For the first two days, Kwan kept trying to make his case, make it with somebody, anybody, but no one would listen, no one cared, not the judges, not the people in uniform who led him from place to place, not anybody. Men in shabby suits, carrying highly polished attaché cases, would occasionally appear and claim to be attorneys and say they had been assigned to “represent” him, and he tried to tell his story to them, but none of them was interested. That was the point, finally, if there was one: no one in the world was even interested.
One attorney, the most honest of them — the only one honest of them — said it straight out: “Never mind that, Kwan. You aren’t political, so forget all that. You aren’t political because it would be too goddamn awkward if you were political, so you’re not. You’re, let’s see, you’re” — studying the papers he’d taken from the gleaming attaché case — “you’re a stowaway, an illegal immigrant, an accused thief—”
“Thief! Who says I’m a thief?”
“You’ll have your day in court, Kwan. That’s the name, right? Li Kwan? Your last name’s Kwan?”
“My family name is Li,” Kwan answered. “My given name is Kwan.”
“Oh.” The man frowned some more at the papers. “They got it backward here.”
“Li Kwan. That’s correct.”
The man smiled in sudden understanding. “I get it! You do it backward! Is that a Chinese thing, or is it just you?”
“It is Chinese.”
“So you’re Mr. Li, is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Like the guy does my shirts,” the man said, and grinned in a sloppy friendly way and said, “I’m here to do what I can for you, Mr. Kwan. Mr. Li. I’ll get it. And I’ll do what I can.” Kwan never saw him again.
But the worst was the women. Several of the functionaries who passed Kwan through their hands like worry beads were women, and Kwan simply didn’t matter to them. They were in uniform or otherwise severely dressed, and their eyes were cold or indifferent or distracted. Most of them had muscle bunches beneath their mean mouths. They met Kwan in small bare rooms with hard metal furniture, they carried their attaché cases or manila folders, they clicked their ballpoint pens, they met him alone or they were accompanied by others, and at no time did he matter.
At first, he tried to attract their attention in the usual way, being a pleasant and interesting and unthreatening but sexually intriguing young male, and not once did they respond in any way at all.
It was not that he hoped for or expected a sex act atop one of these metal desks, but that he simply wanted interpersonal contact in a way he understood, an acknowledgment of their shared humanity, of the world of possibility outside and beyond the airless chambers in which they met. By not noticing him, they made him something less noticeable. By their refusal to have a gender, they refused him one as well; in desexing themselves, they desexed Kwan.
He didn’t understand that specifically, only knew that to his natural outraged frustration at being silenced and stifled by these unemotional automatons, there was added a steadily deepening depression, a loss of self-assurance, a lessening belief that he could ever prevail. The governments robbed him of his high moral ground, the bureaucrats filched his rights and remedies, but the women emptied him of his natural self.
For eleven days they played him, as a cat plays with a mouse. No one listened, and no one ever would. He was simply the shuttlecock in their badminton game. He could not become a participant, so there was no way to win the game.
After eleven days, he decided to stop being nothing by becoming nothing. He took the full tube of toothpaste with which this most recent holding cell was furnished, removed the top, inserted the tube as deeply into his throat as he could, and squeezed as much of the toothpaste into his body as his trembling hands could press from the tube before the lights swirled around him, pain opened through his body, and he passed out.
If he hadn’t made a clatter when falling, he might have died.
It was a black moment when he regained consciousness in the hospital. For the first day and night he took no interest in his surroundings, tried to pretend he’d died anyway. He couldn’t speak, in any event, could in fact barely move. Tubes went into his nose and into a new hole in his throat. Needles pumped fluid into his arms. His wrists and legs were strapped down. White-clothed men and women passed through, ignoring his brain, caring only for his body; he ignored them as much as they ignored him. A bright window to his left showed the changing sky; he didn’t care.
The second afternoon, a rumpled man in tweeds and a bow tie pulled a chair over next to the bed on the side away from the window and said, “I thought you Orientals were supposed to be patient.”
This was so outrageous that it yanked Kwan immediately out of his lethargy, and he turned his head to glare at the man. Round face, round eyes behind round horn-rimmed spectacles, false-looking thick brown moustache. Stupid bow tie, dark blue with white snowflakes; what a stupid thing to wear. If only he could say that.
The man smiled at him. “You aren’t particularly inscrutable either, Kwan,” he said. “May I call you Kwan? Mr. Li seems so formal. If you could talk, you could call me Bob. As you’ve no doubt guessed, I’m a psychiatrist.”
Kwan closed his eyes and turned his head away. Shame, disgust, boredom, rage. Bob: stupid name, like a sound a yeti might make.
Bob laughed and said, to Kwan’s closed eyes, closed face, closed mind, “That’s the true fate worse than death, isn’t it? The trouble with suicide. If you fail, you have to talk to a psychiatrist.”
Kwan deliberately opened his eyes and stared at the man, trying to make himself as cold and dead as possible. He knew what this psychiatrist was up to; he was so obvious, it was insulting. He wanted to become pals, become chums, force Kwan to accept this Bob as a caring fellow human being. If he were only to accept Bob’s humanity, it would imply that Bob — and therefore mankind generally — accepted Kwan in the same way. Which was a lie.
Bob said, “Okay, Kwan, at the moment you just want the facts. Fine. You did a pretty good job on your insides, made enough of a mess that they had to bring you over here to NYU Medical Center, where they’ve got specialists and specialized equipment that can maybe put you back together again. So you aren’t in any kind of jail any more, but there is a cop outside that door, twenty-four hours a day. They wanted to put him in here, sitting in the corner there, but several of us talked them out of that.”
Smiling at the look of inquiry that crossed Kwan’s face despite his best efforts to remain impassive, Bob said, “We felt a world full of cops is what drove you to this condition. We’d like you to know it doesn’t have to be that way. Believe me, Kwan, if you’d waited just a little longer, all those faceless people processing you would have faded away and there would have been somebody to listen.” He smiled, a coach full of positive reinforcement. “Well, fortunately, it isn’t too late. In a week or two you’ll have your voice back, and we can start figuring out what’s best for you. And we will. Kwan?” The cheerful open face above the stupid bow tie loomed toward him. “Will you at least give me the benefit of the doubt?”
No. And I don’t want my voice back. I don’t want anything back.
He’s Sam Mortimer, Kwan thought. He reminds me of Sam Mortimer, the reporter in Hong Kong who betrayed me. All heartiness and fellow feeling and honest concern; and nothing underneath. Professional warmth. He gazed at the professional and willed nothing to appear on his face.