Chapter Eight

It’s not as though Joseph Campbell wasn’t alert to the situation. Though a lesser one than you might have guessed from the boring pants and wheezy voice that something short of fraichement coupe was going on here, but believe as you must. We are each free to choose our own décor, our most representative room in which to die our death, and die it we do. Just don’t undershoot the landing strip. The hissing serpents and run-afoul seraphim of deepest night retreat not before our misunderstanding, friend. All is other than. All is deeply rooted in a foreign soil.

Which is to say, I still don’t know where my meds are. I’m increasingly loathe to look for them, actually, as my fingers have tired of the same stuttering zippers, the same dutiful snaps, only to discover once more the forlorn and ill-loved items encountered before. Syzygy. That’s what the zippers say to me of late. I don’t know what it means.

Dawn is Lijiang. That much seems clear enough. The first rays over Eastern Mountain hit this tangle of stone and weathered pine planking at just the right angle to deepen every shadow and roughen every texture, adding a cast of pink to the chiseled stone and dabbed plaster of an ethnic village in many ways unchanged for eight centuries.

Just this instant, the sun is high enough to roll the morning chill into little whorls of warmth, inducing mini-slumbers as I curl around my cup of yak-butter tea at this rooftop café of no name. I’m awaiting my guide and interpreter, Zhu (pronounced Jew), a tall, somber widower who late yesterday promised me a competent doctor for my right hand. “Is best doctor Lijiang,” said Zhu. “We go very early. Dr. Wang always so busy.”

British travel writer Bruce Chatwin once stopped in Lijiang to see a doctor. Suffering from appendicitis, Chatwin was given poisonous mushroom spores to inhale. The appendix got better. The rest of him died. It’s probably a good thing I’m not that kind of writer.

Trotting to my table, my young waitress poses a question in Mandarin with great formality. I nod agreeably, and off she goes. I wonder what I have just agreed to. Hopefully nothing to do with mushrooms.

The café of no name is, in fact, no café at all but the rooftop of the Yu family’s ancestral home overlooking Lijiang’s dense quilt of grey-tiled roofs. As the Yus’ gate opens upon the most frequented foot route to a park of eight-hundred-year-old cedars, it was a simple enough matter to place a hand-lettered sign at the gate offering tea and pastries. Now when a stranger wanders into their courtyard, as have I, Grandmother Yu looks up from her gardening, takes note of you, and shouts to the granddaughter who comes running, tying on an apron and pointing to the narrow staircase. But not before you have glimpsed a centuries-old rhythm of living and read the silent messages of worn stone and unplaned pine, the clutter of often-used things, the three birdcages of tiny flutterings, the slowly turning wheel of morning chores, the self-renewing drama of anthropos muddle-os, the hero’s journey sans hero.

I take a look at my swollen right hand and ponder the likelihood of our Dr. Wang’s having an X-ray machine. As likely, he’s just received word of the thermometer.

At least my thinking has cleared a bit this morning, or so I self-congratulate as I lift the broad-handled ceramic cup and note its gloss finish. Granddaughter Yu brings me a croissant hard enough to produce a thunk as it hits the plate, over her shoulder the eighteen-thousand-foot preponderance called Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Such a charming name for a volcano whose next stirring will cheerfully cook everyone here alive. You feel the threat with your eyes closed.

My good left hand trembles a bit as it lifts the ceramic cup.

Syzygy is a dangerous word. All those consonants and not a single standard American vowel. Thunk I find much easier to be around.

This particular tea¬—of Tibetan origin, as are most things Naxi—contains egg, ground sesame seeds and walnuts, and milk of yak. My hand trembles again as I set down the cup, and I wonder how long before the analgesic properties of certain recent excesses wear off entirely and what exactly happens to me then. Reasonable question, as I see it, but before I can conjure a suitable answer, a navy baseball cap pulses up the narrow stairs, followed by an unsmiling face behind thick glasses. This would be guide and interpreter Zhu.

Reaching my table, Zhu says, “Hello. Please we go now.” He declines to sit, preferring to wait dolefully at the head of the stairs as Granddaughter Yu runs to fetch my change.

My legs are a bit wobbly as I rise to follow my guide into the street. Right away I’m panting two and three strides behind Zhu as we press through the charcoal smells of morning. I fight the urge to look over my shoulder. Just because someone in red socks is following you doesn’t mean you have to turn and look at him.

Yesterday I was certain I’d spotted Ana Manguella in a street market. A blanket-wrapped woman, her face turned away, was buying fruit, and from the thick ponytail and my own fusty mind, she was exactly Ana until she wheeled, revealing a face something like a knee. We were put together once, a crisp voice once told me. It can happen again. And Mao’s missing testicle may materialize in my left shirt pocket.

Zhu and I skirt around a pile of lime that has caught fire at center. Unhurriedly three construction workers carry buckets of water from the river. As each bucket is dumped onto the pile, a burst of steam erupts, hissing and popping violently.

Just to be sure, I check my left shirt pocket. No testicle.

Zhu leads me across an arched bridge of cut stone. To know Lijiang, Zhu has told me, kneeling at yesterday’s dusk to touch a paving stone, one must know Five Flower Stone. Centuries ago Naxi stonemasons used the pebble-studded rose granite to lift their village from the mud, stone-channeling the Jade River into canals that reached every home, installing waterwheels and self-brimming public wells, laying streets and bridges smooth enough for wheeled carts, even creating a system of locks that make it possible still to flood and scrub down entire sections of Lijiang. All of this was constructed without mortar, resulting in a city all but earthquake-proof, scarcely noticing a seven point two a few years back.

At just past seven, Dr. Wang is in. I pay the receptionist the two point nine yuan required for an office visit—less than twenty-five cents. Following Zhu into a large frumpy office, I discover an old man behind a cluttered desk beneath two vast unscreened windows open to the busy sidewalk, the passersby practically close enough to donate blood. Behind the desk, Dr. Wang is preoccupied with opening a fresh pack of Hong Ta cigarettes. I study the smooth-skinned face beneath the blue Mao cap. Wild salt-and-pepper eyebrows flare two and three inches from his brow, the scattered chin whiskers every bit as seditious. You can’t look at Dr. Wang and not think wizened. As though hearing the thought, he glances up and points to a chair. Unhurriedly the doctor lights a cigarette, sits back, and gives me a calm, appraising look.

Zhu seats himself at my left and says in a hushed voice, “You can ask Dr. Wang something. I tell you the meaning.”

“I have a broken hand,” I say irritably.

The doctor says something.

“Dr. Wang ask,” Zhu translates, “what is happen to your hand?”

I turn to look at Zhu. “I broke it. I have a broken hand.”

Zhu translates timidly, taking forever. I survey the office, hoping to discover something recognizably medical. Aside from the stethoscope around the doctor’s neck, this place could be a really bad church rummage sale. On one table is a fishbowl filled with dried insects. Next to it is an unstrung tennis racket.

“Would you please ask the doctor if he knows how to set a bone,” I interrupt Zhu. “Has he ever done it before?”

Zhu is speechless for a moment. Finally he says, “Yes, Dr. Wang is know.”

The doctor guffaws and blows Hong Ta smoke toward the ceiling.

Patience gone, I place my right elbow on the cluttered desk, hold up my rutabaga of a right hand for Dr. Yang to see, and rotate it slowly for full effect. Even the people on the street are getting this.

“Please tell Dr. Wang,” I say carefully, “that I broke my smallest finger, and possibly one or more bones of the palm, two nights ago and therefore must have the bones set immediately or they will heal improperly. Can you translate that?”

Zhu sets his feet carefully on the floor and begins in earnest. I fall back in my chair, my beleaguered heart hammering, meanwhile pretending not to notice the two adolescent girls seated half-inside the windows, listening. A very thin man stands near them, studying me. I can’t see whether he’s wearing red socks.

As Zhu rattles on, Dr. Wang sets down his Hong Ta, takes a sip from the spout of a brass teapot, and hurries around the desk to grab my left wrist. Immediately, a frown. He’s checking the three pulses. Ah. So much better than an X-ray.

Dr. Wang sticks out his tongue. I return the favor and he examines my tongue with an expression of distaste. Now he’s dabbing at my chest with his stethoscope.

Zhu asks, “Do you have the high, uh, high…”

“Blood pressure?” I say. “No, but I can feel it coming on.”

Dr. Wang goes back to my pulses, still scowling.

“Dr. Wang say your heart is like a very young man.”

“Clean living,” I reply.

Now the doctor’s fingertips are probing beneath my ribs. I feel that he’s half-inside my body cavity.

“He say something is make the liver tired,” reports Zhu. “Also say something is on your head.”

“I’m sorry?”

“On your… thinking,” says Zhu.

“On my mind?”

“Yes. Something on your mind.”

“There’s always something on my mind,” I inform him.

When Wang hears the translation, he stops examining me. Speaking to Zhu in a near-falsetto, he returns to his chair.

“Dr. Wang say,” Zhu translates, “this is why your body have the problem. Stop the problem in the mind, is fix the problem in the body.”

I look from face to face. “I have a problem with the body because I fell off the damn bed.”

Zhu stares at me for what seems a full minute before breaking into peals of laughter. His laugh is eerily like that of Desi Arnaz.

Wang leans across the desk, eager for the translation. When he finally gets it, he begins slapping the desk, his wheezy laugh almost inaudible. On cue, the girls in the windows practically fall into the office laughing. Now they’re telling a couple of other people. A crowd is forming.

I look down at my throbbing hand. I’d have been better off wrapping the goddamn thing in frozen fish.

Finally, Dr. Wang says something to Zhu, who’s wiping his tears on a rag from his pocket. Zhu blows his nose twice before continuing. “Doctor say, if no problem is in the mind, why you do this to yourself?”

I look across the desk. Wang, no longer laughing, stares awaiting my answer.

I sigh. It’s a long story, okay? Forcing a smile, I say, “Well, it’s done now, isn’t it? Why don’t we just concentrate on fixing it?”

After the translation, Wang answers listlessly, lighting a second Hong Ta from the first.

Zhu says, “Doctor say, no fix your hand today. Give you some kind of tea, some kind of leaf make your hand go small. Bone is stay very soft.”

I give Wang a glance. I feel mushroom therapy coming.

Now the doctor speaks at length, shrugging his shoulders with every other sentence, pausing once or twice to sip tea from the spout of his dirty teapot. The half-dozen people at the windows are leaning in, holding their collective breath. It must be quite a speech.

Finally Zhu turns to me. “Dr. Wang say fix the problem too quick like put bone together wrong. Is need keep soft. Is need—” Zhu pauses to search his mind for appropriate words. “Is need fix the mind or next time break the neck of your head.”

I’m still forcing a smile. “But it isn’t easy to fix the mind.”

As this is translated, the doctor’s face seems to expand in surprise. Now he chortles merrily. The people in the windows think it’s pretty funny, too.

Zhu translates, “Many things not so easy. You want the advice, Dr. Wang tell you something very true answer.”

I close my eyes for a moment and try to focus. Forget the people in the windows. Forget the swollen hand. Forget everything except what these two men are struggling to offer me. When I open my eyes, I find them moist. “Please tell the doctor that I am a very sad man. So sad that I’ve no idea how I remain alive.”

I can’t believe that I’m saying this. I check short-term memory to be sure. I’m saying it all right.

“Something is… turned wrong,” I tell the two men. “I can’t feel anything. I drink. I snort. I smoke. I—”

“You what?” asks Zhu.

I enunciate the words carefully. “Snort. Smoke. Ganja. Shit. Spliff.”

“You mean,” he asks in amazement, “some kind of drugs?”

“Some kind of drugs.”

Zhu’s voice is a little different as he translates. Dr. Wang’s face is impassive. Finally the doctor replies. Lots of words, lots of shrugs, lots of puffs on Hong Ta. The people in the windows are losing interest.

“Dr. Wang is say,” Zhu tells me, “need to regulate the mind. Once mind is regulate…”

Zhu drones on. I look at the doctor, who is still giving me this endlessly patient expression, yet I feel that he has yet to see me at all. I know perfectly well what’s going on here. Of the three people in this room, not counting those half-inside the windows, two are healthy, centered, well-balanced humans who inhabit their lives with simple, direct grace. Are you doing it wrong? Well then, begin doing it right. What could be simpler? And what could be more impossible for these two men to understand than human being number three, the one somehow removed from his offices, somehow outside looking in, gesturing to those inside and warm, saying how do I get in there? And they, in their innocence, their maddening ingenuousness, can only reply: why you’re just in here.

The street is quiet as Zhu and I step out into the harsh sunlight. There’s no one in red socks. Zhu is darkly silent during the long walk to my hotel. At the construction site, the lime is no longer burning. Workers are mixing it with water and sand, re-laying Five Flower Stone over new sewer line. Walking ahead of us are two women with ponytails. Neither is Ana Manguella.

I think there was once a time when things mattered. A boyish interval, an awkward interlude, less than a summer, more than a pity. I can almost remember the taste of it but could no more call it back than serve it on a wedge of rye, that too-simple and overly angular abstraction, virtue, which my sister clings to as to a porcelain doll while denying the smallest portion to me. Nor am I entirely certain that I would call it back if I could, just to see it perish once more beneath the bone-splintering press of the world’s baseline indifference. And my own. At times I feel its weight like a cement truck, the antipathy of this doomed race of smelly flesh-ripping monkeys whose deepest devotion is to the sniffing of paint cans. “I find that entirely offensive,” said Ana Manguella. “If you must know, it doesn’t become you at all.” Nor does the color orange. When she bid me farewell at the Guangzhou train station, the Englishwoman offered up a piece of advice, and my stomach drew in protectively. “If you really want to contribute something here, you simply must find a way to ground yourself. You could begin by taking off that moldavite. It’s from outer space, you know. I can’t imagine how you intend to accomplish anything at all here, Julian, when you’ve yet to acknowledge that you’ve arrived.” For a moment, the two cool eyes held me almost tenderly and I wondered how this woman could have known about the moldavite pendant hidden beneath my shirt. I felt a sudden urge to tear it off my neck and hand it to her, to wrap it in the cool porcelain fingers just to discover what moment it might bring to her face. I think I would’ve had she not so quickly turned away.

I’ve no idea what I think anymore. I’ve yet to completely claw my way out of the stupendous stupor of two nights ago, let alone the teeming hideom of my days and nights since boarding a plane in Memphis with a quarter-formed apprehension and a half-pound of multi-grind. Here I am panting at ten thousand feet, my shattered right hand pulsing with each step, while the other clutches a bundle of pungent herbs wrapped in a Beijing Daily from eleven months ago.

“I know sometimes is very hard,” Zhu’s hoarse whisper says to me now as he walks dolefully at my side. His eyes don’t rise to meet mine. “Sometimes I too feel this way. Don’t have the wife. Don’t have the job. Daughter go away. I start get old. Think about this only make me feel sad, so just get up, put on the shoes, go walk somewhere.”

Zhu turns to peer at me, his eyes enormous in the thick lenses. “Julian, please don’t take the drugs. Just go out someplace. Go walk, talk to somebody have the trouble more than you. You feel better like me.”

My eyes hold the melancholy face for a moment, unexpectedly touched by the concern of this gaunt man I’ll never see again. If only his kindness didn’t make me feel that much worse. Zhu and I continue up the hill, each of us gazing thoughtfully at Five Flower Stone as though at any moment one of us will say something encompassing. It doesn’t come.