ICU monitors

As the glass door to the ICU closed, Ah Yu's shadow was pinned to the wall by the smell of disinfectant. Amid the rhythmic beeping of the monitor, Zhong Hua's face was as white as freshly unwrapped gauze; the ventilator tube peeked from between her lips, each movement accompanied by the soft popping of bubbles. The nurse had just changed the IV drip; the clear liquid trickled down the tube into the vein on the back of her hand, like a frozen snake.

"Blood oxygen has dropped again." The head nurse's pen scribbled sharply on the whiteboard. Ah Yu stared at the fluctuating numbers on the screen—92, 91, 90. The green waveform suddenly trembled, like the surface of a lake ruffled by the wind. He remembered three hours earlier in the mudslide, when Zhong Hua was trapped under a broken tree trunk, and he had also suddenly held his breath in the same way.

She was still clutching her interview notebook in her hand, the plastic cover swollen from being soaked in mud. When Ah Yu squatted down to pick it up, she found a ginkgo leaf specimen tucked inside, its veins gleaming gold under the emergency light—it was a gift from him last autumn, when she was squatting in front of the Gu's Building interviewing sanitation workers, ginkgo sap clinging to her eyelashes.

"Mr. Chen, family members are not allowed to touch the patient's things." The nurse's voice drifted over through the mask. Ah Yu hurriedly stuffed the interview notebook into the pocket of her white coat, her fingertips touching a hard object—Zhong Hua's voice recorder, the switch still stuck in the "record" mode, dark red mud embedded in the dents on the body.

At three in the morning, the monitor's alarm suddenly blared. When Ah Yu rushed to the bedside, Zhong Hua's fingers were digging into the sheets, his knuckles white as the tiles on the ICU ceiling. The moment the doctor rushed in with the defibrillator, he saw a golden glint in her hair—the ginkgo leaf specimen had somehow slipped into her hair bun, like a stubborn medal.

“Her intracranial pressure is still unstable.” The doctor’s rubber rubbing sound as he took off his gloves was painful to the ears. “If there were a familiar sound to stimulate her, perhaps she could be awakened.” When Ah Yu took out her interview notebook, a note fell out between the pages. Zhong Hua’s delicate handwriting was stained blue by water: “Final draft of the interview. I owe Ah Yu a celebratory drink.”

He sat in the folding chair and turned to the first page. A hint of gardenia scent suddenly mingled with the smell of disinfectant—Zhong Hua's usual perfume, now wafting from the floral pillowcase she was using. She'd sprayed it before her interview with Gu's, and he'd teased her then, "Using floral scents as weapons when negotiating with capitalists?"

"A True Account of the Survival of Low-Level Employees at the Gu Group, by reporter Zhong Hua." Ah Yu's voice drifted through the empty hospital room. He cleared his throat and traced the marks of her revisions with his fingertips—"exploitation" was crossed out and replaced with "imbalance of labor rights," next to which was a simple drawing of a crying face.

The monitor's sound seemed to be a beat behind. He continued reading, and when he got to the security guard who was owed wages, Zhong Hua's eyelashes trembled, as if a butterfly had landed on them. Ah Yu remembered the day she was interviewing; the security guard had secretly slipped her a USB drive, saying it contained evidence of Gu's tax evasion. At the time, she had hidden the USB drive in the lining of her thermos, and when she returned, the thermos was still damp with cold sweat.

"...The night shift nurse told me that an intern collapsed in the corridor after working 72 consecutive hours. Surveillance footage showed that the last document he looked at before collapsing was Gu's newly signed overseas labor contract." Ah Yu's Adam's apple bobbed. The handwriting in this section was blurred by water, and tear stains were faintly visible along the edges of the pages. He suddenly remembered what Zhong Hua had said when he shoved this interview notebook into his arms during the mudslide: "Don't let the truth be buried."

The blood oxygen level stopped at 88. A nurse came in to adjust the ventilator and whispered, "She has a strong will to live. The machine just showed that her brain waves were active." Ah Yu stared at Zhong Hua's mouth with the tube inserted and suddenly noticed a small wound on her lower lip—it was from the corner of the recording pen. At the time, she had hidden the pen in her collar to record Gu Yanting's threats, and when she came back, there were red marks all over her collarbone.

Tucked inside the interview transcript was a sticky note, written in lipstick: "The person I want to thank most—" followed by a blank space, only a long, drawn-out scratch. Ah Yu's fingertips hovered over it, recalling the press conference three months ago, when Zhong Hua was pushed down by Gu Yanting's bodyguard, and he rushed over to shield her in his arms. At that time, her recording pen fell to the ground, rolling to Lin Wanqing's feet, and the president's wife, who always wore white gloves, for the first time lost her composure and picked it up with bare hands.

“The person I want to thank the most,” Ah Yu’s voice suddenly went hoarse. Amid the beeping of the monitor, he heard his own heart pounding in his chest, “is the girl who stuffed my interview notebook into my arms during the mudslide.”

Zhong Hua's eyelashes suddenly trembled violently, and a tear slid down her cheek and into her temple, leaving a small dark dot on the pillowcase. Ah Yu hurriedly wiped it away, and as her fingertips touched Zhong Hua's warm skin, the numbers on the monitor began to jump up—89, 90, 91.

He continued reading, and when he got to the part about Gu's company using substandard building materials to build employee dormitories, Zhong Hua's fingers curled up, as if trying to grasp something. Ah Yu gently placed her hand on top of his, and her fingertips immediately hooked around his little finger, like grasping a lifeline. He remembered her once saying with a smile, "Investigative journalists all need to have a body of steel." But at this moment, her knuckles were as soft as cotton, and there was still dirt stuck in her fingernails.

As dawn broke, the interview transcript reached its final page. Zhong Hua's blood oxygen level stabilized at 95, and the ventilator's rate slowed, like the sea after a storm. Ah Yu flipped to the back cover and found a photograph inside—a group photo of them in front of the Gu's Building. Zhong Hua was holding a camera, the lens pointed at him, while he was looking at Lin Wanqing behind him. The president's wife stood in the revolving door, clutching a torn document, the fragments fluttering like white butterflies in the wind.

"Final draft completed on October 17, 2023, 72 hours after the Gu's fire." As Ah Yu finished reading the last line, the monitor suddenly emitted a calm, long beep. A nurse rushed in to check and exclaimed with delight, "He's breathing on his own again!"

When he looked down, he noticed that Zhong Hua's eyes were open a crack, her pupils reflecting his image. Her lips moved, and air leaked from the ventilator tube, making a muffled sound. Ah Yu leaned closer and heard her say in an almost inaudible voice, "Fix...fix it..."

He suddenly remembered the lipstick note. Ah Yu took out a pen from his pocket—it was Zhong Hua's, the cap still stained with her lip gloss, a dusty rose color—and he trembled as he wrote three words after "the person I want to thank the most," then held the paper up to her eyes.

Zhong Hua's eyelashes trembled one last time, but this time they didn't fall. The monitor's voice softened, like someone humming a gentle tune. Ah Yu gazed at the morning light streaming through the window and suddenly smelled a faint scent of ginkgo leaves, unsure whether it was coming from her hair or from her mud-soaked coat.

His fingertips pressed on the three words on the paper, feeling the paper slightly warm, as if a fire was burning underneath—that was his name, the last name Zhong Hua shouted in the mudslide.