Authors: Andy Oakes
Tasks performed, as if they were the cement between the bricks … team members broke away, returning to the sluice room. Lockers opening. Gowns discarded. Some moving back out to the compound in a procession following the organ packs. The Zhishengji thudding into life. Rotors slicing through air and arc-light. Wind, dust, and thunder … it rose out of the grip of the floodlit compound. Wind, dust, thunder … abating. Lost in the night, darkness closing around it in a tight fist. Moving north, over the city. Nothing left of what had occurred except the witness of green tail lights fading by the second.
*
The operating room was empty, just Piao, just Wu. And on the tables, holed and discarded … two white bodies. For the first time the Senior Investigator noticing their faces. Young, early twenties. Too young for age’s etch of lines. For grey hair. For an instant, just an instant, the Senior Investigator closing his eyes. Monochrome stills welded together in photoflood blue-white, filling his inner vision. Eight faces of mud. Eight bodies of mud. Lacerations, holed flesh, eyeless eyes … as the shit hued mud was washed aside. Piao opened his eyes, the breeze from the air-conditioning across his teeth in a sickening taste of iodine, hibiscrub, and spent helicopter fuel.
“This is what happened to the eight that we found in the Huangpu, isn’t it?”
Wu, slowly peeling back his surgical gloves.
“They had their organs stolen and you knew, didn’t you, doctor?”
Raising his head, his spectacle lenses blazing white in the operating lights.
“ ‘Harvested’. We call it ‘harvesting’ the organs.”
“Harvesting? No, doctor. No. Harvesting is about wheat, summer days and working together in the fields and trying to get a peek down the front of the girl’s work overalls. That is harvesting …”
Piao waved a hand toward the bodies.
“… this is not harvesting. This is murder. This is rape.”
Wu removed his theatre hat, his spectacles, polishing their lenses with it. Saying nothing. The Senior Investigator took the glasses from Wu’s hands, holding them up to his eyes. A world of smeared, dragged colours. And the bodies, melted into baby pink blobs. The sculptured crimson strokes of the scalpels diffused, whispered away. Piao removed a blemish from one of the lenses with a pinch from his shirt front and handed the spectacles back to the old man; his voice low, calm, but with a cut-throat edge of purpose.
“Tell me what you fucking know about this harvesting, or we will complete our sightseeing drive across the Yangpu Bridge.”
Wu leant against the stainless steel of the operating table, his cuffs brushing dead skin. The holed, dissected body, disregarded … just so much waste by-product, to be discarded.
Somebody’s child. Somebody’s son.
“People like you.”
The old man averted his eyes from Piao, replacing his glasses.
“People like me, what doctor?”
“People like you are smug. You are young, in good health. You think nothing of those who are not. Can you even imagine what it must be like to suffer from kidney failure … to be told to go home, wait for the telephone to ring to tell you that a replacement kidney has been found? And all the time, knowing that such a call will never come. Or for your eyesight to slowly degenerate into a blur, into blindness. Knowing that with a transplanted cornea you could see your wife once more. The faces of your grandchildren …”
The old man waved an angry arm across the corpse.
“… this is what that is about. Giving life. Giving hope.”
“No doctor. This is not about giving life. This is about taking it away. Giving no hope …”
He moved closer to Wu, so that the old man could not mistake the look in his eyes.
“… for fuck sake, look at them and tell me that this is about life, that this is about hope?”
Wu looked away.
“And what should we do, waste these organs, incinerate them … is that what you want? Be sensible, be realistic. We execute over ten thousand prisoners a year, their bodies belong to the State, we can do what we wish with them. And what we wish, is to use them in a responsible way so that out of bad can come some good. I ask you, Senior Investigator, is it unreasonable that out of so many necessary deaths we should choose to give so much life?”
“Tell me how it works. Tell me how we can give so much life to others from death?”
Piao’s eyes on the pale face of the prisoner, hardly able to accept that it was the man whom he had seen being dragged from the detention block and shot in front of him. A face without eyes. So much humanity ebbed away with their loss. Hardly able to accept that this face had ever been loved, kissed.
“I do not understand what you require, Senior Investigator?”
Moving closer still. So close, the doctor would be able to steal his breath; it would smell of anger restrained and in chains. It would be of a sadness that no words could ever colour in.
“I want details. Everything that you know about this trade, I want to know. Not your viewpoint. Not a lecture on the ethics of it. Details. Just details.”
Wu removed his glasses, fiddling with them nervously. Details … there is pain in just details. The veneer rubbed down to the bare boards of truth.
“You must realise that what I am going to tell you is a state secret. It is knowledge that few people in our country know. It is knowledge that is not known beyond our country. Ethics committees outside of the People’s Republic would not understand. They would not be able to dissociate a post-execution process from the execution process itself. In our country it is a different situation.”
“How different?”
The old man’s finger traced along the edge of the stainless steel operating table.
“Prisoners who are to be executed are not asked for their consent before donating organs, neither are their relatives. Families of the prisoners are held under house arrest until the execution has been completed, until they are allowed to come and receive the ashes. They will not be told that organs have been removed. In the rare cases in which relatives are asked for their consent, if they do not give it they will be threatened with large bills for the prisoner’s food and for the cost of the bullet that will be used in the execution and for other expenses …”
The old man paused before continuing, waiting for the sharpness of Piao’s tongue. He said nothing.
“… once a prisoner is shot, from a legal point of view he is no longer a human being. He is just an object that is now the property of the State. The authorities will have known what blood group he is. They will have already matched his organs up with a recipient for them.”
“But they wouldn’t be able to plan that far ahead. The execution would damage organs. Bullets don’t obey orders.”
Piao’s gaze drifting to the far table. The body. The shot received at the base of the skull, exiting through where the left cheek had been. A crater of horrifying size. The eye, the nose, half of the mouth, teeth, jaw … consumed by its ravenous hunger. A ragged bite, the colour of a car’s tail lights moving down a black tunnel.
“But some bullets do obey orders Senior Investigator.”
The understanding thumping Piao in the solar plexus. A hit and run leaving him breathless. Hardly able to form the words.
“The prisoners are shot to order, aren’t they? If the surgeons want their eyes, they are shot in the back. If they want their kidneys, they are shot in the head.”
Wu moved across the room.
“The demand for organs is extraordinary. At present there are more than two thousand provincial centres in the country with prisons that carry out executions. All of the organs from these we can use, but to do so we have to be organised, professional. It is necessary that we plan ahead.”
“So this is planning ahead?”
“You fail to understand Senior Investigator. If you require a kidney we can obtain one for you within four hours, harvested to your personal medical details. A prisoner shot at 11am … you will receive your kidney by 2 pm. In any other country in the world you would have to wait for days, weeks, months, maybe even years. In most countries the wait would be too long and you would die.”
The old man cleaned his glasses once more; they didn’t need cleaning.
“We have sick people coming to us from all over the world. Coming to China. Coming from Europe, America, Asia. For a single kidney they will pay up to one hundred thousand dollars in cash. Imagine Piao, it is regenerating our hospitals. It is bringing many, many millions of dollars into our economy from people who would simply die in their own countries.”
He attempted a smile, the result, pathetic.
“The eight that we pulled from the river, you recognised them, doctor, didn’t you?”
“I recognised what had been done to them. I recognised that someone had tried to cover this up by mutilating them.”
“You recognised them, didn’t you?”
“Only four of them I recognised.”
“Which four?”
No answer. Carefully placing the spectacles across the bridge of his nose.
“So I shall tell you, doctor, shall I? You recognised the four Chinese who were executed in Gongdelin. Yongshe. Feng. Decai. Ziyang.”
“Yes, I knew them. I was the one who pronounced them dead after their executions at Virtue Forest. The last that I saw of them was as they were being loaded into a lorry for cremation.”
“They weren’t used for organ donation?”
“No. They were unsuitable for harvesting.”
The thump of rotor blades beating air invaded the room from the courtyard; a resonance humming through the stainless steel of the operating tables and the glass fronted instrument cabinets.
“A blighted crop, yes, doctor? It must have hurt to have to reject the few hundred thousands of dollars that their organs would have brought to our needy economy.”
“There have been some problems. Screening. Tissue matching. Our quality control has had to improve as many of our prisoners are executed for drug abuse and can carry hepatitis and other viral infections.”
Quality control, the sound bites of the report writer, the economist. They were talking about somebody’s child, somebody’s son. And yet Piao could only think of factories, of cars, refrigerators … of bicycles.
“And what did your quality control say about these four doctor?”
“There was drug abuse.”
“And?”
“Hepatitis …”
Wu halted momentarily, weighing up the words before they dripped from his lips.
“… one had HIV.”
The Senior Investigator whistled. Long, low …
“But Doctor, HIV doesn’t exist in the People’s Republic of China. It is a disease of the capitalist system.”
“You are correct, officially, Senior Investigator.”
“And un-officially?”
“Un-officially, HIV does not care about political systems. It does not stop at checkpoints. It is becoming a problem that is ‘awkward’.”
“Awkward? An interesting description of HIV, Doctor Wu. But it’s not the only ‘awkward’ problem, is it?”
Piao walked to the door, opening it … thundering noise, untethered, piling in upon them. Switching off the main theatre lights; the large reflectors diluting from white, to yellow, to orange, to black. Wu caught in the darkness, fumbling, following the Senior Investigator’s words out into the corridor.
“Four people that you witnessed being executed, Doctor Wu, and sent for cremation. Too infected for their organs to be used for transplantation. And then they are found on the Huangpu’s foreshore, organs stolen. Bodies mutilated to hide what they have been through. Unsuitable donors. Damaged goods.”
They were back in the compound, but Piao was thinking of a street market, any one of a hundred street markets. Overripe fruit. Bruised vegetables. A braid of sharp voices. A boy again, hand in hand with his mother. From her purse, counting out the fen coins for the damaged and dented tins sorted from the series of large bins. Damaged tins, dented tins … always someone willing to buy. Cut price offers. No questions asked.
Piao’s lips to his cupped hands, cupped hands to the old man’s ear.
“You have a black market, doctor. Someone stealing the organs that you steal. Someone who doesn’t give a fuck about quality control. Someone who will take organs that shouldn’t be taken. But there were four others who were dead on the foreshore that night doctor, also robbed of their organs. Three were foreigners, remember? Three who were not a part of our judicial system and who were not executed by the State. You recognised that also, doctor. Another reason why you didn’t want anything to do with the case, Senior Police Scientist and you wouldn’t even fucking touch them.”
“I know nothing of these things, Senior Investigator. Nothing about black markets. Nothing about what you found on the foreshore of the river that night. I only know of our state policy to help those who cannot help themselves.”
Another Zhishengji lifting slowly, sluggishly, as if afraid of heights. Scattering the compound in a strobe of blue-green, orange-red lights.
“What happens when demand outstrips supply, doctor, do you execute more prisoners to make up the shortfall of organs? Make laws that apply the death sentence to lesser crimes? Or just kill anyone who happens to get in the way?”
Wu pointed to the Zhishengji as it moved across the roof of the far detention block. The night sky taking up its spewed colours and dampening them.
“There are three patients waiting in the Number 7 People’s Hospital in Zhengzhou. Two are high-ranking army officials, the other a businessman from Hong Kong. By morning they will have received their organs. Their new lives will have begun. Imagine, Senior Investigator, how they will feel? Imagine how you would feel? Like a new pocket watch on a golden chain of good luck.”
For an instant, before anything moved, no sound, no colour. The Senior Investigator staring through the old man’s spectacle lenses and deep into his eyes. The old man actually believed his own words.
“Yes, Doctor Wu.” Piao whispered, “… a pocket watch on a golden chain with a broken heart hanging from each link.”
*
A cut of headlights through darkness. A sweep of a turn. Reverse lights bleaching brickwork as the second ambulance backed into the inner compound, pulling up hard against open double doors. A stretcher loaded carefully into its interior; a cocoon of chrome and white aertex blankets. Just a prisoner’s face visible. Pale. A pin-cushion of cropped hair. Heavily sedated … his only movement, the roll of the REM snared eyeballs under their lids. The doctor shifted uncomfortably beside Piao, waiting for the question as the stalk of wheat awaits the scythe.