Doctor

My grandfather never forgets to check the mousetrap every morning. It’s the first thing he does after getting up, before he puts on dentures or performs tai chi. There is always a rat in there, sometimes two, all gray except for two bulging red eyes that sway back and forth like searchlights. Today he just stuck a hot poker through the head, and it all ended pretty quickly. By the time I got up, it was already in the trash, still smoldering with pale smoke. My grandfather used to pour scalding water through the cage, or just throw it into the stove like bad fish, but on account of the smell of smoldering fur, the neighbors complained. He had to resort to more humane forms of execution.

My grandfather always had a strange fascination with death, and he passed it on to me. I fill my playtime by tearing worms apart, burning ants through magnifying glass, or pulling snails out of their shells, until there is a smell of death in the air, and the ground reeks of murder. To me, death smelled like ordinary things, fresh snot, hair salons, or government butter.

After taking care of the rats, when the sun is in the process of usurping the moon, my grandfather goes to stoke the fire that sits in the center of the courtyard. Today, the fire had gone out during the night, so he can’t just add more coal cakes into the abdomen of the furnace. Newspapers have to be gathered up and burned, and it would take many attempts to induce a spark in the cold stove. It wouldn’t end until the entire courtyard is filled with acrid blue smoke, the fat hips of the furnace swaying with its tentacles, fighting to invade every crack of the tenements. The rooster died of smoke inhalation a long time ago, and the crack of dawn is signaled by the punctuality of the tangy smoke.

An old woman’s hoarse scream pierces the smoke and what it portends slices the day in half. It is sharp as the smoke, a dense menacing wail, full of air and desperation. It’s from the Yu family on the eastside of the yard, a woman of eighty and her husband older by a decade. Sole survivors from a wealthy family purged during the Great Cultural Revolution. Literally spit out. Too late for children. This entire courtyard used to be theirs, and the walls used to be painted with landscapes of the Perfume Mountains, until the Red Guards diligently covered it up when the artist was revealed to harbor tendencies contrary to party standards. What remain are faded slogans and a broken sickle.

People start to come out of their homes, covering their noses with the sleeves of their homemade cotton coats. No one dares to approach the door where the shout erupted. They know it’s death, and it’ll surely bring bad luck if they have anything to do with it. It is a job for a doctor, or an undertaker.

My grandfather stands by the stove, at the epicenter of all this commotion, as the pieces of coal are slowly being digested. His fingers are greasy and powdery, his nostrils painted with black coal. The fire fizzes and then disappears, and makes you doubt if it was lighted in the first place. He walks toward the cry and opens the door of the Yu house.

The room is suffocating with coal-smoke. Continents of blackness stain the walls. There is a single solitary window; filled only with oily opaque paper instead of glass, making the objects in the room look blurry and yellowish like an aged and tattered family portrait. A washbasin rests precariously on a metal cabinet. The design is one of dancing dragons, but the scales are made of rust. The water is filmy with milky scum, dappled with the precipitates of dead skin and greasy soap. Time-worn clock hands like ancient spears, urine-encrusted chamber pot displayed majestically in comic relief.

A mousetrap lays in the dark corner with the spring still relaxed. In the center of the room is a behemoth of a bed, obscenely geometrical, coffin-like. It is moldy from the dank air and the lack of sun. A broken brick supports one leg. You might mistake the small and sallow man that’s lying on top to be just a pillow, or an apparition. In a room of antiquities, the couple is more ancient than all of them.

“Please help him, dai fu,” the woman says.

He checks the man’s pulse, moves his neck towards the nostrils to feel for a weak exhalation. Comrade Yu’s blood trembles like a caterpillar ascending a tree branch. Then it stops. By the grimace of my grandfather and the distance the neighbors have allowed it, he is surely dead.

“He has passed on,” my grandfather says, while walking back to re-light the fire.

A carriage will soon come and stack his body in cardboard boxes. Will they bury it, or burn it? But the family will always receive an urn and they’ll pretend the sand it contains are in fact the ashes of their loved ones.

Meanwhile, the woman’s wails become weaker, and she just sits there, seeming to coalesce with the lifeless chair. A tremulous leaf masters the puppetry of its movement on the paper window, its shadow dances through the room. It is the only thing that moves.

My grandfather was never called dai fu before. A doctor. A doctor? I would have to ask him that someday. I will catch him by surprise through the smoke. Meanwhile, more rats would have to be sacrificed for that kind of truth. It was when he lost his sight that he finally told me his story.

To Be Continued…