The commune hospital for the proletariat was death row for the defunct worker. The building was a hut, the doctors were teenage girls, and the medicine was a red liquid in a Pepsi-Cola bottle. These ‘doctors’ visited every patient and demanded, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I have a fever,’ a boy with the flu would croak.
‘I have diarrhoea,’ a man with dysentery would moan.
‘I have stomach pains,’ cried a girl who had accidentally swallowed the poison of a cane toad.
‘He feels the chills,’ a deathbed parent would wail next to their death-rattling child.
To be at the hospital meant that your rice rations would be reduced. Your body was only a machine that was keeping you alive, and so long as that machine was in working order for the revolution, it had some value. After it was broken, you were just spare parts, the sum of which did not make a whole. The only thing of value would be the buttons on your clothes.
Red and black – when those two colours were one beside the other, he would always associate them with death. The black-clad girls would poke their syringes into the bottles and extract the red fluid, the ‘revolutionary medicine’, and then inject it into each person using the same needle. It was a one-size-fits-all forced euthanasia, because with or without this medicine, the patients died.
Most of the sorry lot in this sanatorium were teenagers or young children. The Black Bandits waited like hyenas at the work units to carry them away. ‘Hmm, they are too sick to work, they have to go to the hospital,’ they would say. By the time they carried you to hospital, you were a cadaver with working lungs and a beating heart.
There were two types of patients – those who were already past the point of no return but whose organs had not yet shut down, and those who were on the brink but not quite over the edge. They still felt hunger pangs.
The hospital gave out watery rice porridge. There was a bowl of the stuff next to a woman who was like a corpse with a chest that rose and fell. That was the only sign of life left. She would be dead in a few hours. A young man with an impossibly yellow sick glow leaned over from the rattan mat next to hers to take the bowl from the dying patient. Just to move his few remaining muscles took so much effort that watching him was like watching a slow-motion wind-up skeleton.
The Black Bandit doctor saw this and walked over. Instead of giving the grasping man the porridge, she kicked him. The doctor kicked him to the ground, while his fingers still gripped the rim of the bowl. Even as he fell and the bowl tipped over, the man was still grabbing at the spilled grains and shovelling them into his mouth.
This was what palliative care looked like when Kuan first visited the hospital. He was at the hospital with Chicken Daddy, whose daughter was dying.
In her old life, her brothers had called her DeeDoo, which meant Spider, because they said she was black with angular arms and gangly legs. True, but this was only because she played in the sun so much when she was very young and had a sticking-out stomach. Then at thirteen, because she spent so much time indoors, her tan faded. Her hair was ink-black. She became lovely. All the adults reverted to calling her Chicken Sister, daughter of Chicken Daddy.
She’d grown up in the factory. For a time it had produced felt-tipped markers and pencils. Her great-aunt had given her packets of these, but taken out the black and white ones: the bad colours, her great-aunt told her, because they were the colours of death and funerals. Hers had once been a world filled with likes and dislikes. These preferences outlined who she was at ten, at twelve. She liked the colour orange, she didn’t like green. She liked the smell of nail polish, she didn’t like prahok. She liked her uncles but didn’t think much of her aunties. Every day they told her a million things she could not do and should not do. Her brothers would also never shut up. When told off, Egg, the youngest, would thrust his chin out and up. Roll his eyes and stare you down. It was comic, the way he did it. ‘Look at that little face!’ It was because he was so skinny with such large eyes that you wanted to love him. Same with her – her very thinness and hunched concentration over coloured pencils made adults want to keep her away from sharp objects. Chicken Sister had grown up in the capital with nannies and minders and chauffeurs. She had spent her days studying and playing.
Now she was in a world where none of these things existed.
Still, she tried very hard.
She wasn’t too tired, she had said in the fields. She could still keep working.
Keep working, then, they told her.
She vomited one day. Still not sick, she insisted.
She could still keep working.
But after her brothers were gone, she decided she’d never dig another hole in the ground, not even a thumb-sized hollow for little rice shoots to sprout.
*
Chicken Daddy was stroking the face of his daughter.
‘Ba is here, Ba is here,’ Chicken Daddy kept saying. But Ba wasn’t there to stop them taking her away to the collective with the other children. Ba did not see when she fell sick. Ba did not see how they hauled her to hospital by her arms, with her legs dangling down and dragging on the ground, or how long she had been there. How hard she had tried.
‘She was still able to speak a little when they first brought her in a few days ago,’ the patient in the next bed said. ‘She kept whispering, “Went back to find the place.”’
‘What place?’ her father asked.
‘How am I supposed to know? Perhaps she buried some food somewhere. “Went back at night,” she kept breathing so quietly, “but couldn’t find the place. It was so dark.”’
At the end of the day, when these little revolutionary scouts had their survival skills tested, they were entirely alone. When the last breath slid out of her, she did not even open her eyes.
The patient leaned over and told them, ‘You are lucky she still has all her buttons. Yesterday, the doctor wanted to take the buttons off the clothes of the lady opposite. We told her, “She is still alive!”’
These were the only words of consolation, from a dying patient in the next bed who used all his strength to utter them.
Chicken Daddy wanted to fold up his daughter in his arms and take her home to bury her at the back of his hut. But the Black Bandits would not allow him to do that. She was buried in the field at the back of the hospital.