Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

THE CLINIC FOR FOREIGN VISITORS

New things always have to experience difficulties and setbacks as they grow.

— Mao

IWAS WORSE when I woke the next morning. The night had passed in a black swirling dream, leaving me with no memory of how Rocky had finally found the hotel or what Walter had said when he’d seen us; no idea how Rocky had returned to his home. And by the time I woke I was too sick to worry about anything more than what was happening inside my chest. The pain was astonishing.

‘Jesus,’ Walter said. He sat across the room from me, his face so drawn and tired that I suspected he’d been watching me for hours. ‘Why did you go out last night if you felt this bad? You know we’re traveling tomorrow.’

‘I thought I was all right,’ I said. ‘Then on the way home I got so much worse so quickly …’ I paused, struck by a sudden vision of me and Rocky in the back seat of a cab. Had that really happened? Our limbs sprawled in strange directions, our feet against the windows, my skirt rucked up and my pantyhose torn in the rush? I lifted the sheet and found I was wearing a sweat-soaked pink nightgown, which might have meant that Walter had undressed me. On the floor near my bed I saw my clothes piled untidily and knew he hadn’t; he would have folded everything. Casually, trying to look innocent, I leaned over and snagged my pantyhose from the pile. There was a fist-sized hole near the top of one thigh.

I buried the pantyhose under the pile and looked at the rest of the room, but I wasn’t reassured by what I saw. The walls were vibrating in the sun and the pink peonies and golden birds in the prints had turned mean. The curtains framing the glass doors moved as if they were breathing. I closed my eyes and felt the pulse pounding at my temples and the base of my neck, and when I sat up the room began to waltz. Slowly, carefully, I said, ‘Did you meet Dr Yu’s son? Zaofan? She sent him along with me because she was afraid the driver might get lost.’

‘I met him,’ Walter said shortly. ‘So did everyone who was still in the lobby. He and the driver carried you up the steps. How could you let everyone see you like that?’

‘It’s not like I had a choice,’ I said.

He shook his head and tore a tissue into long, thin shreds, every line in his face declaring his anger. Alien germs are nature’s secret agents , he’d told me a few days earlier, when I had tried to eat a pomegranate. They’re like kudzu in a temperate climate. You don’t have any resistance to the organisms here. I knew he was going to blame me for what I’d caught.

He waved a strip of tissue at me. ‘I suppose I should be grateful,’ he said. ‘I was. I am. They got you back here in one piece, and that boy — what’s his name? — speaks decent English. Enough to get me down to the lobby, at least. Enough to tell me you’d passed out in the cab. But how you could agree to ride with him in the middle of the night, with a driver who can’t speak English and doesn’t know his way here …’

‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘It’s not like there were cabs hanging around everywhere. This was all Dr Yu and her husband could find.’

‘You’re right,’ he said wearily. ‘I don’t understand.’

He was tense beneath his coldness and I knew why: we were supposed to leave Beijing the next day so he could lecture in Xian and Shanghai and Chongqing and Guangzhou. He’d made the plans months before — he and Katherine Olmand and another scientist I didn’t know were to give lectures in the major eastern cities. He’d looked forward to this as much as he had to the conference itself, and here I lay in bed, grunting with each painful breath and not even packed. My clothes were strewn all over the room — dresses, skirts with elastic waists, billowy blouses, queen-sized bras. I had brought entirely too many things, liking myself in none of them. Six pairs of shoes because I had nice feet; a dozen scarves to draw attention away from my body and toward my face and neck. For years, I’d rested my hopes on good shoe leather and interesting neckline treatments.

Walter sat in one of the gray chairs near the lemon-colored table, sipping green tea and regarding me in my sweat-soaked bed as if I were a plague sent to ruin his life. He didn’t touch me, didn’t rest his palm on my brow, didn’t hold a glass of cool water to my dry lips. I could hardly blame him — I’d been impossible for months.

I made myself as small and helpless as I could. ‘Dr Yu’s husband gave me the address of a clinic,’ I said. ‘He told me to go there if I wasn’t better today, and I’m not. Will you take me?’

Walter sighed and folded his arms around his narrow legs. ‘If you’d just stayed in last night,’ he said. ‘If you’d just been more careful …’ He sighed again. ‘Get dressed. I’ll call a cab.’

We hardly spoke during the long ride into the city. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said once or twice. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, and he patted my hand, but I knew he’d added another entry to that long ledger of wrongs he carried in his mind. I added an entry to my own ledger; he was acting like a prick. I was streaming sweat, delirious, my head swarming with words and visions not mine. I saw an old man, Dr Yu’s father, staggering inside a circle of vengeful children. Books burning, manuscripts torn, paintings slashed; a sea of schoolboys waving their little red books and quoting Chairman Mao. I had read that book before we left home; anyone could buy a copy in the university bookstore. And I had browsed through my great-uncle Owen’s maps and letters and dictionaries and books, as well as a few more recent accounts that detailed the glory of the socialist transformation.

I had a phrasebook I took with me everywhere and studied each night, and all that half-knowledge was rattling around inside my head, bumping up against Dr Yu’s stories and her husband’s mad strategy. I saw the house Dr Zhang had grown up in, and then the cramped version of it he’d fixed in his imagination, the corridors littered with bones and joints and muscles and nerves, the walls dotted with chemical elements, the rooms crammed with French and English verbs. As if a mind could stand to remember all it ever learned, as if the art of forgetting weren’t just as important as the art of memory. I knew that, if anyone did. I was a master of forgetting.

Walter said something to me, but I couldn’t hear him. I drifted away again and imagined myself foot-bound, willowy, with lacquered hair, swaying above a stream like an apple blossom. My fingernails four inches long, my robe brocaded and stiff, alone in an ornate room like the Dowager Empress Cixi. We had something in common, Cixi and I — she had stolen the money meant to rebuild China’s navy and had used it to redecorate the Summer Palace and to restore a marble boat. I had done something almost as strange with my great-uncle Owen’s legacy.

Why did you do that? someone said. Zillah? Maybe not. When I opened my eyes I was out of the cab and Walter was leading me down Dongdan Street in search of the clinic. Whoever had spoken wouldn’t acknowledge it. I peered into the faces I passed, looking for my interrogator, but the people cut their eyes away and then slid them back and looked furtively at my sweat-drenched clothes and the hair knotted down my back in a ratty tangle. Why do you live this way? I heard. I spun around, wrenching myself from Walter’s grasp, but behind us was only a mass of black-haired people, eyes cast down.

I’d given Walter the scrap of paper Dr Zhang had given me, on which he’d written the clinic address in both English and Chinese characters. Walter kept stopping people and waving this paper under their eyes, and those who had any English told us to go down the road and then take a right. We walked to the intersection and turned right: no clinic. Walter showed the address to another man, who told us to go back where we’d come from and turn left. We found nothing but a bookstore, a small restaurant with a window full of roasted ducks, and a shop selling radios. By then Walter was half carrying and half dragging me. Each face I passed seemed to speak to me and I wanted to stop, to ask what they meant. Why were they looking at me? They got up in the morning, dressed, ate, worked, shopped, talked, came home to their families or to bare walls, narrow beds, nights that stretched on forever and a world full of things they couldn’t have, that we were all reaching for: light, beauty, connection, hope. And still they got up, dressed, ate, worked. As if they knew why.