by Leigh Lyn
Careful not to strain his back, he swept the loose pages in a pile and sorted them into the right sequence. He made coffee and took it out to drink on the terrace overlooking the rocky seashore, where a strong wind was blowing while Bull’s Eye ran hither and thither.
It didn’t occur to him that Lin had a secret hideout. Amongst her friends, there was Bonnie, her old school friend, but she was in Shanghai and Lin shouldn’t have her passport with her. Frances was in New York. Amongst her colleagues, Kat was the most likely person whom Lin might contact. Wen made a mental note to call Corinth on Monday. Who else? She wouldn’t have wanted her twins to see her this way. No point calling Niang, he shouldn’t think. Besides, Liu would have the family covered.
Just in case, Wen went outside, walked around the house and looked for concealed doors. When he didn’t find any, he made another mental note to call the locksmith as soon as the typhoon was over. When Lin had put the manuscript in the nook was not altogether clear, but it seemed she’d wanted him to find it. And he must say, it dropped a few bombshells. The first one was the memory he had of his own practice. The amount of information Lin hid from him was dire. Reading about her wild escapades he had no inkling about served to jolt him out of his skin. The more he thought about it, the more unnerved he became. If it could happen with this patient, it could have happened with his other patients too.
The next shock was Frieda and the way she’d floundered confidential patient information to anyone who would lend her an ear. First, who would do something like that? Second, how come no one complained? And third, how is it possible this madness had not come to his attention? Wen remembered the circumstances under which he’d hired her. Surprised by Lin’s notes, he thought one of the nurses at the asylum had given her a pencil. He’d given the young nurse hell.
“But it wasn’t me,” she’d stammered. “Frieda did it.”
Wen had called the nurses’ station in the ward and asked to speak to Nurse Frieda, who appeared to be new. They said there was no nurse by that name.
“How’s this possible?” He’d asked them to check again and get back to him as soon as they could. Fifteen minutes later, there was a discrete knock on his door. A slender, mature woman in a nurse uniform entered, a pleasant smile, an impeccably made-up face and short gelled-back hair dyed black. She introduced herself as Frieda Chou. His first impression was how unlike that of a nurse her handshake was. It had been the determined handshake of a district council member running for office, while her attitude was that of a mom who wanted you to finish your veg.
“No worries,” she said. “All I gave the patient was a soft crayon. I thought it might help the patient relax.”
He’d been impressed and charmed by the woman whose social skills were better than the average hospital staff—doctors and management included. That was the reason why he asked her to come work for him. Never had he suspected she was such a blabbermouth. He should count himself lucky no one sued him for it. With the benefit of hindsight, he should have done a more vigilant background check on her than the regular vetting.
Then there were Lin’s visits to 8th Sky and this old man called Shi Gong. Unless he was a creation of Lin’s imagination, this recluse’s purported experiments reminded Wen of controversial stories going around campus when he was a young psychology student. In the seventies, rumors were circulating about professors conducting experiments on patients and students behind closed doors. These were spin-offs of gossip that were going viral in the states about Project MK Ultra and the CIA. The students figured, if this could happen in the US, the same could happen here at their own university. The controversy became white-hot until the dean of the humanities department issued a memo, stating that any student caught spreading these rumors would be expelled. After that, they died down.
This Shi Gong was different though. He appeared to be a rare soul who had his head in the clouds while taking on the challenge of solving society’s problems. He also seemed to have a keen eye on the suffering of the people he tested his theories upon. Lin’s hunch that Shi Gong’s synchronizing of herbal genomes and health plan was a humane front for a self-serving enterprise doing experimentation on unwanted children seemed ungrounded. Yet, it did not preclude that something was going on. Wen’s eyes wandered over the humongous waves.
“Mr. B?” he called out several times until the little white doggie, dripping wet, waddled toward the terrace from the beach where he’d been.
“The waves are too high to play with today, my boy.”
The weather was getting worse fast, and rain drizzled down on the rocky beach. Wen went back inside and returned to the window seat with the manuscript. He continued reading, thinking how, if he’d known what was going on in Lin’s life or in her mind, he might have changed the course of events.
“Isolated cries sinking in a yellow swamp” was how Lin described her first notes, and her memoir was to some extent still the same. The ardent task that befell Wen now was to string these cries together. Lin’s high cholinergic level might have disabled her rational and fact-checking abilities once again, causing a hodgepodge of misconstrued observations and far-fetched hypotheses. He felt terrible. His focus had deteriorated over the decades. In his younger days, he would not have let things slip like this. He would have registered something odd was going on when she told him about the apparitions she saw when she was little.
Lin’s confusion about the resemblance of many of her relatives and random individuals appearing in her life could be caused by relapses into a conscious dream state mixing with reality. Aided by the high cholinergic level in her brain, neurons fired away and recalled fragments of previous dreams while her rational faculty or fact-checking ability was out. PTSD triggered the memory and activated the hippo-campus to retrieve previous sensory records, amongst which long-forgotten, suppressed ones surfaced. Shi Gong’s ‘death’ or the whole existence of 8th Sky could have been a lucid dream triggered by her malfunctioning hippo-campus retrieving childhood memories of her treehouse adventure and the bonesetter.
Wen sighed. It was all possible, but Lin seemed so composed during their last session; so calm and confident. Despite that little drunken incident at the yacht trip, he honestly believed she was ready to be discharged and better off that way.
Something wet nuzzled his leg. Looking down, he saw Mr. B staring at him, his long white head inclined to the left, his blue leash in his mouth. Wen looked up at the small clock built into the door of the gleaming steel fridge. Red digits jumped from 18.59 to 19.00 pm. On-the-dot, canine intuition.
Chapter 51
“Off you go,” Wen opened the glass sliding doors of the veranda to let Bull’s Eye out. He looked up. He’d been too busy to notice the apocalyptic cloud covering the blackened sky. Every few seconds, lightning escaped from its lower edge, electrifying the atmosphere. White waves clashed into the dark rocks, exploding into a gazillion tiny water drops. Excited by the spectacle, Mr. B jumped over the ledge down to the sandy boulders below.
“Come back, Bull!” Wen yelled, but the storm drowned out his voice, and Bull’s Eye ran to the edge of the water. “Bull’s Eye!” The old man chased after him, squinting his wary old eyes to look for the little dog, who had disappeared in the vertical cascade of foaming waves. At the edge of the rocks, Wen came to a standstill, mesmerized by the spectacular wall of water looming above him. He squatted down and raised his arms above his head as tons of water crashed down on top of him, surrounding him in a liquid fury that drained away as fast as it appeared. A lull followed. He waited a few seconds before lowering his cold, wet arms. He was in the same spot while the sea had retreated to gather its strength for the next assault on the rocks. Wen stumbled up to make his way further down the beach, squatting down each time another giant wave washed over the rocks. Then, he spotted a little lump of white fur thirty feet ahead of him. With a heavy heart, he scurried over, picked up the motionless wet dog and lifted him in front of his eyes to see more clearly. A pink tongue slipp
ed out and licked his wet nose.
“What’s gotten into you, you crazy dog?” Relieved, the old man laughed out loud and, hugging Bull’s Eye to his chest, he stumbled back to the house.
Exhausted, Wen stepped in the steaming hot bath and added a handful of flower-scented bath salt into it from the jar Karen had left behind.
“That feels better, doesn’t it?” she said, sitting on the edge. “Soak the cold out of your bones before you come down with one, my love.”
“Never have I felt as old as tonight,” he told her. “Bull will be the death of me one day.”
He scanned the sky while lying back in the soothing hot water. Lin had designed the bath as a tiny infinity pool in a projecting glass box looking out over the sea and up to the sky where the apocalyptic cloud was drifting along like a spaceship with a mission. Now more than ever, Wen was grateful for the shelter the house was lending him against the world raging outside. He reached up to the touchscreen controls embedded in the glass and dimmed the light till it was barely visible and the walls glowed a soft fluorescent white.
At intervals, lightning rendered the sky bright white lasting a second, but for most of the time darkness loomed. Wen rested his head on the cushion embedded in the edge of the tub. He entered Karen’s dream. He was hiding in her translucent flower petal shelter but, unlike her, he did not feel protected. Shadows moved along the lush, thick glass, displacing air with a menacing tune as he let go of his thoughts. Shades melted and blended with the room, spreading over it in a ubiquitous layer of human darkness. The floor, walls, and ceiling lost their form, the blackness spilled into the wall as light entered the space, draping over him like a duvet, draining warmth from his body. He slipped into the water while keeping his eyes on the specters that coaxed above its surface, waiting for air bubbles to rise from his mouth and nose. Wen watched the black shadows slip into the bubbles and sinking them back down until they re-entered his body, filling him with a sense of impending doom.
With a thunderous bang, heaven unloaded its wrath, lighting up the space and jolting Wen awake in the tepid, cold bath. The shimmering walls had regained their solidity. He got out of the chilly water, put on a fresh change of clothes and returned to the kitchen to pack food in a cardboard box. Karen had loved this house, said Lin recreated her childhood fantasy with its many nooks to play and hide from adults and their world at large. This beautiful whim had taken on an unexpected dark undertone in his dream just now.
With Mr. Bull on his leash, the box under one arm, and the manuscript under his other, Dr. Wen headed to the pier where Chang E was moored. Once on board, he checked all ropes and knots to make sure that the sails and boom were tied. The typhoon had blown over and was heading toward Guangzhou. The Observatory had announced it would lower the Typhoon to level three in an hour. Although the sea seemed calm, the gusty wind could turn anytime and blow the gale back. Wen lifted the binoculars he had retrieved from the little compartment under the helm to his eyes and peered at his house. After a few breezy minutes of affirming that everyone and everything were asleep in the dozen houses lining the beach, Wen descended into the cabin. He poured himself a whiskey, settled on the sailor-clothed bench and continued reading.
Lin’s considerable effort to look into her past did not lead her to uncover the traumatic event that caused her haunted dreams, if there ever was one. Instead, it led to a series of episodes culminating with a most gory hallucination involving her uncle. Did a chain of aggravating traumas unleash alters that had been living in the periphery of her mind all this time? Or were new alters created when memories were triggered and causing her to relive the traumas?
Wen took off his glasses and put the manuscript aside. The sun was rising, driving out the shadows in the corners. Feeling more at ease, he caught a few hours of sleep when his cell went off. Noting the Caller-ID, Wen answered.
“Dr. Liu?”
“Yes, I’m sorry to wake you again, Dr. Wen.”
“Not at all, I was up already. Any news?”
“We found Lin.”
“Thank God!” Wen exclaimed. “How? Where did you find her?”
“She walked through the door by herself; I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“Where?”
“At G.Y.’s facilities,” Dr. Liu said. “Where she was hospitalized.”
Wen clenched his jaw and thanked Dr. Liu. After he ended the call he gazed out a porthole at the rhythmic movement of the water. Something was terribly wrong. He picked up his cell and called his friend for help.
Chapter 52
Emerging from the underground car park, Wen shielded his eyes against the sun. Hundreds of young demonstrators hogged the pavements and roads. Some wore their school uniform, others were in black with a yellow ribbon pinned on the sleeve. Wen had walked straight into the Occupy Central protest. Camera crews and bystanders watched on from the sides as a group sang to pass the time.
Staying close to the closed shops, Wen made his way between the water and food supply stalls to the Landmark, one of the many swanky malls in Central with a trendy psychedelic facade. He was meeting his old pal. Wen checked his watch. He was ten minutes late, which meant Henry—who had the invariable habit of being ten minutes early—had been waiting for twenty.
Tall, stooped, and with a head full of snow-white hair, which he had worn in a crewcut since 1949, Henry Au-Yeung was studying the chaotic street scene outside the first-floor café when Wen arrived. After they graduated over four decades ago, Au-Yeung had chosen the ivory tower, completed a Ph.D. and had led his own research team in teaching mice tricks, decoding their neurological signals, and transferring them to a robot. Later, when funding in Artificial Intelligence trickled to a bare minimum, Au-Yeung had studied patterns in brain scans of people with behavioral disorders and other mental phenomena while Wen built his practice.
If anybody, Wen trusted Au-Yeung’s judgment, whom he’d played squash with twice a month for the first three decades and golf in the last one when their bodies forced them to slow down. Without reservations, Wen told Au-Yeung about Lin’s case. Today, however, they did not see eye to eye.
“Damn it, James!” Au-Yeung said, when Wen finished. “How do you know if she is telling the truth or not? For all you know, the whole manuscript is a product of her imagination.”
“I’ve given it a lot of thought. What she wrote made sense. I admit it’s a gut feeling, but the accuracy of the details—some of which were impossible to know unless she’d gone to all those places; seen, heard, smelled and felt it all—convinced me.”
“She might be a good storyteller with a vivid imagination.”
“Yeah well, it’s not just the descriptions. The writing showed the signs of deterioration of her psychological state over time, which she did not notice let alone make up.”
“This could be another Gradiva, and Lin could be another Wil Jensen,” Au-Yeung retorted.
“It could, but I don’t believe it. I believe her experience, her emotions, and her self-doubts are real and most of the things in her manuscript took place.”
“You believe?” Au-Yeung gazed at Wen over his bifocals perched low on his wide nose. “I’m a man of science. Belief and gut feelings rank low in my book.”
“Well, that’s why I’m bringing you in.”
“How is that, my friend?” Au-Yeung leaned back in his black leather chair.
“I reckon you are up-to-date with the latest application of neural science to mental disorders and, therefore, the perfect person to determine if she’s taking me for a ride.”
Squinting his quick eyes and raising his white brows, Au-Yeung asked, “What is it you want me to do?”
“You have a portable MRI scanner, don’t you? That will come in handy,” Wen said. “If we could do a brain-scan of her and check its pattern for similarities with the brain scans of patients with similar disorders.”
“Well deducted I would say, were it not for three minor details. One, I too retired a year ago. Two, a portable
MRI is a magnet housed in a twenty-feet truck weighing several tons. And three, how do we do scans when the very institution her story is incriminating, locked her away?” Au-Yeung sighed.
“I have a plan—”
“A plan? James…” Au-Yeung tapped his finger on his armrest, emphasizing his words. “Do you know what you’re up against if what you believe is true?”
Wen opened his mouth, but Au-Yeung raised his hand, silencing him before he uttered another word.
“Don’t let yourself be dragged into her narrative, my friend, unless you’re 100% sure of her story. Even then, it is pure madness. Is there any way she can win this?”
“I know what you are saying. I used the same argument with Lin years ago when I first started her treatment.” Wen lowered his voice. “I had hoped I could tone down her extreme mood swings with medication, so she would fall back into her previous life. Alas, it turns out she hid major events in her life from me, which prolonged her state of disintegration and aggravated the crisis between her perception of the world and her ideals.” His throat tightened. “But it didn’t have to happen that way. Had I known Lin’s inner turmoil, I would have treated her with other methods. I—” Wen hesitated for a second. “Knowing her distrust of therapists, I could have helped her find ways to take control of her neuroses herself to mitigate the conflict between her values and rise above those of society.”
“And do what?” Au-Yeung shrugged.
“In some cases, psychoneurosis is not so much an illness as a transformative stage one has to go through to develop this higher state of awareness.”
“Throwing textbook theories at me, are you?” Au-Yeung rolled his eyes.