The Ramp

Dashan is forty-two this year, and he lives in two old tiled rooms at the edge of Nanwa Village, facing the road. Ten years ago he fell from a scaffold in the provincial city; two sections of his spine snapped, and from that day his lower body has known nothing. The foreman, surnamed Zhao, paid out a little over ten thousand yuan and vanished; the work-injury certification took three years of running, and in the end it settled into a flimsy disability card — three hundred and twenty yuan a month in injury allowance, plus his mother's subsistence grant.

His hands still have strength. Years before, he had studied two winters under the town's old clock-maker, and so he set a low table at the village mouth and mended clocks, cut keys, patched umbrellas. One hand turned the wheelchair, the other turned a screwdriver, and on a good day he made a dozen yuan.

The slope at Nanwa's mouth was the threshold he crossed every day. When the village office was newly built, a plaque reading "Model Accessible Village" hung on its wall, and a cement ramp was genuinely laid at the entrance. But the ramp was too steep, and it faced a row of carelessly parked electric scooters. Each time Dashan went up he had to have the scooters shifted one by one, then grip the wheel rims and inch upward. Once, in the rain, water pooled on the slope and the wheels slipped; he slid down chair and all and struck the curb, opening a cut on his cheekbone, blood and mud smearing half his face. A few young men passing laughed: "Uncle Dashan, your wheels are sturdier than an ox-cart." He said nothing, and wiped the blood away with his sleeve.

Hardest was the trip to town. His mother's legs had swollen for half a year, and he had to push himself to the clinic for her medicine. Before the town clinic's outpatient building stood eight blue-stone steps; a ramp did exist to the side, but it was blocked year-round by a scrap collector's tricycle, and half a man's height of cardboard was piled at its mouth. Dashan shouted from the foot of the steps for a long while before the old gatekeeper ambled over and pushed the trike aside a crack. "Your wheelchair won't do up there anyway," the old man said. "Inside there's no room to turn, and the toilet's on the second floor — how would you manage?" Dashan said, "I only need to fetch medicine downstairs." The old man gave him a look and went back to his sun.

That June, Dashan's bedsores festered and his seat burned. He could bear it no longer and had two grain-buyers haul him, chair and all, up the eight steps. In the corridor a nurse glimpsed the wheelchair and frowned: "How do we wheel this in? Wait outside." She left him at the corridor's end with no shelter. The call screen flickered a long while; when his number came, a young doctor asked two questions and wrote a slip: "Get an X-ray, second floor." Dashan said, "I can't reach the second floor." The doctor looked up, as if noticing his legs only then, paused, and said, "Then go home for now; I'll give you the antibiotic shot down here." After the shot Dashan sat in the corridor and heard a woman's labor cries next door, a child's laugh, a nurse calling "next." He thought suddenly that every door in this building had been left for those who stand.

Earlier, the neighbor Aunt Wang had spoken for him to a widow from the next village. The woman came to look him over, saw the wheelchair in the corner and his trouser legs hanging empty, and left within ten minutes. Aunt Wang later passed word: "She says she can't nurse him." Dashan smiled, and after that never spoke of marriage. At night he often sat in the yard listening to crickets, thinking how his lower body could not even feel pain, yet made others ache first.

His mother died not long after. The funeral Dashan received in the courtyard from his wheelchair. The villagers came, bowed, and on leaving all skirted his chair, as if skirting a well.

This year the county launched its civilized-city campaign, and the table at the village mouth was confiscated by the urban management, cited as "harming the city's appearance." Dashan asked, "Where am I to work?" The officer flipped through his disability card and said, "Your case should be filed with the federation; you can go anywhere." Dashan did go, to the federation. The new civic center was grand; on its glass door were pasted the characters for "accessible," and at the entrance a gently sloped ramp had truly been laid. He rolled up the ramp, reached the door, and found it was sensor-operated: he stopped two paces out and it would not open; he edged forward and it beeped and opened, but beyond it lay another threshold — a three-centimeter marble lip laid for grandeur. His chair caught on the lip, unable to enter, awkward to retreat.

A security guard came, looked at him, and said, "The system is under maintenance today; come another day." Dashan said, "I only wanted to ask whether I could be fitted for a new chair." The guard said, "That needs the leader's approval; leave a number." Dashan sat a long while beyond the lip. The glass door mirrored his own shape; behind him the plaque "Model Accessible Site" blazed. He understood at last: the ramps, the plaques, the sensor doors of this city were none of them meant for him; they existed only so the city need not be embarrassed.

He turned the chair and went down the ramp. The slope was gentle and he feared gathering speed, so he gripped the hand-rims and braked. But at the daily threshold at the ramp's foot, the scooters were parked bumper to bumper again. He stopped there, looking at the tangle of wheels on the ground, and did not move for a long time.

Near dusk a young woman with a child passed. The child pointed and said, "Mama, why does that man sit in that chair?" The woman pulled the child away and hurried off. Dashan did not hear the rest; he only saw the child turn and look back at him as she was dragged away.

That one look was about the color of the sky he had seen, ten years before, lying on the scaffold and looking up.