Feeling a bit sheepish about being treated to a bowl of noodles and an injection by an aristocratic woman, Gao Yang strained to sit up. After stepping barefoot onto the cold, damp cement floor, his head swimming, he stood wobbily, his injured foot so numb it felt as if he were stepping on cotton. He picked up the plastic pail, which wasn’t particularly heavy but stank horribly, and tried to hold it at arm’s length. Unfortunately, he wasn’t up to the task, and each time it bumped against him it splashed its stinking contents onto his bare leg.
The sun’s rays were blinding, his eyes ached unbelievably, and his face was awash with tears. After a moment, his eyes stopped hurting, but he still couldn’t get his arms and legs to stop quaking; so he halted, put down the pail, and grasped a post to steady himself and catch his breath. His respite was short-lived: a guard at the end of the corridor screamed at him, “No pails on the floor!” Frantically he picked it up and fell in line behind other prisoners carrying similar pails. At the end of the corridor they turned southwest, toward a little room with walls of corrugated metal and wormy planks, one of which sported the word “Men” in a red circle. Dozens of pail-toting prisoners lined up in single file waiting to enter the room. One came out, another went in, over and over.
When it was his turn, he walked inside, barefoot, and was immediately ankle-deep in a sickening mixture of mud and human waste. An open pit filled the center of the outhouse, and it was all he could do to keep from falling dizzily into it as he dumped his load. The other prisoners lined up beside a rusty water tap near the outhouse to clean their pails. The water came out weakly, like the stream of a little boy pissing into the air. The prisoners swabbed their pails with a balding short-handled broom, as if reaming out their own entrails. He felt like puking, and could nearly see the stringy noodles squirm around his stomach, chased by golden fried eggs. Clenching his teeth, he forced back the soggy lump that had risen to his throat. I can’t throw up. I mustn’t waste good food like that.
Before swabbing out his pail when he reached the tap, Gao Yang stuck his injured foot under the water to remove an accumulation of filth he didn’t dare look at. The man behind thumped him in the rear with his pail. “What the hell are you so picky about?” he growled. “This is no bathhouse!”
He turned and was face to face with a clean-shaven middle-aged inmate with large, jaundiced eyes and crinkled skin — a shriveled face that looked like a soybean soaked in water, then set out to dry. Frightened and chastened, Gao Yang excused himself pathetically: “Elder Brother, I’m new here … don’t know the rules … injured foot—”
The jaundiced-eyed inmate cut him short. “Speed it up, damn it! Exercise period’s almost over.”
Gao Yang hastily rinsed off his feet — the skin on his injured left foot was a ghostly white — then hastily scrubbed the inside of his pail.
Exhausted by the time he returned the refuse pail to its place in the wall, he could scarcely believe that in the space of twenty-four hours a vigorous man like him had been turned into a worthless, panting shell of a human being. The brief stay outside his cell made him aware of how foul the air was inside. He heard a rattle deep down in his chest and was confronted with thoughts of death. I can’t die now, he thought. He steadied himself and moved out through the still-open door into the light of the corridor, a vantage point that gave him a better sense of the prison layout.
Each end of the long, narrow corridor featured a steel cage manned by an armed guard. He spotted two small doors in the gray southern wall of the now-empty corridor, and wondered where the other prisoners were.
“Number Nine,” the guard at the western station called to him, “through that door.”
Doing as he was told, he emerged into the glorious outdoors, or, more exactly, an open-air cage around a concrete slab whose length corresponded to the corridor, but was some thirty feet wide and a good ten or fifteen feet high. Thick bluish steel ribs strung between rust-spotted steel posts formed the barrier between the prisoners and the land beyond the cage, which was planted with greens, potatoes, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Female guards were out picking cucumbers. Beyond the garden area rose an imposing gray wall topped with barbed wire, which reminded him of what he’d heard as a child, that prison walls are equipped with high-voltage wires that electrocute anything that comes into contact with them, even a bird.
