I shrug. “Things happen. Think about it. Don’t make up your mind, we’ll talk about it tomorrow. But remember, we should have decided before next council meeting.”
“That’s only a month,” he says.
I know.
“Marriage is a big thing,” he adds.
“I’ve been married before,” I say.
“I know. I asked everybody everything about you.” I must look nonplussed because he explains, “I know you were a captain. I know you’re from West Virginia, I know you hated the Commune when you were first here, I know you’re almost never sick, you never had any children and that your ex-husband is still in the Army and that he’s stationed in California. People respect you, a lot of people came to the meeting tonight just to vote for you.”
“How did you know Evan’s in California?” I ask.
“Claire, one of the newcomers from two years ago, she works in transmissions. She told me you got mail forwarded from an E. Jansch from some base in Southern California.”
I occasionally get stuff from Evan, not much, not often, and I usually pitch it.
“I admire you a lot,” he says. “I don’t want your charity, I want, well, to start, I want your respect.”
“It wouldn’t be charity, Dormov,” I say. “I get up some mornings at three-thirty, four A.M., and I’d expect you to do the same.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You checked up on me?” I’m not sure if I like this or not.
“Well, not exactly, I just remembered what people said about you, and then because people knew we were friends, it’s a small place, people like to talk.”
I find this all a little unnerving, and I find the way Alexi is looking at me, well, I’m not sure what it means.
“Think about it,” I say briskly, “I’d like to have you and Theresa.” I find as I say it, I mean it. Oh, I know that the moment Theresa throws a tantrum I’m going to wonder how I ever got into this, but for right now, I really feel it. I need not to be alone, and Alexi is someone I could live with.
“We could try it,” I add, “at least for Theresa’s sake. If it doesn’t work out, I throw you out. It’s not an irrevocable decision.”
He nods slowly.
I know well enough when to leave, I stand up and he stands up, too.
He opens the door and then says, “Well, how about”—shy—ly—“I mean if we’re thinking about getting married, if you wouldn’t mind, a good-night kiss?”
And after that he says, “How about if I walk you home?”
Zhang
“Ni hao ma?”
the nurse says, smiling at me. Mandarin “How are you,” literally translates as “You good, huh?”
“Hao,”
I answer, good. Actually I feel dreadful. I have finally decided that it’s not adjustment to a different time zone, I have been sick the entire week since I got here. I am running a fever and I have the backache to end all backaches and if I throw up one more time I will hang myself in despair.
I catalogue my complaints for the nurse who frowns and tells me that I am not in the system.
“Ni gang lai-le ma?”
I went to a special secondary school where we spoke nothing but Mandarin, I can dream in Mandarin, so how come my fever be-fogged brain has to translate laboriously to recognize, “You just got here?”
“Dui,
” I manage. Right.
“Huaqiao ma?”
Are you overseas Chinese?
“
Dui.
” I think for a moment before I add, “Can I sit down?”
He checks me with a monitor and informs me brightly that I have a fever, apparently an infection, and slaps a tab on my arm.
I’m not sure how long he says to leave it on, I’m not really paying much attention. I have decided it would be altogether too impolite to put my head down on the table. He comes back, peels the tab off and tells me to come back in three days.
Then I’m out on the street again. So much for the most advanced medical system in the world. I want to be home in New York. Instead I wait for a bus. I have to ask three times about where to sit. I keep getting up and down confused in Mandarin. I walk to the back muttering
loushang, houbiar,
upstairs back, like it is my mantra. It doesn’t really bother me when the front separates from the back of the bus, but when the top separates and we cut up into the overcity there’s this moment where the thing rises as if cresting a hill and my stomach rises with it. I am not violently ill, but it is purely a matter of will.
I manage to get off at Nanjing University, where I am a special student but where I have yet to attend a class. I go to the correct tower, take the elevator up and find the suite I share with Xiao Chen.
“What did the doctor say?” he asks in English, either for practice or out of deference to my condition.
“That I’m sick,” I say, and go to bed.
I sleep for twelve hours and wake up feeling human. Whatever they gave me has worked wonders. I emerge wan but without fever, my mind burned clear. Everything feels new, amazing. Colors are wonderful, not feeling as if I am going to throw up is wonderful, people do not know how lucky they are. Xiao Chen and I go downstairs to get something for breakfast. I don’t know him yet, we have only been roommates for a week and I’ve been sick all that time. I know he’s from Singapore and he speaks Mandarin, Singapore and Singapore-English (augmented) and is learning to speak English (augmented). He seems nice enough, moon-faced and dark. I keep telling him he should learn Japanese but he is studying scientific history and all of the important stuff from the 20th and 21st centuries is in English.
He convinces me that I should have hot rice cereal for breakfast, that it’s bland. I’m not really hungry but it smells nice. Standing in line I drop my spoon and bend over for it, when I stand up I see stars and things go black for a moment because all the blood has rushed to my head, except that my ears start roaring and my vision won’t clear. I grab for the counter in front of me, for Xiao Chen’s arm, although I’m not sure where he is, the world is turning or I am falling.
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. “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 its
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,
tongzhi.
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 naive kidney cells, cells like fetal cells, to piggyback on your old kidneys. The naive 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 spices and to watch my salt intake. October, only a few days after October first, 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 me. 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 respectfully 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 Haitao 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?”