Low

by Anna Quon

  For my father and mother, Dr. Charles Quon and Patricia Joan Wagstaff Quon who have been my there for me through all the crazy darkness and in the light.

  Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

  —Lao Tzu ( Tao Te Ching)

  In the darkness all cows are black.

  —Slovak proverb

  Chapter 1

  Adriana. Adriaannaaa. The sound of her name echoed through the stark corridors, empty of nurses, doctors and patients. There were no visible intercoms or speakers either, just her name repeating over and over, with no instructions to report anywhere. Still, she felt queasy not knowing what was wanted of her.

  “Adriana. Adriana, wake up.” She opened her eyes slowly to see her father standing at the foot of her bed, grasping her big toe. This was the way he had always awoken her. She had done the same to him once, many years ago, as a round-faced toddler. Even then, she had known better than to cry or giggle, lest she rouse her mother.

  Adriana felt some relief, that it was her father and not some nameless authority that she had to answer to. And not her mother, eight years dead, floating down the halls in a fluttering white shift.

  “What time is it?” she asked, raspy with sleep and rubbing her hands over her face. She was sure her father had already visited her earlier that day.

  The room where Adriana lay was desolate and unornamented. Despite the hundreds of people who must have passed through as patients, there was no shadow of any of them. Not a single personal mark, not an initial carved in the furniture or even a scrap of tape was left of them. It would be the same when she left this place, Adriana thought, but that was fine with her. She wouldn’t want to leave anything of herself behind.

  Mr. Song sat on the plastic hospital chair and leaned forward, his elbows on his bony knees. He looked haggard, his hair uncombed and wisping everywhere. He looked, in fact, like a patient, Adriana thought.

  “Penny had a stroke this afternoon,” he said. There was a downward swoop of crows in Adriana’s stomach. “She’s unconscious, she’s not going to last long.”

  Aunt Penny in Toronto had become the adoptive mother to Adriana’s much younger sister, Beth, who had only been a few months old when their mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. After Viera died, their father, heart wrung with grief, had decided to send Beth to live with his favourite sister. Penny’s sour mouth melted into a heart shape when she held Beth, so Mr. Song knew he had done the right thing.

  Adriana pushed herself up to sitting with her back against the headboard. She knew her father was in agony. Mr. Song pulled his hands down his face, as though he were washing it with a face cloth. From his red-rimmed eyes, Adriana thought he must have been crying. Where does an engineer go to cry? She imagined him at work, sitting in a storage closet or locking himself in the washroom.

  “I want to bring Beth home,” her father said, squinting at his hands. Adriana’s insides tumbled again. Beth, here? She felt her face get hot. Her dislike of her younger sister was unfair and selfish but she couldn’t help it. It had just been her and her dad for so many years.

  Mr. Song looked up at her, his eyes brimming with sadness. Adriana realized, in that moment, that it hurt him that she didn’t like Beth, that she had never expressed interest in her sister. Somehow he had managed to hide his feelings for years, but now he didn’t bother.

  “Adriana, please…she’s your sister.” There was anger in his voice. Usually that tone would make her sit up and take notice, but this time, she gave in weakly, lying back on her pillows.

  Mr. Song stood to leave, his eyes soft and troubled. “You rest,” he said. Adriana nodded. She felt she’d been awake for a century. Mr. Song hugged her head to his chest. It had been a long time since Adriana was small enough to do that, and he could only do it now because she was sitting down. “You get well,” he said gruffly. Adriana knew he was holding back a flood of tears, that as soon as he got on the elevator, he’d be fighting to contain them, alone and without a tourniquet.

  A feeling of guilt overwhelmed her, and she lay looking up at the ceiling, wishing it would come down and crush her.

  Adriana thought she should have been a starfish or some other supine creature, without arms and legs. She wished her limbs would disappear, that she would cease to be recognizably human. Then no one would expect her to act like one, to live her life every day like a normal person.

  She opened her eyes. There was the chair with the plastic orange seat, where her father had sat, telling her the news of Penny’s death, and the fake veneer locker, narrow as a coffin, in the corner. The side table with a bunch of wilting flowers from her dad’s garden, in a plastic jar. Nothing else, except her sneakers looking forlorn and abandoned near the door. They made her want to weep. But she had no tears. Her mind was corroded, a grey, metallic mass, full of little holes and eaten away by acid. It left a stain, like blood, when she tried to think. Adriana closed her eyes again, in the faint hope she’d go back to sleep; but her thoughts clacked against one another like dominos, beneath an industrial, almost deafening, hum.

  Chapter 2

  Adriana was spending more and more time in her room the summer before she was hospitalized. At first, her father seemed cheerfully oblivious. It was Jazz, Adriana’s best friend, with her antennae for trouble, who noticed something was amiss.

  “Come on,” she said, pulling Adriana by the arm out of bed, one morning after a sleepover and ostensible study buddy session, at the beginning of the university’s fall term. She pushed Adriana, always a reluctant waker, into the bathroom, closing and locking the door so Mr. Song wouldn’t barge in on them brushing their teeth.

  There’s never enough morning, a weary Adriana thought. Or maybe it was too much morning. She always felt like a refugee—homeless and futureless—when she woke these days. It was enough to make her wish that, instead of this scratching every day on the door of life, like a stray animal, there was somewhere else to go. Adriana realized she was being dramatic. She tugged at her thoughts, and stood up straight.

  Jazz pulled at her pony tail and stuck her tongue out at the bathroom mirror. Running her tongue around her gums, Jazz grinned at herself, then frowns. Yup, clean. Eyebrows up, eyebrows down, like aplié in ballet, Adriana thought. She cleared her throat, and Jazz wiggled her eyebrows at her.

  Adriana splashed water on her face one more time. She liked a wet face, it woke her up, made her feel fresh. Made her feel half-way human. She picked up a women’s magazine from the stack her father kept on the back of the toilet tank. As a single parent, he felt it was his responsibility to keep up with the latest parenting trends. Adriana squinted and frowned, then smiled mechanically, and repeated. It was good to have a relaxed face. Gospel according to Jazz.

  “Do you know what your child is thinking?” popped out at Adriana from the cover of Chatelaine. It was an article about keeping the lines of communication with your teenager open. Adriana’s forehead crinkled, until Jazz tapped on her cheek. How embarrassing, Adriana thought to herself, keeping her face entirely smooth. Parents and their teens were supposed to have one-word conversations. That was just normal.

  Adriana understood that she was no longer a child, that she was barely even a teenager anymore. But she wished she could hang onto the fringes of childhood for forever. She thought about the only adult close to her, her father—awkward, sentimental, always on the verge of an emotional outburst. It was exhausting just to avoid adding any pain to his burden—something she felt she had the responsibility for, now that she was legally an adult. Is this what life is like? Adriana’s mouth hung open at the thought. She closed her lips and then opened them again. This can’t be what life is supposed to be like.

  What is it supposed to be li
ke, Adriana’s mother asked, arms crossed, in the very back of Adriana’s head. Dead eight years from breast cancer, Viera always appeared to her daughter in a housedress, apron, and strangely, pointe shoes like a ballet dancer, ready to leap into action. Adriana shook her head, as if trying to clear water out of her ear. Her mother appeared to her in self-pitying moments, to chastise her, and in times of guilt and misery. Frown, smile, frown.

  Jazz, mouth full of foam, put a hand on Adriana’s shoulder. “You look so serious,” Jazz said, spitting a gob of froth into the sink.

  Adriana realized she never knew what her face looked like, and she didn’t check the mirror that often, because it gave her a headache. Jazz was always the one to tell her. Jazz had the china-smooth skin and classical features that verged on the beautiful when she smiled. When she didn’t her face was plain as dirt. Adriana felt a dribble of spit running down her chin and wiped it with a towel. “Iam serious,” was all she could muster as a comeback. “Now you look like a goat,” Jazz giggled.

  One of her father’s magazines said that it was possible to begin to change our mood just by forcing ourselves to smile, and Adriana had been experimenting. Her forced smiles didn’t fit very well with Jazz’s agenda to ban all wrinkle-producing expressions, but to Adriana, it was worth it if it lifted her mood. Her aim, though, was more to distract herself than any real change of affect. She preferred to keep her feelings locked up in a box, in the hope that they would just disappear. I haven’t had a good wallow since my mother died, Adriana thought.

  Her father had, though. He watched their old home videos with a bottle of wine in front of him, tears running down his face. Adriana, embarrassed, slumped beside him, her eyes on the flickering television screen. Her mother’s long curly hair swung from side to side as she held Adriana’s baby’s hands and walked her toward the camera. Viera laughed and talked to her in Slovak, a language Adriana had long since forgotten. The video was blurry and yellowing, turning everything a golden colour including Adriana’s skin. Her mother walked her right up to the camera, so close that she disappeared, and only Adriana’s serious baby face—shiny slanted eyes and puckered lips—filled the lens.

  If it weren’t for the home videos, Adriana could have allowed herself to doubt her mother had ever existed. Among the Song family photos, there were barely any of Viera because she was always the one who took them, while Adriana’s dad was in charge of the video camera. That was the way things were in their house, the labour neatly divided. Her dad cooked, Adriana did the supper dishes and her mother did the laundry, smoked the cigars with a tumbler of brandy, and cut the family’s hair. Adriana and her father always had the same bowl-shaped hairstyle when her mother was done with them. You could tell they were father and daughter, with their straight dark hair in what her Dad would call the Song family haircut, and their slanted eyes. Her mother was the odd one out in the family. Her people were from the old Czechoslovakia, an ocean and a continent away.

  Adriana wondered if her mother’s heart was hard because she lived so far from her home and family. What she remembered most about her mother was the time she grabbed Adriana’s arm and yanked her into the bedroom to make her bed. Adriana had been having a quiet afternoon, making a tent of her sheets and blankets for her Barbie dolls, and had gone to the bathroom for a glass of water, so as not to cross paths with her mother in the kitchen. When she returned to the door of her bedroom, Viera was there, and grabbed her arm, screaming, “You worthless girl. Look at this mess. You’re no better than a gypsy!” The headscarf slipped off Viera’s head, and Adriana was horrified to see the patches of baldness between soft clumps of short hair. Viera covered her eyes with her hands and collapsed on the floor. Sobbing, she tried to gather Adriana in her arms, but she shrank to the far corner of her bed, away from her mother. The weakness in Adriana’s stomach was linked to this memory, as though they were handcuffed together.

  Mr. Song, who had emigrated to Canada as a teenager and still thought of himself as Chinese, was gripped with grief when his wife was diagnosed. This country had given him an education, a career and a family, but now, according to life’s unfathomable arithmetic, it was time for subtraction.

  Jazz patted her mouth with a hand towel and handed it to Adriana. Somehow Adriana thought there should be some kind of face cream involved at this point but Jazz never touched the stuff. “I swear to God, face exercises and fish oil capsules are all you need,” she always said. Adriana thought of her mother, hair wrapped up in a towel and cream slathered on her face every morning. “Come on, we’re going to be late for class!” Jazz was always rushing.

  “I’m not going,” Adriana said. Jazz turned toward her. She had a look on her face that Adriana found disturbing. It was curiosity.

  “Why not?” Jazz asked, attentive.

  “Well, I don’t feel well,” Adriana said, averting her eyes. It was true. The weak feeling in her stomach paralyzed her .

  Jazz had put her mascara on and fluttered her eyelashes experimentally. She put an arm around Adriana’s shoulders. “Peter again?” she asked, eyes shining with sympathy. Adriana hated that, she didn’t want Jazz’s pity. Yes, Peter again. She could barely stand to say his name.

  Jazz touched her hand, lightly. “Sorry,” she said. “Give me a call later, eh?” Jazz’s backpack was right outside the bathroom door. She never ate breakfast at Adriana’s house, and liked to be gone before Mr. Song got up, with his plaid slippers and awkward handshakes.

  Even Jazz didn’t know that Adriana skipped a good number of classes last year. She remembered the first one. Sitting in a café, stirring her milky tea around and around with a spoon, she looked up at the clock and realized her stats class had started five minutes before. Her hand went limp. She’d never missed a class before except when she was ill. The next couple of days she was diligent about getting to her classes on time, sitting near the front and ignoring everything around her except the professor—but she could feel her resolve crumbling. The weakness had tentacles that spread through her chest, as though something were growing inside her. The next week, she went to only one of her classes, first year English. It was held in a cavernous room with two hundred students crammed into little wooden seats. The sound of students talking and laughing echoed around her. The professor shuffled his papers and cleared his throat. She didn’t know why she was there.

  Despite her absences, Adriana passed the year—a year in which she gradually came apart at the seams, after breaking up with her boyfriend, Peter, who never even called her anymore. After their fight he phoned her maybe once every couple weeks, seemingly to test the waters. But one day, tired of waiting for his call, she phoned him and left a teary message. He never called again, and a month later she saw him walking across campus, with a girl she didn’t recognize beside him.

  It was stunning, how hurt she was. The same night, she lay in bed, trying to remember what the girl looked like. From far away, it seemed she had auburn hair and a pale face. Adriana couldn’t get more of a fix on her than that. She wondered if it were someone she knew, if Peter had known her when he was still going out with Adriana. It sent knives through her to think that he might have liked this girl before he’d broken up with her. What if they were in the same class together? Had he smiled at her first?

  Over the summer, Adriana had been working at a fabric store with a flock of motherly, middle-aged women and taking a course in Russian history, which was full of unhealthy young men and women, with fingers stained by tobacco and serious obsessions with Dostoyevsky and Nabokov. Among them, she had felt stifled by melancholy and torpor. At home, she had had crying jags which seemed to come out of nowhere, and passed as quickly as a thunder shower. There were moments of frantic energy and hysterical laughter over nearly nothing, then the inevitable crash. Jazz put Adriana’s head in her lap and caressed her hair. “He’s gone, buttercup,” was all she said.

  Despite everything, Adriana had quietly decided that in Se
ptember she would continue working part time at the fabric store as a cashier, and take just two courses, during the mornings, to get them over with. She told Jazz but not her father, because she feared he would have too many questions. She could see his face, pained and concerned, as she tried to explain her motives. “I just need a break, Dad,” was all she could think of, and that answer would simply raise other questions in her father’s mind. A break from what? Wasn’t the summer enough?

  And even this, this compromise with herself, she hadn’t been able to live up to. She had gone to the very first day of classes and no more, and the fabric store had let her go at summer’s end, her supervisor telling her firmly and politely that she needed to “take care of herself” and that the store could not afford to let her do that on its dime. Adriana came home from that meeting and sat at the kitchen table, the future yawning before her like a wasteland, grey and terrible. She fingered the paring knife that her father had left that morning on a plate with a spiral of orange peel. She felt like that, like something has been stripped from her.

  Mr. Song was an engineer, and expected his daughters to be educated, and productive. Adriana had tried. But it was as if her head was locked in a deep sea diving helmet, which nothing could penetrate.

  Chapter 3

  After Jazz left, Adriana went back to bed. She gazed up at the wallpaper. There were big, dusty roses on it. Her mother’s choice, no doubt, though she never asked her father about it. On a small desk by the window, the same one she’d had since childhood, there was a large textbook, open to two black and white photos of the human brain—one whole and perfect, the other partially dissected with black lines spiking from it like a sea urchin, neatly labelled.

  The brain was such an armoured thing, solid and impenetrable—but in the end, just as vulnerable to human curiosity and exploitation as the moon or the ocean. Adriana was used to staring at this picture, trying to differentiate the hippocampus from the surrounding tissue. It amazed her that brain scientists had been able to pinpoint that it was the hippocampus, which lay curled in the brain in the shape of a sea horse, that was the seat of memory. Without it, Adriana thought, life would cease to have meaning.