Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘Randy, Walter, Page, Hank,’ she continued. ‘Even your Uncle Owen — you can’t just watch these lives and then try them on for size like clothes. You must make your own.’

Below us, some bright birds dipped and swooped through the trees. ‘How do you know those names?’ I asked.

‘You talked in your sleep,’ she said. ‘We talked together. You were dreaming, I think. Or something. Do you remember this?’

I stared at the trees again, and then I tried to tell her what had happened to me. How I hadn’t been dreaming, not exactly; how Zillah’s voice had come to me and bent Dr Zhang’s description of his memory palace to her own ends. ‘I was a house,’ I told Dr Yu. ‘The parts of my body were rooms. This voice — the voice of a girl I knew when I was small — made me remember things I don’t usually think about.’

Things , I heard Zillah say. Of course. My life was made of things; my language was the language of things. I was drowning in things, devoured by my possessions, and that couldn’t have been what Uncle Owen had meant. Invest it wisely , he’d written. Instead I’d invested my inheritance sensibly.

‘Yes?’ Dr Yu said. She fixed her eyes on mine. ‘Your memories came very detailed, like hallucinations? Smell, sound, place? You heard this voice actually speak?’

‘ Yes ,’ I said. ‘How did you know? It was just like that, the voice was so real — it was like I was living those scenes again. I felt everything.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Meng knows about this,’ she said. ‘Years ago, before the bad times, he studied this. What happened to you is something special, which usually happens only in those having seizures. The place in your brain where memory lives — when it is stimulated, your memories come back entire. As if life is lived again. Sometimes this can happen with high fever.’

‘Chinese medicine?’ I asked.

‘No — Western doctors know about it too. But one doctor here in Beijing became famous when he showed that gentle electricity applied to certain brain parts causes memories to pour out and voices to be heard. Meng did postgraduate training with this man. But then the Red Guards seized the institute and burned all the books and files and locked the doctors away.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Is that what made your husband so bitter?’

‘That is some of it,’ she said. ‘The rest he did himself.’ She paused for a minute, and then she said, ‘What did you get from your memories?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘They were so real — it was like my whole life was given back to me. But I’m not sure I wanted it. When I look at what I’ve done, the ways I’ve lived …’

Dr Yu rubbed a few pieces of gravel between her fingers. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is always the way. That is what happened to Meng on the farm, when he put all his heart into making his palace and ignored everything around him. Then he compared what is then, and now, and he sank into sadness. That is the way with old things. Not that you should forget them — but to make a palace of them? No.’

‘Did that ever happen to you?’ I asked. ‘Did you ever get lost in your old lives?’

‘Never like what happened to you,’ she said. ‘And I never did on purpose what Meng did. If I made anything, it was a palace of dreams — what I wish for. What I want. What I hope. I remembered my life before, and then I dreamed of life to come. You understand?’

‘A palace of dreams,’ I said, turning the idea around in my mind. And then I heard Zillah’s voice again, gentle, persistent, and low. Sally Ferguson , I heard. Nancy Knauf. Cece Rubin. The names of the realtors who’d haunted the first house I’d redone.

‘What is it you wish for?’ Dr Yu continued.

‘Right now?’ Those women had entered my house and gazed at it with calculating eyes, congratulating me on my skills. I had let Cece sell the first house for me, and then I’d let her sell the others. There was nothing left for me to do but repeat myself, and suddenly I knew, more strongly than I ever had, that I wanted something else. ‘Right now I wish I could stay here,’ I said.

‘Here on this hill?’

‘Here in China.’ The wish crystallized even as I said it. ‘I like it here. Everything interests me.’ The faces, I thought. The surge of people surrounding me; the way a disconnected string of figures would suddenly form a shape in the crowd, standing out like a piece of sculpture. The chaos. The noise. The sense that every person I spoke to held the end of a thread that tied into the web of life I’d been too lost to perceive.

‘So stay,’ Dr Yu said.

‘How? Walter …’

‘Walter,’ Dr Yu said impatiently. ‘Forget Walter, for now. Forget all things at home that call you back for bad reasons. You want to stay?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But …’

‘Here are ways,’ she said. She raised a finger with each one. ‘You could teach English — everyone wants to learn. You could tutor students for examinations. If you wanted to, if you wanted to do science again, you might even be able to work for me. I have wonderful students, and you would be a help to them.’

‘You make it sound so easy,’ I said. ‘But what about Walter?’

‘Walter could stay,’ she said. ‘Any university would be happy to have him — visiting famous scientist, absolutely. But also he could go, and you could stay alone. Visas, all could be arranged if you did work useful to serve the people.’

‘I haven’t felt useful in years,’ I said.

‘No?’ She looked at me skeptically. ‘Maybe not. What about those houses you did?’

‘I made some money,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

‘You can do things with money,’ she said. ‘If my children had money, if I had money to give them …’

We rose and strolled around the hilltop, drawn by the clamor beyond a small ridge. A crowd of people clustered around a young Chinese woman and four tired horses draped in embroidered blankets and crowned with glittering headpieces. An old camera mounted on a tripod stood next to the woman. Dr Yu laughed. ‘Watch,’ she said. ‘Family pictures. Oh, this never would have been permitted before.’

The parents of a small girl handed the young woman a few fen , and then the woman gravely dressed the girl. A red velvet cloak, silver ornaments, an enormous crown dripping baubles and fluffy red balls. Four-foot feathers stuck up from her crown like ears. The woman posed the girl on the horse, against the panorama below. The girl grimaced fiercely, her best imitation of a Mongol warrior, and the woman shot several portraits. The parents beamed.

‘So silly,’ Dr Yu said. ‘But so nice to see.’ Young men posed with their sweethearts, and girlfriends posed together. The photographer put her fees in a small metal box and wrote out receipts for the pictures to come. Dr Yu looked happier than I had ever seen her.

‘What is it you want?’ I asked her curiously. I didn’t doubt anymore that we’d talked in the hospital, but I’d lost her half of the conversation and it was odd, now, to feel that she knew so much about me when I knew hardly anything about her.

‘What do I want?’ she repeated. She tucked her rumpled blouse in while we watched the photographer. ‘Not so much for myself, now — it is almost enough to have my life back, my work. It is almost enough to watch this. But I want for Zaofan. I want him to go to the US, to study there, to work. I want more than anything that he make his life there. He is not safe here, I think — someday he will land himself in trouble. There is some way, perhaps, that you could help him leave?’

Zaofan; Rocky. We hadn’t mentioned him before and I had managed not to think about him. I remembered our cab ride together and I trembled so violently I had to sit down.