Snakehead tct-4

by Peter May

  During the forty minutes it had taken her to drive from the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner to her destination, she had made a conscious effort to blank out the reason for her trip. Her mind had wandered, and at one point she had figured that the original German settlers must have named the fort Dietrich as in Marlene, and that time had corrupted it to Detrick, the soft German ch that came from the back of the throat hardened to a ck from much further forward on the tongue. And she had almost laughed at herself for allowing such trivia to fill her thoughts. Except that laughter was impossible, and now that she saw the orange flashing lights at the gates of Fort Detrick on the road ahead of her, she felt a constriction in her chest and found it hard to breathe.

  The duty doctor was a young woman, dark hair scraped back into a ponytail. She wore army fatigues and carried the rank of major. Her complexion was sallow, and she had large sad eyes that conveyed something of the apprehension she was doing her best to mask. She led Margaret briskly through the labyrinth of corridors to Ward 200. The air at the receiving desk was bristling with tension. Several medical staff looked at Margaret with a mix of curiosity and concern.

  ‘He’s not good,’ the doctor had said when she picked Margaret up at the front desk. ‘Temperature’s high, over a hundred and six, and there’s fluid in his lungs, intermittent vomiting. He swings between fever and lucidity without warning. His symptoms have developed incredibly fast.’

  Margaret reached the door to the Slammer and peered through the window. There were two medical staff in Steve’s room, both wearing light blue protective suits, yellow cable corkscrewing behind them. She could barely see the figure lying on the bed. But she could see the IV feeding lactated Ringer’s solution into his arm to combat dehydration and a forest of wires leading off to the equipment monitoring his condition.

  ‘We’ve done everything we can to keep his temperature down, but it’s a losing battle,’ the doctor was saying. ‘And it’s impossible to tell at this stage if the rimantadine is having any effect. But he’s strong, you know; he could ride it out.’

  Margaret wondered how much homework the doctor had done on the symptoms and progress of the Spanish flu. She remembered Markin’s words: It could reduce a strong, vigorous adult to a quivering wreck in a matter of hours. And then it occurred to her that when the prognosis is bleak and all hope gone, comfort is all that remains. It is the doctor’s final crutch with which to face the patient’s loved ones. Margaret searched the doctor’s face for some sign that she knew something she wasn’t telling. ‘What do you really think?’ she asked.

  The doctor shrugged hopelessly. ‘I have no idea. The next few hours will be critical.’

  Margaret said, ‘I have stuff for him. A picture of his little girl. Can I go in?’

  The doctor closed the door behind her, and she found herself in a small changing room, shelves rising to the ceiling, cotton pants and shirts arranged in colours: white, khaki, blue, brown. Margaret laid her pale blue personal protective suit on the bench and undressed quickly. She slipped into a pair of white pants and shirt, fingers fumbling with the ties, before stepping into the protective suit and zipping herself in.

  For a moment she was gripped by panic. Claustrophobia, fear. She turned and saw the plaque on the door, red lettering on white. EMERGENCY DOOR RELEASE. And almost gave in to an impulse to hit the release and get the hell out. She took a deep breath and heard it quivering in the sealed confines of her suit, and then saw her world turn opaque as it misted her visor. She put a hand on the wall to steady herself and then turned toward the outer shower. There was no need to decontaminate on the way in.

  Clumsy in the suit, she stepped through a short, narrow corridor past the outer shower, closing the door behind her, and opened the heavy stainless steel door into the large chemical decontamination shower. On the inside of it, above a push-handle for opening, was a red warning sign: CLOSE OUTER SHOWER DOOR BEFORE OPENING INNER SHOWER DOOR. She pulled it closed behind her, and looked around the glistening walls of the stainless steel cubicle, pipes and shower heads, stop-cocks with knurled red turning handles. On the way out she would be bombarded in here by liquid chemicals designed to kill every living thing. Her breathing had become shallow and rapid, emphasised in her head by the loudness of it. She thumped the push-handle of the outer door with her open palms and it swung open into the anteroom with the white-painted brick walls that she had seen through the window from the outside. She swung the door shut again, and twisted awkwardly to find the nozzle at the back of her suit that fit the end of the yellow corkscrew cable that hung from the wall on her left, fumbling through her white latex gloves to make the connection. As it locked into place, the suit immediately began to fill with cool, filtered air, expanding around her, and she began to feel the panic diminishing. She could breathe again. The misting on her visor evaporated. She looked around and saw on the shelf behind her the rows of short green booties that the doctor had told her to put on. Moving with the awkward, slow-motion gait of a spaceman, she reached up and pulled down a pair of boots, checking them for size and then slipping her inflated feet inside.

  She saw the doctor, through the glass, waving her to the door. She disconnected from the yellow cable and waddled over to where she could open the hatch of the ultraviolet chamber to retrieve the photograph, cassettes, and handful of books she had bought at the airport. Then she turned back toward Steve’s room. The nursing staff had spotted her by now, and one of them pointed to a yellow cable hanging free from the window wall on the far side of the bed. She hurried across the anteroom and into the special care room, rounding the bed and connecting to the cable before she turned to look at Steve where he lay in the bed. The air rushed back into her suit and blew down over her head.

  Steve’s face was a strange putty colour, with incongruously red patches high on his cheeks and forehead. His mouth was open and his breathing shallow, eyes shut, sweat beading across his brow. One of the nurses laid a cool wet towel across his forehead, and his eyes flickered open. He inclined his head a little to his right and the dull glaze left his eyes, a lustre returning to them as he recognised Margaret behind the visor. He smiled, and reached out a hand to take hers, wires trailing in its wake.

  ‘Welcome back to Wally World,’ he said. ‘It’s a fun place to spend forty-eight hours.’ Phlegm caught in the back of his throat, throwing him into a convulsion of coughing that turned him scarlet and left him gasping for breath. When he had control again, he said, ‘I knew I should have paid those goddamned parking fines.’

  Margaret squeezed his hand tightly. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it yesterday.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what’s twenty-four hours between friends? I knew if you couldn’t make it there’d be a good reason.’ He paused. ‘So what the hell was it?’ And then he broke into a grin. ‘Only kidding.’ He nodded toward the bag. ‘What have you got for me?’

  She held it open for him to see. ‘Some books. Your personal stereo. And I didn’t know which tapes you’d want, so I just brought them all.’

  He flicked his head toward a blue and silver portable stereo on a shelf on the opposite wall. ‘One of the nurses loaned me her ghetto-blaster. Jesus, she only had tapes of rap music. You know, that’s rap with a silent C. Go figure.’ He stopped to catch his breath. ‘Put Clapton on for me.’

  Margaret glanced up at the nearest nurse who gave an imperceptible nod of her head. ‘Sure,’ she said, and rummaged through the cassettes until she found the Pilgrim tape. She crossed to the stereo, slipped in the tape and pushed the play button. The creamy sound of the Clapton guitar swooped and slid around the room, rising and falling in skin-tingling crescendos. And then his soft, tremulous voice praying for a healing rain to restore his soul again.

  The tears ran hot and salty down Margaret’s cheeks as she turned to see that Steve had closed his eyes, dried lips moving, almost as if he were miming the words. She moved back to his bedside and took out the little pewter frame. ‘I brought Danni,’ she sa
id.

  His eyes opened again and she saw that they, too, were filled with tears. He looked at the photograph in her hand and reached out to take it from her. For a long time he looked at the little girl smiling at him. Then he looked at Margaret. ‘I wish I could have known her,’ he said.

  ‘You will,’ Margaret said softly, urgently, and with more conviction than she felt. ‘Be strong, Steve. You can make it through this.’

  Steve clutched her hand again. ‘I want to see her,’ he said. ‘Even through the glass. They’ve got the address and phone number out there. Martha’s still down as my next of kin.’ And he was racked by another fit of coughing. And when he caught his breath again, he said, ‘Call her, Margaret. Please.’

  IV

  Li watched the traffic out on Connecticut Avenue drift past in the colourless sodium light and felt the deep rumble of the Washington metro through the floor of Charlie Chiang’s restaurant as a train pulled into the Van Ness metro station somewhere deep below them in the bowels of the city. His normal appetite for Charlie’s excellent cuisine was on hold, and he picked at the shredded beef and noodles in the rice bowl before him. Sitting opposite, in some deep, dark world of her own, Xiao Ling ate in small, almost frenetic, bursts. Plain boiled rice. She seemed to have only the most tenuous grasp of why her diet was being restricted, but did not seem to mind that she faced a lifetime of dull and simple food. It had never been a priority.

  Li had asked her several times about the ma zhai, and in small, teasing fragments, she had confirmed what Margaret had told him. Yes, she thought she recognised them. No, she didn’t know their names. She was not sure if they worked at the Golden Mountain Club or not. Perhaps she had seen them at the massage parlour. She couldn’t remember. Li was certain that her memory lapses were selective and inspired by fear. Whatever else they had done, the ma zhai had been successful in scaring her into silence.

  Finally, he reached across the table, removing her chopsticks from between her fingers and taking one of her hands in both of his. ‘Xiao Ling, we are in Washington now,’ he said with as much reassurance as he could muster. ‘You are safe here. Tell me about the Golden Mountain Club.’

  She pulled her hand away and shook her head. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She took a long draught of Coke, one of a handful of soft drinks that had been identified as ‘safe’. She met his eye. ‘And if I told you, you wouldn’t want to hear it. Believe me.’

  He knew that her recent past was like an open wound. It would take time to heal, time before he could touch her again and she could revisit that place without pain. He did not want to force the issue, particularly since she was going to have to face yet more trauma in the next hour. He had not yet had the courage to tell her. Some instinct told him that if she knew, nothing would persuade her to come home with him. To come face to face with the daughter she had abandoned.

  He felt sick. It was not only Xiao Ling who faced the trauma of reunion. He had no idea how little Xinxin would react to seeing her mother again after two years. At first he had told her that her mother was ill. That she had been taken off to a hospital for treatment and then to a rest home in the country to recuperate. Initially, she had asked daily when her mother would be coming home. When would she be well again? Why couldn’t she go and see her? It had broken Li’s heart to lie to the child. It was such a breach of trust, and trust between child and adult was almost as important as love. Margaret’s presence had been an invaluable diversion, a substitute mother-figure, a loving presence to fill the black hole left by the disappearance of her real mother.

  Gradually, Xinxin had asked after her less and less, and in time not at all. There was a knowingness about her whenever the subject came up, as if somehow she had guessed. And she had become adept at side-stepping the issue when she was asked by children at school or by their parents or her teachers. She had never once asked after her father, and Li had been taken aback once, when collecting her from kindergarten, to discover that she had told her teachers that she lived with her uncle and that both her parents were dead.

  Li paid the check and told Xiao Ling it was time to go. He asked Charlie to call them a cab, and the driver took them south on Connecticut, crossing Rock Creek at the Taft Bridge, guarded on either side by impressive carved stone lions couchant, and then turning right past the seven-storey hotel that was now home to the Chinese Embassy. From their cab, the only identifiably Chinese feature was the red and gold emblem of the People’s Republic above blanked-out glass doors. Xiao Ling did not even notice it. Li craned to see if there was anyone he knew coming or going. But the tree-lined street was empty, dark and deserted in the quiet mid-evening of a Washington fall.

  They crossed Rock Creek again, just past Sheridan Circle, and found themselves passing into the precincts of Georgetown. The driver made his way down through quiet shady streets onto O and turned west, passing a towering red-brick church that dominated the east end of the street. When Li had paid the driver and they were left standing on the sidewalk, Xiao Ling looked around her in amazement. Painted townhouses with lacquered doors and Georgian windows, fresh-painted wrought-iron gates and chintzy shutters, crooked stairways and narrow alleys overhung by red-leafed ivy. Alarm systems everywhere, prominent on walls and in gardens. Expensive cars lining both sides of the street. She turned to Li. ‘You live here?’ All she had seen of America were filthy cellars, overcrowded apartments, night clubs and massage parlours in Chinatown. ‘All on your own in a house this size?’

  ‘Not on my own,’ Li corrected her.

  Xiao Ling frowned ‘What do you mean?’ Like Margaret before her, she was jumping to the wrong conclusion.

  He took her by the arm and led her gently up the path to the front door. Through glass panels they could see that there was a light on in the downstairs hall. He unlocked the door, almost certain that she would be able to hear the banging of his heart against his ribs. ‘I have someone living in,’ he said. ‘A nanny.’ He closed the door behind them. ‘I needed someone to look after Xinxin.’

  Almost before she could react, Xinxin appeared from the kitchen calling his name. She was barefoot in her nightie, dressed for bed. Her hair, released from its bunches, was hanging in untidy clumps. She stopped abruptly, the smile frozen on her face. Mother and daughter faced each other for the first time in nearly a third of her life.

  Li tried to react normally. ‘Hi, little one,’ he said. ‘Guess who’s here to see you?’

  Xinxin took a couple of hesitant steps toward them, the expression on her face unreadable. Then she burst into a run, past Li’s bike leaning against the bannister, and up the stairs stuffing her fist in her mouth to stop herself crying. They heard her footsteps on the polished floorboards, followed by the slamming of her bedroom door and a howl that was almost feral. Li felt as if someone had just driven six inches of cold steel into his chest. Then his face stung and burned white hot as Xiao Ling struck him with her open palm, a blow of such force that he stumbled and almost fell. Their eyes met for only a moment, and he felt their hatred sear his soul. A deep sob broke in her chest, and she ran down the hall, through the first door that she could find, passing a bewildered-looking Meiping. Meiping looked at Li, alarmed. ‘Is everything all right, Mr. Li?’

  V

  Margaret sat in someone’s office staring at the shadows on the walls. A lamp on the desk burned a pool of light into a white blotter. Beyond it, only the shapes and shadows of the monsters that stalked her imagination moved in the darkness. Her body felt as if someone had been pounding at it with clenched fists. Her head ached and her eyes stung.

  Tracking down Steve’s ex-wife had not been as simple as she had expected. Martha and her new husband were out to dinner somewhere, leaving Danni in the care of a teenage babysitter who gave Margaret a cellphone number. But the cellphone was turned off, and Margaret had been forced to call the babysitter back for the name of the restaurant. The girl said she would have to call home and find out, and that she would call back. In spite of Marg
aret stressing the urgency of the situation, it was twenty minutes before the babysitter returned the call, saying that her home line had been engaged.

  When, eventually, Margaret got through to the restaurant, it was the husband who came to the phone. The banker. He took some convincing that this was not one of Steve’s practical jokes. Apparently there had been several. Margaret inwardly cursed Steve and his juvenile sense of humour but still was unable to resist a tiny, sad smile. She assured the banker that this was no practical joke.

  Then Martha had come to the phone, truculent and ready to be difficult. How serious could it be? Did Margaret know how long it would take her to get there from West Virginia? And it was far too late to be dragging a young child out of her bed.

  Margaret, patience strained to the limit, had said simply, ‘Martha, it might be the last time Danni gets to see her father. There’s a very strong chance he could be dead by the time you get here.’

  And the silence at the other end of the line had stretched out for an eternity. Finally, in a very small voice, Martha had said, ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  There was a knock at the door and a wedge of yellow light fell in from the corridor as it opened. Margaret looked up expectantly and saw the silhouette of Felipe Mendez standing in the open doorway. He looked almost like a caricature of himself, tousled hair, creased and rumpled overcoat, a battered briefcase hanging from the end of his arm. She heard, rather than saw, his smile. ‘People who sit in the dark, my dear, are generally trying to hide from something,’ he said.

  ‘Life,’ Margaret said. ‘Or maybe it’s death.’