‘We need a bandage,’ Pin says, still laughing.
And so here they are. Father and son standing face-to-face with a great churning in them both. Each poised on the cusp of awareness. Each, unmoving.
‘We need a bandage,’ Pin repeats. ‘You’re a doctor.’ Wordlessly it is the father who eventually walks away. He retrieves a first-aid kit from a drawer of his desk. Wordlessly it is he who wraps a bandage around your boy’s head. When he is finished he goes to a jade panel and presses his body into it and closes his eyes as if he is trying to press out an enormous weight. An elderly man suddenly. With a ruined kind of brokenness in his face. The stillness of a warrior who has just had a crushing loss, who has never had a defeat of such magnitude in his life. Because it involves the one thing he controlled the most. He has had to surrender, to get his son back, to save the grand plan of his life.
As drops of water eventually fill a pot, so is an unskilful man eventually filled with cares.