Jonathan Dee - Palladio

The doctor was Malaysian, and he was the unfriendliest medical professional Molly had ever encountered: not simply brusque or overtired but outright hostile, seemingly adrenalized by sarcasm. He sewed five stitches into her head and told her that she was seriously anemic. She needed to eat more, he said, and on top of that to take some sort of iron supplement, at least for a month. He said these things in a spirit of self-justification; it was clear he didn’t expect his instructions to be followed, nor did he care if they were. The stitches were the dissolving kind, he said; no need for him to see her again.

Molly was all the way out to the parking lot before it occurred to her that she had no way to get back to Berkeley. She wasn’t even really sure where she was. She didn’t have enough money for a cab; the only thing to do was to call the house and have someone come over in the van, but even if someone was home, and the van happened to be there, how could she provide directions so that she could be found? In her pocket she found change for a phone call; the coins, somehow, had blood on them. She caught sight of a phone booth on the sidewalk a few hundred yards away, but when she reached it she saw it had been stripped, down to the colored wires. No other phones in sight. Molly walked back to the clinic, stuck her head through the window and asked if she could use their phone to call for a ride. The receptionist banged the phone down in front of her without a word.

No one was home.

It was cold and sunny, the sky a cloudless icy blue. Molly went back out to the parking lot, sat on the rear fender of a nice car that must have belonged to one of the doctors, and cried. She cried forcefully, looking at the pavement, her head pounding, for fifteen minutes or so. Then she stood and returned to the clinic waiting room and asked the broad woman with the two children for directions to a bus stop. The first bus she got on took her in the wrong direction, but the driver told her where the transfer point was for a bus back to Berkeley. She got off at Shattuck Avenue, and by the time she made it back to the house on foot it was well after dark.

Everyone fussed over her when she came in, standing up from their chairs, bursting out of their rooms, helping Molly on to the couch, and she let them do it. Richard even led them in a prayer. Molly took four aspirin and went to bed early. She wasn’t sure how late it was when Sally came into their room, undressed quietly, and got into Molly’s bed, folding her knees behind Molly’s and lightly draping one arm around her stomach, just above the curve of her hip. Molly was amazed but still too exhausted to let it keep her awake for long. Nothing happened; they lay there like an old married couple. In the morning when Molly woke Sally was gone.

Molly was sitting in the big red chair with a bowl of cereal, watching television, lightly touching the bandage on her head, when Richard walked in. “Can we talk a little?” he said, smiling; he turned the set off without waiting for an answer.

Molly put the bowl on the floor and struggled to sit more upright in the enormous chair. Her brother stood in front of her, still smiling, his hands folded. His hair was cut very short now; in fact, Molly was pretty sure he was cutting it himself.

“Molly, I’m worried about you,” he said.

“It’s just a cut. And the fainting thing, the doctor said I just needed some more iron,” she said, even though she knew that wasn’t what he was talking about.

He shook his head. “I’m worried about your soul,” he said.

The room was filled with sunlight at that time of day, and the carpet showed so threadbare in the glare that you could see through to the heavy skeletal weaving underneath it.

“My soul?”

“You’re drifting. You’re drifting badly.”

“And this is because.”

“I think you know why.”

“Because I’m not saved?”

Richard said nothing.

“And who’s going to save me? You?”

“Who does it is not the question. The question is how. And there’s only one way.”

“What way is that?” Molly said angrily. “What are you, Jimmy Swaggart?” She didn’t understand the defensiveness she felt all of a sudden.

Richard’s smile weakened. “Molly, you have to admit I’ve never broached this with you before. I’ve never pressured you. You’ve been living in our house for six months and I’ve let you go your own way. But you’re my sister and I can’t watch you drift toward damnation like this and not do anything about it. Look at what happened yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Are you going to tell me you didn’t feel some despair? That you didn’t feel lost? Don’t you think there’s some sort of message for you in all that?”

“I fainted,” Molly said, exasperated. “I fainted and hit my head. A nice man took me to the clinic, and I had a hard time getting home. That’s all.”

Richard shook his head. He seemed close to tears now. “Don’t you see the connection?” he said.

In People’s Park, overgrown and unmowed, piebald with bare earth and strewn with bottles and condoms, there was a pro-democracy rally during exam week. Molly stopped to watch. The day was overcast and cold; under the familiar bright-red flag on a homemade banner tied between two trees, students took turns standing on a milk crate and declaring their support for their fellow students suffering under martial repression in China. A Chinese-born exchange student briefly interjected a note of authenticity with a speech about the conditions in the smelting plant where his uncle worked; but the speech went on quite long, and people began moving away. All of a sudden three students from the Berkeley Communist Party pushed through the small crowd, shouting their support for Zhao and claiming CIA involvement with the Tiananmen Square occupation. They were quickly shouted down by the others, energized by this suddenly visible opposition, and the three Communists marched off again, red-faced.

Molly lingered at the back fringe of the gathering, hands in her pockets. After a while she noticed another man standing on the fringes, twenty feet away; and when she noticed him, he quickly turned his head away from her.

It wasn’t just his age that made him look out of place there — he might have been thirty, but it was not unusual to see grad students around the city that age or older. He had red hair cut to a kind of military bristle; his face bore some old acne scars. He wore a pristine white turtleneck under a long windbreaker, and creased navy-blue pants, though slacks might have been a better word for them. Even under the windbreaker he had the overdeveloped arms and shoulders of someone who spent a lot of time in a gym. When Molly turned back to face the speaker she could see the man’s face turn again toward her.

“We will not waver,” said a young woman in a green field jacket whose head was shaved on the sides, “in our mission to topple the fascist lords of China, and tyrants everywhere.” There was such an element of longing in their anger, a frantic dismissal of the idea of inconsequence.

She turned to look at him again; and this time, when she turned away, the red-haired man ambled over casually and stood beside her.

“I will now read the text of a letter the committee has drafted to Premier Li Peng and to Boutros Boutros-Ghali.”

“You a part of this?” the red-haired man asked her.

Molly shook her head.

“I didn’t think so,” he said.

After the letter was read and its contents approved, the meeting ended. Molly continued looking at the empty space above the milk crate.

“What’s your name?” the man said.

She turned to look at him.

“Why should I tell you that?” she said.