At first, he tried to attract their attention in the usual way, being a pleasant and interesting and unthreatening but sexually intriguing young male, and not once did they respond in any way at all.
It was not that he hoped for or expected a sex act atop one of these metal desks, but that he simply wanted interpersonal contact in a way he understood, an acknowledgment of their shared humanity, of the world of possibility outside and beyond the airless chambers in which they met. By not noticing him, they made him something less noticeable. By their refusal to have a gender, they refused him one as well; in desexing themselves, they desexed Kwan.
He didn’t understand that specifically, only knew that to his natural outraged frustration at being silenced and stifled by these unemotional automatons, there was added a steadily deepening depression, a loss of self-assurance, a lessening belief that he could ever prevail. The governments robbed him of his high moral ground, the bureaucrats filched his rights and remedies, but the women emptied him of his natural self.
For eleven days they played him, as a cat plays with a mouse. No one listened, and no one ever would. He was simply the shuttlecock in their badminton game. He could not become a participant, so there was no way to win the game.
After eleven days, he decided to stop being nothing by becoming nothing. He took the full tube of toothpaste with which this most recent holding cell was furnished, removed the top, inserted the tube as deeply into his throat as he could, and squeezed as much of the toothpaste into his body as his trembling hands could press from the tube before the lights swirled around him, pain opened through his body, and he passed out.
If he hadn’t made a clatter when falling, he might have died.
* * *
It was a black moment when he regained consciousness in the hospital. For the first day and night he took no interest in his surroundings, tried to pretend he’d died anyway. He couldn’t speak, in any event, could in fact barely move. Tubes went into his nose and into a new hole in his throat. Needles pumped fluid into his arms. His wrists and legs were strapped down. White-clothed men and women passed through, ignoring his brain, caring only for his body; he ignored them as much as they ignored him. A bright window to his left showed the changing sky; he didn’t care.
The second afternoon, a rumpled man in tweeds and a bow tie pulled a chair over next to the bed on the side away from the window and said, “I thought you Orientals were supposed to be patient.”
This was so outrageous that it yanked Kwan immediately out of his lethargy, and he turned his head to glare at the man. Round face, round eyes behind round horn-rimmed spectacles, false-looking thick brown moustache. Stupid bow tie, dark blue with white snowflakes; what a stupid thing to wear. If only he could say that.
The man smiled at him. “You aren’t particularly inscrutable either, Kwan,” he said. “May I call you Kwan? Mr. Li seems so formal. If you could talk, you could call me Bob. As you’ve no doubt guessed, I’m a psychiatrist.”
Kwan closed his eyes and turned his head away. Shame, disgust, boredom, rage. Bob: stupid name, like a sound a yeti might make.
Bob laughed and said, to Kwan’s closed eyes, closed face, closed mind, “That’s the true fate worse than death, isn’t it? The trouble with suicide. If you fail, you have to talk to a psychiatrist.”
Kwan deliberately opened his eyes and stared at the man, trying to make himself as cold and dead as possible. Fie knew what this psychiatrist was up to; he was so obvious, it was insulting. He wanted to become pals, become chums, force Kwan to accept this Bob as a caring fellow human being. If he were only to accept Bob’s humanity, it would imply that
Bob—and therefore mankind generally—accepted Kwan in the same way Which was a lie.
Bob said, “Okay, Kwan, at the moment you just want the facts. Fine. You did a pretty good job on your insides, made enough of a mess that they had to bring you over here to NYU Medical Center, where they’ve got specialists and specialized equipment that can maybe put you back together again. So you aren’t in any kind of jail any more, but there is a cop outside that door, twenty-four hours a day. They wanted to put him in here, sitting in the corner there, but several of us talked them out of that.”
Smiling at the look of inquiry that crossed Kwan’s face despite his best efforts to remain impassive, Bob said, ccWe felt a world full of cops is what drove you to this condition. We’d like you to know it doesn’t have to be that way. Believe me, Kwan, if you’d waited just a little longer, all those faceless people processing you would have faded away and there would have been somebody to listen.” He smiled, a coach full of positive reinforcement. ccWell, fortunately, it isn’t too late. In a week or two you’ll have your voice back, and we can start figuring out whafs best for you. And we will. Kwan?” The cheerful open face above the stupid bow tie loomed toward him. ccWill you at least give me the benefit of the doubt?”
No. And I don’t want my voice back. I don’t want anything back.
He’s Sam Mortimer, Kwan thought. He reminds me of Sam Mortimer, the reporter in Hong Kong who betrayed me. All heartiness and fellow feeling and honest concern; and nothing underneath. Professional warmth. He gazed at the professional and willed nothing to appear on his face.
Bob waited, then leaned back and shrugged. “We have time,” he said, apparently unaware how chilling that statement was. “You know, Kwan,” he said, “you don’t have to be strapped down like this. The only reason was to keep you from hurting yourself, pulling the tubes out or whatever. I mean, you know, you really and truly can’t kill yourself in this room, but you could probably do yourself some damage, and nobody wants that. Now, if I guarantee the doctors and that cop out there that you won’t do anything self-destructive, I’m pretty sure I can get those straps taken off, and then you could even sit up and look at the river outside that window. Or I could get you something to read. Chinese or English? Would you like some reading matter?”
Kwan closed his eyes. The tears on his cheeks felt like acid. There was no way to win. They were legion, and they had soldiers for every campaign. And here he lay, helpless. Alone, helpless, hopeless, betrayed, despairing but not even permitted to stop.
“Magazines? Chinese?”
Kwan, behind his closed eyes, nodded; another defeat.
* * *
Sitting up, his view to the left was of the East River and some industrial part of Queens on the far side of the wide water. River traffic was sparse and almost all commercial: barges, tugs, the occasional small cargo boat. Every once in a while, a small seaplane took off or landed. This side of the river, just barely visible at the bottom of the window, was the rushing busy traffic on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive; all that barely glimpsed bustle on the roadway made the river seem even emptier, without at all suggesting that it might be serene. Looking out that way, watching the shifting shades of gray on the river, Kwan was reminded of his rowboat crossing from mainland China to Hong Kong. What a different person he had been then. With what hope he had pulled on the oars, and seen the lights of the city come closer.
His view to the right was of the door, through which the doctors and nurses and Bob from time to time came. Every time the door was opened, Kwan could look out and see a uniformed policeman, every shift a different one, seated on a metal-armed office chair against the opposite wall, usually reading a newspaper, sometimes just seated with arms folded and feet planted wide as he gazed away down the wide corridor, probably admiring some nurse’s behind. Once it was a policewoman out there; she read a magazine.
So did Kwan. On the white metal table beside his bed were the magazines Bob had brought him, plus a pencil and notepad in case he wanted to ask for anything or make any kind of comment. He had nothing to say, no reason to use the pencil and notepad, but he did read the magazines, in Chinese and in English, and despite his efforts to keep it out, the world did crowd in on him, in its hopelessness and its faithlessness.
Other times, he slept. He took his medicines, submitted to
the tests, underwent the physical therapies. Because of the damage he’d done to his throat and esophagus, he couldn’t eat, or drink any liquids, or talk, but the intravenous-feeding needle fixed into the fleshy part of his left: forearm dealt with the first two of those problems, and he had no need to deal with the last.
* * *
Because he slept so lightly, once they no longer needed to give him painkillers, he was aware of the door when it opened, and had turned to look that way while it was still swinging wide, so that the person coming into his dark room—Venetian blinds closed over the night view of the river—was silhouetted against the lit corridor. Then the person swung the door shut and shuffled softly forward, and in Kwan’s mind the afterimage showed the corridor, and the empty chair against the opposite wall.
The policeman? Coming in here for some reason?
No. The quick impression of that silhouette, the backlit border of it, had suggested the kind of long white coat worn by the doctors, not a policeman’s uniform at all. But when medical staff came into the room at night, they always kicked down the little rubber-tipped metal foot attached to the door, to hold it open, so they would have the light from the corridor to help them see—plus their own little flashlights—and wouldn’t have to disturb him by putting on the main lights.
Kwan, because he’d already been in here in the dark, could see faindy, could at least make out shapes. The other person in the room, who’d been in the brighdy lighted corridor, was obviously having trouble finding his way across the blackness toward the bed; Kwan heard chair legs scrape when the person bumped into it.
And suddenly he knew. Trying to sit up, hampered by the board attached to his left arm that kept it rigid for the intravenous needle, and by the tubes still inserted in his nose and the new hole in his throat, Kwan gargled out hoarse ragged frightened noises, the first sounds he’d made since waking up in the hospital. These noises caused him extreme pain, but also caused that shuffling dark presence over there to stop, to become very still for a moment, and then to whisper, in smooth educated Cantonese, “So you’re awake, are you, Li? I am here to help you.” And he sidled forward again.
Kwan knew what sort of help this smooth bastard was here to provide. He had tried to kill himself, for his own reasons, to gain his own goals, but of course his desires had meshed wonderfully with theirs. How convenient of him to want to get himself out of their hair, eliminate all potential future embarrassment. But he had failed—as he had failed in everything, he now saw—and so they had decided to help him along the way, had sent this undersecretary or chauffeur or military attache from their embassy or U.N. mission, to see to it that he didn’t fail a second time.
Not this way! Kwan thought, instinctively resisting, clawing to retain life as automatically as he’d tried to throw it away. He made that hoarse croaking sound again, regardless of the pain, but it wasn’t at all loud enough to be heard through that closed door.
And where was the policeman? The easy pleasant whisper answered him: “Relax, Li, no one will disturb us. We paid for one tiny mix-up in assignments—they believe, simple souls, they’ve gotten out of the way of a photographer from the New York Post—and so we’re all alone. You want to sleep, Li, I know you do, and I am here to assure you of sleep. A long and dreamless sleep.”
The figure was at the bed. Kwan, still struggling to rise, felt the man reach past him for one of the pillows. He dropped back, pressing his palm flat against the man’s chest, pushing as hard as he could, but he was too weak, and the chest he pushed at rippled with hard muscles.
The pillow came down tight onto his face, wrenching the one tube from the hole in his throat, crushing the other inside his nose. The damage he’d already done to his throat was made worse, much worse. Kwan fought not for life but to make this pain go away. He flailed uselessly with his one good hand as the man bore down, his weight keeping the terrible pain inside.
Kwan’s hand slid off the solid shoulder and upper arm of the man, waved out and back, flung wide, rapped his knuckles hard against the white metal table, scrabbled like a spider on that surface, found an object, stabbed upward with it.
“nn”
Good; a reaction. Kwan, planets and fiery satellites spinning against his eyelids, head and chest swelling with the need for air, stabbed again, and a third time, and a fourth, and the thing in his hand that he was stabbing with broke just as the weight on the pillow abrupdy eased. Kwan pushed it away, gasping, to see that he held tighdy gripped in his fist half of the pencil that had been placed with the notepad on the table, for which he had had no use.
And the figure was reeling backward, both hands clutched to his face. Kwan half leaped and half fell from the bed, the pain when the intravenous needle ripped from his arm almost unnodceable in all the other pains clamoring at his body. He staggered across the room, good arm out, reaching for the door, finding the knob, pulling it open, so weak the door seemed to come toward him through water.
With a quick look back, he saw the man, Oriental, tall and sinewy, dressed like a doctor, wide-eyed with horror and rage, openmouthed, gripping with one palsied hand the pencil that jutted from his cheek, afraid to pull it out. He saw Kwan in the doorway, about to escape. He stared, then gave a little cry, and yanked the pencil free, flinging it across the room. Blood spurted from the attacker’s cheeks, and Kwan fled.
Ananayel
They keep moving earlier than I anticipate. First Frank, and now Kwan.
I hadn’t realized that some overreaching bureaucrat within the sprawling Chinese government would decide to order Kwan’s execution. A close thing, that. Kwan saved himself, fortunately, or I would have had to begin all over again, abandoning this entire first group to work out their shortened destinies on their own.
I did arrive to help Kwan, though belatedly. When he let that room door close behind him and ran down the corridor on his tottering legs, his guardian angel was once more at his side. I permitted the assassin, back in the room, once again in the dark and going into shock, to fall over the chair I’d placed in his way, giving Kwan extra seconds to get to the double doors, and through, and find the stairwell.
Kwan’s weakness would have ruined him, but I gave him of my own strength, enough to get him down the stairwell to the ground floor and through a door that was locked until one second before he touched it and locked again one second after he passed through. Various pedestrians—three nurses and one doctor—were shunted slighdy from their original routes so that Kwan could pass by unseen. A closet he opened now contained— though it had not previously contained—a tattered topcoat that would fit him reasonably well and cover most of his hospital- issue pajamas. On their sides on the floor lay a pair of shin-high black rubber boots, only a bit too large for Kwan’s feet. He tucked the pajama legs inside the boots and moved on.
A uniformed private security guard would have been at the side exit, except that he’d just been called away to a telephone call, only to find that his party had hung up. (More graceless and clumsy work on my part, but what was I to do with no time for preparation?)
Kwan emerged into a chilly and cloudless night. It was just after five in the morning. First Avenue was to his left, with very litde traffic apart from the occasional cruising taxicab. FDR Drive was to his right, scattered with fast-moving cars, and the river lay beyond.
Kwan went to the right, found an on-ramp to the Drive, avoided it, followed a narrow street that ran between the Drive and the rear of various buildings in the hospital complex, found a group of three bundled-up people asleep on a warm-air grate against a high brick wall, and joined them. Lying down, immediately unconscious, the wounds in his neck and left forearm beginning to scab over, he became at once invisible, merely another of New York City’s many thousand street sleepers.
I left him there, and went briefly back to Susan, only to assure myself the demon hadn’t attacked her again—he had not, he was still off somewhere licking his wounds—and turned my attention to my other primary actors.
And they’re moving so fast. It’s as though they know, and are in a hurry to reach their end.
26
At ten-thirty the dryer buzzed, and Maria Elena carried the sheets upstairs. She looked out the bedroom window, and of course the gray Plymouth was still there, across Wilton Road, in front of the house two doors to the right. Yesterday it had been one house farther away, and the day before it had been on this side, down two houses to the left. Always facing in this direction.
Did they think she was a fool? Or were they showing themselves deliberately, trying to intimidate her? That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? Having already given up her connection with the dissenters, to now be pressured by the government— the FBI, the state police, whoever that was out there—to do what she’d already despairingly done.
There were so few cars ever parked on the street along this curving suburban road at the edge of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, that a strange vehicle would of necessity draw attention. Did they think, because the lone observer in the car was a woman—a chain-smoking woman—that Maria Elena wouldn’t understand what was going on? The nondescript gray car, the vaguely progressive (but inoffensive) bumper stickers—i luv EARTH; SAVE THE WHALES—were hardly disguise enough, not in a neighborhood like this.
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Page 21
