End of East, The (22 page)

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Authors: Jen Sookfong Lee

BOOK: End of East, The
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Pon Man’s mind shifts, and he is walking on the crest of a snow-covered mountain. He carefully avoids the sharp rocks and clings to the face with his bare hands, which, he now sees, are tinged blue and peeling. He looks up at the crisp sun, the shadows that seem to tear the light in half, that are nihilistic opposites to the tall peaks he is meant to climb. Something pierces his foot, and he realizes he is wearing no shoes, only a pair of thin khakis and a yellow polo shirt. He shivers.
As he makes his way along the ice and rock, he feels a tug
at his waist. He reaches down and pulls hard on the rope tied through the belt loops of his pants. “What am I dragging?” he says out loud, then shudders at the echo that calls back to him.
Attached to his rope are all five of his daughters, each struggling to keep pace with him. Wendy’s nose and eyes are red. Daisy cries openly. Jackie holds Samantha’s hand in hers, and Penny stomps like a soldier, sending icy fragments spinning into the air.
“Where are we going?” he asks Wendy.
She looks surprised. “Don’t you know? This was all your idea.”
And he knows she is right. He must keep going, no matter what, even if he is lost.
They reach the peak, their breathing laboured and shallow. Sammy vomits on his feet, but he can hardly feel it through the numbness.
His mother stands at the peak with a flag. She looks as if she has been waiting for a long time. “I’m so glad you’re all here,” she says. “Now, we only need to wait for Seid Quan to arrive before we can raise the flagpole.”
The girls are delighted and spring forward to put on the fur coats Shew Lin holds out for them. But Pon Man, his feet now encased in thermal boots, looks worriedly out at the setting sun. “How will Father make it in the dark?”
Shew Lin smiles. “There’s no need to worry about him. He’s stronger than you think.”
“No, but he isn’t. He really feels the cold.”
She waves her hand dismissively. “I’ve never worried about him, and I don’t think we should start now.” She turns to the girls. “Come and I’ll show you the ice rink. It shines just like a mirror.”
Pon Man stares down at the jagged mountain below him, searching the snow for an indication that Seid Quan is on his way. The sun drops, disappears behind another far-off peak, leaving Pon Man standing in a sudden darkness. He can hear the girls snoring and his mother softly singing a lullaby. Still, no Seid Quan. Pon Man peers through the dark, noticing, for the first time, the endless shades of black on black.
He wakes in the middle of the night, moves his head to the side until the sharp pain slices through his throat.
Right,
Pon Man thinks.
I’ve just had surgery. Such strange dreams
,
though
.
He squints into the gloom and sees that someone has left the curtains open. Through the window, he can see the overcast night sky, the moonlight reflected on the silvery undersides of clouds. He suspects that, if he could stand up and look down, he would have a view of the hospital parking lot, but as it is, from where he’s lying, it all looks painfully pretty.
Siu Sang sleeps on the chair beside him, wrapped in her rose cardigan. Her mouth has fallen open over her small teeth; her glasses sit on top of her head like rakishly placed aviator goggles. He wonders if he should wake her, then remembers that the doctors warned him not to speak for a few days after the operation. He reaches out and pats her arm instead. She doesn’t stir.
The door opens and Seid Quan walks in, his hands around a steaming Styrofoam cup of coffee. “You are awake, I see.”
Pon Man nods slightly.
“How about I just sit here with you, then, quietly. You should not talk, so I will not tempt you.” Seid Quan sits on the windowsill and sips his coffee.
Pon Man feels his eyelids growing heavy again, and the sleep creeps from his toes all the way up his body until the warmth envelops his head. He falls asleep, this time dreamlessly.
A hot summer sky. A thin layer of smog smeared across the sun. He wipes his forehead with the top of his golf cap, then puts it on again.
Remission
. He has been running the word through his mind all day, whenever he has a free moment.
Remission.
He touches his throat with his long fingers.
The colours and noises of the Exhibition swirl around him—spinning lights, the shouts of boys in game booths who brandish three-foot-tall stuffed toys. Pon Man wonders if he will ever succeed in expelling the hot dog smell from his nose. He looks behind him at the Ferris wheel, where four of his daughters are caught in its slow loop. He wonders if Daisy can buy cotton candy where she lives in Hong Kong. Their two carts stop at the very top for just one moment; a breeze sways them gently, and Pon Man’s heart jumps as he reaches out his hand. But then, the wheel turns again and they float downward, out of sight.
It was only yesterday that the doctor told him he was cancer-free. He had cried in the office like a woman, a wad of tissue balled up in his hands. Wendy, sitting beside him, laughed and then rested her head on his shoulder.
At home, Siu Sang cooked furiously, pulling together every dish Pon Man had ever said he liked, yelling at the girls to step up and help her before everything went rancid. During the surgery, recovery and radiation, there had been no noise, as if his family were afraid to speak lest they wake the cancer up. He hadn’t known how much he missed the racket of banging pots, squeals from his daughters, even his wife’s complaints.
When Seid Quan heard the news, he smiled and nodded, placed his lean, spotted hand on Pon Man’s shoulder for just one second before he took it away again. As his father walked down the hall to his bedroom, Pon Man shouted to his family, “We should celebrate! How about the Exhibition tomorrow?”
In the blazing sunlight, his daughters stand in line for the roller coaster, eating candy, jostling each other for room. Sammy head-butts Penny in the stomach. Wendy and Jackie giggle, hold their bags of mini-donuts and cotton candy above their heads until the wrestling subsides. Pon Man walks toward Siu Sang and Wendy’s young husband, both of whom sit at a picnic table, eating pretzels with mustard. As he sits beside them, his son-in-law, beads of sweat dotting his forehead, gestures to the lineup. “Can you believe it? You couldn’t get me on that roller coaster for all the money in the world. I would throw up for sure.”
Pon Man watches as his daughters climb into their car—two in front, two behind. When he turns to Siu Sang, she is picking at a large grain of salt caught in her back teeth. “Suicide,” she mutters, casting an accusatory glance at everyone in general.
For the very first time, Pon Man wonders what it would be like if his wife died, if she simply expired quickly and quietly, leaving nothing behind. He looks at the lines on her face, her tightly pursed lips, the suspicion in her gaze as she stares at every person who walks by. He closes his eyes against the brightness of the sun and garish colours of the booths around them and tries to remember the young, scared girl he married, the girl who needed him so badly she cried out in the night.
When he opens his eyes again, he sees his daughters’ green car rounding a corner and beginning its ascent. From this distance, he can’t tell if any of them are scared.
Siu Sang stands up. “Oh,” she says, clutching at her purse, holding it in front of her stomach like a shield. “There they go. Pon Man, they’re going.”
Wendy’s husband hurries to stand beside Siu Sang, his upper lip shiny with more sweat. “Come on, Dad. Come see this.”
Pon Man stands up just as the car tips over the big fall and begins to speed up. All the girls have their mouths open. Their hair pulls backward, away from their faces. Wendy, her head thrown back in laughter, flings her hands up in the air.
As they reach the bottom, Siu Sang lets out a big breath and collapses on the picnic bench. “I was so scared for a minute,” she says. “Such a big fall.” Her voice shakes.
Pon Man places a hand on the top of her head, feels the wiry ends of her curly hair on his palm. She looks up at him, her eyes wet and pink, the residual fear lingering in the looseness of her mouth and jaw.
“Did you see that? Oh man, I just about peed myself watching it.” Their son-in-law’s young face has gone pale and slack.
Pon Man slaps him on the back, and Siu Sang laughs, coughing into her hand. Tears form at the corners of their eyes as they try to hold it all in. She throws her arms around Pon Man’s waist and leans into him, pushing him so hard that he holds himself as straight as he can to support them both.
He stares at himself in the small mirror lit from above by a tube of fluorescent lighting. He swallows, feels a slight burning in his throat. Opening his mouth wide, he pushes his tongue to the side, wonders if there is anything to see and, if so, whether he wants to see it. The smell of the urinals (sharp, masked by ammonia) reminds him that he is in the office washroom and
that, at any moment, one of his colleagues might arrive and see him standing at the sink, making faces in the mirror.
When Pon Man sits back down at his desk, he pulls his cup of hot tea closer to him. He hasn’t felt like eating or gardening or anything other than sleeping. The numbers in the open ledger in front of him seem impossibly small. How had he ever been able to read them?
“I’m fine. We’ll be fine,” he says to himself. He turns to look at the cars parked in the gravel lot outside, at the trucks rumbling past on the highway in the distance. “I’m in remission. There’s nothing the matter with me.”
Pon Man cups his hands around the mug, feels the warmth spreading through his arms. He likes the sensation of boiling hot liquid travelling down his throat as if, somehow, he could keep the sickness away with steam.
Pon Man lies hotly in a hospital bed that has been set up in his bedroom. The chemotherapy has sapped everything out of him, and it is all he can do to lie down and watch the hair falling off his body. The house is deathly quiet.
Siu Sang walks into the room, wiping her hands on her sweatshirt. “We have to bathe you today,” she says. “The water is ready.” Jackie peers around the door, waiting for her mother to tell her it is all right to come in.
His wife and daughter watch as he pushes himself to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Breathing heavily, he reaches out with both arms and says, “You’ll have to help me to the bathroom. My feet are swollen.” He stares down at his own thin lap, unable to look Siu Sang or Jackie in the eye.
It is easier, somehow, to pretend he is someone else, that these two women are not his wife and daughter, that he was
never the man who used to pay the mortgage and teach the girls how to ride their bikes. He feels their cool hands on his arms and back as they walk down the hall. When they lower him into the bathtub, he closes his eyes so that he is spared the sight of his own naked body.
“Jackie, you don’t want to mix the towels. He has his own over here.” Siu Sang’s voice cuts through the air, and Pon Man opens his eyes. As soon as she sees him looking, she turns away and begins to arrange the soap on the counter.
“You don’t want everybody else’s things to touch me,” he says quietly.
Siu Sang looks confused. “No. I mean—I don’t know.” Jackie inches backward until she is up against the door.
“Do you think the cancer is contagious?”
“Of course not. I’m not some village idiot.”
“Then what?”
She pushes her hair to the side. “It’s bad luck, isn’t it?”
Pon Man leans his head against the cool tile. “What’s bad luck? Do you mean me?”
“Yes, of course.” Siu Sang smacks her fist against the counter. “You’ve been sick and better and then sick again. What kind of luck is that? What if the girls get sick? What if I do?”
He grips the sides of the tub. “Leave. I will bathe myself.” Jackie takes a step forward and opens her mouth, but Pon Man waves her off. “Get out. Both of you. I don’t need you.”
Siu Sang pushes past Jackie into the hall, then turns around and pulls on her arm. They shut the door, and Pon Man hears them whispering, waiting for him to call out, or for the sound of him falling in the tub. He grunts and reaches for the soap.
Twenty minutes later, while drying himself off with as many of the family towels as he can reach, he slips and falls,
crashing into the bottom of the emptying tub. Jackie and Siu Sang rush in, and he holds on to them with all the strength he has left. He wishes that this day had never started, that he could just lie in a pit by himself, in a darkness no one can penetrate, where he could live or die—whatever he ends up wanting. There is no choice in this moment, this real life.
As his wife tucks him into bed, he whispers into her ear, “I guess I do need you, after all. I’m sorry.”
If she hears him, he cannot tell.
The doctor walks into the bedroom and stares at Pon Man, his eyes sweeping the entire length of his body. Pon Man holds his breath while the home care nurse adjusts his IV.
“Can you walk?” The doctor lifts up the sheet and looks at his swelling feet.
“I can, to the bathroom and kitchen. I don’t jog around the block, though.” Pon Man laughs, and then stops when he sees that neither the nurse nor the doctor is laughing with him.

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