by Sam Meekings
From the black dots on the wall display colour began to prickle up, the first light out of primordial chaos. Yuying consulted their ticket: 247, now also flashing in siren red above them. She nudged her husband, who shifted his weight forward and pushed himself up uncertainly, still too proud to reach out for support.
‘Just be honest,’ Yuying whispered, though Jinyi simply readjusted his stiff grey cotton suit and pretended he had not heard her.
The doctor was sitting at a white wooden table in a small room with white walls. The white sheets on the single bed were dotted with maroon patches, and the white curtain to be pulled round it was decidedly crusty. This was, however, the fifth best hospital in the city, or so the sign outside proudly claimed. It was also the second cheapest; though in theory the government should have paid back eighty per cent of any costs, since both of them were retirees of state jobs.
‘Well hello,’ the doctor said – a little too loudly, Jinyi thought, as though he suspected the couple was deaf. The doctor was in his early thirties, his face shining with the joys he expected to fall effortlessly into his lap, his fingers ever busy, alternating between the four red pens in his shirt pocket and his floppy fringe.
‘Hou Jinyi, I would like to ask you a few questions. Is that all right?’ The doctor said, after Yuying had bent close and whispered to him for a few seconds.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s great. Now, I hear that you had a little fall last week. Is that right?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose. Someone must have left … something on the floor, and I can’t have been looking where I was going.’
‘Ah ha, of course, of course.’ The doctor nodded earnestly. ‘So can you tell me when you were born?’
‘Well, I …’ Jinyi’s words trailed off into silence.
‘It’s hard to say, doctor.’ Yuying said, coming to his rescue. ‘My husband grew up in the countryside, you see, and never saw a real calendar until he came to the city. But we celebrate his birthday in April, and we think he must be around seventy-five or seventy-six.’
‘I see. Mid to late seventies, that makes sense. So, can you tell me what year it is now?’
‘Yes. It’s, erm, 19 … well, it’s 1976.’ Jinyi knew this was the wrong answer, but he figured it must be close enough.
‘Hmm, all right, now can you tell me who the current president is?’
‘It’s that … man … that man with the big eye-things. You know who I mean.’ Jinyi’s voice was rising, unable to hide his irritation.
‘Big eye-things? Ah, yes, Jiang Zemin’s black spectacles are a little on the large side. Ha. Very good. I think I can see what is happening here. We will need to do a few more tests, if that is all right with you.’
‘Will they be expensive?’ Jinyi asked, and his wife looked at him sharply.
‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so. They should help us to understand the extent of your problem.’
‘What is the problem, doctor?’ Yuying asked hesitantly.
He took a deep breath. ‘Well, the lack of spatial awareness, dizziness, memory problems, confused vocabulary and language issues – these are all signs of dementia. It’s just what happens when the brain gets old, I’m afraid, once it has too much to hold. But we’ll know more after the tests.’
‘Where are my words?’ Jinyi mumbled.
‘You’re just having a few problems finding them, that’s all. And besides, “Nothing that can be expressed in words is worth saying.”’ The doctor smiled, pleased with himself.
‘Lao Tzu,’ Yuying said and the doctor nodded.
‘We’ll know more after the tests.’
He scribbled a few indecipherable notes on a square sheet of paper, which he handed to Yuying before ushering them out of the room. They stood for a minute outside the office, buffered between people hurriedly moving through the corridors. Everything goes so fast these days, Jinyi thought. There is no time for anything.
‘Come on then, let’s see if we can’t find where they do the tests. Upstairs, I’ll bet. Perhaps they’ve got a lift we could use. That would be nice.’ Yuying talked because she could not think of anything else to do, because the meaningless chatter was more comforting than her own thoughts.
There was no lift, only a broken escalator and a slippery set of stairs, which they negotiated hand in hand. When they reached the next floor, the corridors curled off in every direction, giving the impression that the hospital was immense, that it was akin to an endless maze from which there was little hope of escape. They passed rooms filled with incubating babies; rooms that were silent but for the tick-tock trickle of intravenous drips hanging like empty speech bubbles above the patients’ heads; rooms of scattered bedpans attended by armies of insects; rooms where middle-aged men in dark suits drank liquor and smoked endless cigarettes over the beds of the comatose; rooms of rash-speckled children playing marbles; and rooms in which prosthetic limbs hung on hooks, almost beckoning. Whenever Yuying asked for help or directions, the dumpy nurses looked at them contemptuously.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jinyi whispered to Yuying.
‘Sorry? Whatever for?’ she said, shaking her head and smiling indulgently.
He did not reply. It had begun as a series of little secrets. The things that he felt confused about, the small slips and scrapes, the household projects he would start and later come across with surprise, wondering who had left the work unfinished – all the little things too trivial and embarrassing to be worth mentioning. After that it had graduated into a family joke: you haven’t lost the keys again, have you Jinyi? Don’t worry about introducing yourself to Pa, he’ll only forget your name anyway! Should I phone twice or three times to remind you about dinner? Jinyi had laughed along with the jokes, as if to say, yes, I’m getting a bit old and forgetful, but that’s as bad as it gets. And as such, the slow progression meant that for the first few years it had been easy to ignore, while for the next couple of years if it was spoken of, it was only in pitying terms behind Jinyi’s back.
‘After all,’ his daughters had all agreed, ‘he has suffered enough humiliation and trouble for one lifetime. Just let him be.’
Jinyi clutched his wife’s arm to make sure she did not slip on the freshly mopped floor at the end of yet another corridor. He could at least pretend that he was in control, that everything was still fine. He could still recall with perfect clarity their wedding day, the tiniest details of their earliest arguments, every turn of the river and every leafy bristle of the forests they had pushed through on their way to his aunt and uncle’s house, yet he sometimes found he could not remember a single thing that had happened only the previous day. Whole days, weeks, seemed to have disappeared, been struck from the calendar. His dreams alone retained a strange clarity: the faces of his aunt, of Dongming, of his colleagues in the dumpling restaurant, of the baby boy they carried through the fields away from the fighting in the city, all returned to him at night, as if they had never left his sight. However, there were days when his new great-grandson came and climbed up onto his knee and he found himself struggling to work out who the little boy could possibly be. Again, his only recourse was to smile and avoid risking offending whoever’s child it was, smile and do his best to hide his panic.
‘This must be it,’ Yuying announced, and they settled onto another set of plastic chairs outside another small room. A little girl in front of them in the makeshift queue was about to have her blood taken, and, when she caught sight of some of the things going on through the half-open door, she began to scream at her mother in protest.
‘Oh, I must remember to buy a chicken and cook a big stew for when Xiaojing and her husband come to dinner. We’ll give them the leftovers too – they need everything they can get now, what with their factory being “temporarily closed”.’
‘Xiaojing. Yes, she’ll be home from school soon.’ Jinyi latched onto a thread of his wife’s daily monologue. Since they had been forced to give up the mornings on the farm, Yuying had told him what had to be done
each day before they did it. It was her way of filling the time, of ordering the chaos.
‘No, dear, she’s much too old for that. Your daughter sells DVDS now, remember?’ Yuying said, drumming her fingers on her bag.
Jinyi’s eyes were half closed. In the late Tang dynasty, the Confucian poet Han Yu wrote of the mythical unicorn that its sighting is a sign of good fortune, as is made clear in the works of the classical scholars. Even small children recognise the name and know that it is lucky. However, Han Yu noted, it is also a creature which resists definition – we can only say what it is not, never what it is. Therefore, he concluded, we might be staring right at a unicorn and not know what it is. This was how Jinyi felt almost every day; the familiar things in front of him – spoons, keys, spitting boys, doctors, grandchildren – were rendered unfamiliar by his inability to match them to their name, to provide them with their definition. His world was slowly becoming populated by unicorns; a multitude of unicorns of different colours, shapes and sizes, strange beasts whose presence seemed more terrible than auspicious.
Jinyi struggled and finally forced out the words. ‘Maybe we should come back tomorrow.’
‘It won’t be any less busy then. Don’t worry, we’ll be home for lunch,’ Yuying said, using the reassuring but assertive tone of voice she had spent years practising on their children.
‘But do we really need to know the … the things … what … the …the things?’ he said.
‘The more we know, the stronger we are. If the doctors know what is wrong, they can do something about it,’ Yuying assured him.
Jinyi was not convinced. Experience seemed to teach that the more you knew, the more trouble you were likely to encounter. Far better to just get on with your own business and leave the answers to someone else.
When the tests were finished, Jinyi and Yuying retraced their steps through the tapering corridors, retreating past an old woman wailing at a vacant line of orange plastic seats, and a rabble of little boys taking turns racing on a rusty wheelchair. It took them half an hour to find their way out, and another half hour to walk back through town, past the dingy office blocks and the nearby fast-food neons, until they could collapse in the little bunker of a house, where they did their best to stop too much of the present from creeping in. Yuying spent the rest of the day rustling up a stew from the fuzzy vegetables and ancient spices at the back of the half-empty kitchen cupboard, having spent their monthly pension on the hospital fees, while Jinyi opened his martial-arts adventure book and spent the afternoon pretending not to worry about the results.
‘I’ll make you some green tea, dear, and you’ll soon forget about the tests,’ Yuying said from the kitchen, but quickly regretted her choice of words. She dipped a spoon into the bubbling pot to retrieve some crinkly white hairs. If she did not keep her snowy bob pinned back behind her ears, she found it moulted everywhere, just like the neighbour’s yappy dog.
‘What we don’t know … is an ocean,’ Jinyi replied. His wife nodded her head, not needing to reply. And we are stranded on the ever-shrinking shore.
How do we fill the time while waiting for the rest of our lives to begin? This is not a new question, and there are no new answers. Jinyi did the same as he had done on his barefoot treks toward Fushun, in the fields back at his uncle’s house, in the steamy restaurant and the sweaty factory, with the lazy oxen and with his wife’s silence – he hid behind a docile smile. At least then he had something else to think about; now, there was nothing but the waiting, which he twisted into a penance for something he had forgotten, a staring contest with his own fears.
After a phone call from the hospital, Yuying left her husband, telling him that she was popping out to do some shopping. When she returned a few hours later, Jinyi did not notice the absence of bags; he was too busy flicking through the calendar, studying the appointments scribbled in the small boxes and trying to separate what had already happened from what was still to come.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him.
‘Fine. Fine,’ he replied distractedly.
It was then that Yuying decided that she would not tell him about the results of the tests – to know that the doctors predicted only slow deterioration would be of little comfort. She would go to the hospital alone whenever she could; she would keep a daily log of his behaviour, noting any problems; she would worry for both of them, and be strong for both of them. That is what women do, she told herself.
There is more than one type of demon. They are not all fang-toothed tail-swishing child-stealers. Oh, no. Jinyi had learnt that some of them are so small that they can creep into your ear while you are sleeping and, with a tiny pair of chopsticks, froth up your brain as though they were beating eggs to scramble for dinner. And where before, when he was separated from his wife and family by war zones, by work, by the whims of politics or the weight of grief, he could turn to his memories for comfort, now it was those that were being shaken off like dandruff from the shoulders of a dark suit.
Yet, in his moments of lucidity, he realised too that love also changes shape. It was no longer slim, lithe, nervous and sweaty-palmed. It was no longer sleepless, heavy, a stone weighing deep inside the chest. It was now warm, slow, soft, a tatty old blanket huddled under in the dark. It was the last embers of a promise made decades before, still glowing red though the flames had petered down.
And so, if some mornings in the first minutes after he woke he had trouble recognising the plump old woman beside him, it was not because he had forgotten her – it was because, still blurry from drawn-out dreams, he was trying his hardest to keep hold of the memories of the young lady with the shy smile and the floating vowels and the golden slippers and the strength of dragons.
Yuying was woken by her husband twitching, his legs flailing out and kicking into hers. Her first thought was for the bruises that rose up ever more easily on her limp skin. Her body was becoming foreign to her, the parts not claimed by gravity now wrinkling and hugging her muscles for comfort. Everything bruised her now – like an autumn peach, she thought. Jinyi whimpered, flailed, turned; his body was a rickety raft caught by a tsunami. She moved tighter to him, holding fast to his shoulders and scrawny arms, trying to calm him.
‘Hey, hey,’ she soothed. ‘Wake up. Hey, what is it?’
His eyes shot open, and darted left and right. Finally he fell back, into her arms. It was a strange gift, she thought, to be belatedly granted the tenderness she had craved in the first decades of her marriage, to be given sensitivity only after she had turned hard with blisters and calluses. She stroked his thinning hair. It was matted with sweat.
She reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. ‘What was it? A nightmare? What happened? Did you see something horrible?’
‘No.’ His voice was small, hoarse.
‘Then what was it scared you?’
‘I … I was not scared. Just people.’
‘People? What people?’
‘Old.’
‘Like you and me? We’re not that old, you know.’
‘No, no, no. People. Gone.’
She stroked his arm. It was always ghosts these days. ‘Why don’t I boil some water and make us some tea? How about that Fujian black dragon we’ve been saving, hmm? We’re not going to sleep again now anyway.’
She slipped on her bobbly dressing gown and helped her husband into his. While she put some water to boil on the stove he settled on the crumbling futon, biting his nails. Might our dreams be the place where it is possible for the two worlds to meet, Yuying wondered: like a hole in the roof where the water leaks in? Or were dreams just a trick of the brain? When it came it down to it, she considered, was there actually a difference between these two theories? They reached the same conclusion – that logic is left behind at the borders of death and dreams. She slopped the water into the small clay pot and carried the tray over to Jinyi.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
He shrugged, lifting the small cup to his nose – the f
irst cup for smell, the second for taste. Who had told him that?
‘Who did you see?’ Yuying asked between sips.
‘Everyone.’
‘Oh. I see.’ She wanted to ask, ‘Were they well? What did they say? Did anyone mention me?’ But she did not want to upset him, to give credence to the idea that his nightmares might be more than a sleight of hand of memory. ‘Do you remember when the children were young and had bad dreams? They used to crawl into our bed, remember? Sometimes they’d all migrate across and cram in together, even though ours was much smaller than the kang they shared. We wouldn’t get more than half an hour’s sleep a whole night, and then work twelve hours or more. I wonder how we did it.’ She chuckled, then looked across at her silent husband.
Jinyi kept the cup held up in front of him, an offering to some invisible residue of the dream.
She led him back to the bedroom and pulled the covers tight around his shivering body, then slipped into the ancient indents her own body had left in the bed over the years.
Yuying took out her teeth and closed her eyes. This is how life works, she thought; being given what you wanted only when you have learnt not to need it. There were a hundred questions she might have asked him with this gift of honesty and dependence, when she was sixteen, twenty, thirty even; but these days she could guess what he would say before he had even opened his mouth. She told herself it was better this way. Slowly the day’s conversations at the hospital came back to her and she wondered about her husband’s dreams. If he must lose everything else, his memories, our life together, even me, then at least let him keep his dreams, she mouthed to gods whose names she could not quite remember.
Perhaps, she began to think, as she lay in the bed the two of them had shared on and off for close to fifty years, this is what love is – a wilful forgetting, remembering only the best days, the little joys and the times they felt like they were flying through their lives. There was still something of that old Jinyi left, she told herself, some part of that young man who cooked her dumplings and had walked more than a thousand li to find her, who always had a joke to trade for a tear.