by Chongda Cai
He was so quiet I worried for a second that he had fallen off the back of the bike. He was as quiet as a potted plant.
He finally spoke when we got home. “Okay,” he said, “I’m ready.”
I knew what he meant. He was telling me that he was ready to die.
The disease had finally conquered him. He was like a prisoner on death row, resigned to his fate.
But it was only by giving up all hope that he could finally make peace with the reality of his illness.
He no longer had to pretend to be strong. He could give in to his emotions. He would sometimes break down when his left arm refused to respond. He gave up on his schedule and his exercises and his rules. Instead, he went each day and sat by the front gate. When people walked by that he didn’t like, he didn’t hold back from shouting abuse at them. When the neighbors’ dogs came around, he would swing his cane at them to drive them off. When the local kids got in his way when he was out and about, he pushed them out of the way with the cane, too. He no longer had to hold on to his identity as family patriarch. He acted more like a child—a bratty, spoiled child.
I would arrive home after school to find my father sitting in front of our house with some of the older men of the neighborhood. They sat around him, listening to his only slightly exaggerated stories of the glory days. They occasionally even wiped away a few tears with him. Every now and then, we would get complaints from neighbors about him upsetting children and pets.
He was no longer the man I had once called my father. My sister and I no longer called him Father, but switched to his nickname, A-Yuan. When my niece was born, he called her Little Kernel (in Hokkien it means something like “plump and cute”), so people started to call him Big Kernel.
He liked the nickname. He continued to weep with the old men and fight with the local dogs.
Death, for whatever reason, seemed unwilling to come for him.
That did not deter him from constantly delivering what sounded to me like deathbed testaments. He used to say, “You need to make sure you choose the right woman to marry. I won’t be around to help you.” He told me, “I want you to cremate me, so you can carry a piece of me around with you wherever you go.” After a few days, he started to say, “Don’t worry, when I’m gone, the family will still be here.”
I usually tried to laugh it off, chalking it up to my father coping with his illness and his inevitable end. But that cut me deep. When he said again, “Don’t worry, when I’m gone, the family will still be here,” I couldn’t take it anymore.
“You can’t talk like that!” I yelled.
“It’s the truth.”
“But don’t say it again.”
He left it at that. But later, when he went out to sit by the gate, he started telling everyone who passed, “I just told my son, when I’m gone, the family will still be here. He got angry at me. I still think I’m right.”
Then he’d turn to look at me to see if I was angry enough to go over and shout at him again.
At first I couldn’t accept my father regressing. I couldn’t understand how he could strip off his patriarchal identity. And the man-child that he became was quite strange. His words still held the weight of life and death for me, but he never held back from speaking. However I felt about the change, though, I knew it was the best way for him to live out his days.
My father might have been waiting for death, but he seemed to experience a sort of rebirth, taking sudden pleasure in life again. He talked about death like an old friend who would be stopping by to visit sometime in the distant future. He sometimes seemed to forget that vague date. “My boy,” he said, “when you have a kid, are you going to raise him in our town?” And another time he asked me if he could name my future child.
“I thought you were about to die,” I said, teasing him.
“You’re right,” he said, as if he had suddenly come to his senses. “I might as well just hurry up and die.” Then he laughed so hard that drool leaked from the left side of his crooked mouth.
I learned a few things during my father’s long illness that I expect most people do not know. One of them is that when it gets cold in the winter, blood vessels start to contract, and it’s particularly tough on older people, since their circulation tends to be weaker. The same goes for anyone who has paralysis after a stroke, since vasoconstriction makes hemiplegia even worse.
When the cold weather came, my father found it even harder to walk, to the point that his left foot seemed to completely disobey his commands. He fell often, ending up covered in bruises, with a gash in his head. I used my authority as head of the family to order him to stay home. I felt like a father giving orders to a disobedient child.
He listened, then looked up at me, blinking, and said, “If I’m good, will you buy me some of my marinated duck?”
It was an unexpectedly cold winter, colder than any winter I remembered, colder than a southern Fujian winter had any right to be. The chill seemed to penetrate right to the bone marrow. When I went out, I could feel my scalp tightening as the cold wind scraped my bare head. I bought a hat and a parka for my father. He had always been heavyset, but in his winter clothes, he looked like a meatball. The Big Kernel nickname had never seemed more appropriate.
Even though we kept him bundled up, he started to have fainting spells. The first one happened while he was eating. He was halfway through his meal when he suddenly slumped down, his face buried in his hand. He managed to get out that he was feeling light-headed, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he started to foam at the mouth.
My mother jumped up and rushed to his side, pinching the skin between his nose and upper lip in the hope that the pressure point would rouse him. She shouted for my sister to get some warm water. I rushed to get the doctor.
“I really thought I was going to die,” he said when he came to. He sighed. “I guess I wasn’t ready to go.”
“Then stay here,” I said, taking him in my arms. I held him for a long time.
The good news was that my father was afraid to die. But the doctor had some bad news. He told us that as time went by, as my father grew older, his circulation would worsen, so that the paralysis on his left side would slowly become more severe. He might be rendered incontinent, confined to his bed.
That night, after we received the news, my mother took me aside. As she figured it, probably within five years, my father would be bedridden. “Don’t worry about me,” she told me. “I can shoulder the burden.” She had calculated that if my father lived to be eighty years old, taking into account his medical care and prescription fees, the living expenses for the two of them, and what it would cost to get me married, it would cost a fortune.
“I don’t want you to worry,” my mother said. “We’re in this together. Even if your father is completely paralyzed, I’ll be there for him. I can pick up some small jobs again, things I can do at home. All you need to do is work as hard as you can for these five years.”
When it came time for me to leave, my father behaved like a child, begging me not to go. He very reluctantly agreed to let me go to Beijing to look for a job. The plan my mother and I agreed on called for us to work as hard as we could for the next five years, so once I had a job, I would only come home a couple of times a year. Every time I went back, I brought my work with me, so I usually only saw my father briefly before retreating to my room to write. In the morning, he would call me for breakfast. He was dying to see me. But I had usually been up until five or six in the morning writing, so I would drowsily stumble down, yell at him not to bother me, then stumble back upstairs to sleep. The same pattern would repeat itself the next day.
I worked that way for three years, and I was honestly surprised to check my bank account one day and realize that I had saved two hundred thousand yuan. I started to fantasize about what I could do with the money. I never told my father this, but I had an idea that I could take him to America to see a doctor. I had heard about some advances in nano-neuroscience, where mic
roscopic tools could be threaded into blood vessels in the brain to clear blockages.
I started to cut my expenses, carefully adding up every yuan I spent. When I got home at night, I checked my account online, watching the number slowly go up as the days went by.
I told my mother about my savings, but I kept my plan from her. She was just happy that she no longer had to struggle to get by. Another three years, I thought to myself, and my father will be better again. Once my father got better, he could return to sit at the head of the family, and everything would be like it once was.
But all that changed one rainy afternoon. As I paused on the street to watch a monitor showing the countdown to the World Cup opening ceremonies, my phone rang with a call from my cousin.
“Can you talk right now?” he asked.
“Sure! But I thought you’d be watching the World Cup. You’re a soccer fan, right?”
“Forget about that. I need to talk to you. I want you to promise that when you hear what I have to say you won’t panic.”
“What’s going on? Why are you talking like that?”
“Can you promise me?”
“Sure. Okay.”
“Your father passed away. It was just after four o’clock. When your mother got home, she saw he’d fallen. He passed out again. She called us over to drive him to the ER, but on the way there, he passed.”
I swore at my father, I thought you still wanted to live?
You said you wanted to live. You broke your promise.
I flew into Xiamen and got home just after eleven that night. I found my father laid out in front of the ancestral altar. He still looked plump, but his face seemed to wear a grimace of dissatisfaction. The cheers of neighbors watching the World Cup came from houses along the alley. Every four years, I thought, the whole world joined together to celebrate. None of them realized that I had just lost the most important person in my life.
I took my father’s hand. I couldn’t cry.
His hand was stiff and cold. I couldn’t suppress the anger that rushed up from somewhere inside of me. “How could you do this?” I yelled at him. “Without even saying goodbye, you just leave like that? You promised me.”
Trickles of blood began to flow from my father’s eyes and from the corners of his mouth.
An aunt came and dragged me away. She told me to calm down. She told me that even if someone is dead, the spirit is still in the body. “If you act like that,” she said, “the spirit can’t leave. The spirit is crying. He’s crying blood. His life was hard enough. Just let him go, please, just let him go.”
I watched with horror as the blood kept trickling. I went to his side and, as if comforting a child, said, “Please, it’s okay, just go, I’m not blaming you, I know you tried your best. . . .”
I repeated it again and again, until I couldn’t control my emotions and broke down wailing and sobbing.
The day after my father was cremated, he came to me in a dream. “I saw the offerings you burned,” he said, angrily. “What am I going to do in the afterlife with that little car you offered me? Why not a motorcycle? I can’t even drive a car.”
When I woke up that morning, I told my mother about the dream. She had seen him, too, she said. He had told her to tell me to hurry up and get him a motorcycle. He wanted to take a ride up the coast.
“That sweet father of yours,” my mother said, smiling.
4
Christmas in the ICU
I remember the hallway that seemed to go on forever, with a marble floor that made even the softest footfalls echo long and loud. The sound of people coming and going in the hallway became a rumble. The chilly overhead lighting falling across the floor made it look even longer than it was.
The signs over each doorway down the long hallway stated the reason the people within had been gathered together: Cardiovascular, Neurosurgery. . . . Disease ruled that place, disease was the organizing principle, disease made the rules, and disease subsumed all other identities.
The people gathered together in those rooms—no matter who they were or what they had done, whether they had just stepped down from a dais or were dozing on the ridge between rice paddies—all woke up in the same place.
Wherever disease had found them, whatever lives they were living at the time, it had put them in the same place, confined together like farm animals.
They lay on the same white sheets, shielded by the same white curtains, looking up at the same white ceiling. Their names were no longer important. What they had in common was disease. They might have never had reason to meet each other in another life, but there, relationships were reorganized by shared ailments, and two strangers could get to know each other intimately in a matter of days.
Most conversation was confined to topics corporeal. They would compare symptoms and sensations in great detail. Someone might say, “Today I can get four or five normal breaths before I have to take a deep breath. How about you?”
“I can get about six or seven.”
“I started feeling a pain in my big toe today, on my left foot.”
“Not me. But I can feel a sort of hot stream running down my . . .”
There’s usually some distance or some separation between your consciousness and the vessel that carries it. But in that place they understood, perhaps for the first time, the clear barrier between body and soul. They learned to respect the body as much as they respected the soul or the emotions.
My father’s illness is what brought me there. I was sixteen years old.
I am talking about the intensive care unit, the ICU. It was located on the top floor of the hospital. The elevator to the top floor opened on the long hallway hung with signs listing all those spine-chilling names. Each one of those diseases was given several rooms, as if it were territory captured by occupying forces and the patients within were prisoners of war. Before arriving at the ICU, I had no idea that hospitals operated on that kind of martial logic. The deadliest, most bloodthirsty diseases seized the high ground.
The outpatient department handled diseases too weak to hang on for long, and the morgue handled the bodies that disease had already abandoned. The still-thriving and the dead were set side by side.
That was because they were both the products of the most incompetent illnesses. Death is never disease’s objective; the objective of disease is to occupy and then dominate the human body. Uncomplicated trauma or illness and death are both the result of disease executed without sophistication or elegance.
I often went through the outpatient department on my frequent trips to pick up supplies, or whenever I needed a break from the ICU.
There were two ways to get down from the top floor. The first option was an elevator right beside my father’s room. That was the most direct route to the outpatient department, but the elevator was usually crowded. It stopped at each floor on the way down, providing a survey of each layer of disease: first the neuroscience ward, then internal medicine on the next floor, then surgery. . . . When the door opened onto the outpatient department, I was hit with a wave of spirited noise.
The second option was the staff elevator. It was always deserted. There was an unspoken rule that family members of ICU patients had free use of the elevator. The staff saw us as comrades-in-arms. We had a secret in common: we had both felt the breath of death on our necks.
The staff elevator was in the secluded southeast corner of the building, all the way at the end of the long hallway. The worst part of the trip was going from one end of the hallway to the other. I couldn’t stop my eyes darting from doorway to doorway, checking each bed to see if anyone was missing. An unexpectedly empty bed would sometimes catch me by surprise.
I hated that feeling. It was like I was going along and had stepped in a crater in the road. My heart would sink.
That was the reason I usually took the main elevator to get down to the outpatient department. I knew I would have to go through the crowd of people, through the irritated chatter, through the humid fug of pers
piration—but I liked submerging myself in it. Sometimes the noise of the outpatient department reminded me of a concert, and the thick smell of sweat gave me a peculiar sensation. Each time the elevator door opened, I knew I was in for a thrill, and I wondered what I would see and hear and smell. The joy of being human, I thought to myself.
Soon after arriving at the ICU, I found out that there were other kids among the families of the patients. I say that I found out about them because I never really got to know them.
There was an invisible barrier that kept any of us from becoming friends. Maybe it was something in their eyes. They seemed to be able to see right through me, right into my heart. Those were the eyes of someone who has experienced real pain; those were eyes that had been washed clear by tears. I knew because I had the same eyes.
It’s painful to try to talk to someone with those penetrating eyes. You can’t help but feel your chitchat is too vulgar or too simple, as if you are insulting them with your flimsy attempts at conversation. It felt like undergoing vivisection. It was better to steer clear of them and avoid a second attempt at a heart-to-heart.
We avoided each other by unspoken mutual agreement.
I think perhaps there was another reason. Since we were all children of patients, we already knew what lurked in each other’s hearts. I knew what kind of pain they were in and how they put on a brave front. I knew how guilty they felt after trying to make a joke to forget everything they were going through.
So I didn’t bother trying to make friends with anyone my own age.
After I came to that conclusion, whenever anyone tried to invade my space or get close to me, I would glare at them until they retreated.
But looking after my father wasn’t enough to take my mind off the sorrow. In the ICU, if you give yourself a moment to ponder, your thoughts will overwhelm you. Those insidious emotions are the shameless mercenaries of disease.