And that’s the last thing I remember for three days.
I wake in a perfect little room, very clean. I am jacked in, the unit on my left wrist is heavy. I’m comfortable, it is just difficult to work up the energy to do more than turn my head. On the windowsill is a bright yellow spray of forsythia. I have vague memories of dreams.
The doctor comes in, crisp and businesslike in her dark red tails. She sits and jacks in. “I am Dr. Cui. We’ll speak English, I think you have quite enough to worry about without trying to speak Mandarin.” Her English is dictionary perfect in the style of someone who is augmented but either her system is very good or her English isn’t bad on its own because she doesn’t hesitate for translation time.
“When you came in on Friday the practitioner saw that you had an infection and gave you standard treatment.” She glances over a flimsie, obviously my medical print-out. “We gave you a virus to combat the infection.”
“Pardon me?” I say.
“You don’t do that in the West?” she asks, perfect eyebrows rising. She is a very polished woman, I feel as if I can trust her. “The virus we gave you carries RNA which uses your body’s own immune system to tell it what cells are infection cells.” She gestures with manicured hands. “Your cells learn to identify a disease by the pattern of it’s outer layer and then creates antibodies that are templates for that outer layer, that fit the offending cell. Do you understand?”
I nod, although I am not really sure.
“All right, the virus we gave you ‘learns,’ so to speak, to identify a bad cell from reading the cells of your own body and then alters itself to attack those cells.”
Okay. So why am I in a tiny clean room?
“Unfortunately, once in a while something goes wrong. In your case most of the virus did what it was supposed to do, but a small portion of the virus mis-identified. That is why you became so ill on Saturday, and Saturday and Sunday you were a very ill man. This is Tuesday, you have been here for three days.”
“Am I okay now?” I ask.
She smiles benignly, “You are recovering nicely, tongzhur. However I am afraid you will be here for a few weeks until your new kidneys are mature.”
“You have to give me new kidneys?” I ask.
“Oh no,” she says, “you already have them, we just have to wait for them to come on-line, so to speak.” She smiles, dimples a little, “That is all right to say, isn’t it? ‘On-line’? In a sense, what we have done is infect you with new kidneys, we have implanted naïve kidney cells, cells like fetal cells, to piggyback on your old kidneys. The naïve cells are also anonymous, which means that they have no identification at all and your body doesn’t recognize them and so attack them. The unit on your wrist is monitoring your condition and stimulating your new kidneys to grow. Is that clear?”
“I think,” I say, and smile back.
“All right,” she says, “lie still a moment, I want to check you out.”
I have no desire to do anything else. She concentrates for a moment, frowning at the air. She sees a display but I don’t, I’m not jacked into her system.
“Everything looks fine,” she says after a moment. “Go to sleep.”
It’s as if she has tripped a relay, because I do.
Occasionally I am half awake, when Dr. Cui comes to see me I am fully awake, but mostly I am not. Dr. Cui explains that since my left kidney has ceased functioning and my right is badly damaged, they are keeping me as nearly suspended as possible. There is a fine line, she explains, between too much activity which would overwhelm my system and too little which would mean that the new kidneys would not grow. I take all of this placidly.
“Dr. Cui,” I say, “you are controlling my moods, aren’t you.”
She pats my hand, the first time she has touched me that I remember. “Of course, you are new here, alone, ill. If we didn’t you would be frightened and depressed. The unit,” she indicates my weighted left wrist, “is feeding back into your nervous system. In a sense, you are not jacked into it, it is jacked into you. That’s how we control your moments of consciousness, as well as your moods and stimulate the growth of your new kidneys. They are vascularized nicely, by the way. In a few days they will begin to take over. Your old kidneys will shut down and eventually will atrophy and be absorbed by your body.”
How exciting. I find it hard to maintain interest in what she is saying, or in anything. Back to nothing.
After three weeks I am released. I have lost seven kilos and my pants don’t fit. My kidneys, my new kidneys that is, are functioning well, but I have been instructed to avoid things like beer and alcohol and to watch my salt intake. October, only a few days after October 1, National Day, the day the People’s Republic of China was founded and here in the city the windows of some of the shops are still decorated in red and gold. I am assaulted by noise. Nanjing dialect, Mandarin, I am washed in Chinese. The people on the street are all well dressed and healthy looking. Everywhere, elegant men in black and red business tails, or casually dressed in coveralls. Women with sprays of light in their hair. Light displays hang suspended in front of windows, light sticks refract into images whenever I turn my head, characters flash across the backs of my eyes.
I stand waiting for the bus. I feel dizzy again, but it’s not physical. I put my hand against the signpole. The bus coasts to a stop in front of me.
Xiao Chen is at the suite, and he has friends over.
“Zhang!” he says, then beaming to the others, “See? I told you he existed.” I collapse into a chair, worn out from the effort of getting to the dorm. His friends begin the obligatory, ‘You must be tired,’ and I shake my head, no, no, please do not leave. “Beer?” Xiao Chen asks in English, proud of himself.
“No,” I say politely in Mandarin, “I cannot, new kidneys.”
They ask me how I am and Xiao Chen describes my spectacular collapse in the dining hall. He describes things I do not remember, says that when I came to I talked to him, but that my back hurt very badly and that I was very brave, He tells about medical coming and putting me out.
“I don’t remember,” I say.
“I to hospital go, see you,” he says in clipped Singapore English, “They say you sleep. I send to you flowers, they come not come?”
“Yellow ones?” I ask, I don’t know the word for forsythia in Mandarin.
He beams. Introduces his friends. A couple are from Singapore, huaqiao, overseas Chinese, like Chen and I. Two are from Chengdu, Zhongguo ren, Chinese citizens. They sit and chatter and I stop trying to follow the conversation, just letting the sound wash over me, drinking tea. It is nice to be with people.
Oh, I am lonely. And it is all so strange. I miss Peter.
I am three weeks behind in my classes. For my lab on tool-handling this is no problem, I have more experience than most of the class. The cutters and sealers we use are often different makes than I am accustomed to, and the steps we learn in class a bit more formal than the way I am used to handling them, but I’ve used so many different makes it really doesn’t bother me. We stand, fifteen of us in the lab, jacked in, and the teacher tells us to turn on the cutter. The tip of my cutter glows ready.
The class has been practicing controlling the width of the beam. The teacher says he wants the beam the width of a pencil, we are supposed to burn a hole through a piece of plastic. I heave three feet of cutter into position, rest the tip where I want the hole and fire a quick burst (plastic keeps melting a bit after the cutter shuts off so it’s always good to do a bit too little.) Then I wait for fifteen minutes while everybody else practices and learns the texture and density of the plastic. I help the people on the left and right of me. The girl on the right keeps pulsing the cutter and has little keyhole shapes all over her piece of practice plastic.
For me the only real problem with the class is that I’m out of shape and the cutters are bulky.
The teacher suggests that I test out of the class, but it will probably be one of my two high marks so I r
espectfully decline. As a non-native speaker I also take Mandarin, poutonghua. Since many of the other non-natives are still augmented in our classes and we are not allowed to be augmented in this class, I do well. The teacher gives me books to read to improve my character vocabulary, my reading is not as good as my speaking.
It is the other classes, the math and engineering courses, that worry me. I have five courses, including an engineering lecture and an engineering lab. I’m going to be thirty in five months, I’m too old to be in school.
I am assigned a tutor for engineering, to help me make up the time I have lost. I am embarrassed. It is clearly my incompetence, they feel I am not quick enough to make it up on my own. It is low self-esteem, I am aware. I am alone, Chen has his circle of friends, it seems to me that in the four weeks I have lost, everyone else has adjusted.
I am unable to fathom engineering, so I go to my tutor, taking the lift to the bottom of the Dong-ta, the East Tower, where I live, crossing the arcade of shops that connects the overcity complex above the University to the Bei-ta, the North Tower, and taking the lift back up to the address I have been given. I knock on the door, and Yang Haibao opens it.
His eyes flicker down and up, very swiftly, and he smiles. He is smooth faced with a stiff brush of hair. “Hello,” he says in Poutonghua, “you are the man with the incredible name?”
“Zhang,” I answer. Lenin and Mao Zedong, my huaqiao name! “I suffer for the sins of my parents,” I add, a glib response, a play on Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought which says the child is formed by the parents and the son of the landlord is also a landlord, even if he owns no land. Only after I have said it do I think, I am in China and I don’t know this man and I watch to see if he is offended.
Not at all. He grins, “Come in,” he says.
His dormitory. How can I say what it is like to walk into Haibao’s dormitory? His name means ‘Sea-wave’ although a better translation is tidal wave. The room is blue and lightfish swim lazily near the ceiling, skeletons aglow. His room faces out, looking at the city-Chen’s and my room faces into the inner wall-and the city is going to smoky twilight, so it seems as if the blue goes on and on. Furniture is soft, dusky shapes.
He waves his hand and the room programming picks up. Lightfish flicker into shadows and are gone and the light comes up, the window dims, and suddenly the room is bright. The furniture revealed shifts chameleon-like to rose and the pale yellow walls seem to be textured, like cotton.
“Nice room,” I say.
“Thanks,” he says. “Can I get you a beer? Nanjing beer.”
Nanjing beer is supposed to be very good. “Thank you, but I can’t. New kidneys.”
“That’s right, you’ve been sick,” he says.
I tell it briefly, tired already of explaining and not wanting to bore him. He makes me nervous. He is polished, his clothes casual and, to my eye, expensive. I think to myself I will remember that open shirt, the brushed gray tights, the calf high boots. Look for something like that. I wonder what he thinks of me in my American clothes, looking huaqiao and appearing with the outlandish name of Zhang Zhong Shan.
“How tiresome for you,” he says, with sympathy. “How do you like China?”
I am ready to march out the platitudes but I don’t. “I don’t know, I’ve spent most of the time here in bed.”
He laughs. My foolish heart, I am in love with him. This polished young man with his perfect clothes. He cannot be bent, I cannot be so lucky, and yet, and yet.
Does he dance? That’s the way to tell. When a straight man meets a straight woman, they dance. When I meet someone bent, we dance. It is so subtle. I only know when I meet a straight man, he doesn’t dance. It seems to me that Haibao and I are dancing, watching each other’s faces a little longer, responding by looking away or swift nervous smiles. But this is China, maybe I’m crossing cultural signals. I’m lonely and I want this young man, this polished tidal wave, to be like me. To like me.
We start at the beginning and he grounds me in engineering. He’s a pretty good teacher, he understands my need to know what something means. I arrange to come back on Thursday.
That evening I stop in the arcade and buy a copy of a magazine called Xiansheng, a men’s magazine I’ve picked up once in awhile in New York. It’s as expensive here as it is in New York. Beautiful men in shirts that shimmer like lacquer and silk jackets brocaded with cranes and dragons. The sweaters have hoods. Everyone is wearing those calf high boots that Haibao had on.
Thursday I have class from eight to ten (a math class) and then I am free until three. I go shopping.
I head north up Daqing Lu, the street is lined with stores. I stop and look in windows, the prices are ghastly. I have some of my Baffin Island salary on credit plus a stipend from the University. Because I study technology, my only cost was getting here, the rest is scholarship. Getting here was expensive enough. Clothes are five times what they would cost at home. And strange. The refinements of fashion look awkward to my untutored eyes. First I buy a pair of those skintight calf-high boots. I feel confident about those.
Then a pair of rust-colored coveralls. I’ve seen people in these and I have good shoulders. I think the coveralls will flatter me. I finger a brocade jacket, all yellow with circles of long life worked in it and stylized blue waves across the bottom. So expensive, three weeks of my inflated Baffin Island salary for a jacket. And I don’t know what it means. What kind of person would wear this jacket, what does it say about the wearer?
If I don’t know then it would undoubtedly call out, ‘Huaqiao with more money than sense.’
So I buy conservatively, spending money to blend in, not to impress. How painful. But when I think of my sweaters with the leather ties and the mirrors and look out at Daqing Lu, filled with shoppers and scooters and segmented buses, I can only wince. If Haibao ever saw the way I dressed at home… At least I will not embarrass myself.
That night I study engineering and think of questions to ask Haibao. I want to catch on quickly, be brilliant. After an hour and a half of study I’m drawn back to Xiansheng. I study the clothes, but more closely I study the ads. The regular features show some sort of fashionable ideal, but the ads, they show something that has to pass for everyday life. A different ideal.
I wish I had someone to talk to, someone to compare notes with. Not Xiao Chen, who dresses like a tech; coveralls that he could have worn twenty years ago, and will probably be wearing twenty years from now, all in grays and navy blues. Peter. But Peter is in Brooklyn and I am in China.
I write him a letter that begins, “I’m in love again.” It’s ten here in Nanjing, so it’s morning in Brooklyn and he’s at work. Well, the letter will be waiting for him when he gets home. “Love from the Middle Kingdom, Zhang.” And then I hit transmit.
Does he take in my new clothes when his eyes flicker over me? It is hard to tell. Maybe the rust coveralls are wrong? “Hello,” he says. His room is all the color of a sunset until he rather absently waves his hand and then the only sunset is outside his window. And himself, dressed in a thigh-length tunic that shifts from red at the neck to indigo at the hem. The same brushed gray tights and calf-high boots.
He is distant and pre-occupied this evening. I don’t know how to act, so I open my book and feign diligence.
“You teach well,” I say after awhile.
“Thank you,” he says. “I was a teacher.”
“Of engineering?” I say, surprised. I though he was a student.
“No, I taught physics in middle school.”
I had thought him younger than me. “What made you quit?” I ask, wondering, are those wrinkles at the corners of his eyes? Is he older than I am? He is an engineering marvel, full of suggested cables and supports, tense under his easiness.
He shrugs. “No money in teaching. No guanxi, either. Fifteen-year-olds aren’t very good people to make connections with.”
“How did you get reassigned?” I ask without thinking.
“A fr
iend,” he says vaguely. “How did you get to school?”
“I was a construction tech on an island in the Arctic circle for a year. I got special placement.” I shouldn’t have asked him how he got to school. Teaching is an assigned job, a work unit job, cradle to grave security but the drawback is that it’s hard to change. Like the army. Not like my job, which is a free market job, but has no health care, no security, almost no protection. I get a housing allowance, but except for the Baffin Island job I’ve never had assigned housing until Nanjing. But I can quit any time I want to, go to employment and get on the job assignment list.
How did he get permission to leave his work unit to come to school? Maybe he has a lover with connections?
I smile to myself, I don’t even know if he’s gay and already I think he’s got a lover in the army or something.
“That’s a secret smile,” he remarks.
“Thinking about how different it is here,” I say.
“What’s the biggest difference?” he asks.
I think for a moment. Everything is different. In New York I ride a subway system built sometime in the 1900’s, here buses segment and flow off in different directions. There’s a city above the city, a lace work super-structure that supports thousands of four tower living units and work complexes like the University complex we live in; what they call the xin gongshe, new communes. And there’s the constant assault of Chinese, I get hungry for someone to speak English with. The food. I ate Chinese and Thai food at home, but not all the time. And there’s food here I’ve never seen or heard of, from Australia and South America and Africa, at outrageous prices. Everyone here seems rich.
China Mountain Zhang Page 14
