Bob waited, then leaned back and shrugged. “We have time,” he said, apparently unaware how chilling that statement was. “You know, Kwan,” he said, “you don’t have to be strapped down like this. The only reason was to keep you from hurting yourself, pulling the tubes out or whatever. I mean, you know, you really and truly can’t kill yourself in this room, but you could probably do yourself some damage, and nobody wants that. Now, if I guarantee the doctors and that cop out there that you won’t do anything self-destructive, I’m pretty sure I can get those straps taken off, and then you could even sit up and look at the river outside that window. Or I could get you something to read. Chinese or English? Would you like some reading matter?”
Kwan closed his eyes. The tears on his cheeks felt like acid. There was no way to win. They were legion, and they had soldiers for every campaign. And here he lay, helpless. Alone, helpless, hopeless, betrayed, despairing but not even permitted to stop.
“Magazines? Chinese?”
Kwan, behind his closed eyes, nodded; another defeat.
Sitting up, his view to the left was of the East River and some industrial part of Queens on the far side of the wide water. River traffic was sparse and almost all commerciaclass="underline" barges, tugs, the occasional small cargo boat. Every once in a while, a small seaplane took off or landed. This side of the river, just barely visible at the bottom of the window, was the rushing busy traffic on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive; all that barely glimpsed bustle on the roadway made the river seem even emptier, without at all suggesting that it might be serene. Looking out that way, watching the shifting shades of gray on the river, Kwan was reminded of his rowboat crossing from mainland China to Hong Kong. What a different person he had been then. With what hope he had pulled on the oars, and seen the lights of the city come closer.
His view to the right was of the door, through which the doctors and nurses and Bob from time to time came. Every time the door was opened, Kwan could look out and see a uniformed policeman, every shift a different one, seated on a metal-armed office chair against the opposite wall, usually reading a newspaper, sometimes just seated with arms folded and feet planted wide as he gazed away down the wide corridor, probably admiring some nurse’s behind. Once it was a policewoman out there; she read a magazine.
So did Kwan. On the white metal table beside his bed were the magazines Bob had brought him, plus a pencil and notepad in case he wanted to ask for anything or make any kind of comment. He had nothing to say, no reason to use the pencil and notepad, but he did read the magazines, in Chinese and in English, and despite his efforts to keep it out, the world did crowd in on him, in its hopelessness and its faithlessness.
Other times, he slept. He took his medicines, submitted to the tests, underwent the physical therapies. Because of the damage he’d done to his throat and esophagus, he couldn’t eat, or drink any liquids, or talk, but the intravenous-feeding needle fixed into the fleshy part of his left forearm dealt with the first two of those problems, and he had no need to deal with the last.
Because he slept so lightly, once they no longer needed to give him painkillers, he was aware of the door when it opened, and had turned to look that way while it was still swinging wide, so that the person coming into his dark room — Venetian blinds closed over the night view of the river — was silhouetted against the lit corridor. Then the person swung the door shut and shuffled softly forward, and in Kwan’s mind the afterimage showed the corridor, and the empty chair against the opposite wall.
The policeman? Coming in here for some reason?
No. The quick impression of that silhouette, the backlit border of it, had suggested the kind of long white coat worn by the doctors, not a policeman’s uniform at all. But when medical staff came into the room at night, they always kicked down the little rubber-tipped metal foot attached to the door, to hold it open, so they would have the light from the corridor to help them see — plus their own little flashlights — and wouldn’t have to disturb him by putting on the main lights.
Kwan, because he’d already been in here in the dark, could see faintly, could at least make out shapes. The other person in the room, who’d been in the brightly lighted corridor, was obviously having trouble finding his way across the blackness toward the bed; Kwan heard chair legs scrape when the person bumped into it.
And suddenly he knew. Trying to sit up, hampered by the board attached to his left arm that kept it rigid for the intravenous needle, and by the tubes still inserted in his nose and the new hole in his throat, Kwan gargled out hoarse ragged frightened noises, the first sounds he’d made since waking up in the hospital. These noises caused him extreme pain, but also caused that shuffling dark presence over there to stop, to become very still for a moment, and then to whisper, in smooth educated Cantonese, “So you’re awake, are you, Li? I am here to help you.” And he sidled forward again.
Kwan knew what sort of help this smooth bastard was here to provide. He had tried to kill himself, for his own reasons, to gain his own goals, but of course, his desires had meshed wonderfully with theirs. How convenient of him to want to get himself out of their hair, eliminate all potential future embarrassment. But he had failed — as he had failed in everything, he now saw — and so they had decided to help him along the way, had sent this undersecretary or chauffeur or military attaché from their embassy or U.N. mission, to see to it that he didn’t fail a second time.
Not this way! Kwan thought, instinctively resisting, clawing to retain life as automatically as he’d tried to throw it away. He made that hoarse croaking sound again, regardless of the pain, but it wasn’t at all loud enough to be heard through that closed door.
And where was the policeman? The easy pleasant whisper answered him: “Relax, Li, no one will disturb us. We paid for one tiny mix-up in assignments — they believe, simple souls, they’ve gotten out of the way of a photographer from the New York Post — and so we’re all alone. You want to sleep, Li, I know you do, and I am here to assure you of sleep. A long and dreamless sleep.”
The figure was at the bed. Kwan, still struggling to rise, felt the man reach past him for one of the pillows. He dropped back, pressing his palm flat against the man’s chest, pushing as hard as he could, but he was too weak, and the chest he pushed at rippled with hard muscles.
The pillow came down tight onto his face, wrenching the one tube from the hole in his throat, crushing the other inside his nose. The damage he’d already done to his throat was made worse, much worse. Kwan fought not for life but to make this pain go away. He flailed uselessly with his one good hand as the man bore down, his weight keeping the terrible pain inside.
Kwan’s hand slid off the solid shoulder and upper arm of the man, waved out and back, flung wide, rapped his knuckles hard against the white metal table, scrabbled like a spider on that surface, found an object, stabbed upward with it.
“nn”
Good; a reaction. Kwan, planets and fiery satellites spinning against his eyelids, head and chest swelling with the need for air, stabbed again, and a third time, and a fourth, and the thing in his hand that he was stabbing with broke just as the weight on the pillow abruptly eased. Kwan pushed it away, gasping, to see that he held tightly gripped in his fist half of the pencil that had been placed with the notepad on the table, for which he had had no use.
And the figure was reeling backward, both hands clutched to his face. Kwan half leaped and half fell from the bed, the pain when the intravenous needle ripped from his arm almost unnoticeable in all the other pains clamoring at his body. He staggered across the room, good arm out, reaching for the door, finding the knob, pulling it open, so weak the door seemed to come toward him through water.