Granta 125: After the War (18 page)

T
here is a fundamental difference between being able to find consolation in life and being able to invent it; do you, Hui asked herself, possess or at least understand either skill? This was what she had ruminated upon for days as she drove to work. She was the kind of person who did not tire of cornering herself with unanswerable questions. Failing oneself, more than failing others, offered a continuity like the thin ice on a lake surface: flimsy, treacherous, it nevertheless lured one to go on skidding and hoping for miracles.

Where Sunnyhill Crescent, Hui’s street, joined Pinewood Road at a sharp angle, a whitewashed cement block stood between the merging traffic and the canyon beyond. The Painted Rock it was called, and had, since its inauguration five years ago – as a memorial to a baby deer that had run into traffic, and to the mourning doe that had for days refused to leave her – metamorphosed into a bulletin board for public announcements. In the neighbourhood newsletter, Hui read that the rock had created a sense of community for the hillside suburb. What exactly was that sense, she wondered, and whose sense was it? People spoke of communities all the time: at preschool drop-offs, on a poster about the adopt-a-hive drive at the entrance to the farmers’ market, in a local campaign to increase the number of chickens a family could keep in their backyard, in group emails calling for gatherings to support the Occupy Movement or to protest it. Even nature seemed to be serving its function to unite people into a community: when neighbours circulated blurred cellphone pictures of red foxes and newborn deer and birds rare to the region, the conversation inevitably ended on that essential note.
Our advantage over trees and birds and wolves, Hui thought, is that we alone are the species who can enshrine our habitat.

Felicities, like disasters of major scale – and unlike tragedies of minor scale – claimed public attention without questioning their right to do so. Driving past the Painted Rock in the morning, Hui often found yet another message covering the previous one, announcing a birth or birthday, engagement or anniversary, graduation or enlistment, or another landmark of life. Such messages must have been shared already on Twitter and Facebook, where hundreds or thousands of communities proliferated. Hui did not understand the extra effort people undertook to spell out their news for passers-by.

Some days she imagined herself carrying a bucket of paint and a small flashlight to the rock. ‘Rest in peace, my dear self,’ she would write under the cover of darkness, but what disquietude she would cause this neighbourhood – with its pale fog in the mornings and orange sunshine in the evenings; its resident eccentric who fed wild turkeys from her own plate and turned them into attackers of cars and pedestrians; its own broad-smiling orthodontist who remembered his patients’ names and their sports teams.

And what is peace, in any case? Hui had not known peace in her life, and she suspected that the peace of an eternal rest was a creation of peace-less minds, just as in her home country, immortalities were invented for those who feared their disappearance in history: Communist leaders, national heroes, rich men, and people like Hui’s mother, who, as a lifelong educator, believed that her contribution to humankind was indelible.

Still, Hui liked to fancy certain things, of sending a last message – as disturbing as it might be – to the neighbours who considered her a conscientious community member; of going inland until she reached an almond orchard and making a nest under a tree. In late March she had taken a day of sick leave and driven north into the Central Valley, where miles of almond groves were at the height of the blossoming season. Aluminum strips dangled from branches, and in the breeze the reflections of the sunlight must have spelled alien dangers to birds.
We live in an age where scarecrows are no longer made of straw but of metal, Hui had thought then, knowing that such a measure meant that there were not many people or much traffic around.

She had not known, on that excursion, what she had truly wanted. She went from one orchard to another without meeting a soul, and after a while, the unchangedness of the groves made the place an eerie desert of flowers and bees. Perhaps she had only wanted to see how far she would allow herself to go before being reined in by duties calling: the fish fillets that she had taken out to thaw; the library books due in two days; her daughter, Sophie, at Tumbleweed Preschool, which closed at five o’clock and charged a dollar a minute for late pickup; her husband, Wu, whose flight from Shanghai would be touching down any minute.

In her teenage years, there was an old song that many of her friends had liked:
Remember the days when we were young. You liked to chat, and I liked to laugh. One day we sat under a peach tree, breezes between the branches, birdsong in the treetops. Without knowing, we fell into a long sleep; how many petals have fallen in our dream?
Hui had thought of it a sentimental love song; only when she was driving between the orchards did it occur to her that the song was about death, if not by a violent measure, then from the annihilation of time.

How could she have overlooked something so apparent? But then, wasn’t that the story of her life, always understanding too late, either because she was unable to or because she refused to see things for what they were? The bumpy unpaved road between the orchards reminded her of the train rides that she had taken, a week every winter and a week every summer, to see her father. She had begun to take these trips alone when she had turned six; before that her father had travelled to see her, but he must not have done so regularly, as Hui did not remember much of him in the apartment in Beijing. He and Hui’s mother had never officially divorced, but only after he passed away did Hui allow herself to wonder: a marriage settled in two cities and tenuously maintained by a travelling daughter could not have been a good, or even a real, marriage at all.

Despite the morbidly romantic idea of a long rest in an orchard until someone, one of those migrant workers who drove a beat-up pickup, stumbled onto her and said a prayer in a foreign language for her, when Hui felt ready she had little energy left for a long drive. So she decided on water, the most reasonable place when one lived near the bay. Not the Golden Gate Bridge – it would be a joke to want to end one’s life there – but the bridge further north, with a deserted dock stretching into the grey ocean.

She told her colleagues that she would be taking Friday off, and stayed late on Thursday to finish up a few things. The next morning, she locked the windows and set the house alarm. She had planned it out: she would park the car on a side road, take the pills, top them off with a bottle of wine and wait until the last possible minute to walk to the dock. She would place a card with her name and address on the dashboard, and leave the car unlocked. In death, as in life, one should not inconvenience people, or at least one should strive for neatness.

S
he told whomever came to question her – in her medicated confusion she couldn’t tell a policeman from a doctor from a nurse from a social worker, but they were alike, never leaving her alone – that all she wanted was peace. Peace, she said, and could see it painted on the whitewashed block. When questioned further what kind of peace she was talking about, she was vexed. She felt as she had when explaining to Sophie that no, dog biscuits were not meant for little girls; no, brushing one’s teeth was not optional. Or to her husband: no, the fact that she had had an affair did not mean she loved herself more than her husband or her child; in fact, affairs might not have anything to do with love, just as marriages, at times, had little to do with love, either.

Finally, she was deposited behind a metal door and met by a man who loaded a pillowcase, a blanket, and two towels into her arms. Did she realize that she had almost killed herself? he asked, his large knuckled hands looking as though they were ready to slap her. Why did she want to do that?

His fury jolted Hui out of her sleepiness. Why did he want to know, she thought, and why was he so angry when she couldn’t answer him? People’s angers, whether targeted at her or not, embarrassed Hui. She did not grasp the reason for submitting to such pure emotion but perhaps that was her problem all along, that she was not able to understand the logic that was apparent to others. I don’t see why you’re crying, she remembered her mother saying to her when she was not much older than Sophie; show me what’s worth your tears. A small scratch on the elbow or a bump on the knee would at least offer an excuse – that, or an argument with a friend or a fist fight with a boy – but Hui had had none of these. When she could not reply, her mother’s face turned icy.
I’m going to spend some time with your twin,
she would say;
now go back to your corner and reflect
.

The twin, who did not have a name, could be seen only by her mother. Her hair was never tangled, so she was able to grow it into long braids, while Hui’s was kept short with a stern cut; the twin ate her meals with neither greediness nor unwillingness, and she drank plenty of water to keep constipation away; she did not desire to be praised, nor did she shed tears over trifles; she did not miss her father and did not fret, when it was time for Hui to visit him, about being left behind.

The man led Hui to an empty bed. Later she would remember those short stretches of dreamless sleep as the only time she had ever felt peace. Once in a while she woke up and wrapped herself more tightly with the blanket, and for a moment felt despondent at losing the peace.

She was in a bed close to the door, which was kept open. The person in the other bed seemed to be constantly getting up to get a drink or to use the bathroom, and sometimes just to pace listlessly around the room, mumbling to herself. At what point had one’s life stopped belonging to one? Hui wondered. In and out of sleep she would think: now her life belonged to the man who kept watch by the door, now to the woman who took her vital signs, now to her room-mate who tried to wake her up without touching her. ‘They’re going to call breakfast any minute,’ said a throaty voice in the semi-darkness. ‘You don’t want to miss that.’

There were many things not to be missed. Diamond, the owner of the voice, who wore a black lacy top and a pair of yellow skinny jeans that seemed too tight for her, invited Hui to the lounge after breakfast so she could give her a brief introduction to life on the ward. If she missed a meal, all she could get from the nursing station was a juice box. Participating in group activities would count as a show of positive attitude. While explaining these details, Diamond also gave a history of her own: she grew up in the Delta – which delta, Hui thought, but hated to ask; yup, a country girl through and through, Diamond said; she had two children, a son and a daughter; she had had a fight with her boyfriend, had drunk all night before going to his house with a rifle; no, nothing bad happened, nothing she would regret – she had passed out just in time, right after driving her car into his pickup. In the middle of describing the impact between her car and the pickup, Diamond’s voice trailed off. A man wearing a paper robe, as though he had just stepped out of a hot spring at a spa, was sauntering toward them. ‘Anyone care for a game of ping-pong?’ he asked, and Diamond jumped to her feet. Hui looked at the thick golden chain around the man’s neck, and he smiled, knowing he had captured the interest of a woman, however fleetingly.

A few patients were watching a morning show on TV, making hooting sounds at inexplicable moments, and a few others were sunk into the couches, still as logs. In a corner, two men, both with messy beards, studied a chess game with intense concentration. Hui waited to see whose move it was next, but her patience ran out before either man lifted a finger.

In the room Hui and Diamond shared, the window was barred on the inside. Outside was a high fence covered with dark ivy, and beyond that, a grove of eucalyptus grown so densely that the room was in perennial dusk. There was little to do in the room, unless one wanted to be reminded of the impossibilities of harming oneself here: paper bag in the trash can, dull metal mirror, curtainless window.

Hui sat in the hallway, trying to fight off the medication. Above her was a skylight, grimy with pollen and dust and dried traces of last
year’s rain; nevertheless, it was a skylight. No one asked her why she was sitting on the floor, which made her appreciate this place. Once in a while she dozed off and was awakened by a tap on her shoulder, and a patrolling staff member would ask her if she was OK, if she had any thoughts of hurting herself or others at that moment.

The next time she woke up, there was a commotion nearby. Two giant African American security guards had cornered a young man in a black hooded sweatshirt and were telling him to return to his room.

‘What happened?’ asked an old woman with a head of cloudy white hair, sailing toward the noise.

‘Nothing, Colette. Go back to your show,’ said Maria, the Filipino staff who wore a lilac top and flats to match. When the old woman was out of hearing, Maria told a co-worker that she had been getting the laundry out of the dryer for the young man in the sweatshirt. ‘And he just squeezed in and humped me.’