Prelude to a Scream

by Jim Nisbet

  “Three?”

  “Three. Show me that arm. There’s my hero.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  She dabbed at the arm with a cotton swab. “This one’s intramuscular,” she said, leaning over to apply the needle. “You don’t have to watch,” she said. Her eyes were about ten inches from his.

  “What is it about you?” he asked.

  “We have the same blood type,” she suggested cozily.

  “Is that true?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is. I saw it on your chart.”

  “So our children are going to be perfect?”

  She smiled. “Why don’t you like to be called a hero?”

  “Because I’m not a hero. Anyone would have done what I did.”

  “Maybe.” She slid the needle beneath his skin, depressed the plunger, removed the needle, and swabbed the little wound with alcohol.

  “Why do you hide your hands in those gloves?”

  “Hygiene, silly. Why do you care?” She capped the used syringe, dropped it into a receptacle on the lower tray of the cart, and took up a freshly charged one.

  “You have lovely hands. It’s a shame to hide them.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and swabbed his arm again. “This is an antibiotic. Also I.M.” She smoothly injected the serum and swabbed the puncture. “I’ll let you call my hands lovely if you’ll let me call you hero,” she said, dropping the second instrument into the receptacle. She added, almost wistfully, “My scarred hero…”

  “That’s not a fair trade,” he said irritably. She turned back with the third syringe.

  “Now what?”

  “Vitamins.” With her face turned toward him and away from the light her eyes gleamed in shadow, framed by the silhouette of her hair and cap. “What’s fair have to do with it?”

  The morphine had begun to socialize with his metabolism. “Okay,” Stanley said, with a small sigh of relief. “I’ll try to explain. Lovely hands are more or less permanent. Heroism is a transitory thing, a product of the moment that engendered it. You do it, then you’ve got to get on with the business of life. True heroism is not a spontaneous act but a continuous one, like getting up and going to work every day instead of blowing your brains out. Like what your mother probably had to do for you and your brothers and sisters after your dad died. I’m no hero, but I’ll bet your mother is.” He took one of her hands, peeled the rim of the latex glove back to the base of her fingers, and began to trace the delicate intricacy of the veins on the back of her hand. “A lot of people are heroic, or have heroic attributes. But not that many people have lovely hands.” He looked up at her. She watched him. A moment passed.

  “See?” Stanley said.

  She suddenly kissed him.

  Stanley was so surprised he didn’t react.

  “This is top-flight medical care,” he finally whispered.

  “No it’s not,” she said. “My hands are shaking enough to ruin you with this needle.”

  “Ruin me.”

  She did a fine job.

  “Why did you kiss me?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I take my heroes where I find them.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “I’ll take it up with Stress Management,” she said, dropping the third syringe into the disposal bin. “Speaking of which, we now remove the catheter.”

  “We what?” he said, gripping the bedclothes.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said, gently freeing the edge of the blanket from his fingers. “I can do it with my eyes closed.” She drew away the edge of the blanket, along with the sheet beneath it, until it was below his knees.

  “It’s a boy,” she said.

  “I thought you said you could do it with your eyes closed.”

  “I can.”

  “I wish you would,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I’m shy, that’s why.”

  “You don’t look very shy.”

  “That was a dirty trick, kissing me first.”

  “It was not,” she said. “Do you feel the morphine yet?”

  “As a matter of fact, I feel like a man with a million dollars and two kidneys. Definitely delusive.”

  “The patient’s irritation with slight disturbances seems to have turned into enjoyment.”

  “Why are we whispering?”

  “You haven’t the strength to shout.” She stood up. “Well. This won’t hurt so much.”

  She began to busy herself. The room had darkened considerably, illumined only by the light from the bathroom door. He closed his eyes. The sensation of his lids descending was as pleasurable as it was unavoidable. The morphine must have been doing its job, for all Stanley felt was the remote impression that, a certain distance away, somebody was boning a fish while it was head down in an umbrella stand.

  He heard a clatter of equipment on the lower tray of the stainless steel cart. “There,” Iris said. “All set.” So pleasurable was the relief flooding his system that Stanley neglected to open his eyes at this news. Rather, he savored the distant clarion of retreat from the pain in his back. He heard the cart roll away from the bed. Realizing that she might be about to leave he forced narrow slits between his eyelids. Contrary to leaving the room, she had parked the cart directly in front of the hallway door. So that anyone attempting to enter would find the door blocked?

  Her shadow moved back toward the bed, with a rustle of starched fabric. Reassured, he closed his eyes again. The bedclothes whispered about him, and the crisp hospital sheet nestled beneath his chin. Iris hadn’t yet left him, he realized happily, she was tucking him in.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, and new sensations began to communicate themselves to him. These, too, were remote, indistinct at first; but they were discernibly, pleasurable. Languorous, even.

  When she placed one hand on his brow, and smoothed back his hair, he could barely open his eyes. The light from the bathroom door was blocked by her silhouette.

  “You’ll be able to use that thing in about a week,” she said.

  Chapter Nine

  THE NEXT DAY HOP TOY TURNED UP AT THE HOSPITAL AND PAID for everything. Stanley let him, but only on the condition that Hop Toy get him out of there immediately. Dr. Sims assured Hop Toy that Stanley would be fine, if only he stayed in bed or a wheelchair for another week or two. Iris promised to look in on Stanley and keep his prescriptions current. So they let Hop Toy and his nephew Fong drive Stanley to Chinatown in the back of the delivery pickup, parked like a home-coming queen in a belayed wheelchair among sacks of onions and Jerusalem artichokes, thin-slatted crates of bok choy and lettuce, and the heaped fasces of asparagus spears.

  Before Stanley left the hospital Corrigan dropped by to see if his memory had improved, which it hadn’t. When nobody was looking Iris gave him a shot of morphine and a kiss that, later and often, would prove there was nothing wrong with Stanley’s memory at all. When the little white hat got slightly askew her black hair fell down in ringlets.

  Hop Toy had no intention of letting some strange professionals take care of Stanley Ahearn. He paraded Stanley straight through Chinatown to the apartment building on Brooklyn Place, where he’d installed Stanley three years before. All the way from Children’s on California to Stockton Street, while Fong drove, Hop Toy talked out the back window of the truck cab, assuring Stanley that he needn’t worry about his job, that it would be waiting for him when he got better, that Hop Toy’s wife Ruth would bring him three meals a day until he’d recovered, and that, as usual, the rent was a problem to be forgotten.

  Much as he’d grown to appreciate the Hop Toy family, Stanley would have preferred to be alone.

  But the Hop Toy family had other ideas. The shack squatted atop a narrow apartment building that faced Brooklyn Place. Hop Toy had tried to convince Stanley to take a nicer place a couple stories down, an actual apartment, but one look had sold Stanley on the shack. Originally built as a wash-house, the shed was a rectangular structure with four
walls encompassing about three hundred square feet. Except for its tin roof the whole thing was made of unpainted wood long since weathered to gray. One long side of the rectangle was ten feet high and consisted of the entrance door and, from waist-high sills up to the modest header beneath the exposed rafters, a wall of windows facing east. On a clear day Stanley could see Mt. Diablo, forty miles away, and every other day he could be content with portions, allotted him by the fog, of the Bay Bridge, Berkeley, Treasure Island, North Beach, a large stretch of the Bay and, of course, the thirty or so top floors of the TransAmerica Pyramid, which tapered up from its block-square footprint a mere six blocks away.

  Except on wash day. Being an enlightened landlord, Hop Toy had long since installed washing machines in the building’s basement. Excepting Stanley, every single one of the rest of the building’s occupants was Chinese. Some of them were quite old, having fled mainland China to escape the Communists or the Japanese, Yuan Shih-K’ai or Sun Yat-Sen or, for all Stanley knew, The Opium Wars. In Chinatown English was not a necessity, and since most of the elders rarely if ever left the vicinity, many of them had never bothered to learn to speak English.

  Much as they clung to their language, many of these same elders shared a compulsion about drying freshly washed clothes in fresh air. They loved the machines that washed, but they sniffed suspiciously at the machines that dried, judged them a poor improvement, and insisted on carrying every load of wet wash five stories to the roof to hang them out in San Francisco’s famous afternoon westerly—a sea breeze that can bluster to twenty or thirty knots, enough to dry a soaked bed sheet in fifteen minutes.

  Hop Toy had no conception of privacy, but he went so far as to respect Stanley’s desire for it. So Hop Toy declared Tuesday, and no other, Drying Day.

  By noon or one o’clock every Tuesday Stanley’s roof became a colorful, flapping cacophony of drying laundry.

  Still, since he was at least a head taller than any woman in the building could reach to pinch a clothespin, even on Tuesday Stanley could stand on his roof and look out over the topography of his island of laundry and see the distant landmarks of the San Francisco Bay. From one of those landmarks he and his busy neighbors must have looked like a gang of pollen-bearers working the petals of a mutant, windblown flower.

  The rest of the week he had the roof to himself.

  A white-enameled cast-iron countertop ran the length of the south gable wall, surmounted by a four-burner butane stovetop and a plastic dishrack above an integral drainboard and sink. The north wall backed floor-to-ceiling shelves. The west wall, only eight feet, had foot-high clerestory windows above a platform bed. The furnishings consisted of two dissimilar caved-in Victorian easy-chairs, a bok choy crate with a small rabbit-eared television on it, and a nearly empty bottle of Bushmills planted on the floor next to the empty chair. The other chair was usually covered with Chronicles and Examiners drifting out from under a pile of laundry, because until his “accident” Stanley never invited any visitors to sit with him.

  Outside, just around the corner from the front door, a five-gallon roofing-tar bucket covered by a Cadillac hubcap made do for the short trips to the toilet necessitated by whiskey and bad kidneys. The real toilet, with a corner-closet and a fiberglass shower cabinet with a mildewed curtain that looked like it had started out as the downhill half of a body bag, was one story down. Except for the curtain, the family of eight he shared it with kept the bathroom clean. And when one of them happened to run into him as he brought the bucket down to empty it into the corner closet, they would always smile, and ask him how the weather was.

  And he always answered, “Beautiful, just beautiful.”

  And often he was telling the truth.

  There was no elevator. Hop Toy and Fong and two others took turns in pairs dragging and lifting him and the wheelchair up the stairs, one flight at a time, with a cigarette break every flight.

  “Hop Toy,” Stanley said, to the shoulders of the man below them all on the stairs.

  “Try not to speak,” Hop Toy gasped. “You might tire yourself.”

  It had taken nearly all of the first year since Stanley had saved Hop Toy’s daughter for the two of them to strike a balance between the generosity of Hop Toy’s gratitude and Stanley’s capacity to accept it. While the former seemed boundless, the latter was definitely limited. A job and a place to live, extended to a man who needed both, seemed more than fair to Stanley, and he’d said so. But now, with his needs so clear, Hop Toy found new opportunity.

  They deposited Stanley on the roof. For the first time in ten days a stiff breeze freshened his nostrils. Then he saw his own bedsheets flapping from a clothesline, and figures moving about in his home.

  Followed by Fong and the two others Hop Toy pushed the wheelchair to the door of the shack. The door was open, and inside stood Tseng, who was now eleven years old, and her mother, Ruth. They welcomed him, and he was glad to see them.

  Tseng climbed into his lap and gave him a big kiss. She smelled of fresh mint and ginger and clean laundry. Was this Tuesday? He wasn’t sure. Hop Toy wheeled them both over the splintered threshold and into position before the television set. Somebody had removed the two easy-chairs to the roof so that there was room for the wheelchair. The smells of garlic, peppers, chicken, rice, diced scallions, black bean sauce and even fried onion cake wafted through the room. The countertops around the stove and the little table before it were heaped with fresh vegetables and saucepans and cooking utensils. A wok stood over a butane flame next to a pot of rice and in front of a pot of tea and, even as Hop Toy parked Stanley in front of a Chinese news program chattering on the television set, Ruth, talking the while, began to spill spatulas covered with smoked ham and spices and chopped vegetables into the wok, where hot sesame oil made them sizzle. If these people knew all about making someone feel at home, they also knew how to work. The mother and daughter had swept the floor and washed all the windows. They had cleaned the kitchen and filled the shelves with groceries. They had found the extra set of sheets and made the bed with them and washed the old sheets, which Stanley probably hadn’t changed in a month. They had done all his laundry and put it away, neatly folded. They had brought in the mail and complete runs of Chronicles and Examiners since he’d been in the hospital. They had planted flowers, Stanley noticed at last, in the neglected boxes that hung below the sills of the east-facing windows. Blooming pansies and geraniums nodded fitfully in the lee of the building.

  People began to appear from downstairs. Several old folks walked in without ceremony, trailing grandchildren. They all spoke to Stanley and made him understand they were glad to see him home. The men squatted on the roof or sat in the two armchairs in the lee of the shack and smoked. The plumes from their cigarettes rose briefly and then shot away on the westerly, toward the Pyramid. After a while one among the men produced a deck of cards and dealt a hand of Pai Gow, the cards so creased and worn they drooped as if made of cloth instead of cardboard. The women came in and sat or stood around the table and gossiped. Someone turned up the television set.

  Much of this commotion, including that on the television, was borne along on Chinese, a language of which Stanley had managed to learn very little in three years.

  “Now that we’ve got you out of that hospital,” said Hop Toy, switching to English for a moment, “we can care for you properly. The food in any hospital is no good. They take everything good out of it. Garlic, pepper, ginger — these things are good for a man. Can you imagine giving a man medicine, yet withholding from him his ginseng? There in the hospital, they act like they don’t know that food is medicine. They cut you off from the healing power of good food. Good food keeps you well when you are well, and heals you when you are sick. Hospital food is no good.”

  Stanley agreed with him. The family that had brought Hop Toy to the United States as a little boy were from the Hu Nan province, whose food was reputed to be hot, spicy, and wholesome. But they eschewed nothing edible, so far as Stanley could
tell; any kind of vegetable, fish, fowl or meat, the Hu Nan kitchen could countenance it, and prepare it well. Stanley had become a fond believer. The last time he’d had the flu, it had been a bad case, with vomiting, diarrhea, vertigo, hot and cold flashes, night sweats. A bowl of Ruth’s hot and sour bean curd soup could stave off the symptoms for two hours.

  “Tomorrow, a Chinese doctor comes to study you,” Hop Toy said. “He will list herbs for tea and soup to make you heal quickly.” He patted Stanley’s knee. “You will soon be well.”

  Stanley looked around him. There were kids wrestling and squealing on his plywood bed. Bowls of food and rice stood steaming on his little round kitchen table. He may as well have been related to all of these people, so attentive were they to his distress.

  Little Tseng came running up with a bowl of food. Before Stanley knew it Ruth’s sister had tucked a cloth napkin under his chin and threaded a pair of chopsticks through his knuckles. The bowl was heaped with sliced carrots, scallions, bamboo shoots, boned chicken, and whole shrimp—all piled on a heap of steamed white rice, and shot through with short yellow skeins of fried egg flecked with bits of the red skins of hot cayenne peppers. The moment the fragrant steam rose from the dish and struck his nostrils his mouth started to water, and the aroma quickly supplanted the taste of ether-saturated mucus that had permeated his senses for the past week.

  He chopsticked the hot, rice-covered morsels into his mouth Chinese style, a rapid one-two-three, chew and swallow, one-two-three, chew and swallow.

  “Good?” said Hop Toy, his eager smile not ten inches away. “Hot?”

  Indeed, the food was hot, both in temperature and spice. Tears sprang to Stanley’s eyes as he swallowed. He chopsticked up another mouthful, and another, and another. Several of the old women around the kitchen table cooed their encouragement. Tseng stood before him and watched him eat. She wore a pink dress and her jet black hair was caught in blue ribbons on either side of her head, just above her ears. A bowl of tea appeared on top of the television in front of him, steaming with warmth and shimmering with the abruptness of its arrival. Hop Toy made a comment to Tseng, who laughed with delight, and showed her perfect teeth. And then Hop Toy fired a request toward his wife, who had begun to circulate bowls of food and chopsticks among the women around her. These objects began to move as if of their own accord toward the door and out among the men on the rooftop, and Ruth paused at the source of this brigade to retrieve a beer from the under-counter refrigerator beneath the drainboard. The bottle passed among the hands and over the heads of the chattering women to Hop Toy, who twisted off its cap and set it next to the cup of tea on top of the nattering television. Steam lifted off the surface of the tea. Beads of moisture trailed down and over Hop Toy’s fingerprints on the bottle. Beneath them both, the television picture slowly rolled.