Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  My father came up with his own solution to the problem. That solution relied not on objective facts but on his own peculiar logic. He had decided that his goal should be to nurse his body back to full health, then resume his role as the head of the family.

  But I knew there was a fatal flaw in his way of thinking: there was no way he could ever go back to what he had once been. He had had two cerebral embolisms after parts of his heart valve broke loose and became lodged in his brain’s circulation. The blockage—a piece of the heart valve—in his brain could not be dissolved, and there was no way it could be flushed out, either, since it would likely become lodged in another part of his brain, which could leave another part of his body paralyzed. His old body was lost forever to him. The truth was cruel. I understood the gravity of the situation.

  I even went to the library to look up a picture of the heart valve. It’s a miniscule thing that looks a lot like the mouth of a fish, opening and closing as the heart ventricles contract. That tiny piece of internal equipment had malfunctioned and left half of my father’s body paralyzed.

  I knew that the longer my father persisted in that way of thinking, the worse it would be for him when he finally realized the truth. But I wasn’t ready to try dissuading him; I didn’t have any better ideas.

  Even if his logic was flawed, it was at least hopeful. And hope was what kept the family going.

  One autumn night after he returned home, he called me over and explained his plan. He told me that he knew the left side of his body was locked up because a blood vessel was blocked, so, he said, “if I start moving around and get my blood flowing, the old blood will get washed away, and I can get my left side moving.” I pretended to believe him, and he seemed to be fooled by my performance.

  Since his end goal was complete recovery, he was able to accept the cane as a temporary aid. The next day, he went out for a walk to Winding Road Market. He wanted to see how long it would take him to get there. When he didn’t come back for lunch, the three of us split up and went looking for him. We found him sitting at a street corner not far from home. I made the journey that had taken him all morning in about twenty minutes.

  But he considered it a good beginning. “At least I know where I’m starting from,” he told me.

  The next day, he laid out his scheme in detail: he planned to go out every morning at eight o’clock, walk to where we had found him the day before, then return home in time for lunch at twelve; after lunch, he would take his nap, then go out again at around half past one, heading for the Winding Road Market, leaving enough time to make it back for dinner at seven; and then after dinner, he would work on balance and exercise his left foot.

  Even now, looking back, I am grateful to my father for being so strong. That might have been our happiest time together. Even if it was going to end in tragedy, his dream of making himself whole again became our collective fantasy.

  My mother followed his schedule with strict devotion. She made sure each meal had eggs or meat, just as he had asked. He said that eggs and meat would keep him strong. He used to say that when he was working on the ships and moving heavy cargo, he sometimes got so exhausted that he was on the verge of collapse, but once he got a good meal with meat or eggs in him, he was ready to go again.

  Each night, when everyone returned home, we did his exercises along with him, turning it into a sort of competition. Intentionally or not, my father always won these improvised games. We all went to bed happy.

  We enjoyed those fleeting moments of happiness because they were all we had. Before my father’s two strokes, there had been a heart surgery and four stays in the hospital—and that was just the beginning. Even with the help of our relatives, we were slowly going broke.

  We had missed out on a rare opportunity when PetroChina offered to buy out the gas station. The offer came just before my father got sick, and since we were focused on his health, we let it slip. Even if the PetroChina offer had never come, we should have tried to expand and upgrade the gas station, but we ended up missing our chance there, too. When the large gas station near the estuary opened up, there was no way we could compete with its state-of-the-art facilities. The station near the estuary even had a shop to pick up snacks and drinks while filling up.

  Nonetheless, with our savings almost gone, we knew we had to reopen the gas station. Even if we didn’t have the facilities or the snacks that the bigger station had, we had a secret weapon: my mother and her inimitable way with people. She always knew the right thing to say; the neighbors admired her. People would come by just to visit her, then fill up their tanks almost as an afterthought.

  Whether it was the result of a formal pact or not I could not say, but the neighbors seemed to band together to support our station, even though they would have told you that the station near the estuary was much nicer. Things at our station ran at a slower pace. Everything was still done by hand, my mother would often struggle to make change or calculate a bill, and it was not rare for customers to arrive and find nobody working, since my mother often had to rush home to make my father’s lunch, make sure he took his pills, and wash his clothes. Our customers were willing to wait.

  Once business picked up, my sister and I started pitching in at the station, too. We took shifts when my mother was busy at home. We started with simple tasks, like filling big soda bottles with fuel, since when motorcycles came to fill up it was easier to use the bottles than pump from a drum. Then we would move the drums and do any of the other heavy lifting that my mother couldn’t handle.

  We did our best, but sometimes we weren’t around to help her, like when the flatbed trucks came by to fill up and she had to move an entire drum of fuel by herself. The big trucks took a full drum, which was good for the bottom line but meant a lot of work for my mother. One time, while trying to drag a drum over to a truck, she gave up halfway and broke down crying. The driver’s mother, who was in her sixties, took pity on my mother and helped her drag the drum, covering herself in grease in the process. After that incident, the flatbed drivers made sure to come by after five o’clock, when they knew my sister and I would be there to help.

  When the sun went down, my sister and I rolled away the barrels, closed up shop, and went home to accompany my father on his nightly workout. We went to bed completely exhausted but fell asleep with smiles on our faces.

  I threw myself into the work and the exercises. I wanted to deny that everything would end in tragedy. I didn’t want to think about the suffering that was awaiting us.

  And we did manage to put some money away. That was a relief. The thing about poverty is that the lack of money doesn’t just wear you down; it’s almost as if other people can smell it on you. When you’re poor, even if nobody bears you any ill will, they start to drift away, or they go out of their way to avoid you. They are worried that you will drag them under, too.

  My mother felt it most deeply.

  She was a proud woman, allergic to even the slightest expression of sympathy. When she sensed that some neighbors were coming to the gas station out of charity, she gave them a chilly reception and made sure they never came back.

  I remember one day when I unexpectedly found my mother shut up in her room. She told me that a man had come by the station. “He asked how your father was doing,” she said, “so I told him he was fine.” The man laughed and told my mother that he used to run with the same gang as my father had, although he had been mostly a hanger-on.

  “You never know how things are going to end up, huh?” the man said, then jerked a thumb at his car. “Look how the two of us turned out, right?” He meant my father and him.

  My mother got upset and knocked over the drum she was pumping from. “We’re closed,” she said.

  “Hey,” the man said angrily, “I’m here to help you out—where do you get off acting like that?”

  My mother picked up a stone and, without really thinking, threw it at the side of his car. It ricocheted off a door panel with a thud. The man saw the gouge i
n the paint job and lunged at her. She took off running, tears running down her face, then grabbed a bigger rock and started chasing him. She hit him solidly in the head with the rock, leaving blood running down his face.

  She didn’t stick around to see what he would do. She ran for her life. When she got home, she bolted the iron gate, locked the front door, then went to take shelter in her bedroom. That was where she was, still sobbing, when I got home.

  “I was just so angry,” she said to me by way of explanation. She looked like a child sent home from school trying to explain what she had done wrong.

  She might have been angry, but what the man had said stung her in some deeper way, too.

  I went with my mother to the gas station. After she ran away, nobody was left to look after it, so we expected the worst. We mentally prepared ourselves to see all the fuel stolen, the place trashed or maybe even burned. We both knew that the loss of the gas station, even if it was temporary, was a blow our family might not recover from.

  We were like contestants on a game show about to see the final result announced. My mother covered her eyes.

  Everything was where it should be. All the fuel was accounted for. Even the table and chair in the station’s small office hadn’t been moved. Someone had placed an empty gas can on the table, beside a hundred-yuan note to cover the cost of the fuel.

  We were speechless. We sat together and laughed, breathing in the thick smell of gasoline. We stayed there until my mother remembered she had to make dinner. We ran home together.

  I know it wasn’t the typhoon’s fault. Fate had already decided our fate. All that was left to be decided was what form disaster would come in. But it took the weight off to put the blame on something we were powerless over. To this day, I still curse that typhoon.

  Southern Fujian has no shortage of typhoons. This typhoon was not the first we had been through. When a typhoon warning was received, everyone set about preparing, patching things up, nailing down anything that might blow away, and stopping up leaky roofs. Then they would shut all the doors and windows and hunker down to ride it out. At night, the windows would rattle in the wind, but that was about as bad as it ever got. Safe inside, looking out, the typhoon seemed like nothing but a 4D movie the heavens put on for us Hokkien people once a year.

  I wasn’t the type of kid to sit at home and watch life go by, so I liked to go out and try my luck against the typhoon. Back then, the wind and the rain were still clean; now if you went out in a typhoon, you might end up soaked with chemicals. When I heard the typhoon coming, I would open the door and yell a challenge, then run outside, letting the wind and rain crash against me. When I made it back inside, I would have to face my mother scolding me for getting completely soaked.

  For me, the typhoons were just another happy memory in a happy childhood. That came to an end that year, though.

  Even before the typhoon came, my father had started to notice that things were not moving in a hopeful direction. That summer, no matter how much he exercised, his left arm remained paralyzed, trapped against his chest. He could still control his left knee, but there was no tangible improvement. And—this is what really scared him—he had begun to lose feeling in his toes. My sister used to wait for him to drift off to sleep, then cut his toenails. That year she slipped once and cut the flesh of his toe. My sister ran to get a bandage to stanch the trickle of blood, but my father didn’t even wake up. In the morning, he was shocked to discover a ball of gauze wrapped around his toe.

  Frustration, like an advancing army, slowly took over, capturing him piece by piece. He tried not to let on what he was feeling; we pretended not to notice.

  He knew what was coming. The sadness he concealed was like a wound that had become infected. It was spreading, slowly making his life unbearable, and there would soon come a day when he could no longer keep it hidden. He clung to his schedule even more tenaciously. He had my mother put a clock in his room and another in the main room, so that he could always keep an eye on the time. As soon as he woke up in the morning, he would yell for my mother, then he would point up at the clock. He set a time limit of fifteen minutes to get up and dressed. Within twenty minutes, he wanted to be washing his face. Within thirty minutes, he wanted to be on his way downstairs. Within fifty minutes, he wanted his breakfast done, and five minutes later, he wanted to be on the toilet; and he would be out the door by eight o’clock. But then he would complain about being one or two minutes slower here and there. . . .

  He sometimes flew into a rage and swept everything off the table or took his cane and rapped it on the floor, shouting, “You don’t want me to get better, do you? You don’t want me to get better?”

  My father, it seemed, feared that as slowly as my mother worked, she would always fall behind his schedule, and he would never be able to recover the paralyzed half of his body.

  It was around then that the first typhoon of autumn arrived. We spent the afternoon before it arrived inspecting the house in preparation for the storm. It would be the first typhoon when we were all together since my father got sick. According to the weather forecast, it was to be one of the biggest typhoons in years, and it was set to make landfall in our town.

  I saw a reporter from the state broadcaster announcing that the Ministry of Civil Affairs had arrived to coordinate the disaster response, but he seemed a bit underwhelmed by the storm. He had probably arrived in the province hoping to file a report while being battered by gale-force winds and blasted by torrential rain, clinging to a tree to steady himself while shouting to the anchor over the roar of the storm.

  He wouldn’t have to wait long to get his wish. That was merely the calm before the storm.

  The wind started to blow, kicking up whirlwinds that seemed to dance down the road, and then, just after one in the afternoon, the tempest struck. Rain came like a volley of gunfire, leaving dimples in the dusty road. As the wind began to howl, the TV reporter shouted to the anchor.

  My mother was already home, since she knew nobody was going to stop by the gas station, and my father was back from his morning exercise. When I got up to close the door, he yelled for me to stop. “What are you shutting the door for?” he asked.

  “Typhoon’s coming,” I said. “Everything’ll get wet in here.”

  “Leave it open. I’m going out.”

  “In a typhoon?”

  “I have to exercise.”

  “In the middle of a typhoon?”

  “You don’t want me to get better. I have to exercise.”

  “Why not take a day off?”

  “You don’t want me to get better.”

  My father got up from the table where his lunch sat untouched, picked up his cane, and headed for the door.

  I wanted to grab the cane from him, but he saw me coming and smacked me across the arm with it, leaving a purple welt. My mother stood up to go to the door, but my father pushed past her. With his cane in his right hand to keep his balance, he had only his weak left hand free to work the knob.

  Failing to open the door, he started to beat on it with his cane, crying and cursing. “None of you want me to get better,” he said. “None of you! You don’t want me to get better.”

  My father’s voice reminded me of a tractor tipped on its side, its engine roaring. The neighbors heard him and started cracking their windows to look out.

  I went to the door and flung it open. “Go,” I said, “just go. Nobody’s stopping you.”

  My father didn’t even glance at me. Balancing his awkward bulk on the cane, he headed out the door. The wind and rain seemed to intensify at that moment. He was blown clear across the road, as if he weighed no more than a leaf.

  When I saw him splayed on the road, struggling to rise to his feet, I rushed to his side. He was still angry. He pushed me away, and I watched him try again to get his feet under him, before finally giving up and collapsing limply to the ground.

  My mother went over and, without saying a word, leaned against his left side and helped
him slowly get to his feet. She tried to lead him toward the house, but he pushed her aside and hobbled in the other direction.

  There was nothing but the wind and rain and my father’s trembling body, tiny and powerless, struggling like a bird in a storm. Our neighbors came out and tried to call to him, telling him to go home, but he seemed not to hear them. He kept walking.

  As he walked by a gap between two buildings, a gust of wind came down the alley like a cannon, knocking him to the ground again.

  When some of the neighbors went over to help him up, he pushed them away. He did not want their help, but there was no way he could get back to his feet by himself. He kept going, crawling on his belly like a lizard. When he could go no farther, he let one of the neighbors drag him to his feet and help him home. He didn’t stay there long. At four o’clock, he was ready to go out again.

  Despite the typhoon, he was committed to his schedule. He repeated the same pattern three times.

  The next day, with the typhoon still blowing, my father stayed in bed. He refused to talk. He lay in bed looking frustrated and helpless.

  He would not say it himself, but I knew that something had snapped inside of him. The sense of defeat seemed to hang in the air—I could smell it even, a salty smell, like the breath of the ocean.

  He stayed in his bed as if he had been born there and would die there.

  After a few days, he broke his silence and called me to his bedside. “Can you take me out along the coast on your motorcycle?” he asked me.

  That afternoon, the whole family pitched in to get him on the motorbike and then tie the two of us together with a length of cloth.

  The low autumn sunlight was as white as snow, as white as salt. The sea shone magnificently under its pure light as I drove along the levee. We watched a kid roasting sweet potatoes over some coals, a few teenagers who had drunk their fill and were taking turns smashing the empty liquor bottles against a wall, and fishermen headed out with rakes and wicker baskets.

  My father was silent while we drove. I searched in vain for a topic of conversation. “That guy that waved to us from the boat, he used to be in your gang, right?” I asked. “I heard that you guys used to be the toughest crew around here.”