The Gray Lung

Wei Changshun was eighteen the year he followed the old stonemason from his village into the quartz quarry in the hills. The mine kept no contracts; it handed out temporary badges stamped with a red seal and paid in cash at month's end. He counted himself lucky. Other young men screwed bolts in the factories of the south, while he swung a hammer among his own hills, earning no less and still able to tend his mother's fields.

In the early years his body was iron. He could shoulder two baskets of stone up the slope in a single breath, and the men called him Iron Lungs. He liked to laugh: lungs of iron, he said; the dust you swallow, you shit it back out.

The third year he began to cough at night. He blamed the wind and washed it down with rough liquor. The tenth year he had to stop and gasp halfway up a slope, but he thought nothing of it, for which miner in the hills did not cough? The fifteenth year, black grit appeared in the phlegm he spat, as if mixed with ink. He kept it in an enamel mug, meaning to show the barefoot doctor when he went home, then forgot; the mug with its dust settled under the bed.

At the turn of his fortieth year the quarry closed. The owner sold the machinery and walked away, and the buildings stood empty. Wei was forty-nine. He had put his savings toward the down payment on a flat in the county town for his son, and went home to the village himself. He thought he might finally rest, but his breath grew shorter.

At first he wheezed on level ground; then he could no longer lie down. The moment he lay flat a millstone seemed to press his chest and he saw stars. He sat up all night against the earthen wall, a pillow behind his back, like a stone statue everyone had forgotten to carry away. While his mother lived she said, "You are only tired; rest and you will mend." After she died no one said it anymore; only his own coughing remained.

His son, Wei Xiaojun, delivered water in the provincial city. When he heard, he sent three hundred yuan and told his father to see the county hospital. The films came back, and the doctor pointed to two pale gray shadows on the screen: his lungs were caked with nodules. This was pneumoconiosis, the doctor said. He must go to the provincial occupational-disease hospital to have it certified; only certification could force the contractor to pay.

Wei stuffed the films into his coat and rode to the city again. He remembered the quarry in the northern hollow, but the hollow was gone, leveled and replaced by a bright shopping mall whose glass walls mirrored his old work clothes. He asked the guard at the gate; the guard said the land had been taken three years before. What quarry? He had never heard of one.

Wei dug the old badge from the bottom of his trunk; the red seal had faded to pale pink. He found the contractor's number and dialed, a dead line. Through others he learned the contractor had later opened a sand yard, which had also failed; the man had gone south and vanished without a trace.

At the provincial hospital a young woman at the window went through his papers and shook her head. To certify an occupational disease, she said, they needed an employment history sealed by the employer, pre-employment and in-service physicals, proof that those years of dust had been breathed for that one unit. He had none of it. They could not write the four characters "occupational disease." Treat it as an ordinary lung illness, she said.

An ordinary lung illness meant no money. Wei rode the long bus home, coughing so hard he knocked the enamel mug over; black phlegm splashed the aisle, and no one came near.

He went to the township justice office and said he meant to sue. The director looked through what little he had and said the case was thin, the odds poor; first register at the petitions office. The petitions office gave him a receipt and said wait for notice. The notice never came. He went twice more; the third time a new face at the window said this matter was not their remit, try the human-resources bureau. The bureau said first prove the labor relationship. And so he circled back to where he began.

Wei Xiaojun brought his father to the provincial city and rented a basement room, meaning to scrape together money for a great hospital. But the great hospital's number needed two weeks of waiting, and the deposit two ten-thousand yuan. Xiaojun earned one yuan and two tenths per bucket of water; he worked it out and set the bucket down in the stairwell.

That winter Wei's face turned the color of a purple eggplant. At night he sat and gasped, and from his throat came a sound like a bellows, each pull longer than the last. Xiaojun kept watch and heard his father say suddenly, "My lungs, every stone I cut for them, grain by grain, it is all inside." Then his head tilted, he leaned against the wall, and was still.

The man was gone; the bill was not. The hospital form still lay in the drawer, the column for the employer's opinion blank and glaring white. Xiaojun meant to throw out the mug of black phlegm from under his father's bed; he lifted the lid and a smell of wet earth rose, his father's evidence kept half a lifetime, recognized by no one in the end.

He carried it to the tap, turned the water on, and the gray sludge spun and ran down the drain. Upstairs the shopping mall blazed with light; behind the glass walls people chose their clothes, none of them knowing that the foundations of this city held forty years of one old man's dust.

The water cleaned the mug, and cleaned away the evidence. Only the blank column remains to remember him: in this world some men cut the stone for an entire city, and not one of them will sign their name.