The 8th Sky_A Psychological Novel With An Unforgettable Twist

by Leigh Lyn

  Speechless, he accompanied Karen to the kitchen where she showed him how to make a decent pot of fragrant Jasmine tea with a few slices of ginger. The way she liked it. When he came back with it, Mo, the plump one, took the pot from him and went around the room while Yan took a sip and mumbled, “It’s good. Just like the tea Karen served.”

  He smiled, glancing at Karen. She was so beautiful he fell in love all over again.

  Yan added, “Karen was a fantastic cook too. Every month, after visiting the monastery, we tried to cook the vegetarian dishes we ate there. Hers were tastiest.”

  “You went every month?” he asked.

  Karen nodded.

  “We sure did,” Yan said, laying her hand on her neck.

  “She never told me where she learned those great dishes,” he said, and Karen winked.

  “Buddhist monastery, every month!” Yan said.

  It pained him to hear this from a distant relative. To realize he didn’t know what Karen believed in after all these years felt like a stab in his heart. It was inexcusable. He examined Karen’s face. How often she’d said she counted herself lucky, which was not always the same as happy. And he wondered if she had been obliging and focused on pleasing him while ignoring her own wants and desires?

  “Nonsense,” Karen said, hooking her arm into his. “I was happy and blessed because I had you.”

  Deep down, he knew he was venturing onto dangerous grounds, but none of this mattered as much as having her with him and curing his melancholy heart. To be with her in the house of her childhood dream was the reason he got up in the morning. He had helped thousands of patients cope with their mortality and had no problem with his own, but her death broke something inside of him. And Karen herself was the only cure he wanted.

  The good thing about this fantasy was that it worked even though he knew she was a soothing creation of his own mind; that it was not real. But who cared if Karen and he could walk Bull’s Eye together while holding hands. The only thing that had changed was that he now made the tea.

  He’d be happy to spend the rest of his life like this, had the kids—concerned about his state of mind—not asked him to snap out of it. Somewhere along the line, when he wasn’t paying attention, the notion had slipped into their minds that their roles had reversed, and he had become the one who needed to be taken care of.

  “I’m a psychiatrist, for crying out loud,” he said.

  “We’re worried.”

  “Don’t be. I share this condition with four-fifths of the world population, who together believe in all sorts of imaginary beings ranging from gods to demons, to Santa Claus, ancestral ghosts and what not.”

  “Quite a stretch, isn’t it?” James Junior asked, raising his brow.

  “It’s true though,” he’d shrugged. “Some would argue it’s a matter of faith, but a fair number of them believe for the comfort of doing so while knowing them to be bogus. That said, those so unlucky to believe in a fake god are just as engaged and faithful as those who believe in a real one. Blissfully bathing in their faith, they hail their gods into their lives and are happier for it. In the end, does it matter?”

  He’d resisted their advice, although he admitted it hindered him from getting involved with what was real. So now that the pain had faded somewhat, he was willing to show good will and appease the kids. That was why he had sailed out to the open sea today. He grabbed a handful of ashes, imagining he was holding his woman for the last time when he stretched his arm over the edge of the boat. “It’s time, Sugar.”

  He opened his trembling hand, and the wind blew her ashes over the South China Sea. He put his hand in the urn for another handful when he noticed her long hair waving in the sea breeze. Karen said, sitting on the bench on the opposite side of the boat and more tender than ever, “Saying goodbye is harder than you think.”

  It was. And strange as it might seem, he’d made a ritual of it, going out to sea in the mornings when the weather allowed. A handful every time, he would set Karen free in the ocean wind. And each time, she would smile at him from across the stern, then he would turn the boat, and they would go home together. And each time it became easier. It seemed what he was throwing in the sea were not Karen’s ashes, but his anxieties about life and his worries about the crossing between worlds.

  Later that morning, Wen finished his breakfast, sitting outside a small Cha Chan Teng at the side beach. Mr. B’s eyes were glued to the sea where a few winter swimmers—local elders keen to stay fit—did their laps in the ice-cold water.

  “Water’s getting rough, isn’t it?” he said to a bald man on his way to the changing room, sizable belly spilling over a black Speedo.

  “It sure is,” the old man replied without stopping. “A typhoon eight is blowing our way from the Philippines; better finish up early today.”

  This morning’s silver sheet was the presage; the tremor before the quake.

  “Let’s make a move too, Mr. B,” he said, picking up his cane. Some days, he’d go into the village to chat. Once a week, the shop would deliver his regular things, his coffee, Mr. B’s dog biscuits, and milk. Sometimes, he’d invite the young delivery man in for a beer, and he’d talk about football. Sometimes, that would be the only conversation he would have that day other than the phone calls from James Junior and Stacy, and the chats he had with Bull’s Eye and Karen.

  With the typhoon approaching, he went straight home so he could work on an anthology he’d been doing with his pal Au-Yeung. After reading In Search of Lost Time twice and deciding against going on a road trip in a camper, as Steinbeck had done with his dog in his olden days, he had convinced his old college friend to tackle a complex question, which had occupied his mind for more than half a century: how psychopathology relates to culture. Today, he should finish mapping the cases he had gathered, representing each with a color-coded dot. He was glad he had covered all continents. Its comprehensiveness was the primary factor that convinced their publisher to come on board with the project. It promised to look great, if he said so himself.

  Back at the house, he went into the kitchen to brew a pot of tea before getting down to it. Jasmine with a few slices of ginger. He could hear the storm stewing in the distance. Overhead, large and dark cloud formations rushed by casting shifting shadows over the silent, white walls of the house. A draft wheezed in its cavities. How solemn the mood of the house was today.

  He switched on the TV. He didn’t really watch it but liked it for the comfort of human voices. The black screen jumped to life with thousands of hopeful candle-flames swaying back and forth in a starlit sky, grabbing his attention. He turned the volume up above the crashing sound of waves colliding with the rocky shore outside.

  The camera panned over a sea of people blocking the entrance to the government offices in the middle of Gloucester Road.

  “Tens of thousands of people have occupied Central, Mongkok, Causeway Bay, and all major squares and avenues in Hong Kong. Come Sunday morning.”

  His gaze wandered to the high rolling waves outside as he pondered how Hong Kong was just another child a debased China was forced to give up for adoption by its foe. Despite having the most economic freedom for the longest time, the child had come to the realization he was not only not a prince of capitalism, but a two-headed designer-baby who had little prospect of leaving the nest and ever becoming independent.

  “Hey, Doc.” Brother Keung, the owner of the Cha Chan Teng, had put a hand on his shoulder a few days back and showed him photos of armored vehicles taken from the top of a double-decker bus. “These have gone viral,” he said. “Is it a coincidence the PLA are bringing in tanks for a parade now? I mean, of all times?”

  Diplomatic as always, Wen answered the man’s question with a counter question. “Would you believe me if I say it is a coincidence?”

  Chapter 50

  “Dr. Wen?” The voice sounded familiar even though Wen couldn’t quite place it. Wen sat up and, picking up his watch, held it two inches away from his
old eyes to check the time. The fluorescent hands glowed near the number five. “Speaking. Who’s this?” he said.

  “It’s Dr. Liu; I’m sorry to wake you up so early,” the voice said. “But something happened, and I want to give you a heads-up.”

  “Ah, Dr. Liu, it has been a while. How are you?”

  “Good. Yourself?”

  “I’m good. Thank you for asking, but what is this something you’re calling about?”

  “An ex-patient of ours escaped from the hospital,” Dr. Liu said. “So, I thought—”

  “Which one?” Dr. Wen got up and walked toward the window.

  “Lindsay Lee.”

  “Lindsay?” Wen couldn’t recall anyone by that name.

  “The architect?”

  “Oh, Lin.”

  “That’s right, Lin. She pretended to be sick. When the nurse entered her room, she smashed her over the head with a tray, tied her up with a shredded bedsheet, and stole her keys.”

  That sounded like Lin alright.

  “You never know what patients may or may not do, and I thought it better to err on the cautious side and call.”

  Wen’s eyes scanned the rocky outcrop outside his window, beyond which the waves of the South China Sea raged.

  “Wait a second, why was Lin in the hospital?”

  “She’d been there for a year already.”

  “Why was she admitted?”

  There was a short pause on the other end of the line. “We diagnosed her with Dissociative Identity Disorder.”

  “DID? I’m sorry but did you meet an alter of hers?”

  “I did but can’t talk about that now. With her escape, I’ve got her family to inform; calls to make according to the protocol.”

  “Yes, of course. Do what you need to do.”

  “Meanwhile, I’d appreciate it if you could remember if she has a special friend or place where she might have gone.”

  “It’s been too long.” Wen paused, spotting a blurry blob running toward him from the dim-lit beach, morphing from animal to human form and back until he recognized it was a dog with stringy gray fur jogging ahead of his owner in gray sweats. Realizing he’d been distracted, he added, “I’ll have to check my notes to freshen up my memory, but yes. I’ll let you know as soon as I can.”

  Lin Lee. The last time Wen had seen her, he was ready to end her therapy and take her off the meds. Then she and that boy, the one who had Tourette’s Syndrome, got so drunk at Wen’s farewell party that they jumped in the Harbor. At least, that was what he assumed was going on. He remembered thinking at the time that at her age she should know better. In hindsight, a young, reckless alter would be the perfect explanation. But good God, to imagine she’d had DID all along and he missed it? To think he had recommended she end her therapy and go off meds. Wen felt beyond terrible and irked.

  “C’mon, Mr. B.” Wen patted the little bull terrier, who was hogging a pillow next to him. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  He liked to stroll on the beach when he couldn’t sleep. Out there, in that thin world sandwiched between a dim sky and a dark sea where the fresh, salty air was cool and crisp, his thoughts were clearer. In anticipation of the storm, the wind had stirred up huge foaming waves, casting a mysterious light on the place he thought he knew so well. Even Bull’s Eye was fascinated. Lingering at the rim of the sea, the little dog waited for the smaller waves to jump in, only to be chased out by higher ones seconds later.

  Wen’s thoughts returned to Lin. He’d always believed it was a stroke of genius when God created the human mind with its hidden drawers, secret compartments, and concealed latches. Unless it became pathological, people were saner not knowing, because the fear and anxiety that certain memories provoked might drive them beyond themselves to overcome the fear. Trouble arose when trapped alters, wishing to live and explore the world for themselves, pried these drawers open willy-nilly. This was why he had asked Dr. Liu to hypnotize her. But, when he found no evidence of DID, Wen had not given it another thought.

  Transferring the pattern of Lin’s relationship with her mother to himself had helped him pinpoint what was wrong with it. He noticed her extreme self-reliance and distrust of authority. She was predisposed to trust her own personal method to do anything, including curing herself. He’d thought memory gaffes, flashbacks and a near incurable stubbornness were her only problems.

  What raised the biggest question was why her alters, if she had them, never showed their faces to him. Or, if they did, why they were not distinct enough from Lin’s personality and mannerisms to alert seasoned psychologists knowledgeable of this phenomenon. How could he fail his patient so catastrophically?

  Once back from their walk and breakfast, Wen dragged his old bones up the stairs, plugged in the hard disk which contained thirty-five years’ worth of patient data and opened Lin’s file. There it was. Hospitalized after a work-related incident, severe sleep deprivation had induced over-active cholinergic neurons in her brain stem to take charge by firing off in the visual cortex. It generated random visuals while shutting down her dorsolateral prefrontal and her orbital-frontal cortex—the rational part of the brain—thus debilitating her ability to tell dreams from reality. She entered a lucid dream, and psychosis arose when her brain told her events happening in her mind were real and tried to make sense of them by conjuring conspiracy theories. Luckily, the damage was temporary. After catching up on sleep, her adrenergic system—which created states of alertness—took over from her cholinergic system. It reconnected and re-activated her dorsolateral, prefrontal, and orbital-frontal cortex and she made an amazingly fast recovery.

  Lin’s character was resilient enough. Growing up in a discordant milieu, she’d only let people in who proved themselves worthy. As soon as their relationship showed inklings and flaws, she’d subconsciously expel them from her life.

  He ascribed that to her family’s immortality project of keeping the family lifeline alive by privileging male descendants. It pushed Lin to beat her fate by relying on her own abilities and talents to get the love and attention she craved. That developed into a compulsion to prove herself; to leave her personal legacy which pushed her to work harder. Although she went off the bend after the all-nighters, she was strong-willed and rehabilitated at an impressive pace.

  She created her own immortality project to fight off the anxiety, which had taken over her life. Her compulsive work ethics pushed her over the top and led to a psychosis, and she obsessed about leaving her legacy through writing her memoir. It occurred to him her hippocampus might have been damaged, causing periodic malfunctions in her short-term memory and hence the blackouts. What was odd was how erratic and far apart these periods of malfunctions were. It was an inconsistency he could not explain until he saw her drunk, and he thought her black-outs could have been alcohol-induced, temporal loss of short-term memory. His final conclusion was that, as a writer, she was prone to dramatization and willingly put herself in the shoes of fictional characters, which became voices in her head rather than alters. Her imagination turned her life into a more interesting narrative.

  Wen was intrigued by her. But with Karen getting ill and her passing, he had been preoccupied, assuming his patients were in the good hands of his successors. Wen was about to close the folder and shut down when he noticed a file he did not recognize the name or the prefix of. He clicked on it, and a window popped up saying he didn’t have the software to open it. After some searching, he found a program that would allow him to view its contents, and he found himself staring at an architectural plan. He wondered what it was and how it got in his archive when he suddenly recognized the furniture layout on the screen as that of the room he was in at that very moment.

  This was Lin’s drawing of the house she had designed for them. Having left the design of it to Karen to liaise with Lin, Wen had never seen the plan before. He was about to close the drawing when his eyes fell on a peculiarity. The walls concealed a double height greenhouse and service spaces. What he didn
’t know was how many of these spaces there were or that these spaces were interconnected by the walls. Double leaved, they concealed a cavity that was two-feet wide with cat-ladders in places.

  Wen got up and went into the master bathroom. Standing in front of the white translucent glass panels, he looked for something that resembled the outline of a door but found nothing. Using his hands to trace the butt-joints, he pressed the edges here and there until one of them gave a little, and he heard a click. He pressed further, the glass panel moved inward, swung sideways and opened.

  Inside the narrow space, Wen saw a dusty LED-light-tube, water pipes, and a ventilation fan. He entered the space, which was so bright it hurt his old eyes. Narrowing them to slits, he tracked through the voids and, to his increasing astonishment, this network of hidden passages and niches enveloped all the rooms. Then he saw it in a nook of this maze. On the floor of this nook was a neatly-folded blanket with a manila envelope lying on top. He bent to pick it up. In it was a document held together with a black, metal clip.

  The cover read “Confessions of a Soulless Woman.” Astounded, Wen flicked through the manuscript, which was much thicker than the few entries Lin had sent him, and a white envelope fell out of it. In the envelope was a hair. After he got over the initial shock of finding this inside his own house, Wen took the manuscript into the kitchen. He made a large pot of strong coffee and settled into the window seat. Overlooking the sky-high waves along the rocky shoreline, Wen started to read.

  The sun was overhead when Wen woke up with his head slumped against the glass. His back felt like a sumo wrestler had pounded it through the night. Outside, gray clouds had gathered in the sky. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and saw Bull’s Eye sleeping on the dark wooden floor with loose pages of the manuscript scattered all around him. Damned! Three-quarters through, he’d undone the clip to make the document easier to hold and had fallen asleep.