Dream of the Blue Room (19 page)

TWENTY-SIX

In Fengdu, time takes on a dreamlike quality, moving as haphazardly as the mouth of a tributary where it meets the mighty Yangtze, pushing forward and folding over on itself, shifting in inexplicable ways. The eleven days and twelve nights we pushed upstream feel now like the distant past. Yesterday, from our small hotel room perched over the city, I heard the low drone of the horn urging passengers to board. The
Red Victoria
was scheduled to depart at 4:15, but an hour later she remained sidled up to the dock, gangplank lowered. Just before sundown the hawsers screeched, the bell clamored, and the old engine rumbled to life. Minutes later the ship bearing my husband pulled away from the dock, leaving a thick trail of sludge in its wake.

This morning Graham and I walked across the street for breakfast. The restaurant consisted of a dark room with three metal tables and six chairs. The woman explained that the restaurant has been ordered to remain open in order to serve the handful of workers at the hotel, the occasional inspectors. A jelly-jar-sized Buddha hung from a gold string in the doorway. We each had a plate of flat, steaming noodles with small beads of spiced pork, and between us a pot of weak tea. The pinched green leaves floated in our porcelain cups. At one point I looked up and, noticing a bit of leaf on Graham’s lip, reached over and wiped his mouth with my napkin. He caught my hand, brought it to his lips, kissed the tip of each finger. The woman watched us from the doorway, where she stood smoking in exactly the same manner she had the day before. She formed her lips into a smooth round O and sent a circle of smoke drifting skyward.

When we returned to the room we stripped to our underwear, the sticky heat overcoming any sense of modesty we might feel in one another’s presence. The first undressing, the night before, had been more difficult, each of us looking away from the other as cottony fabrics slipped over shoulders and thighs. The mystery of the dark cave on Mount Lushan, the spontaneity of the racquetball court, eluded us. Last night, alone in this room, its purpose so clear and unmistakable, we became suddenly shy. He removed his socks and shoes, placed them in the closet and closed the door. He then stepped into the bathroom, and I could hear water splashing in the tub as he washed his feet. This morning, however, we woke like married people, turning to kiss one another before even brushing our teeth.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Hungry?”

“Famished.”

As I walked naked to the window and opened the drapes, I felt no shame for the roundness of my stomach, the imperfections of my thighs. The shyness of the night before seemed like something from a long time ago. We took our time at breakfast, drinking two pots of tea and savoring our noodles, which were spiced with fish sauce and hot pepper. The proprietor sat down and carried on a long conversation with Graham.

After breakfast we returned to our room, and he disrobed while facing me. I reached forward to touch the thin gray patch of hair on his chest, just above the sternum. He placed his hand in the small of my back and guided me to the bed, where he lay me back and arranged me in a pose that pleased him: knees bent slightly to one side, arms stretched above my head.

“If only I had the talent to paint you,” he said. “A Polaroid will have to do.” He took his boxy black camera from the table and shot me, the camera clicking and humming. He was amazed by the flexibility of his own fingers as he compressed the black button, the control he had over his hands.

“Strange,” he said, “I feel a clarity coming on. Have you ever heard of the Chinese poet Tong Sing?”

I shook my head.

“In his old age, he succumbed to an arthritis so severe that his hands were curled like paws. Supposedly, he experienced a miraculous flexibility in the hours leading up to his death.” Graham held his hands in front of him in the light, as if he were witnessing a miracle. They did not shake. He came around the side of the bed and knelt beside me. I placed my hand on his neck and felt the toughness of his skin, the uppermost knob of his vertebrae lodged like a tiny stone beneath his skull.

Lying faceup on the bed, Graham lifts a leg and taps the naked bulb with his foot. The bulb moves in small circles above us, its pale glow illuminating scars and cracks along the shabbily papered walls. He follows the tail of light with his eyes, tapping his fingers on his chest.

“
Tien
means heaven. We’re in the Hotel Heaven. Did I ever mention my paper route?” He turns to face me. “This was in Perth. I was seven. I rode a red bicycle that was much too small for me. I carried the papers in a metal basket between the handlebars.”

I try to imagine Graham at age seven, that thick, coarse hair framing a much younger face. I try to imagine him youthful, without pain, the ease with which he took a newspaper from the basket, snapped his wrist, and sent it sailing onto a vacant porch. I imagine his knees jutting up above the handlebars as his feet pumped the pedals. His legs, even then, must have been long. Not until I saw him unclothed in this room did I realize that the length of his legs is disproportionate to his body, that he possesses the legs of a taller man.

The bathroom has a tub, but no sink. Lightbulbs above a rectangular mirror flicker on and off. Warm brown water sputters from the faucet, a plain copper spigot with a circle of rust on the rim. I let the water run for a few minutes before it lightens to amber, then plug the drain and step into the shallow tub. Through the crack in the bathroom door I can see the little wooden desk, and on top of it the sheaf of rice paper on which Graham had been writing before I called him to bed on the second night. I had come up behind him, leaning quietly over his shoulder, and when my shadow intersected the page he had been startled, drawing the brush clumsily across the page.

“What are you writing?” I asked.

“A note to the housekeeper. I’m telling her not to come into the room for a couple of days.”

“How long are we going to stay here?”

“Not long.”

He slipped the note into a large envelope. I could see that it also contained other things—a key, a letter, a wad of paper money. “What’s that?”

He sealed the envelope, placed it carefully on the center of the desk. “A getaway plan,” he said, smiling.

“Who’s getting away? From what?”

He pulled me to him and began kissing my belly, my breasts. He turned me around, lifted my shirt, and planted kisses along the length of my spine. We made love for the third time that day. Straddling him on the chair, staring into the window of an empty apartment across the street, I felt suddenly young—as if, in time, I might forget everything that came before.

It is morning. Our third day in Fengdu. A light rain is falling. The bulb above the bed has sputtered out. Everything is darkened, damp.

“I need your help,” he says.

I hold my breath. Not now; he can’t do this now. I’d almost begun to believe that he would change his mind.

From a drawer he takes a small plastic bag—the one he got from his friend in Shashi. Inside the bag is a vial of clear medicine, a syringe. He lays these things carefully on the little wooden table beside the bed. The vial catches a dim ray of light. “It isn’t fair to ask this of you. But you must understand.”

“Ask what of me?” I say, but I know the answer.

He lines the items up neatly across the table’s scratched surface: syringe, vial, towel, alcohol, cotton swabs. “I don’t want to be alone when it happens.” He looks at me. Looks into me. “Jenny,” he says.

Only then do I allow myself to admit just what it is he wants of me, what he has been preparing me for these last few days. I feel my heart splitting open. I feel everything slipping—the floor, time, everything that holds my life together.

“No,” I say. “That’s crazy.”

He sits on the edge of the bed, fingers spread over his knees. He is looking at the floor, where a tiny black spider makes its way across the carpet. Everything is blurry. The room feels very hot.

“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”

“It’s out of the question. I can’t.”

“You care about me?”

“Of course.”

“Then you can.”

“No.”

“Try to imagine not being able to walk or talk or eat. Not being able to make love. Imagine spending your last months on a respirator.”

I’m sobbing now. I can’t control my tears, the tone of my voice. “Why not a nurse? Someone who knows what she’s doing?”

“I don’t want to die with a stranger. I want to be with you.”

I think of Amanda Ruth’s ashes, floating down the long and ancient river, to the sea. I think of Graham’s body, upturned and buoyant, sharing the river with her. “This is absurd,” I say through my tears. “I came to China to leave one body behind. And now you’re asking me this?”

“There are people who can do this sort of thing. You’re one of them. I sensed it in you the first time we met. I sense it now. That night on deck, when you told me Amanda Ruth’s story, it became clear to me.”

“You’re wrong.”

Even as I say this, even as I shake my head in denial, I’m thinking of my first cousin Debbie, who died in a car wreck in New Jersey the year I finished college. We were never close. But after the accident, I was the one who was chosen to identify the body. Her father called from Georgia and said, “We can’t think of anyone else.” Standing in the cold mortuary, looking into Debbie’s expressionless face, I said, “It’s her.” I didn’t cry.

A couple of years ago, my upstairs neighbor knocked on my door and told me she had a rat trapped in her bathtub. It was a Wednesday night, and several other people in the building were home, but I was the one she came to. “Could you kill it?” she said. I got Dave’s baseball bat from the closet, went upstairs, entered my neighbor’s bathroom, and shut the door behind me. The rat was fat and gray; it squealed and clawed the porcelain. I lifted the bat in the air, and the rat was suddenly still, looking up at me. For a moment we locked eyes. I hit it five times on the head. There was no blood, nothing. When I left the bathroom, my neighbor, who was standing in the hallway, said, “Is it dead?” I nodded. I asked her for a garbage bag and took the rat out to the alley. Back in my apartment, washing my hands, I felt only an overwhelming emptiness.

I was not always this way. Some time after Amanda Ruth died, some strength that I did not know I possessed slowly began to surface. It did not happen right away; it took months, years even. But to me it has always felt like a borrowed strength—not an essential element of my nature, but a mere act. I have never wanted to be this person. I did not want to accept Amanda Ruth’s ashes the day her mother showed up at my door, pale and shaking. I did not want to identify my cousin or kill the rat. Most of all, I do not want to usher Graham along his final journey. Yet it seems I bear some false identifying mark that indicates I am capable of carrying out the undesirable tasks. Do I give off some signal, some vague unsettling vibration? Maybe Dave and I are not as different as I have always believed.