Candy (16 page)

I was given permission to call my father. I said, Daddy, I’m doing fine, but I want a mirror. They took my mirror away, and I want them to give it back.

My doctor called me into her office, and she said, We don’t let you have mirrors, because we don’t want you to hurt yourselves or make trouble for the other patients, but you can have yours back now.

That night a patient approached me in the bathroom and timidly asked, Can you lend us your mirror for a little while? Just for a moment, and we’ll give it right back. I looked at her, and I said, You can have it for five minutes, OK? I took out my palm-size mirror, and everybody was taking turns looking at themselves, and that night I didn’t feel lonely at all. The one who’d asked to borrow it spent the longest time looking at herself. Another patient told me that the woman who was looking at her reflection was a virgin, that she’d already been here fifteen years. You’re a virgin? I asked her. No wonder you look so young. She said, I’m not so young anymore. I’m old, very old. And hearing her say “old, very old” made me start to cry, because when you’re in withdrawal, you cry easily, sometimes for no reason at all. I felt a little embarrassed about my tears, but nobody paid any attention. Trying to cover my sense of discomfort, I rushed to ask, Why are you in here? She didn’t respond, but another patient told me that this woman had done something evil: she had killed all of her older sister’s children. My God! I exclaimed. But the woman appeared not to have heard us and went on as before, stroking her face in front of the mirror. Someone said, She thought that they were demons, so she killed them. But someone else said, She did it because her sister didn’t treat her very well.

I took back my mirror. I spent the whole night thinking, wondering why some people went crazy, crazy enough to commit murder, and why they hadn’t been taken to the hospital and treated before things got out of hand. Lying under the moonlight, I felt extremely lucky. I wasn’t insane; I was just a gutless little mouse, or maybe, as my father had said, I was just a good girl who had lost her way.

I got the same food as everyone else, a bunch of stuff I couldn’t even begin to choke down, but I was permitted to ask the doctors to help me out. They would pick up a few packaged foods in the little hospital shop for me. Every day, my nurse would boil up some things for me to eat, and I always tried to get her to have some too, but she never accepted except when the doctors said, Eat. She won’t eat until you do. Someone else told me, She killed her father-in-law, so none of her family has ever come to see her, and they won’t pay her hospital bills either. So aside from working as an aide, she also has to put on a pair of galoshes and work in the dining hall. It seemed to me that she enjoyed working. She looked happy as she went about her labors. Another patient snickered, Working is the only way she can get enough money to meet her expenses; she can’t even afford soap or toilet paper. She always takes a square of paper to the toilet with her, but the second she squats down, she hides the paper in her pocket.

I saw a patient standing with her face to the wall, and I realized that it was the virgin patient. I went and stood beside her. She was looking at her feet, and she didn’t turn to look at me. Someone said, She’s being punished again because she’s crazy and because she keeps saying the chief of staff is her husband.

One of the women was called into the office, and I heard the supervisor questioning her: You stole something from one of the rehab patients. What was it? After a while I heard her start to repeat, over and over, Pickles, apples, bananas, bananas, apples, pickles.

My release date finally arrived, and after I had thanked everyone, I had my father give the doctors a hundred
yuan.
I said, Use this money to buy my nurse’s aide the things she needs, to thank her for helping me.

The second time my father brought me to the clinic, I was bald, one of my eyes was messed up, and I was so thin it was disgusting. I barely recognized myself. So who would have thought that when I approached the big locked door to the ward, one of the women would shout my name and cry out, She’s back! She’s back! And this time she’s lost all of her hair.

And once again my father told the doctors, My daughter really is a good girl; it’s just that she’s too willful. But we’re to blame for that, and we’re willing to pay the price. The doctor told me, We were all moved by what your father said. I want you to ponder what he said. Later I was sent for HIV and syphilis testing. Then the doctors gave me some medicine, and this time they didn’t use the same drugs they had the first time. They were going to try a different course of treatment. They said, This time we’re going to have to let you suffer a little; otherwise you’re not going to change.

Every day I took a bunch of little yellow, pink, or white pills. These drugs kept me from sleeping, and they made me feel hot all over, and I paced back and forth in my room, sometimes talking to myself nonstop, heavy-headed, dizzy, and staggering. One night, another patient slipped into my room. She said, If you want to get out sooner, don’t take any more of those yellow pills. By the time I’d raised my head, she was gone, but she’d given me a scare. After a good cry, I decided to stop taking those yellow pills. I said to the doctor, I don’t want to take the yellow ones.

After asthma, nightmares, and excreting every kind of fluid, I began gradually to improve once again. This time I went to work with the others, and one of the patients taught me how to play cards. I started to miss my mother. I missed her cooking, missed everything about her. Every day, I sang the songs on the blackboard with all of the other patients. Except that I still couldn’t stand the food. Oil-free and boiled to a pulp, it reminded me of the food I’d been given in that prison in the Northwest when I was younger.

Once a month we got to have cooked red meat, an event that was a high point for all of the patients. But I couldn’t eat it. Someone asked me, How come you don’t eat meat? How come? and my doctor overheard. My doctor was a Shanghainese woman, very beautiful, a fashionably dressed intellectual. She said, Why aren’t you eating this meat? I said, I feel sick to my stomach, nauseous. Really. She said, Who do you think you are? Today I want you to eat it. I said, Honestly, I don’t think I can force it down. She said, Do you want to get out early or not? I said, I do. Then eat it, she said. You’re no different from any of the other patients here, and don’t you forget it. I said, I’m not eating it. She said, Fine, I’ll have your father come down. We’ll see if you’ll eat it then. She watched me eat a piece of meat and then looked on as I began to throw up, a bit at a time, vomiting and crying. She said, You’re no different from anyone else, and don’t let me catch you wasting food again. Remember the money you gave your nurse’s aide the last time you were here? It was confiscated. You’re no better than anyone else, and what you did actually hurt her because now she can’t be a nurse’s aide anymore. We can’t be certain that she didn’t do something for you that she shouldn’t have. Be mindful of this.

One of the patients got a skin infection and couldn’t work with us anymore. She sat alone on a stool, watching us work. When I walked by her, she asked me, Where did you work when you were outside? I said, What? What do you mean, where did I work? And I asked her, Where did you work? She answered, I worked at a disco, called JJ. Then she looked at me. I couldn’t tell by looking that she was sick, but she had that habit of rocking back and forth and constantly shuffling her feet.

A contingent of drug addicts was brought to the clinic in a police van, and things got a bit livelier. They’d all been forcibly committed. One of them remarked to me once, You have such good veins. I bet you don’t have any trouble at all. Just stick the needle in, and it’s instant bliss. Two new girls moved into my room, Shanghai girls just back from Japan. They were always singing Japanese songs in my room. It was getting close to New Year’s, and one day a tour bus came to pick us all up and take us to Pudong. After we got back, one of the others said to me, You know what? Life outside looks pretty good!

On Christmas we had a party, and someone ate some of my chocolate and started singing for everyone. She was the only patient who wore glasses. She was singing the kinds of Christmas carols that choirs sing. She had a beautiful soprano voice, and her real and falsetto voices blended naturally. When she was finished, I asked her, Where did you learn all these songs? She said, I’m a teacher. So how did you end up in here? I asked. I killed my husband, she said. I asked her why, and she answered, My old man was so tiny—just one squeeze and he was dead. After relating all of this to me, her expression remained perfectly calm.

I began hating myself. I swore I would never again ask another patient why she was in this clinic.

The song we sang in chorus that day was a little love song, and there were several dozen old women belting out,

Let me think of you, think of you, think of you,

Think of you one last time.

Tomorrow I’ll be another man’s bride.

I’m thinking of you deep inside.

They sang with great care and very little feeling, but it was genuinely moving. It had struck a nerve. I had not been touched like that in a long time, and I found my heart again.

Afterward I chanced to hear this popular song many times, and I found out that it was called “Words of the Heart.” Every time I heard it, I would be overcome, and I would stop whatever I was doing and listen to the song until it was over. This song reminded me of where I’d been.

The morning after Christmas, I woke up early. My nurse’s aide came into the room to take away my dishes, and she said to me, These dumplings are so good. Why don’t you eat them? Every day she asked me the same kind of question, and every day I gave her the same answer: I’m not going to eat them, so why don’t you? On this day she responded by picking up the dishes and carrying them out. Soon she returned with a mop and was about to start mopping when she abruptly leaned against the wall and blew a spit bubble. Afraid to call out, I kept one eye on her, and one eye on the space heater, worried that she might pick it up and hit me with it. Just then, one of the registered nurses passed by in the hall. I lowered my voice and said, Hey! What’s wrong with her? The registered nurse came in, took the mop and placed it in the aide’s hands, and had her grasp it tight. To me she said, She’ll be fine in a moment. Don’t worry. And a few minutes later, the aide straightened up and went back to mopping the floor, her face pale, her hair like wires. I wanted to get up and mop the floor myself, but I was afraid to move. After a little while, the registered nurse came in and said to me, She had that episode just now because she ate your dumplings. She eats your dumplings every day, but today a bunch of the other patients ganged up on her, so she got sick. In the future, if you’re not going to eat your food, please make sure you give it to someone different each time.

It was almost New Year’s, and everybody dressed up in clean clothes for visiting hours. One patient ate cake with her son. Another was talking with her husband. Another sat with her mother, who was probably in her eighties. Another patient was waiting around. All of the patients were shuffling back and forth. I sat by my bed, my hands jammed up my sleeves, my two feet rocking back and forth, left to right, right to left, and I looked at the chocolate my mother had brought for me. My mother had spent only ten minutes in my room. She said, The guard at the gate was very nasty to me. He said there was nothing anybody could do to help drug addicts like you. My mother said that now she felt like a criminal, and that she was going to have to leave soon. She didn’t want to be subjected to another lecture.

My release date was getting closer, and I was moved to the large dormitory with all of the other patients. Every night, people talked in their sleep, and I couldn’t sleep. I was always hungry, and I would get up at midnight and have some cookies while another patient watched me from under her blanket and laughed, saying, Why on earth did they move you into this room?

I went home. I said, I want to take a bath. There was nowhere to take a bath in there, and it’s been way too long since I last had a bath. Then I said, The bathroom in our house is too cold. I don’t like being cold, so I’d like to go to the public bathhouse. My mother gave me one
yuan,
which I told her was enough. I figured that she was afraid to give me more money than that, afraid that I would use it to buy drugs.

I was back in my old neighborhood, and now I was going back to the bathhouse where I’d often gone as a child. Wearing the wig my father had bought for me, I went into the baths. I was so weak, wheezing and gasping as I bathed, and my wig fell off. A middle-aged woman, stark naked herself, glanced first at the wig, and then at the fuzz on my scalp, before finally letting her gaze come to rest on my body.

After my bath, I left the bathhouse and spent two
mao
on a deep-fried Shanghai-style fritter, and the sugar-coated fritter stuck to my teeth, and I thought that it was incredibly good, and so cheap too. I was ecstatic at the thought that I wouldn’t have to eat Master Kang’s instant noodles or Danone Tuc crackers from the clinic store ever again. I didn’t want to touch either of those things for the rest of my life. It seemed possible to me that I might be able to start my life over, beginning with this moment. I thought of my home, thought about how I wouldn’t have to feel cold anymore, thought about the clinic I’d just left, and reflected that I was the only patient who had got out in time for New Year’s this year. And then I told myself: Honestly, heroin is nothing but glorified shit.

H

1.

Roses have thorns, just like love. When the petals of a rose fall, they scatter one by one, like the tears of a young widow. This mournful rainy weather is sensitive, but there’s something inauthentic about it too; I’ve always felt a particular connection with it. The sound of rain is heartless, it forms a barrier between me and this world, and the sound of my lover’s singing drifts in the air. I can no longer kiss him, I can no longer plead with him, I can no longer thank him. I see my face buried under a big stone, and I want so badly to push that stone away.