Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  There were all sorts of tiny tasks to take my mind off the situation. When I changed my father’s IV, I had to search for a patch of skin not yet punctured by countless tiny holes. When the doctors had a new prescription for him, I had to choose between the “Made in China” option or the more expensive import. “Which one do you want?” the doctor asked. I asked the price of the import and thought for a long time.

  “Will the ‘Made in China’ one have any extra side effects?”

  “Probably. There might be some pain after administering it. There’s no chance of that with the import.”

  I did a quick mental calculation of how much money we had left and how much longer my father might remain in the hospital. “I’ll get the ‘Made in China,’” I said.

  Then I had to watch my father writhing in pain, unable to sleep.

  The family of the patient in the room next to my father’s used to scold me: “You need to look after him better than that. Don’t try to skimp on his treatment!”

  I could only laugh.

  Early on, I decided I could make friends with ICU patients. There was no way I could make friends with their families—too sick with worry, too stressed out to be thinking about friendship. The patients often had a sunny disposition, even if it was nothing but a front. Perhaps the sun is the perfect comparison: to shine so bright, they had to burn what was inside of them for fuel.

  I was drawn to a patient who stayed down the hall from my father’s room. He was a dark, wiry man from Zhangzhou, a city west of Xiamen, and old enough for me to call him uncle. He was confined to the ICU by heart disease. He often stopped to catch his breath while speaking, but other than that, he seemed fairly healthy.

  He had been a healthy eater before, but he couldn’t even eat a full bowl of rice by the time I met him. One day, chuckling, he told me the story of his first meeting with his wife and her family. He had gone for a meal, as custom dictated in this kind of marriage arrangement, and he shocked his future mother-in-law by wolfing down four heaping bowls of steamed rice. He figured it was because of that that she agreed to marry her daughter off to him. When I helped him to the bathroom, he would go into the stall by himself, then shake and shiver, waiting for something to come out. He would yell over the partition to me, “Can’t even take a piss anymore, it just drips like a leaky pipe!”

  He used to have fun with the nurses, maybe going over the line sometimes. If he saw one of them dressed up more than normal or wearing makeup, he would ask, “So, what time are you picking me up tonight?”

  His relatives used to jokingly call him an old pervert. That nickname became Ol’ Bastard when it spread through the rest of the hospital.

  “Tell us a joke, Ol’ Bastard,” someone said.

  He was eating an apple.

  “Did we lose you, Ol’ Bastard?”

  He laughed and said, “I’m still here, I’m still here, I’m not dead yet.”

  My father was jealous of our friendship. He wanted to joke around with me, too. He tried to entice me with stories about his younger years, about old girlfriends or scams he had run with his gang. But I still went to visit the man from Zhangzhou. I used to tell my father to take him as an example: “Just look at him, he’s still got happiness down in his heart. That’s better than any medicine.”

  My father abandoned the rivalry, but he refused to ever talk to him.

  I took a trip each evening down to the second-floor cafeteria and picked up the same items I always did: three portions of rice porridge, a portion of meat, a portion of vegetables, and—with my usual second-guessing whether I should—a bit of braised pork for the man from Zhangzhou. His doctor had told him to stay away from the fatty, sweet glazed belly meat, and his family would never buy it for him, but I always grabbed a portion to secretly slip to him.

  Each night, I got off the elevator and stopped to see him first before going to my father’s room.

  But one evening, returning from the cafeteria, I found his bed empty. I thought for a moment and decided that his family must have taken him out for dinner. I took the food to my father’s room and we started to eat. “That guy from Zhangzhou, he’s not in his room,” I casually said. “Did his family take him out? If they were celebrating something, they should have invited me along.”

  “He passed away,” my mother said flatly, not looking at me.

  I wordlessly finished eating, then went up to the roof of the hospital to watch the sun go down. I vowed never to make friends with an ICU patient again. I sneaked back into my father’s room, pulled out the recliner chair, and lay down. I pretended I wasn’t sad.

  Auntie Wang was one of the most popular people on the ward. She was one of the cleaning women, and like the rest of them, she carried the smell of the soil with her. She had a powerful voice and was a hard worker.

  Thinking back, though, she wasn’t really a good person. If there was nothing in it for her, she wasn’t interested. If she didn’t pretend to forget her task, she would still help you out, but she would be grumbling the entire time, cursing you under her breath. Her way of speaking was not particularly pleasant. Sometimes the children of patients who had just arrived would play in the hallway, getting in her way, and she would fling her mop aside and roar, “Who do these kids belong to? Brats! We’ve got people dying here and they’re running around having fun!”

  Their cries would echo down the hallway, then an adult would sneak in like a thief and spirit them away. The next sound you would hear was faint sobbing from a room on the ward.

  The only reason she managed to get along with anyone is because the ICU was a sort of exclusive community. She also had the least contact with disease. There was no need to worry about certain things around her. There was no need to cover up your grief. There was no chance that she would suddenly disappear from the ward. And her bad temper also had its advantages: there was no expectation or reason to form any permanent relationship with her.

  I saw many families leave and never come back. Once they had the chance to leave, they seemed to wipe from their memories any traces of the place. It was as if the ICU was a parallel universe.

  I tried to sympathize with Auntie Wang. Like me, she must have formed some relationships with patients—and then those new friends disappeared. She learned how to shield herself. She knew that the families of the ICU, as genuine as they might have seemed, would one day leave and never return.

  I felt a new warmth toward her when I realized what she must have been through.

  I tried to figure out what made Auntie Wang happy. She definitely liked to gossip. She told the story of Old Wang in the fourth-floor orthopedics department, who tottered over to the toilet with a broken leg, then wound up slipping and breaking his other leg. She described both his legs suspended over the bed like a big V. But her biggest contribution to hospital gossip was the story of conjoined twins born to a mother in the maternity ward of the obstetrics department on the second floor. The parents were sobbing, she told us, and the doctors were still trying to figure out how to separate them. “I went and got a look at them,” Auntie Wang said, “while I was cleaning down there. They look like a pair of temple gods!” She became animated when relating juicy gossip, speaking with her hands.

  I could not stop thinking about the twins. For several days, the entire ICU seemed to be discussing it. Everyone tried to picture how they would live.

  It was like a soap opera for us, with each new twist and turn in the series related to us by Auntie Wang. She arrived one morning and announced that the conjoined twins were two baby boys. “What a shame it turned out like this,” someone said. “Twin boys are such a blessing.”

  She returned later that same day to break the news that the doctors planned to use a surgical saw to separate the twins. It was just a matter of time, she told us. The ICU was in an uproar, with everyone speculating about the procedure. The patients of the ICU had undergone their fair share of surgeries, so they had their own theories about how it might be done.

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bsp; The next day, everyone was waiting for the next installment. Auntie Wang did not disappoint. “They have only one heart,” she said.

  Everyone came together to discuss the update. “Ai-ya! That means they’re going to be stuck together for the rest of their lives,” someone said, “eat together, sleep together, forever.”

  The obstetrics department, which included the maternity ward, was on the same floor as the cafeteria, so every time I finished picking up food, I would sneak over for a look. I was free to roam the hospital, since all of the nurses knew me and would usually wave me in to stroll around other parts of the hospital, but that privilege, accorded to family members of ICU patients, did not extend to the obstetrics department. They knew we were in close proximity to death, and they didn’t want to risk us passing it on to the hospital’s newest arrivals.

  Gossip from the maternity ward was the most highly prized. Everyone would hang on every word of a story about a newborn. The maternity ward was like some fantastic tourist site. The ICU children were always looking for ways to sneak in.

  Various ruses were employed, like pretending to be dropping off food or saying they had to pick up a prescription there, or even using a doctor’s cap and a surgical mask as a disguise. They all failed.

  I finally convinced Auntie Wang to take me with her to the maternity ward in exchange for a set of tutoring books she planned to give to her own kids.

  I was given a mop bucket to carry, and Auntie Wang told me to follow her in the ward. She panted as she walked, and I could smell her body odor. Two nurses on duty watched the door to the ward like soldiers at a roadblock. They looked at me skeptically.

  “I’m not feeling good today,” Auntie Wang said by way of explanation, “so he offered to help me out. He’s a good boy.”

  The nurses conferred, then handed me a blue nurse’s jacket to wear. But as I followed Auntie Wang into the ward, one of the nurses called me back. “You need to go to the disinfection room and get clean first!”

  I knew what the nurse was thinking. I threw down the jacket and ran back to the ICU.

  I had given up on trying to see the conjoined twins. Auntie Wang kept updating us, though, until about a week after my foiled maternity ward visit, when she dropped the topic completely. Nobody could get anything out of her.

  Everyone realized what had happened. It was the same thing that they were all dreading could happen to them or their loved one.

  That which could not be named had stolen in and carried the twins away. It might come for them next.

  When I saw the way they looked at each other, I knew exactly what was going on between the head nurse and the new doctor.

  When she was a younger woman, the head nurse must have been a pretty young thing. Her face had kept its elegant shape at least. There were two dimples in her cheeks that deepened when she smiled, but as long as I had known her, she usually wore a cold expression and spoke in a dull monotone.

  There was a nurses’ station in the middle of the ICU. It had a counter like you might find in a nightclub, about waist height, and it was located right beside what we called the VIP room. The door to the VIP room was always closed. Doctors could come and go as they pleased, but patients needed an invitation.

  Nobody was quite sure what the interior of the room looked like, so it became a topic of speculation in the ICU. Rumor had it that there were European-style furnishings and a shag rug, and some said there was even a pool table.

  However, we all knew that one day we would receive the call. An invitation to the VIP room meant that your family member was at the crossroads of life and death. The meeting in the VIP room was about the final surgical option.

  The procedure began like this: the afternoon before the surgery was scheduled, the head nurse would arrive with a smile and a notification form for the patient’s family. “The doctors want to have a word with you tonight,” she would say. “Bring whomever you want to accompany you.” At eight o’clock, the head nurse would tap at the door and lead the family into the VIP room.

  The door to the VIP room would open briefly and then swing shut as the family entered. The next morning, the patient whose family had received the VIP invitation would be sent to the operating room. That was the last anybody saw of them. If the surgery was successful, the patient would be transferred to a recovery room for observation before either being sent to one of the wards on the lower floors or discharged directly. If the surgery was a failure, return to the ICU was unnecessary.

  The romance between the head nurse and the young doctor had everyone in the ICU on pins and needles. In a place like that, love was usually an extreme thing, either unimaginable joy or crushing sorrow. The patients had practical concerns, too, since a change in the head nurse’s mood might mean that she would be careless when giving the next injection. Everyone in the ICU studied their faces for the slightest changes in emotion, but the head nurse and the doctor never dropped the mask of professionalism.

  It was even more stressful for me because the doctor was in charge of vascular conditions, so when it was time for surgery, he might hold my father’s life in his hands.

  The romance between the nurse and the young doctor became a matter of public safety. There was constant whispered speculation about the progress of their relationship and discussion of how things might be pushed forward.

  The first reaction had been to find a way to drive them apart. There were suggestions that we should start a rumor to break them up. When the head nurse came around to give an injection, a patient would drop a story that they had seen the doctor hanging around a nurse from a lower floor. “Oh?” the head nurse would say. “Is that so?” She might have appeared calm, but the way she jabbed the needle in gave her away—and it left the poor patient moaning in pain.

  Another patient took it into his head that he should introduce the young doctor to another eligible bachelorette, promising him that she was prettier than the head nurse and from a wealthy family. When the head nurse got word of the scheme, she stormed into his room. “I think you’re enjoying your time in here a little too much,” she said, arms crossed across her chest.

  After that, everyone decided it was preferable to have the courtship proceed with as much stability as possible. Family members of patients would hang around trying to overhear the head nurse, then it would be passed on to someone else, who would go to the young doctor to drop hints. If the head nurse seemed upset, we would do our best to get out of her whatever the issue might be, then do our best to make it right.

  My role in the project was minimal. I was charged with complimenting the head nurse whenever I saw her—“You look beautiful today”—and observing to the young doctor how considerate and responsible the head nurse was. “You know,” I would say to him, “that’s the type of woman I’d like to marry.”

  I always seemed to run into the doctor in the bathroom, though. He would take his time zipping up his pants, then turn to me and let me have it. “You little bastard,” he said, “don’t let me hear you going around talking like that again or I’ll give you a cuff upside the head.” I nodded. I couldn’t reveal that I was only playing my part in the scheme. The next time I saw him, I repeated it again.

  We struggled through each day as best we could, but at least we found things like that to entertain us temporarily. Things seemed to be getting better with my father’s condition, too. That might mean he was well enough to attempt surgery. Doctors started prescribing milder medications. I got the sense that our visit to the VIP room was imminent.

  I was right. It wasn’t long before the call came. The head nurse led my mother and me behind the counter of the nurses’ station and into the VIP room. There were several large desks with office chairs, and then a big, soft sofa, which sat like a plush oasis in one corner of the room.

  The sofa was meant for the family to sit on. It was supposed to make them feel safe and comfortable.

  I didn’t have time to process the disappointment at the lack of a shag rug or a pool t
able. The doctor in charge of my father’s treatment was waiting on one side of the sofa. He smiled as we entered, rose to greet us, and gave me a surprisingly firm handshake. I realized that all of this—the smile, the sofa, the firmness of the handshake—must have been the product of careful research into the best way to handle the family of patients ahead of surgery.

  A few other doctors took their places around the room, and I noticed the young doctor was among them. I had guessed right: he was going to be involved in my father’s surgery.

  The head doctor launched into a detailed explanation of the surgery that completely baffled me and my mother.

  My mother cut him off. “Doctor, I just want to know what his chances are.”

  “I give him a 60 percent chance. I want you to know what the risks are. During the surgery, his heart will be temporarily replaced by an artificial heart. If his blood pressure drops too low while he’s hooked to the machine, it might be impossible to save him. But if we can stabilize him and perform the surgery, our plan is to replace the valve with an artificial valve. The risk with that is an air bubble in his circulation. If that’s the case, then again, it might be impossible to save him.”

  My mother looked like she was about to faint. She motioned for the head doctor to stop.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but this is necessary. It’s my duty to inform you of the risks.”

  The head doctor’s lecture seemed to take an eternity. “Can we get your consent to perform the surgery?” he asked finally. “I’ve told you that I can predict a 60 percent success rate for the surgery, but you need to weigh that against his prospects without surgery. If that valve is not replaced, it’s not likely he’ll live to see next spring.”

  My mother was speechless. She turned to me. “I want you to decide,” she said. “You’re the head of the family now.”

  “Can I think on it?” I asked.

  “That’s fine,” the head doctor said, “but time is limited. We need to do the surgery before it’s too late. We have a window of opportunity here and now. We want to schedule him for the morning of the day after tomorrow.”