The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I smile and nod. His speech is childlike. I’ve no way of testing the amount of damage done.

  He frowns, and takes my hand and repeats insistently—Xiao Cao translating—“Tell her, they tell me, it’s good.”

  “Shi haode,” I agree, in my lame Chinese, “It’s good.”

  He is distressed, though. My response isn’t what he wants. He looks thoughtful. Frowns a moment. Finally he says, slowly, “Hold on, little brother.”

  English. Did he hear me say that? And now he remembers? “Incredible!” I say, delighted. Who knows how the human mind works, what it remembers, what it doesn’t?

  But he doesn’t care about my response. He takes my hand and repeats, in the same slow way, “Hold on, little brother.” He is probably even mimicking my inflection, he sounds as if he is trying to comfort me. Of course, I’m vulnerable. We are all living on the edge of nerves, Terry, Megan and I. There’s not much left over to comfort each other, and I want comfort, so badly. I can feel the tears rising in my eyes.

  He nods, thin faced, clear-eyed. He’ll come back, he promises.

  And he does, every couple of weeks. At first, he comes with his cousin or his uncle, getting off the bus carefully, like an old man. Each time we go through the same ritual, and I check him over. Then he sits and watches me while I work with other patients. In June, Megan’s two years are up, and Terry and Xiao Cao take her to Beijing and put her on a plane home. The next time Zhao Lianfeng comes to see me, he gets off the bus alone, no cousin or uncle helping him, and stands in the hot June sun, smiling at his accomplishment. I introduce him to Jeff, Megan’s replacement, and I give him a Snickers bar from Beijing. He thinks Snickers Bars are shi haode.

  In June, one of our EID cases (we average about fifteen a month) goes through the same stages as Lianfeng’s. She is a woman in her forties, but after five days of high fever, her temperature comes back to below normal. By the seventh day, she is curled up on her side, sucking her thumb. At the end of the month, I include the information in my report to Geneva.

  In July, Lianfeng is still thin, the points of his bare shoulders are sharp under his skin. He wears a bright pink strap T-shirt and baggy, navy-blue pants. His speech improves. He learns a little English. “Hello, Kate-ah Daifu,” he says when he gets off the bus in August. A miracle, I think. A tribute to the resiliency of the human body. And, despite his fragile look, he remains surprisingly healthy. His lungs stay clear even in this country, where it seems that no one has clear lungs. A little bundle of bone, he sweeps out the clinic one day.

  “Do you work, do you have a job?” I ask through Xiao Cao.

  He nods. He is making parts for motor scooters again, although he looks like a stiff wind would knock him over. “Okay, Kate-ah Daifu,” he says, “Lianfeng okay. They tell you, thank you.”

  My Chinese is getting a little better. “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Eryu-de,” he says, and I have to get a translation. He doesn’t want to tell Xiao Cao, but he finally does, “Whisperers.”

  “Do you still hear whispers?” I ask. I’ve never heard of anyone still hearing whispers after they’ve recovered, but it could be residual damage.

  But he doesn’t want to talk in front of Xiao Cao, countryside boy saying foolish things in front of the city boy. He turns his head away and won’t answer.

  EID cases are on the upswing worldwide. The disease seems to have changed. It’s done this periodically over the last twenty years. It doesn’t seem to start in one area and travel; when it changes, it seems to change abruptly all over the world, all at once. One of the more peculiar qualities of EID. We have twenty-one cases in August. Seven of our cases exhibit the Lianfeng cycle. Eleven of the more traditional cases die, three recover in a more typical fashion.

  In September, Zhao Lianfeng cleans our coal flue. He has quick hands, the hands of a mechanic. My uncle, my father’s brother, had those hands, stained around the nails with oil and grime after a Saturday spent fixing the car. My uncle is dead of EID, died when I was nine; the sudden strength of the memory surprises me.

  In October, I realize that Zhao Lianfeng is growing. He is seventeen, and it’s not unheard of for seventeen-year-olds to grow, but he is still so thin, so fragile-looking. But he’s added two inches, he looks me in the eye. Me, the solid, heavy-hipped 5′7″ giantess from the west.

  I don’t give him physical exams anymore, but with this sudden growth spurt, I feel compelled to have him sit on the examining table. He climbs up for me, and I realize that over the last couple of months he has regained all the coordination he lost. His temperature at his monthly exam is 35 degrees Celsius, way below normal. His blood pressure is 85 over 50. I smile at him, pretending not to be concerned. He has bruises under the skin on the insides of his elbows and knees. Anemia? Leukemia? Bruising is a symptom of leukemia, but usually there is a rise in temperature. I’ve never heard of somebody with leukemia having a low body temperature. Maybe the EID caused heart damage, but his hands are not cold.

  I need Xiao Cao for this. “Lianfeng,” I say, “I want you to go with me to the hospital in Tai’an.”

  Xiao Cao knows this is bad, but his face betrays nothing.

  “Don’t worry about money,” I say, “this won’t cost you anything.” I don’t want to alarm him. I want to have blood tests run. I think of the hospital in Tai’an, and cringe, remembering water standing on the uneven concrete floor, spittoons in the corners. They have a heart-lung machine, the only one in the province, but they still give injections with re-usable syringes. Hepatitis? Could this be some odd manifestation of hepatitis?

  “Kate-ah Daifu,” Lianfeng says, “mei guanxi.” “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Shi haode,” I say, “it’s good.”

  He shakes his head. “Tai’an hospital, no go,” he says. And launches into a torrent of Chinese with Xiao Cao. A conversation in Mandarin sounds like an argument in English. Sometimes I wonder if the Chinese are all slightly hard of hearing. But the upshot is that he says he doesn’t need to go, he is not sick. He says that several times, emphatically. Despite the evidence in front of me, despite a chest like a washboard, despite the yoke of his collar and shoulder bones, despite his deer-narrow wrists.

  “He says it is ‘them,’” Xiao Cao reports. “He says they are just still making some changes.”

  “What does he mean, ‘them’?”

  “I think he means demons,” Xiao Cao confides. “Guai-zi ma?” he asks Lianfeng.

  Lianfeng snaps a negative, offended, and launches into a torrent.

  I can’t follow the rest of the argument. It must be hot, Xiao Cao is angry. When Xiao Cao gets angry or has a beer, his whole face flushes down to his collar, as if he has been washed in watercolor. He is flushed now, and arguing back.

  “Enough!” I finally shout. “What?” I say to Xiao Cao.

  Xiao Cao has a sense of the enormity of his responsibilities as mouthpiece for western medicine, and he draws himself up. “He says I am calling him a stupid peasant,” Xiao Cao explains. “He says he doesn’t believe in demons, and that the whisperers are real. It doesn’t matter what you call it, though, it is superstition, whether you call it demons or whisperers.”

  Lianfeng knows he’s being slandered, he can see it in Xiao Cao’s face. “Kate-ah Daifu,” he begins, but is immediately defeated by his lack of English vocabulary. In frustration, he turns on Xiao Cao again.

  Again I manage to stop it. The important thing is the low body temperature and blood pressure, the bruising at his joints. I think the whispering is a red herring; it’s probably residual brain damage from the fever, or even some sort of tinnitus. Maybe he’s making meaning out of white noise; I don’t know or care.

  He argues—the whisperers say he is all right.

  “Then it won’t hurt to go to the hospital,” I say.

  Xiao Cao translates with glee, and Lianfeng can clearly think of no counter argument.

  But the way he looks at me needs no translation. Betrayed by hi
s beloved Kate-ah Daifu.

  * * *

  Wednesday morning, we are supposed to go to the hospital. It is a clear, cold October day, just two weeks after the October first holiday. October first is the Chinese Fourth of July. It and May Day are the only two official holidays. I don’t know whether Lianfeng is going to get off the bus or not, but I am hoping. I don’t know what village he lives in; if Lianfeng doesn’t get off that bus, he could disappear out of my life forever, just slip into the vast pool of humanity in China, and I would never know.

  I stand there in my quilted navy-blue coat, with my cap pulled down over my ears, and watch for the red-and-white long-distance bus. Finally, it comes slowly through the little town of Lijiazhuang, slowing to rattle across the railroad tracks, and stopping to let people off at the railway station. I can hear the gears grind a block away, and the blue smoke of the exhaust rises.

  It stops in front of the clinic, and two men get off, but neither of them is Lianfeng.

  I am not surprised. I am feeling as if I am supposed to be surprised, but I am not. I betrayed Lianfeng’s trust in the argument with Xiao Cao, I could tell. I don’t know what else I could have done, though.

  “Kate-ah Daifu?” one of the men says.

  It’s not Lianfeng. Oh Lord, is the boy sick? If he is sick, what can I do for him in a village in the middle of nowhere? The logistics of getting him to the hospital in Tai’an seem insurmountable. And how would I pay for a hospital visit?

  “Come in,” I say, “come in,” gesturing like a friend for the man to follow. “Xiao Cao. Xiao Cao!”

  It is Lianfeng’s uncle (mother’s younger brother, Chinese is very specific about family relationships). Lianfeng is fine, he explains through Xiao Cao. He could not come today, he is sorry. There is a chance for a big order for motor scooter parts, but Lianfeng must build a machine, a kind of stamp or mold—Xiao Cao’s English doesn’t include much practice at manufacturing parts. Lianfeng, it turns out, can build machines like no one else. He is making the village wealthy, the uncle says proudly.

  “He’s sick,” I say.

  No, the uncle says, Lianfeng said that Kate-ah Daifu would be very upset, but she must understand, he is fine. But he will come Friday, and go to the hospital with her.

  China. Goddamn China, where you make plans and they say, sorry, not today. No tickets available for the train. Or they come at seven in the morning, unannounced, and say, are you ready?

  “You don’t understand,” I say, searching my smattering of Chinese. Anger, I discover, improves my ability to speak. “He is sick.” I grasp for something to make them understand the importance. “I don’t know, I think, baixuebing.” White blood disease. Leukemia. “Maybe,” I add in English, for Xiao Cao to translate, “I don’t know. I need a hospital to tell me.”

  The uncle is a young man, in his thirties, a peasant with bad teeth and thoughtful eyes. He listens, and absorbs, and is very still. He looks at me for a long moment. Then he nods, and, through Xiao Cao, he says to tell me that he will bring Lianfeng tomorrow. He cannot bring him today, the bus back to the village doesn’t leave until two, it will be too late when he gets home.

  He won’t stay, he has errands to do in Lijiazhuang.

  Watching him walk off through the crisp morning, carrying his string bag for purchases, I am embarrassed by my anger. The man has made a trip that will cost him ten hours out of his day, in order to make excuses for Zhao Lianfeng. Because I’m a western doctor, and western doctors are important, have a certain prestige. Forget that I’m not really a doctor—in China, I have more training than most of the local doctors. If the plague hadn’t hit China, maybe there would be a phone, but there is no phone in the clinic, maybe no phone in Zhao Lianfeng’s village. Oh, China! Oh, Lianfeng!

  At least the uncle understands the importance of getting Lianfeng here.

  * * *

  Thursday morning, we ride the train to Tai’an together. We are riding hardseat for the hour trip to the city. It’s a local train, lots of stops, lots of peasants getting on all bundled-up in quilted jackets and layers of pants, women carrying bags the size of suitcases. The men slouch on a seat—if they can get one—and go to sleep. The women tend children, passing out drinks and orange slices to pacify them. The children drink tea out of jars.

  Lianfeng has the seat next to the window, and I’m sitting in the middle. He watches out the window. It’s his first trip to the city. I don’t have enough Chinese, and he doesn’t have enough English for us to talk, but the distance between us feels more profound than that. The man sitting across from us leans forward and asks me how old I am.

  I tell him twenty-seven, and that I’m American, since that is usually the next question.

  He asks me something else. Every trip is like this, a series of questions that would be too personal to ask back home. Fortunately, I can’t understand him, so I smile and shrug and say I don’t speak much Mandarin. He asks me again, and then smiles at my incomprehension, says “American” in Chinese, and nods.

  I glance at Lianfeng, but he is not looking at us. The man asks him something, and Lianfeng answers him reluctantly. The man has found a source of explanation, and Lianfeng is forced to talk. Daifu, he explains. American doctor. Albert Schweitzer. Dragging an unwilling boy to Tai’an “for his own good.”

  Lianfeng is more interested as we pull into Tai’an. It must seem like we go through a lot of city before we get to the train station. What would he think of Beijing? I wonder. Coming into Beijing by train we always pass a big amusement park; Ferris wheel, roller coaster, the works. I could take him to a western hotel, buy him a duck dinner in the restaurant near Tiananmen Square, go to the Great Wall. The trip of a lifetime for a peasant boy.

  A trip to the Tai’an hospital will have to do. (Unless he is dying, I think, admitting the thought for the first time. If he is dying, I’ll take him to Beijing.)

  The hospital is as horrible as I remember. Patients sleep in beds covered with quilts and blankets from home. Women bring food—Chinese hospitals don’t provide food, although there are vendors who will sell a patient a dinner. The bathroom is not western: a trench in the concrete floor, washed with water and disinfectant. A man crouches in the hall, his IV on a stand. He wears pants and a T-shirt, and has his jacket slung over his shoulders, so that the sleeve doesn’t interfere with the tubing in his arm. He’s smoking a cigarette and talking to another man, maybe a friend come to visit. They look up in curiosity as we pass.

  “Dr. Lambert.” My liaison at the Tai’an hospital is a woman, Dr. Yi. She doesn’t speak much English. I have a list of instructions carefully written out for me by Xiao Cao. She reads them and nods, smiles at Zhao Lianfeng, and says something reassuring. I sit while she prods and taps and peers and draws blood. He is embarrassed to death by the request for a urine sample.

  “Four o’clock,” she says when she is finished, pointing to the clock and then holding up four fingers. Test results at four o’clock.

  I promise we’ll come back. She nods, smiles at me. Then takes my wrist. “TB test?” she says. “You TB test, yes, no?”

  “TB test no,” I say. “No TB.”

  Lianfeng is standing there, happy to be wearing a shirt again, but when I say “no” he looks up, hair in his eyes, and cocks his head, as if listening. His eyes drift left, the way people’s eyes do when they are thinking of something. It is activity also common in some types of seizure, and he looks so strange that Dr. Yi and I both stop talking. He says something to Dr. Yi.

  She answers him, explaining TB, I guess.

  “TB yes,” he says to me.

  “TB no,” I say, feeling foolish and ungrammatical. We test ourselves for TB every couple of months, except in the summer. I can test myself at the clinic.

  Dr. Yi says something to him.

  He shakes his head at me, says in Chinese, “They tell me.” I can understand what he is saying.

  “Who are ‘they’?” But either he doesn’t understand or won’t answer
. “TB yes,” he says firmly.

  What the hell, I dragged Lianfeng all the way here for his tests, the least I can do is let her stick me for TB. And it will empower Lianfeng, give him back some self-respect.

  Of course, in this hospital with spittoons in the corners, the TB sticks are modern, Japanese, efficient. By four o’clock, Dr. Yi will tell me what my TB results are. In the clinic, we still use the old serum test with the injection under the skin and the three day wait to see if there’s a reaction.

  I take Lianfeng shopping. He has a list from his parents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Prices are too high, he clicks his tongue in disapproval and shakes his head. He buys some tools. The shop girls intimidate him with their ponytails and bracelets of watches (Beijing fashion a year out of date). But he is more himself, animated and full of energy. More energy than I have. It’s ironic that he still looks like bone and wire covered in skin and I still have western hips, but he’s got twice the energy I do.

  He eats pretty well, too. We order half a kilo of dumplings and two dishes of pork and vegetables and a couple of cans of orange soda. He eats three-fourths of it, and even jokes with the waitresses.

  Dr. Yi is waiting for us when we get back to the hospital. She is like many doctors with some college training, she reads medical English, and she has copied out test names and test results for me in careful printing. The results make no sense. His white blood count is not high, it’s normal. He is negative for hepatitis, TB, and diabetes. His cholesterol count is 66. That’s about half mine, and I’m very low. His blood pressure, as I noted, is abnormally low.

  She has done a few other tests as well. He is EID positive, of course. I am EID positive, anyone who has ever had the disease is. On the multiphage index, the test of immune capabilities, he scores a chart-shattering thirty-one. The average score in the US is twenty-one, the average score in most Third World countries is around fourteen. On the viral index for a range of cancers, his results are so low that they don’t even register. Everybody—everybody—has some precancerous cells in their body. If you measure six or below on the scale, that means that a normal immune system is able to handle whatever minor cell breakdown you experience as a result of exposure to sunlight or the normal carcinogens (like coal smoke). Six to ten suggests the need for monitoring, and above ten means that you are either at high risk or already have a malignancy.