Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Her sobs were heartbreaking; hearing them made me feel like crying myself. What were we doing here? Oh, God. Look at us. I blinked up at the ceiling and swallowed.

  “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I lied, still stroking her hair.

  At that moment, there was a knocking. An officious iron-haired woman with spectacles and a canvas jacket strode into our room, accompanied by the elderly former English teacher. “Hello,” the teacher said again. “How do you do?” She pointed to the woman in the canvas jacket, who was carrying a cumbersome leather satchel. “Doctor.”

  Claire visibly relaxed. She sniffled, rubbed her eyes, and struggled to sit up in the bed. “Nee how,” she said weakly.

  The doctor acknowledged her stiffly. Picking up Claire’s damp wrist, she took her pulse. She felt the glands on either side of Claire’s neck. She pressed the back of her palm to Claire’s forehead. She shook her head and said something to the teacher.

  “Hot,” said the teacher.

  Claire nodded, rubbed her stomach with exaggerated motions, then mimed throwing up and shivering. The doctor pointed to the bottle of Tylenol on the nightstand questioningly. “Yes, yes,” we both said.

  “Two,” I said, holding up my fingers in what I hoped was the Chinese counting style. It occurred to me that if dialects were regional, maybe hand gestures were, too. What if here in Dinghai the gesture for two really meant seven?

  Reaching into her satchel, the doctor pulled out a thermometer. She tucked it under Claire’s armpit and stood there timing it with her watch. From outside came another spitting sound, then someone yelling sharply across the yard. I looked at Claire and smiled weakly; she nodded at me with relief. We were in the hands of a professional now.

  The doctor plucked out the thermometer and showed it to us.

  It read 40.1.

  “What’s 40.1?” I asked.

  Claire groaned. “It’s Celsius. What’s that in terms of Fahrenheit?”

  Goddamned President Nixon. Back when I was in kindergarten, his presidential commission had promised us that America would go metric by the time we were in high school. Now I tilted the thermometer and held it up to the light to see if maybe it had the Fahrenheit gradations on the other side—which, of course, it didn’t.

  Throughout my schooling, I’d been a stellar math student. I loved the puzzle, the symmetry, the intrinsic justice of mathematics: the fact that what you did to the numerator you had to do to the denominator. I loved its certainties. Right answers were concrete, immune to opinions. Best still, I loved that I was great at it. The quadratic equation. Sine, cosine, tangent. The Pythagorean theorem.

  And, yes converting Fahrenheit into centigrade. I couldn’t tell you how many times in class I’d been required to memorize this formula, and how adept I’d become at computing it in my head.

  F - 32 × 5/9 = C. For years, I’d carried this around in my brain, where it took up mental space along with television jingles, the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, and the calorie count of assorted fruits. Yet of course, now that I finally needed it—now that I had to unpack it from its cerebral mothballs and put it to use—I had no fucking idea how the inverse was supposed to go. If F - 32 × 5/9 = C, than what was F? Wasn’t it C + 32 × 9/5… or was it 32 × 5/9 + C? In my panic, I forgot. Frantically I scribbled calculations on the cover of our guidebook. “Goddamn it,” I said. According to what I came up with, Claire’s fever was either 129.7 or 57.8 degrees Fahrenheit, both of which were obviously beyond wrong.

  But the doctor, who didn’t need to remember any convoluted formula she’d learned back in high school, took one look at the thermometer and said simply, “Hospital.”

  “Hospital?” Claire said.

  The doctor and the teacher both nodded.

  I looked at Claire uneasily. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” I said. “We have no idea what the hospitals are like here.”

  Claire swallowed and tugged the sleeping bag more tightly around her shoulders. Her teeth had started chattering. With her chin, she gestured around the stark hotel room with its lone metal chair, its one nightstand, its ice-cold plumbing. “It’s got to be better than this.” She trembled. “At least there someone will look after me.”

  “Hospital,” said the doctor again insistently. She and the schoolteacher reached over, yanked the sleeping bag off Claire, and pulled her abruptly to her feet. “Ow,” Claire said, rubbing her elbow.

  “Doctor say you very sick,” said the schoolteacher. “Must go hospital now.”

  The doctor picked up the pair of Timberlands Claire had kicked off beside the bed and thrust them at her.

  “You come now,” the teacher commanded. “You go to hospital.”

  Suddenly my hackles were up. I was back in the playground in Central Park, watching a little girl getting bullied. “Hey, don’t you be telling her what to do,” I snapped, sounding oddly like every New York City cabdriver and Puerto Rican homegirl I’d ever grown up around. “You get your hands off her.”

  The teacher simply ignored me. “You very, very sick,” she cried shrilly, tugging at Claire’s arm. “You can no stay here. You go hospital.”

  “She doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to,” I yelled. The two women continued to prod and pull. Claire stood between them limply like a rag doll they were fighting over. “Uuughh, I don’t feel so good,” she groaned.

  “Wait here,” I commanded. The word hospital suddenly sounded ominous. “Don’t agree to anything, Claire,” I instructed. “Don’t even put your shoes on. I’ll be back in a sec.”

  I dashed out into the hallway and pounded on Gunter’s door. “Gunter,” I hollered. “Gunter, we need you.”

  Gunter opened his door abruptly. He was wearing his Windbreaker zipped all the way up to his chin. He had his rucksack on with the fistful of tea twigs poking out of the top, his passport holder dangling around his neck, and his little canvas carrying bag in one hand. He stepped out into the corridor, set down his bag, and methodically locked the door behind him. “Jah,” he said. “I was just coming to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye?” I said. “What? Where are you going?”

  Gunter reached down and picked up his bag again. “Today I am seeing Dinghai, and I am thinking that it is not being a very interesting place. So I have bought a new ticket for the ferry back to Shanghai.”

  “What? You’re leaving?” I said. “Now?”

  “I am feeling very lonely,” said Gunter.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Gunter, we need you.”

  “The ferry, she is leaving in half an hour. The hotel manager, she is driving me.”

  “Gunter,” I pleaded. “Please. Don’t leave. Claire is really sick, and the Chinese are insisting on taking her to the hospital, and the whole thing—”

  Gunter shrugged. “Tomorrow, there is maybe not being a ferry. It is very hard to get tickets here. They do not have tickets for foreigners. They are not used to us. So if I give up my ticket, maybe I cannot go back.”

  “But, Gunter, we’re really in trouble,” I pleaded. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t communicate with anyone.”

  Gunter shrugged again. “I am sorry, but the manager, she is waiting for me. She can only use the car one hour.”

  And with that, he turned and galumphed down the hall. At the elevator, seemingly as an afterthought, he turned and called back, “Please be telling Claire and Jonnie auf Wiedersehen for me.” Then he stepped inside the elevator. The jaws of it closed shut across him, and he was gone. Watching him disappear, standing alone in the narrow hallway, I suddenly flashed upon the Gone With the Wind video playing over and over onboard the Jin Jiang, upon Scarlett O’Hara at the end of part one, falling to her knees on the war-scorched earth utterly alone.

  ———

  “No, this is good. This is better,” Claire murmured as we sat in the back of the doctor’s tiny, rusted car. She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the spotted glass of the window.
“I’ll be more comfortable this way. I’ll get more attention.”

  The prospect of comfort seemed increasingly dubious to me. As the car bounced along the rutted road, the outskirts of Dinghai became visible. The countryside was stunning. The clouds had dissipated and the majestically lush emerald mountains were now ribboned with undulant light, as if reflected in a swimming pool. But once we entered the city, the streets themselves became a parched conglomerate of squat gray-stone houses and filthy cinder-block buildings. Women with faces like dried apples wore coolie hats and rough-sewn kerchiefs over their heads. They squatted in the dirt along the highway selling greasy machine parts, a few small green oranges, and woefully blackened bananas. Skeletal men and women trotted barefoot in the dust carrying enormous baskets of produce and charcoal dangling from yokes on their desiccated shoulders, or pulling carts laden with live geese, chickens, nets full of dried eel skin and shrimp. A few people pedaled rusty bicycles. The road was inexplicably littered with crab claws. All along it, piles of gravel, tile, and brick lay untouched before half-constructed buildings. A hot wind blew.

  The car lurched on, past lean-tos; past squat houses with scalloped roofs; past an entire family—father, mother, sister, brother—in identical Mao uniforms, trudging solemnly up a hill, farm implements slung over their shoulders. Dinghai was one of those rural farming communities that flouted the government’s “one child” policy; I could see six- and seven-year-old children helping to till the fields in the sun, their tiny backs bent forward like plowshares jutting into the furrowed land.

  Soon we were past the city, and the road gave way to the idyllic countryside again: gold and chartreuse fields, mountains framing the distance. The doctor maneuvered the car onto a rutted path. The frenzied wobble of the chassis seemed to stir Claire out of her sleep. The car continued down the road for about a hundred yards beneath a canopy of trees, then pushed into a clearing through an iron gate, scattering a bevy of chickens and whipping up a swirl of dust as it did. Abruptly, it stopped. The doctor and the former schoolteacher scrambled out, opened the passengers doors, and ushered Claire and me onto a wide dirt path.

  “Come,” commanded the teacher. She and the doctor led us up a stony incline. Claire and I followed reluctantly, but what else could we do? If Chinese officials give you orders, remember, you must obey. You must follow all instructions, rules, and laws. You must respect all representatives of the People’s Republic of China.

  Before us stood what looked like a wooden stable and concrete barracks with a shaded porch. At a short remove, nestled among tall grasses and silvery weeds, was another concrete structure and a crude wooden building on stilts that looked like a chicken coop.

  “Here,” the teacher commanded again. She and the doctor each placed a hand on the small of our backs and steered us toward the buildings.

  “I thought you said we were going to the hospital,” Claire said.

  “This hospital,” said the teacher.

  With that, both Claire and I stopped violently. “This is it?”

  “This hospital. You very sick. You go hospital now. You no stay in hotel. Hotel no good.”

  Only then did it become apparent that the hotel manager, the teacher, and even the doctor were not nearly so concerned about Claire’s illness as they were about the prospect of being held responsible for it. None of them wanted the shame of having word get back to the authorities that Dinghai’s first American guest had fallen ill on their watch.

  As we drew closer to the buildings, we saw that the structures were filthy: moldy walls streaked with mud and dirt. I’d grown up around poverty and slums, but this was of a different league—a different century, really. There wasn’t even a front entrance to speak of, only a rudimentary doorway cut out of the concrete. The interior felt like a cave: cool, clayey, dim. At the front desk a woman stood arguing with two farmhands. The floor was powdery cement. Directly to the right of the doorway, in full view of anyone who entered, an old, half-toothed woman lay uncovered on a wooden pallet with an oxygen tube taped beneath her nose. As she rasped and moaned, people walked past her as if she were a piece of furniture, all of them smoking, spitting, arguing, carrying baskets of food. Chickens hopped around the entryway, scratching and pecking at the dirt. From somewhere, another woman was screaming, and there was the smell of frying onions mingled with the sharp scent of ammonia.

  My impulse should have been to turn around then and simply run, but by that time, a peculiar sort of fatalism had set in. Claire and I were both so helpless and so clearly no longer in charge of ourselves; the surrealism of it all had overpowered us. We had surrendered now, and I was aware that my consciousness seemed to have bifurcated. I was both experiencing the situation of the hospital and passively observing it from a distance, as if I were watching myself on footage from a security camera.

  The doctor steered Claire out to the other concrete building across the pathway. I followed her, I suppose still hoping that maybe, just maybe, it would get better. Maybe, as with so many other Chinese facilities, there was a separate, superior facility for foreigners. But while the second building proved larger and brighter, there were still intensive care patients crowded onto beds in the reception area, chickens clucking, and hordes of people standing around coughing and spitting. At the sight of it, Claire buckled over. “Oh, God,” she groaned, clutching her stomach. “I need the bathroom. Now.”

  Taking her by the elbow, the doctor hustled her outside and around the back of the building. Hurrying after her, I descended with them into a rancid basement. The doctor kicked open a rough plywood door, then pointed Claire to a steaming trough gouged into the earth. Claire let out a cry and I ran back upstairs. “Someone,” I shouted, “is there even someone else here who speaks English?”

  How did you say it in Mandarin? Both Jonnie and Trevor had told me.

  “Ni shou ying wen ma?” I cried.

  The schoolteacher and the receptionist fell upon me then, each grabbing an arm. While the schoolteacher barked repeatedly, “You must sign papers,” the receptionist thrust a sheaf of printed forms at me covered with official-looking seals. The schoolteacher literally jammed a pen into my hand, motioning. “You sign, yes?”

  “I don’t know what they say,” I cried. “I can’t read Chinese.” There seemed to be pages and pages, line after line of characters blurring together into gibberish, a rain of cross-hatchings and pen strokes. For all I knew, signing them would authorize the Chinese to give Claire a frontal lobotomy. “I’m not signing anything,” I shouted.

  When the schoolteacher refused to let go of me, I yanked my arm away, slapped the papers down onto the desk, and threw down the pen. I might as well have detonated a stink bomb. As soon as the pen hit the floor, everyone began yelling at me: one nurse, another, the schoolteacher. Forms were being waved, pushed back into my face, papers creasing and flying. Chickens were hopping around clucking in an uproar. A male doctor appeared holding a syringe and pointing. Suddenly Claire had rematerialized; he and the female doctor were hustling her down a long hallway. All I could see was the back of her yellow-gold hair shaking like a mop and her voice crying “Ow! Ow!”

  “Claire,” I yelled.

  “You sign papers,” cried the schoolteacher, literally twisting my arm now in a panic, her fingers hot on my wrist.

  “Get away from me,” I bellowed, yanking my arm back. As I pushed past the nurses and paper-wavers, I knocked into a pallet of empty wooden stretchers, sending them clattering. Elbowing through the gawking spitters, smokers, and farmhands, I ran down the dank hallway after Claire, shouting, “Someone, please. Ni shou ying wen ma?” My voice broke then; tears dripped down my cheeks. I couldn’t find Claire; she’d been taken from me. This was far too much, way out of my league. “STOP” I yelled hoarsely down the empty corridor to no one, my voice dissolving into the damp vegetable air. “STOP!”

  “I’m sorry, milady. But may I be of some assistance to you?” a voice behind me said in breathless plummy English.


  An elegant middle-aged Chinese man in a three-piece pin-striped suit with a polka-dot necktie and a bowler hat appeared before me.

  “Excuse me?” I said, wild-eyed.

  Bowing every so slightly, he said in impeccable British-accented English, “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Victor. I am a friend with the Foreign Affairs Department. I wondered if I couldn’t perhaps be of service to you.”

  In my panic, I never stopped to ask Victor how he just “happened” to be nearby so fortuitously, where he’d learn to speak English so perfectly, or even how he’d known exactly where to find us. In fact I never stopped to question him at all; I accepted him as I accepted the rest of the situation, in all of its improbable, hallucinatory strangeness.

  “Yes, help me,” I cried. Trying to contain my hysteria, I explained the situation as best as I could. Victor appeared unfazed. Immediately he led me down the fetid hallway to an examination room. He seemed to know precisely where to go.

  In the dark concrete room, Claire appeared to have revived considerably. She was standing defiantly away from the doctors, flailing her arms anytime they tried to get near her. “NO HOSPITAL!” she hollered. “NO VACCINATION! HOTEL, NOW! DO YOU UNDERSTAND? HOTEL!”

  When Victor appeared, all the Chinese began pointing at her and pleading their case to him at once. The male doctor was still holding his syringe and waving it for emphasis. I wish I could say I was making this up, but I’m not: I could actually see beads of rust along the injection needle.

  “The doctor would like to give you a vaccination,” Victor explained gently to Claire. “He says that it will make you feel infinitely better.”

  Claire, like me, did not even pause to consider Victor, to ask who he was or why he was there. She cried only, “Tell him to keep his hands off me. I’m not getting any shots. I just want to go back to the hotel.”

  This seemed to distress the hospital staff greatly. As Victor escorted us out onto the crude breezeway, they hurried after her, swiping at her arm in persistent attempts to vaccinate her while she flailed at them shouting “Off! Get off me!” Finally Victor turned to them and said something that seemed to put an end to it once and for all. In an instant, the staff scurried back inside the hospital.