The Natural Laws of Good Luck (21 page)

“You don't understand this kind of thing. Do nothing. Don't talk about. Don't say anything. No word. These things already pass. Nothing.”

“Don't talk?”

“Don't talk.”

It was a Sunday that Da Jie roared up in her Toyota, braking just in time to avoid mounting the back steps. I was never so happy to see her. She clapped her hands and announced: “Today we need wash old dog. Too dirty! Give me get some water, some soap, some scissor, some rope.” Our sixteen-year-old wolfy mongrel had never had a bath in his life and hated water. He had slept out in the elements through so many starry nights, snowstorms, and foggy hours that he had become one with nature, like an old Taoist monk who disappeared into the landscape whenever he wanted. In the morning he shook off what had settled atop his fur, but the residue of time contributed to his impenetrable thatch.

Socrates had a reputation for snapping if touched around the neck. When the children played ball in the yard, he threw himself into the air in wild-eyed ecstasy, snapping at shirttails on the way down. In the winter, he pulled off their mittens and scarves and ran to the woods with them. He barked all night, knocked over the garbage can and tore the bags open, lunged at glass windows trying to get the cat, and rammed through two layers of chicken wire to nab a hen.

Da Jie grabbed him by the collar and tied him to the porch rail. After a few halfhearted snaps at her hand, he remained docile for the entire two-hour haircut. Three people snipped. Da Jie clipped all around his balls, anus, and the tip of his penis. Her high-pitched singsong English put the wolf in him under a spell. “OK, boeey, no problem, right? Clean poo-poo part, clean pee-pee part, clean sexy part, OK?” Zhong-hua twisted a wet cloth and cleaned out inside his nostrils. He scrubbed his tongue and teeth and clipped his toenails. I trimmed the hair guarding the hot, deaf labyrinths of his ears.

The hair underneath the top layer was matted into a two-inch layer of foul-smelling felt, which accounted for his being able to snore through blizzards without even shivering. He liked to sleep right outside the kitchen door. The old dog's eyelids began to
droop as he relaxed into the bliss of being fondled all over by thirty fingers. When we were done, he was shorn like a sheep and there was a golden brown haystack of hair, small sticks, and burdock seeds. Socrates blinked like the Heavenly Worthy that he was and waited to see what was next. The shampoo and water came next. Da Jie barked orders while I carried bucket after bucket of suds and my husband lathered and rinsed, lathered and rinsed. Every vertebra on the dog's spine stuck up, and his long, shaved tail hung down like a rudder from a boat. I towel-dried his bones, and he swayed back and forth, drunk with sensual pleasure, afterward tottering a few dozen feet clear of the scissors to lie in the grass. Big Sister was satisfied, but I had an uneasy feeling that we had stripped Socrates of his armor.

No Place of Death

Z
HONG-HUA HAD SEEDS SENT
every year from north ern China for foot-long green beans, thorny cucumbers, Chinese chives, and pungent Shandong celery. The cherished cucumbers are named
huanggua
, or yellow squash, for their pale, translucent interior rather than deep green skin, and nothing was more eagerly anticipated. Zhong-hua and Da Jie stood in the garden and ate the supercrunchy vegetables right off the vine, spikes and all. The cucumber plants were very demanding. Each tender baby required a sturdy hardwood sapling to wind itself around on its way skyward. The tops of one row of slanted poles crossed the tops of another parallel row eight feet in the air, where hemp twine lashed the intersection to a ridgepole that held everything to the sky. We had to tie the weak necks to the pole as they grew. Every day they determined upward until their necks drooped again, and we rescued them with bits of rag or string. They spiraled up the poles, spreading handlike leaves and blossoming yellow goblets for the bees. The fruits grew like infant fingers. By moonlight the poles cast ghost legs running to the dark wood.

Zhong-hua wanted Da Jie to come with us to Boston. I arranged for Sweet Sweet to spend three weeks at a camp in the Adirondacks. The social worker at Dana-Farber Institute reserved a room for us at the nearby Holiday Inn at a special rate for families of patients,
but the hospitality was limited to three nights; after that we would have to give our room to the next family in need and move to the more expensive Best Western. Da Jie brought a trunkful of snacks, including two shopping bags of tomatoes, a bag of cucumbers, sweet and salty dried fish, bean cakes, pumpkin seeds, and a large slatted crate of peaches. The pumpkin seeds had a hard shell, which she was expert at spitting out while holding on to the soft, edible kernel with her tongue. She could eat vast quantities of seeds at one sitting. While Zhong-hua was in surgery, we waited in a room of family-sized cubicles provided by the hospital. Sweet Sweet called from camp to plead for Chinese food. Da Jie was unsympathetic as she set up our own camp in the cubicle with soda and a balance of healthy and unhealthy snacks. “I think don't need send the big baby food. She father sick, and she just think about she own stomach. Ellen-ah, how about you? Eat, eat, eat!”

I wasn't hungry. “No, Ellen-ah, you not understand. This one you don't need hungry—eat anyway, is OK. Don't need hungry! Go ahead!” She took another handful of seeds. “This one I eat a lot. Hungry, not hungry, doesn't matter.” I left her at the carpeted campsite and escaped out the revolving glass door to bustling Brookline.

The alleys between the Dana-Farber Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital navigated canyons cacophonous with hissing steam and the humming silver turbines that diced the sunlight on the multileveled roofs. Sirens rose in precise vertical screams from ambulances as they crept clumsily into congested emergency ports. Plastic pipes traveled the concrete walls like giant opaque vessels. Outside the immense revolving doors, women sat in wheelchairs with newborn babies in their laps waiting for their rides home while cancer patients in hospital gowns leaned on the cool wall and smoked.

Clusters of crisply dressed people holding cell phones to their ears proceeded across the intersections with the green light. Women clipped along in high heels that rang out on the pavement so loudly
I could hear them for two blocks. The electronically connected coiffed heads struck me as novel, and the secure strides bespoke a strength of purpose far removed from what I felt. Two ladies in blossoming skirts sipped Frappuccinos and flashed the chartreuse and fuchsia soles of flip-flops while ducking into a taxi, which sped off without hesitation. They had a destination. I thought of my husband's large intestines and of the doctors lifting them out of his body, revealing what is ordinarily hidden. They took out his entrails, all six feet of them, bejeweled with polyps too numerous to count, the kind that have the power to transform themselves a hundredfold. They saved this wizardly organ for science. Tall, pretty Dr. Beecher reached inside him again and, with the free end of the small intestine, folded a loop like the letter
J
that would become his substitute rectum. While this healed, my husband's excrement would squeeze out a hole in his side into a plastic pouch. I decided not to think anymore about this for the time being.

They cut my husband from breastbone to groin, stuck their hands inside his body, and rearranged everything. After six hours, Da Jie was still spitting hulls and watching the national poker tournament on TV. Dr. Beecher came in smiling. She said her team was done taking out the colon and rectum. There had been too many polyps to count. She had fashioned the
J
-loop into a new rectum, sewed it to Zhong-hua's anus, and poked a penny-sized hole in his side for the colostomy bag. The wayward cystic duct had its own surgeon, Dr. Swan, assigned to locate and remove it. That night in the darkened recovery room, Zhong-hua looked dead. The skin on his face was taut like a mummy's face, and he couldn't speak or turn his head. A whispered gust escaped his cracked and barely parted lips: “Cold.”

When the sisters in Zhong-hua's Tai Chi class at the Sacred Heart Convent had voiced their curiosity about what lay behind their belly buttons, my husband tried to enlighten them, but his English was not up to the task. He wanted to say that in the area around and behind the navel lies the Sanctuary of Spirits. The
point corresponding to the navel on the spine is called the Vital Gate. The Vital Gate is the point where physical vitality is generated. On both sides of the Vital Gate, deeper in the body, are the kidneys. Between these four landmarks—the Vital Gate, the Sanctuary of Spirits, and the left and right kidneys—about two inches below the navel, is the Golden Stove, where internal energy is cooked and stored. Instead, he said, “Below belly button area is factory, and you is factory worker.” The sisters had nodded.

The first few nights, I sat in a chair by Zhong-hua, and Da Jie went to the hotel. Her ankles pained her when she walked as a result of injuries sustained long ago when another Kung Fu expert threw her against a wall. Both ankles and a hip had fractured. It was no small hardship for her to walk from the hotel room to the car and from the car down the hospital corridors. Evenings when I drove to the hotel and asked, “How would you like to take a little walk to see your brother?” she always said, “Sure! Yes! Yes! Yes! You rest.” In the room her willingness was soon dampened because Zhong-hua could stand neither the nervous light nor the babble of television. The globes of Zhong-hua's swollen eyelids glistened, reflecting light as flesh should not. He looked like a miserable owl except when he opened his eyes enough to release an accusatory gaze. He didn't move a muscle. If he wanted a drink, he touched his lips once. If he wanted the bed raised, he brushed the sheets with his fingertips. If he wanted not to be conversed with, he showed the heel of his hand.

Eventually, Zhong-hua consented to the silent hospital TV station that played close-ups of leaves quivering with raindrops and sandpipers on rapid legs like needles stitching and unstitching land to ocean. Flocks of shorebirds lifted into the sunset, the undersides of wings flashing white against a blue and orange eternity all at the same instant. Keeping vigil in the dark, unable even to read a newspaper, Da Jie had little to distract her from her own aching bones. She could not relieve me for long.

Once I opened the hotel room door into the blue light of the Las Vegas poker game on TV and found Da Jie sitting cross-legged on
the bed like the Happy Buddha, with peach juice dripping down her breasts and an almost empty bag of dried fish on the pillow. Another time she had fallen against the tub while trying to scrub it to meet her standards. One whole side of her body was badly bruised. Making a home away from home was not easy for her.

My husband held up first six, then seven, eight, and nine fingers against a visual pain scale that ranges from a smiley face to an agonized grimace. The doctors started him on intravenous morphine. Zhong-hua became nauseous, agitated, and paranoid. His eyes glittered in icy alienation, first from the doctors, then from the nurses, and finally from me, too. He was terrified to be left alone in the hospital room. Even my short absences to fetch food upset him. The hospital had a rule that family could not stay overnight in rooms shared by two patients. They bent the rule for me but would not provide a cot. I made a bed out of two chairs padded with pillows, but my bottom always ended up sagging into the crack. The crack had a jokester personality, always gaping suddenly wider just as I was falling asleep.

A dozen times a night my toes blindly searched out my shoes. My feet shuffled into the overilluminated halls of polished tile, stainless-steel cabinets, and monitors that never stopped beeping and flashing red warnings. A shadow creeping along the wall and into the storage room, I fetched clean pajamas, dry bedclothes, hot washcloths, and extra blankets, sleepwalking back and forth so many times that the nurses ceased to see me. Gradually, I lost all self-consciousness, existing at the edge of even my own perception. Teams of brisk doctors arrived at 5:00 AM to find me in a T-shirt and underwear, which conveniently concealed themselves, along with the center section of my body, deep in the seam of my makeshift bed.

Mother Nature had been banished and replaced by a well-intended but awkward substitute. Instead of warm arms and breasts, there were electrically heated blankets that lost their comforting power in ten minutes. Instead of flowing brooks and
dripping trees, there were hooks hung with plastic bags leaking fluid into the veins of patients. The coffeehouse fifteen floors down had day-old buns at half price. I chewed these buns outside, sitting in the half-light of dawn or dusk on the pebbled concrete rim of a raised garden. On one side, ambulances sped to the emergency room; on the other, speckled sparrows hopped close along the hospital wall on a carpet of myrtle and cedar chips. Red flowers trembled on long green stems, and dwarf trees with shiny heart-shaped leaves made dappled shade. I never saw the people who tended these healing gardens to thank them.

Through a haze of pain and paranoid delusions, Zhong-hua perceived my exhaustion and urged that I go to a hotel. I was reluctant because it seemed to me that the bag stuck to his side was not filling up with waste as it had started to do the first days after surgery. I feared that the morphine might have stunned his small intestine, preventing it from contracting normally. The doctors said this could happen. Zhong-hua still insisted that I get one night of rest. Our Holiday Inn time was expired, so Da Jie set out to scout for another room, planning to return for me that evening. When she didn't appear by ten, I called her cell phone. It was not in service. The Foxwoods Casino billboard flashed in my mind. That was one hundred miles west of Boston, wasn't it?

When I returned to the hospital room and sat down, Zhong-hua made no sign of being awake. His head was propped up, and his eyes were closed. The man in the bed next to Zhong-hua was scheduled for triple bypass surgery the next morning. Just a few feet away and separated by a curtain, he was talking on the phone: