The 8th Sky_A Psychological Novel With An Unforgettable Twist

by Leigh Lyn

  “But China has rebuilt itself, hasn’t it?”

  “It reinvented itself. Yes, it has, but with a devastating personal price paid by billions of people over many generations.”

  A loud squawk interrupted Shi Gong. I waited, but he’d fallen quiet, staring over the mountain range across the gorge, his eyes glazing over.

  “So that means you don’t believe in our country?” I asked, suppressing a nervous laugh.

  “Not at all.” He glanced at me briefly. “I think we should look for a less painful path. Culture, timing, and serendipity can make or break the best and worst ideas. The source of gravity matters little. It’s arbitrary, but gravity is the crown jewel. Without gravity, everything is up in the air.” His gaze was resting on a bird that had appeared out of nowhere and was crisscrossing the misty air over the Daning.

  “You lost me again,” I said.

  There was no sign that Shi Gong heard me as he continued. “The Chinese have been compared to loose sand that disperses in the slightest wind, but the contrary is true.”

  “You think?”

  “I know. Despite the most gut-wrenching wrong done unto them, our people have hung on. Think of Deng and all the other leaders who were purged and then came back to serve the country. Think of yourself and all those in Hong Kong who have returned after the exodus before the Handover. Not to say all is fine and perfect, but people have hung on. We’ve hung on because we know that, if we persist, this country can be great. Only in China is there this unfathomable collective support for creative destruction. What we Chinese are gravitating toward after everything else has collapsed is our loyalty to China; our homeland—but we have to be careful. We must pre-empt the effect of popularism and curb its destruction. We have to be mindful of its disastrous effects and protect ourselves from ourselves. After all these rebirths, the phoenix is about to awaken as a dragon.”

  I too gazed at the cruising bird.

  “As of today, the old social glue is dried up. There’s a desperate need for an upgrade.”

  “What kind of upgrade?”

  “That is the most urgent question that nobody has found the answer to yet. We thought that, by bumping the human psyche up a notch, we could reinstate the social glue or gravitation.”

  “Does the end justify any means?”

  Regretting the question the second I asked it, I watched Shi Gong’s jaw muscle tighten as he said, “From G.Y.’s perspective, it is. Xiao Pang told me you are interested in our health-plan?”

  Was Shi Gong changing the subject because my question offended him?

  “Oh yes,” I nodded. “Everyone says how good it is; how it’s improving their lives.”

  “We try. Once the employee has signed on, she and her family will enjoy our holistic treatments for life.”

  “Even if they lose or quit their jobs?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, unless one wishes to be taken off it.”

  “But who pays the premium?”

  “That’s not an issue.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  Shi Gong frowned. “There’s no catch. Our concept of a holistic health plan is about maintaining a perfect equilibrium in Chi. It works by reducing medical intervention to a minimum. Our account sheets prove it.”

  “It doesn’t sound cheap.”

  “It is. The psychological and physical sense of well-being and security our plan creates reduces illness, which lowers our overheads. The more areas we extend into, the more economical it is. On top, our attractive business model has multiplied our market share. All taken together, we’re doing well. So, we’re giving back to society.”

  “Magic, is it?” I blurted out.

  Shi Gong frowned at my sarcasm. “You know the phrase ‘Money makes the world go around’?”

  I nodded.

  “The problem with China’s vast population is that they don’t have any money. So, we have adapted our business model and focused on tapping their latent value.”

  “Which is?”

  “Their labor. They compensate us by working pro-bono.”

  “They work for free?”

  “In fair measures, yes. We offer people the most valuable thing in their life: their health. So, they help us pro bono and contribute to the community’s need. To China’s need.”

  The warm tingling sense of pride I felt inside vanished. Did he mean the Party’s need?

  Before I could probe any further, Pui showed up and whispered into his ear, after which he turned to me.

  “Ma Da Fu, our chief physician, is here. Pui will take you to him for your examination.”

  Getting up, Shi Gong shook my hand. “Take good care of yourself for me, Miss Lee.”

  Chapter 26

  Reluctant to leave the charismatic old man, I followed Pui up the cliff-clinging steps and traversed the compound as I pondered over Shi Gong. He seemed to be one of those peculiar, unstoppable people whose visions become either the ascent or the undoing of whole civilizations. Not that anyone these days has any scruples against messing around with genomes, human or otherwise. By the look of 8th Sky’s people, many generations of designer babies should have passed through the birth canals of designer moms here at 8th Sky. Shi Gong said they’d abandoned it for bio-engineering and something to do with bumping the human psyche up a notch and reinstating the social glue or gravitation. I was not sure what that amounted to, and it worried me.

  I dreaded to think what they might reinstate in me. When we arrived at the examination room, I told Pui I felt fine and would skip the medical check-up. But she said it was a prerequisite of the health-plan. Putting a firm hand on my trembling shoulder, she shuffled me in. Standing by the window was 8th Sky’s physician. The first impression Dr. Ma—as he told me to call him—made on me was that he was thin. Not as thin as Shi Gong, but the sunlight shining through his linen outfit showed an outline lanky enough to be disturbing for a doctor.

  He asked me to sit on a tall bed lined with a paper tissue, took my wrist and held it with his thin, knobby fingers. He stared at his watch, absorbed by the insights on my bodily state they registered. Lifting my eyelids, he made me stick out my tongue and instructed me to lie down, telling me what medics always told me, “You seem tense, Miss Lee. Relax!”

  Reluctantly, I tried.

  He continued in a monotonous voice, “Now lean back and watch the moving petals of the ceiling fan above me. Screen out everything and focus.”

  Space, light and sounds faded. My body slumped as the blades spun, thinning my thoughts as they went round and round.

  When I awoke, it was dark except for the screen, on which shadows were dancing in a haze of white light. I was back in the room Pui had taken me to when I first arrived. I tried to open the automatic door by waving my arms, stepping back and forth, pressing and pushing the sensor panel, but nothing happened. My stomach was growling, which was odd considering I’d eaten so much. My hand rubbed a spot on my arm and pain shot through it like a shard of glass was dug deep under the skin. I turned it over to see a swelling the size of a barley but, before I could study it further, the door opened, and Pui entered. She was wearing her hair pinned up instead of loose, which was odd although I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  I looked at her. “Good morning? What time is it?”

  “It’s eight. You’ve been sleeping. At least, that’s what I assume you were doing in here.”

  Had everything been a dream? Dazed about what might or might not have happened in the last twenty-something hours, I nodded, “I dozed off, but I couldn’t have slept for a day. Did Dr. Ma give me any medication or injections?”

  Pui shook her tiny head. “I’m not sure what you are talking about. Don’t you remember what happened?”

  Stumped, I stared at her. The door opened again, and a servant girl entered carrying a tray with food.

  “I’m sorry, but there is no time for that.” Pui waved the servant girl away. “I’ll have that packed up
for you. You are leaving.”

  “What, right now?” I snatched a steamed bun off the tray.

  “There'll be a meeting here, and I’ve been told to arrange your departure before that begins. The pilot is waiting.”

  As involuntary and brisk as I had been summoned, I was whisked on board the chopper and flown back to Chongqing. It was all rather odd, but I consoled myself it was just as well since I had Xiao Cai’s meeting on Monday. Not that I looked forward to being thrown to the wolves at Chongqing’s Planning Bureau.

  The mountains above the gorge looked different. Trees seemed drier, their leaves paler. Stark shadows underlined the colossal bridges that spanned across the chiseled rock faces. Flocks of geese flying over the paddy-fields at the mountains’ feet seemed more hurried. Thin sandy trails widened to become roads; slums made space for proper houses; houses grew larger; clusters became denser and housing estates popped out of the ground at higher frequencies. Roads joined expressways and expressways became flyovers and intertwined with monorails. The spiked duck-head of Chongqing sandwiched between the Jianling and Yangtze River emerged. Soon the chopper landed on the helipad next to the rooftop pool at the Hilton. I’d returned to civilization.

  Before I changed my clothes and showered, I charged my phone, which had died a day ago. Drying my hair, I read my messages. There was one from Ben, asking me to call him, several from the twins about a sleepover, and one was from Kat. It said Peter wrote the team a memo after she told him about Chongqing. She’d attached it to the message. In it, he instructed that no one from our company should deal with the Chongqing’s Planning Bureau directly and to leave the lobbying to the client and his Bureau-trotter. I love Peter.

  With tomorrow’s meeting canceled, I took the next flight back to Hong Kong, which took off three hours later. Looking over the city of Chongqing from the plane, I pondered over Shi Gong. The engine’s hum was the only sound audible as the plane glided southward in the amber dusk. As a profession, architects had egos second to none, except perhaps physicians and surgeons, whose life-saving jobs were inherently heroic. At the indisputable top must be the gene-slicing scientist who alters God’s creations. None of that power had gotten to Shi Gong, who was more grounded than anyone I’d ever met. But even if the old man could be trusted, could G.Y. or Dr. Ma? Had they chosen Shi Gong as the face of G.Y. because of his noble and benign inclinations?

  This helicopter pickup service couldn’t be part of their customer service. What if they knew my intentions and all this was staged to end my suspicions? Shi Gong more or less admitted that at 8th Sky they use their policyholders as voluntary lab-rats.

  I rubbed the swelling on my arm, which had shrunken to the size of a rice kernel. Could it be an insect bite? The orphans in their little red aprons sprang to my mind. Saved from infanticide, abandonment, mutilation, forced breeding of male descendants, and forced abortions, what awaited them surely couldn’t be worse.

  I opened my laptop to edit my memory entries. I censored any clues that let on any of what had been happening in the last few days. Then, I sent them to Dr. Wen as I had promised. Soon, the captain’s digitized voice announced we were to land in fifteen minutes. I looked for my medicine in my carry-on and counted the pills. There were twenty white ones, ten blue ones, and twenty yellow ones, which meant I’d skipped medication for five days. Feeling fine without them, I put them away.

  Chapter 27

  Two days later, Frieda called me at the office. My ringtone stirred the still air. It was dead silent because Peter hated noise. Surrounded by hundreds of colleagues, I sank lower in my chair and cupped my hand over the receiver.

  “Got it,” Frieda said, referring to my memoir entries.

  “Good,” I replied.

  “It’s revealing.”

  I perked up my ears. “What is?”

  “You didn’t hear this from me, okay?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said, glancing at the clock.

  “Dr. Wen thinks the Dutch town, Haarlem, is the model on which you base your fantasy world.”

  “My fantasy world?!” Several of my colleagues looked my way. “He used that word?”

  “He described it as ‘a benign environment with dangers lurking beneath the surface’.”

  “What nonsense is this?”

  I couldn’t believe Dr. Wen would overstep doctor-patient confidentiality as grossly as this. Or was it Frieda, whose resourcefulness to find gossip spiced up everything?

  “Calm down. This is what shrinks do; they analyze patients.”

  “In private, I had hoped.”

  “Hear me out, sweetie—”

  “This better be good.”

  “He’s got an issue with your genealogy and wants me to check it out—”

  “Again?! Haven’t you checked my parents’ medical history already?”

  “He might have found contradictory information after a counter-check in some hospital database, but he wants me to find out what happened to your grandmother’s firstborns.”

  “Why, what are you talking about?”

  “Sweetie, because you’re writing this memoir and digging in your uncharted past, Dr. Wen asked me to stay one step ahead just in case.”

  “Okay, but why plural as in first-borns?”

  “Because there had been more than one baby.”

  “What?!”

  My shrink was playing detective behind my back and being darn good at it too, but his excessive involvement felt wrong.

  “How are you staying one step ahead if you’re telling me everything about it?”

  “You’re my friend. I thought I ought to tell you. Now, do you remember anyone ever talking about them, any stories you may have overheard in the past?”

  I opened my mouth. I closed it again. Had we hit on what Niang was afraid of when she told me to leave the past alone?

  “Hello? Are you still there? Lin?” Frieda asked.

  “I am.” I took a deep breath. “Yeah, I don’t remember the exact story, but I believe he died.”

  “Oh. Well, don’t worry about it, darling, I’ll sort it out. Listen, a patient just walked in. I have to go.”

  “Hang on,” I quipped. “Tell Dr. Wen I need to talk to him about his house.”

  A few months ago, Dr. Wen had asked me to design a house for him and his wife Karen on a small beachside site in Saikung.

  “Will do, but I got to go. I’ll see you Thursday, okay? Don’t go tell Dr. Wen I talked to you though.”

  Come Thursday, Dr. Wen was in holiday mood still. “I got a nice surprise when I came in.”

  Dr. Wen walked up to the window, followed by Bull’s Eye, his little white dog who always stayed at his feet during sessions. In a small pot, a single deep purple orchid was propped with a thin bamboo stick. “It opened yesterday. Smell it.”

  I lowered my head and, taking a deep breath, memories of cold winter nights and warm mugs with thick creamy drinks flashed in front of my eyes. “Chocolate?”

  “Cocoa,” Dr. Wen said, beaming. “Exquisite, isn’t it? No two are ever the same or have the same scent. Nor do you ever know when they’ll bloom.” His hand traced the orchid without touching it. “But when they do, they have a precious and poignant honesty about them.”

  Dr. Wen’s capacity for insight and profundity was as large as my suspicion of it, but this was a moment I must seize.

  “Speaking of honesty, are there things patients shouldn’t know? I mean, is it against a therapist’s protocol to be too honest?”

  “Well, some say there are as many protocols as there are therapists. I say there are as many protocols as there are patients.”

  Not revealing anything about his investigation, was he? The issue I used to have about these sessions was that my therapist seemed to think his job was done by sitting in that chair and listening. But knowing he asked Frieda to investigate was worse if he was not letting me in on his findings. Beckoning me to take a seat on the oversized calf-leather couch in front of his f
ireplace, Dr. Wen sat down in the velvet armchair across from it with Bull’s Eye at his feet. Above the mantelpiece, Rudolph was looking down on us with warm, compassionate eyes.

  “You mean neither of us should have any notions what to expect? Like Zen monks?” I asked.

  “That would be ideal, if possible.” Dr. Wen tossed his white hair back.

  “Not very scientific, is it?”

  Dr. Wen shrugged. “No, it’s not. Can I ask you a question?”

  “At last.”

  “Lie down on the couch.”

  Although I couldn’t see Dr. Wen’s face, I felt his gaze on me, studying my face like a shop detective studied a shoplifter.

  “I read your entries about your childhood, Lin. You think you have changed since you were little?”

  “I was relentless and zealous like a silent resistance fighter. But I had confidence in my way of looking at the world. And I was winning.”

  “What were you winning?”

  “Dunno. Credit, I guess… esteem… rights.”

  “In your notes, you mention the predecessor of your spies and snipers and what life was like being illegal immigrants.” At last but, coming out of Dr. Wen’s mouth, that remark sounded more disturbing than when I wrote it. I was glad Frieda had warned me.

  “I meant that immigration officer was the first person of that kind we came across.” I closed my eyes to stop them from blinking. “That experience wasn’t traumatic, and there were no snipers then or now. I used a metaphor to liven up the prose.”

  “Let me rephrase: you suggest you grew up in an oppressive and treacherous world as a metaphor to make it a better read? In other words, it didn’t happen that way?”