by Vincent Lam
After Ma Ma divorced Yeh Yeh, she married a man whose business was mostly in Taiwan. This was daring at that time, for a Chinese woman to divorce her husband and then remarry. It was in the newspapers. While reading in his garden one day, her new husband was assassinated. The bullet travelled expertly through the back of his neck and out his throat. He would not have suffered. He was thought to be a candidate for leading a Chinese secession movement. My father said this was a political ambition only imagined by others, and that his death was unfortunate because he had been kind to my grandmother. This had helped to calm her. She was still excitable, and that was the last point in her life when her beauty could, at least superficially, compensate for her temper and vindictiveness.
Yeh Yeh no longer had an excuse not to marry his mistress, and so he did. She became Second Wife. Second Wife did not get along with grandfather’s new mistress, who became Third Wife—although they were never legally married. Both wives lived in the same household. Third Wife was docile, and tried to submit to the will of Second Wife, who nonetheless continued to be unhappy with the situation. Second Wife tried to kill herself with a gun, but managed only to shatter her arm, which then had to be amputated. With the shame of the disabled upon her, my grandfather bought her a house and sent her money periodically. No one has been able to tell me what happened to her after that. Third Wife was kind to Fourth Wife. Fourth Wife was sixteen years old when she married my then middle-aged grandfather. Fourth Wife was more cunning than Third Wife, and insisted on a legal marriage. Soon after this, the Viet Cong changed Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City, the Americans were suddenly gone, and those who had links to the capitalist economy were being imprisoned or shot. My grandfather convinced the High Commission that he was a British subject by virtue of his having once lived in Hong Kong. When he fled Vietnam, Fourth Wife went with him because she had marriage papers, while Third Wife remained in Ho Chi Minh City with her child.
One day, my grandfather woke, peed in the toilet, and then went back to bed. He did not dress. He told me that he didn’t want to get up that day. He felt tired, and the thing in his side was growing.
“Come and feel it. See what you think,” he said in Cantonese.
His left flank bulged as if a balloon was being inflated under the skin.
“Mo toong,” he said. There is no pain. He felt his side delicately, and pulled up his shirt so that I could see it. I pressed the tumour gently with the tips of my fingers. It was firm, hard like cold Plasticine. What did I think?
“Ho choy mo toong,” I said. It was fortunate that it wasn’t painful.
“Hai,” he agreed.
Yeh Yeh explained that he always wore suspenders in these past few months. If he wore a belt, he pointed out, it would rub his side where the tumour was growing under the skin. His biggest fear was that the skin would split over the growing lump. He wore his pants slightly loose—held up by suspenders to avoid friction on this area. The thought of the cancer escaping from the confines of his body and making itself public in a wet, bloody way horrified him. He said he wouldn’t be able to care for himself if the thing broke through. They would move him to the dormitories. Go look in the toilet, he told me.
I looked in the toilet. There was thick blood. It seemed to have a surface to it, clotting as if there was so much blood that it had become independent of the urine. Experimentally, I flushed and saw the thickness of it break up and swirl. It was not as viscous as it initially appeared, but this was a deep and serious tone of red.
“Yeh Yeh,” I said. “We should go to the hospital.”
“No hospital.”
“But you look pale. You are weak. Dr. Spiros said this might happen, that you might lose blood and need a transfusion.”
“No more hospital. Your grandfather dies here.”
“Yes, but if we go to the hospital, they may be able to help you live longer. We’ll come back here, and you won’t have to go to the dormitories.”
“Who needs hospitals? Besides, you’re a doctor. You’re here.”
I was early in my training and wanted to pretend to be a doctor. I suggested that we call Dr. Spiros.
“Bring me my medicine,” said grandfather. He wanted the box of little brown bottles. I went to get them. There were eight remaining. I pried the tight cork from a bottle, gave it to Yeh Yeh, and made him a cup of tea. In Toronto, I had gone with my grandmother to the herbalist on Dundas Street to buy these medicines. I had been surprised by her concern for Yeh Yeh’s well-being, and her desire to purchase medicines. She had questioned the herbalist vigorously in purchasing these herbal concentrates, which were reputed to invigorate the kidneys. She had insisted that the medicines must be of the best quality—nothing fake, nothing second rate. Before buying them, she produced her trump card, telling the herbalist that I, her grandson, was a brilliant doctor and would smell each vial before she would buy them. The herbalist smiled obligingly, I sniffed them each in turn—their odour both bitter and heady—and told my grandmother that they smelled very strong. She was satisfied and paid for them.
Dr. Spiros was not in his office. His registrar was there, but said that he couldn’t assess anything without seeing the patient. We should bring him to the emergency department, and if they wanted to involve urology, they would page them. Yeh Yeh refused to go. I called Dr. Wong, who came to the cottage and spoke to my grandfather. He felt the mass, and then told Yeh Yeh that as an orthopaedic surgeon he didn’t have much expertise here. Yeh Yeh should see his specialist, he said. I realized that real physicians, when called upon in awkward family situations, try to pretend not to be doctors. Grandfather said he was ready to die. Dr. Wong said he could bring elders from the church for a bedside baptism. Yeh Yeh agreed.
The two of us strolled down the walkway in the bright warm afternoon of the Brisbane winter to Dr. Wong’s car. He said to me, “You know he’s going to die?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Nay ho gwai,” he said, patting my shoulder. You are very obedient and well-behaved. A Chinese compliment.
That night, I asked grandfather if he knew who his real parents were. He told me it didn’t matter, that one always has to move forward, otherwise the past holds too much pain.
After two years in Hong Kong, my grandfather and Fourth Wife moved to Australia. Toward the end of the Vietnam War, my aunts and uncles had been sent to different countries. The idea was that someone, somewhere, would land on their feet. Uncle Will went to Sydney, and later sponsored Yeh Yeh from Hong Kong. After several months, my aunt Alice told Uncle Will that if Yeh Yeh continued to live with them, she would leave. He was drinking and gambling heavily. Fourth Wife was younger than all of Yeh Yeh’s children.
My uncle helped Yeh Yeh and Fourth Wife buy a house in Brisbane. Yeh Yeh told me he had never wanted to stay in Sydney. Too cold. Brisbane is tropical. Fourth Wife started a restaurant, and began an affair with the cook. She divorced my grandfather but continued to visit him weekly in the retirement home they found for him. That was twelve years before the cancer. He told me that it’s understandable. A younger woman wants a younger man. Yeh Yeh relied on Fourth Wife to bring him cigarettes. While smoking these cigarettes, he spoke sadly about the early arguments, the poisoned misunderstandings he had with Ma Ma. At that time they were younger than I was now, he told me.
The next day, Yeh Yeh was too weak to stand. His forehead was pale and sweaty. The toilet bowl was thickly stained with blood. I had to lift him under his arms to get him to the washroom. He wouldn’t eat. I called my aunt Alice and uncle Will to ask what I should do. Should I take him to the hospital? They asked me what they should do, should they fly from Sydney? Everyone else was in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto. With the time difference I didn’t want to wake them. In the evening, against my grandfather’s wishes, I called an ambulance. The spinning red siren lights turned on the wall of the cottage, making it look like it was in constant motion. They took him out, wrapped in an orange tube of blanket. I tried to be medical a
nd tell the paramedics about his condition, but I couldn’t remember any of the details.
Two days and eight units of transfused blood later, my grandfather was complaining to Dr. Spiros that he should be discharged. Dr. Wong had come to baptize him, and had brought fried noodles in white styrofoam boxes. The Wongs had a place on Stradbroke Island, and suggested that I go there for a rest. Grandfather was more stable now.
On Stradbroke, I stayed across from the headlands beach. In the morning I woke early to watch the humpback whales migrating north. As the sun streaked low across the water, their spouts were small torches in the grey shadowless tide. The light became full and round. I saw dolphins diving out of the crests of waves to hunt the fish that were driven into the cove. The sun lifted higher and burned through the day. From the pay phone at the side of the road, I called grandfather at the hospital. He was doing all right, he said. He had sent Dr. Wong to the cottage for the bottles of Chinese medicine. There were two bottles left, he said. I should stay at the beach and enjoy myself, and see whether they had fresh crab in the restaurants. Yeh Yeh advised me to have them sauté it in cognac, that’s what he would do. He said that I should remember always to move forward, to not allow the past to become hurtful. He advised me that this was sometimes a difficult thing to do. Yeh Yeh reminded me to thank my grandmother for the medicines, when I would soon return home and speak with her.
WINSTON
IN THE BLACK PART OF THE MORNING OF November 6, Winston manages to sleep for the first time since Halloween. He wakes with a sudden, clear memory of the event, and decides to seek help. It has been years since Winston has seen a doctor, but now he desperately needs one. He walks to the nearby clinic, and stands outside for a while, wondering if this is the right thing to do. After all, some people say that doctors dispense poison. Winston decides that he must take this risk, and goes in.
For fifty-six minutes, Winston sits in the waiting room, where the receptionist stares at him because she can see everything about him and Adrienne and the grates and the whispering. For six minutes, Winston sits in the examining room waiting for Dr. Sri. When the doctor enters, he is too young, too friendly, and he moves too quickly—all of this is suspicious. Nonetheless, Winston explains (almost) every relevant detail, and after he has made himself perfectly clear, Dr. Sri—instead of running for the antidote, the syringe, the shot, the emergency cure—just sits there and says to Winston, “Let’s be sure I understand: you feel that the reason you’ve been having these experiences, these feelings, is that you’ve been poisoned.”
Winston says, “Primarily, I want to believe that you can help. Otherwise, I am permanently injured. But I have my doubts, suspicions even.” His hands wrestle snakes on his lap. He looks down and says, “No, I’ve got to trust someone.” He looks up. “Who else to trust but you, doctor? It’s just doubts then. We won’t say suspicions. That would be the wrong footing. Isn’t it enough to say I’m on the verge of being destroyed?” His wiry frame leans far ahead, somewhere between a bow and a pounce.
“Tell me—” says Sri.
“So just fix me, basically. Wield your tests, potions, cures, et cetera. The evil in my bloodstream fizzes my brain, makes neurons swell and pop. That blue drink—I knew something was funny, not the funny colour, not ha-ha funny, but funny. Put down the glass, don’t even sip, said my inner voice, but I didn’t listen. I was wearing this ghost costume, and it was such a nice party and everyone seemed so nice and I really wanted everyone to like me. Adrienne said they loved me, it was a classic costume. But then she poisoned me.” Suddenly, Winston looks like he might cry.
“What did—”
“I can’t think, can’t sleep. Or maybe I can’t sleep therefore I can’t think. Doctor, give me a sign to trust you.”
Sri unclips his laminated name tag, holds it in front of himself like a talisman. It reads Dr. Sri. Resident Physician, PGY-1.
“That looks serious,” says Winston. Sri is about to clip the tag back on the pocket of his shirt, but Winston reaches for it. “Let me see.”
“Sure.”
Winston takes it, turns it over to look at the bulge of the magnetic-coded backing, runs his finger along the edge that is worn from card-readers, holds it up next to Sri and compares the faces.
“Smile,” he says.
Sri imitates a smile, and only once he has done so does he see that his patient might be making fun of him, might be taking advantage of him and will at any moment laugh at the humour in a momentary tilt of the balance of power. But Winston regards him studiously in a quick moment and then hands the card back.
Sri says, “When did this problem begin?”
“The drink, like I said, the blue drink.”
“You said you remembered the poison. As if you didn’t know right away.”
“This morning. That is the ethos of poison: that the victim does not immediately realize. You know this drug, of course? Bad stuff?”
Sri says, “We sometimes see the mind affected in this way—even in illness, and some think of illness as a kind of poison.”
“Exactly, doctor, the poison has made me ill.”
“Sometimes, we don’t find a poison, and illness itself is the issue.”
“I thought of that. See, even you think I’m talking crazy, right? Thought of it already, that people would think I’m going nuts, and that’s why you, being a doctor and everything, have to treat the poison because this stuff is making me sound cuckoo. You’ve got to fix it before it does make me nuts.”
Winston smeared peanut butter on a banana. As he ate, he wrote.
November 3
Morning. Is it really? Yes, of course.
Sheep, they say. Counting.
So bright. Upstairs—if only Claude and Adrienne would be quiet.
Sheep: how many does it take?
I should complain. No, that’s not right, neighbours and all. I could speak to them about the noise. But Claude has a temper. Why not complain? It’s not right. That would be dangerous. Why? No.
Winston sat sideways at the kitchen table, hunched on the chrome-legged chair. He had not slept since the night of Halloween. He heard the downhill thumping of feet from the third floor to the second. A slight pause at the second floor, at his own door? Maybe not. Or maybe a pause, but perhaps it was because Claude had an untucked shirt, or a coat to zip up. Maybe nothing to do with me, he thought. Maybe no pause—he was not certain. The feet drummed down to the first floor. The scrape open, then clunk closed of the solid door, and then the secretive click of the bolt thrown shut. The screen door made a metal whine, then a wire smashing sound. From his square-framed kitchen window, Winston watched his upstairs neighbour Claude walk through the first-frost mist of the shared backyard and climb into his small red car. Winston felt relief, and wondered if he would now be able to sleep. The red car whined, its headlights shone pillars in the mist, it backed out and roared down the laneway.
Winston heard soft, shuffling footsteps above him. He crouched to the ventilation grate. Big, slanted vents angled slightly upward from the tall baseboard. The floor undulated from side to side; the dark wood strips foot-worn in some places and warped in others. The shape of the grate was soft, blurred by successive layers of thick white paint, and this same paint had jammed the grates open so that he could not avoid, he told himself, hearing Adrienne hum softly to herself, running her bath. Winston remained crouched to the ground, heard the plunk like the sound of his own swallowing as she entered the water. He imagined the moment that preceded this—the robe slipping off her shoulders—perhaps the white silk housecoat he has seen fluttering in the backyard. He lay with his ear against the jammed-open grate, reassured himself that he could not avoid hearing the splashing noises of Adrienne’s bath. Later, the water drained with a funnel sound that went through his whole apartment. She must be drying herself, he thought. One of the big, fluffy purple towels that Winston has seen her pin on the laundry line in the backyard—Adrienne waved whenever she saw him watching from his
window.
The day glared brightly.
Then came night—illuminated by the conversations from the third-floor apartment.
Dr. Miniadis, the supervising physician, is in the observation room reading journals and listening to Smetana’s Moldau. When Sri enters, she removes her headset.
He says, “Were you watching, Dr. Miniadis?” On one of the row of screens, Winston swings his foot.
“Unfortunately, I was not,” she says, and smiles brilliantly at Sri. “Please.” She removes a handful of charts from a chair, waves at it beneficently. “Go ahead.”
Sri sits, centres his notes on his lap, and says, “Winston is a twenty-two-year-old man with no previous psychiatric history who believes that he was poisoned by his upstairs neighbour Adrienne. He believes that after secretly administering a drug to him in a blue-coloured beverage, she seduced him at a Halloween party. He is sexually and romantically obsessed with her, feels that she is secretly in love with him and that she wants to abandon her husband, Claude. Winston believes that the drug produced a temporary amnesia and also has caused his profound sleep disturbance.” Sri moves his mouth to wet his tongue. He continues, “The patient reports multiple somatic complaints, a sense of hyper-vigilance, and has paranoid ideation concerning this woman and her husband. There is a suggestion of auditory hallucination—whispers heard in the night—and perhaps of thought implantation. Winston is paranoid, with some morbid thoughts, but has no homicidal or suicidal ideation. His thought process is at times tangential, his speech borders on being pressured, and my overall impression is one of a first-break psychosis.”
Dr. Miniadis’s upper body, clad in a multicoloured striped sweater, sways a little with the rushing up and down of the Moldau, which emerges, constricted and tinny, from her headphones.
She says, “Wonderful,” and beams at Sri. Her eyes, magnified by teacup-sized reading glasses, seem to float in front of her.