The Natural Laws of Good Luck (19 page)

Zhong-hua kept vigil into the night. From the kitchen I could see the orange embers and small flames around which Zhong-hua's dim form stepped trancelike as he raked. The lit end of his cigarette floated back and forth. I knew he liked to take a process to the end, “make all done,” so I went to bed. He didn't need me in that dream space between the sawed-off world and the new one.

Soon he was shaking me awake. “Ellen, Ellen, come! Quickly come! You see what! You know, not?” Crooked twigs caught in his hair, and his black eyes were liquid and shining. Something had shrieked at him, he said, something very close but invisible.

“Was it an owl?
Who, who, who-who-who-who
?”

“Not.”

“Was it coyotes?”

“No. Not. Not animal. Not bird. Terrible! Don't talk about.”

“You mean a demon?”

“No. Enough! Don't talk about.” He wanted me to go out there and look, because, he said, this thing that was neither animal, bird, nor demon was not after me, just him. There was another thing.
It had spoken very clearly: “You are de-strepped. De-strepped!” Then he had rushed terrified to the house. All the next day he kept asking, “What you mean,
de-strepped
?” I assured him this was not a word, but he could not accept that he could be attacked by a nonexistent word screeched in the night. He was sure the unknown entity had let fly a real word that had struck him like an arrow.

Chinese demons could appear disguised as pious monks; old, frail men; or lovely, seductive maidens. This not-a-demon impostor took the form of a word that seemed to be English and seemed to have meaning, but was not in the dictionary. We called our friend Michael, who speaks three languages, in New York to see if the word was German. It was not. The word had no nationality, nor could it be categorized in any manner. This gave it fearsome power. I wondered what I could do to get us disentoiled from its influence. I had read once about a small flying creature in Manchuria that the indigenous people avoided because it belonged to no category. It was neither bird nor mouse. With its enormous nocturnal eyes and strange webbed legs, it was believed to be the lost spirit of a dead child. If accidentally encountered, it must be helped along on its journey to the land beyond the sunset.

I didn't know how to help our visitor along, so it stayed with us. Every few days he asked again, “What do you mean,
de-strepped
?”

“Well,
de
means ‘not' or ‘un,' like ‘untied.' It means ‘separate,' like in ‘depart,'
fengkai
.”

“
Fengkai
? Oh, this not so good.”

“Zhong-hua, that's just
de
. The other part,
strepped
, doesn't mean anything.”

That thought drew his worry tighter.
De-strepped
harassed my mind. I returned to the Funk and Wagnalls dictionary.
De
means “down,” as in
descent
and
decline; de
means “completely,” “utterly,” as in
derelict
and
denude; de
means “the undoing, reversing, or ridding of.”
De
was certainly sounding relevant to our situation, but just what was being reversed?
Strepped
? What was
strepped
?

I found
strephosymbolia
, “a condition in which objects, letters, etc., are seen in reverse, as in a mirror.” The roots were
strephein
, “to twist,” and
symbolon
, “to sign.”

There was
streptococcus
, the virus, from the Greek word
streptos
, “twisted.” I paused. If
strepped
was
streptos
, then
de-streptos
could mean “untwisted.” In the context of physics,
twist
meant “torsional strain.”
Torsion
meant “a state of being twisted.” The two words bumped heads, signifying each other. But wait—in mechanics a synonym for
torsion
was
stress. Stress
is the measure of a mechanical force acting upon a body. I had to stop and lie flat on the floor with the Funk and Wagnalls upside down and open on my forehead. If
strepped
was
streptos
was
twisted
was
torsion
was
stress
was the measure of mechanical force acting on a body, and
de
was the reversal of this measure, then
de-strepped
was the process by which the body rid itself of the effects of external forces upon it.

The week culminated in a car crash. It was sleeting. A woman driving the car in front of Zhong-hua suddenly stopped. He said she was reading a book while driving. Our car was totaled, and the policeman's comment was, “I don't know what you are saying, sir. I don't understand you, sir. Stop talking and sit down. You were behind, so you are in the wrong.” Triple-A's tow truck deposited the car back in our driveway. I felt that our life was imploding, but I didn't want to say anything to make my husband feel worse than he already did.

That night he dreamed that his dead uncle, aunt, and sister were sitting together at a table playing a game of mah-jongg. They saw him and beckoned, “Come here, come here. Play with us, nephew. Play with us, brother.”

“This kind of dream is very bad, I know.” He held me tightly, uncharacteristically straightforward: “I can live two years. Then probably I need dead. In my young times, I very strong. Factory have four thousand employees. We have competition to lift heavy iron thing. A lot of people try, but only me could do. A person in young times very strong, very crazy—I know—cannot live a long
time. Is OK. Every person need sometime die. Die young, die old, doesn't matter. I not afraid die. Eh-lin, I want you take care of my daughter.”

“Of course I will do that. But, Zhong-hua, this kind of dream can have another meaning. Maybe your relatives are trying to help you before it's too late. Maybe they are telling you to quickly pay attention. Let me make an appointment with a doctor.”

“No! I don't want doctor. If I need, I will tell you. I already saw Chinese doctor in China. He say gallbladder no good; he say if not cut out, I need eat special herbs. I decide I don't want cutting. This gallbladder no big deal. Just sometime hurt a lot. Nobody can change what time he need go dead. You know, in China we have a kind of person can tell you exactly when you will die. Chairman Mao one time say, ‘Bring me to this person. I want to know future. I want to know who will try to stop me from making a new China. How much can I do in my life?' People lead Mao down many small streets until he don't know where he is. Chairman Mao sit at small table and listen. This know-future person tell Chairman Mao he in danger. Chiang Kai-shek's people want cutting his head. But, he say, Chiang cannot catch Mao. Mao could do this work of changing China for forty-one years and then die. Chairman Mao believed this fortune-teller, but when he went back to search for him later, he could never find him again. Chairman Mao told the Chinese people they cannot believe in this kind of superstitious thing. He want them be modern people. But
he
believed.
He
believed. Chairman Mao ruled China for forty-one years, then dead.”

“But, Zhong-hua, everything around you lately is breaking—this means something is very wrong. I don't think some bad thing
must
happen to you. There has to be some part you can change.”

My comments disappeared into his expressionless face. This is how his face looked when he listened hard to things he did not wish to discuss.

A few days later, we drove up the mountain to teach Tai Chi at the church on the other side. Zhong-hua pulled over and asked me
to drive. He slumped in the seat beside me, and before we got over the mountain pass, he was bent over retching into some newspaper. He greeted the students apologizing with small bows of the head, saying his wife would be teaching the class. He remained standing, facing me behind the students. I could hear my instructor voice disembodied, echoing in the rafters as I was thinking how badly he must be hurting to step back.

He spiked a fever of 105 at two o'clock in the morning, clutching his side. He said, “No problem, wait short time, maybe OK.” I drove him to the emergency room in Troy and told them my husband's gallbladder was inflamed. The doctors could not decide what was wrong because they said test results did not show that the gallbladder was bad enough to be causing such a high fever. Four specialists hovered until morning, when they concurred that he had malaria, a novel idea suggested by the gastroenterologist. The others said they wished they had thought of that and started an IV with medication for malaria. The next day a general practitioner joined the team and ordered another test that proved that bile was backing up from the gallbladder into the liver because the gallbladder was inflamed. They stopped treating him for malaria, and the surgeon took out his gallbladder. When he woke up, he asked the nurse to please bring him his gallbladder, that he wished to take it home. She said she was sorry to say it went out in yesterday's trash.

Washing the Dog

B
ACK AT HOME
, Zhong-hua lay on a floor mattress all day, rolled up in a cocoon of blankets. He was always cold. The old dog Socrates lay around, too. When I came home, I poked my husband quizzically. “Give me get hot water” or “I feel very, very tired” was all he ever said. My heart contracted when I drove up the mountain and saw my dog's limp body in the middle of the driveway. I jumped out of the car and ran to him, thinking he was dead, but he rolled over and showed his impressive grinning fangs. Every time I arrived home, he was playing dead in a different spot. He had abandoned his usual place in front of the door for random spots in the middle of the field or in the driveway.

Instead of getting better, my husband continued to worsen until he was sleeping most of the day. When I expressed worry, he said, “No problem,” “Nothing,” “Pffff,” and “Don't talk about bad things. Short time rest, probably OK.” The more he lay still, the more I worried. It turned out that the antibiotic prescribed upon discharge for the gallbladder surgery caused a virulent case of Clostridium difficile, a bacterial infection that sometimes results when prescribed antibiotics destroy the body's natural intestinal bacteria. The doctor prescribed more antibiotics to cure this infection, and I was in the unenviable middleman position of insisting that Zhong-hua take more antibiotics while explaining that the
cause of his misery was antibiotics. By this time, Zhong-hua was profoundly distrustful. In annoyance he said, “You want to fix me like a teapot.” That hurt my feelings, even though I didn't understand the metaphor. Like a teapot? I knew that in China people called a small boy's penis a tea spout, but what about the handle? This puzzled me much longer than it should have considering that we were teapot makers and
teapot
was one of the few English words that held no ambiguity in my husband's mind. It should have been obvious that he referred directly to my fixing compulsion and was not obscuring a metaphor in the anatomy of the teapot.

The biopsy of the gallbladder's cystic duct, leading from the gallbladder to the common bile duct, had come back as precancerous. The doctor told us that when he removed the gallbladder, he had not suspected it of being precancerous and therefore had left the small cystic duct inside my husband's body. Now he feared this duct might also be a source of cancerous cells. He said he could never find this wandering sentinel again because by now it would be tiny and shriveled and far away from where he had seen it last. He referred us to a radiologist and an oncologist.

Zhong-hua never spoke of sickness, death, or fear in the light of day. Only under the protection of darkness and lying next to me in bed would he speak sparingly of such things. Around this time, he told me that the sister he had dreamed of had died of colon cancer and another still-living sister had just had her colon removed due to colon cancer. I turned on the light and fetched the fat red Chinese-English dictionary. He hadn't used the word
colon
or the word
cancer
but had said the
dachang
, the “large intestine,” “grew many small fingers.” By this he meant the precancerous growths growing inward from the lining of the intestine. Once they rooted outward through the intestinal wall, this was cancer.

My eyes opened wide in alarm, but I still couldn't see my husband's face. “All those times the doctors and nurses asked you about your family's health history, you said everybody was fine. Now you say that two sisters had colon cancer and one is dead? Dead is not fine!”

“Yes, I know.”

“Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“I don't know.”

I remembered that the general practitioner had mentioned that my husband was anemic, but this had been forgotten during the malaria scare. If my husband did have polyps in his colon, these could be bleeding and causing anemia. I called the general practitioner and got a referral for a colonoscopy. She said she had been meaning to call about that. The local gastroenterologist did a colonoscopy and found hundreds of polyps in Zhong-hua's colon, indicating a genetic disease called FAP (familial adenomatous polyposis), which predisposes a person to colon cancer. This man was not comforting. He said, “Mr. Lu, if you are going to die of cancer of the cystic duct, then there is no point in doing surgery to remove your colon.”

Tests led to more tests. The radiologist said to give him a week to call Japan and India, where two other cases involving the gallbladder had been reported. The oncologist in Troy told us he had never seen this particular variation of FAP—with the involvement of the gallbladder. He conceded that he was over his head and felt an obligation to send us to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. This was in Boston, three hours away, and the insurance company reluctantly approved this one visit, for consultation only.