit. The husband is no longer a patient, but an exhibit lying flat among the machines, unaware of who is beside the bed and unaware of himself.
At half past three, the visitation stopped. Everyone returned to the twelfth floor and gathered together to discuss whether to cut off Mr.'s trachea. Going home was impossible. How kind. The machine room is the end of life. Precise technology now ensures humanity, allowing patients to successfully survive and to show their families that survival---At this time, humanity is technology---I went to the corridor to talk to a respiratory doctor in Shanghai. He confirmed that cutting the trachea was just an ordinary minor operation, and used professional rhetoric to imply: Yes, it is a delay, not a treatment, and no one can ensure that the patient will survive as a result.
Ward No. 11. The setting sun in winter. Sir's bed was removed. We stand. If we give up cutting the trachea, will we be compassionate or cruel? I have no idea. I'm not a doctor, but the doctor is waiting for me to decide. After half an hour, everyone grunted and agreed to give up.
The second floor of Linhe B&B in Xizha, Wuzhen, is dark and quiet. The next morning, when I opened the window and looked down, I saw a small patch of semicircular microwaves on the river, like fish scales, slowly changing the direction of the drift. That year, my husband dived to his hometown alone and said to himself: "This is That's my style of writing. "---There's only half an hour left for the afternoon visit. I have nothing to do during the day, so I go to Wanqing Xiaozhu. The two yellow dogs raised by the husband followed at random paces. After a patrol, everything was deserted. I stopped in my husband's bedroom on the second floor. On the bookshelf were familiar photos to me: Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mrs. Woolf... The frame was from when he was in New York. I painted it with gray in my spare time, making it a tile-like color, as if it had been there for a long time. The studio is cold and cold, with papers and pens scattered on the desk, and years of paint condensed on the porcelain plate. I took a pile of Mr.'s notebooks and went to the dining room to sit and read them. My husband's manuscripts were always written on cheap paper pads, with yellow paper price tags from New York stores stuck to the corners. In an instant, the gloom dissipated, and I was amused by his vicious and quiet words here and there. Laughing until you lose your composure, Dylan is by your side.
Rare solitude. How different home is from hospital. At noon and afternoon, one book after another was densely packed. I was familiar with the uncopied manuscripts of my husband, but it was difficult to identify which ones were written after returning to China. When I showed it to Dylan, it seemed that the part where the strokes were awkward was: I remembered half of it again. His ridiculous and tragic signature from months ago. At the bottom of a group of horizontal notes, there are two vertical lines of couplets in the margins of the page. My husband often switches from vernacular to classical Chinese - I suddenly felt happy: there was an elegiac couplet for the funeral! Immediately I was surprised that I had thoughts of a funeral--was that what the gentleman was thinking about when he wrote:
This heart has only superficial and superficial desires.
On the other side, Wushuang's careless writing still laments that his ambition has not been fulfilled.
Heading to Tongxiang at half past two. I really don’t want to end this silent reading. It was my husband who happily unfolded his clearly transcribed manuscript for me to read - it happened a long, long time ago - and now I was shocked: this was the first time I had read his manuscript without permission. At his house, I was doing things I shouldn't be doing. Will he come back alive? Just like that, Michael Mu decisively abandoned his lifelong manuscript... At three o'clock sharp, I found myself in the crowded intensive care ward again and broke into the small machine room. Six days later I learned that this was the last time I saw Michael Mu alive.
The pale fluorescent light shines. The nurse at the door said that the bronchoscope had just been suctioned and removed. I no longer paid attention to the equipment in the room, and went straight to the bedside: Michael Mu, his eyes were slightly open, not looking, tears were gathering in the corners of his eyes, and his lips were curled inward, opening and closing under the vertical and horizontal restraints of the tape and the intubation tube. Standing, like a fish being taken out of the water, struggling to breathe. Due to this difficult breathing, his entire face raised his chin from the pillow in a posture I had never seen before: this was the only time he showed suffering and struggle after being admitted to the hospital. But he clearly didn't know his own struggle. Only a person who has completely lost consciousness and strength will have his body--mainly the part connecting the neck and head--subjected to fixed spasms.
I burst into tears, angry at this face. Michael Mu ignored it, and just held the same posture with his face held high, panting, and stubbornly destroyed all my memories of this appearance in front of me.
I returned to Beijing at night and started writing the obituary. I've never done anything like this. My husband didn't have an employer, so Xiang Hong said, "You write it." Six years ago, Michael Mu's book was first published in mainland China. I wrote a promotion, but now it's my husband's obituary. I didn't know how to continue writing the column of year and date of death for a long time. "You must keep thinking of death," the gentleman said again and again. I have been thinking about it since I was a child, and now I want to tell my husband: It’s really not about “thinking” that is the reason for death, it’s about the machine room.
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