The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(32)
While her parents began to argue, Lai King sat at a small table and played with a bouquet of forget-me-nots that she’d picked the day before. She’d been told that the small, ocean-blue flowers smelled better in the evening, though she wasn’t sure if that was true or another one of her father’s stories.
“We can stay inside, keep the door locked,” her mother pleaded. “We have enough food for a week—three if we skip meals. Besides, where would we go?”
Lai King’s father peeked out the window. “The Chinese mission on Battery Street. They’ll take us in. Long enough to kill all the rats and clean the ship.”
Lai King pictured a horde of rats pouring down the gangway, flooding the streets, climbing up drainpipes, and infesting their home.
“Pack your things,” her father said. “We’re leaving.”
* * *
Lai King heard bells ringing as she held her mother’s hand and they ran from the heart of Chinatown, up the steep hill to the south. In Lai King’s other hand, she carried the small bundle of flowers. As they fled it appeared that everyone who was Chinese had already retreated to their homes, their workingman’s hotels, their alley apartments where families lived. The only people on the street were British sailors, longshoremen, and Western merchants with negroes readying their horses or loading wagons so they could leave with their wares. Lai King and her parents, suitcases in hand, followed a stream of people leaving Chinatown. Some of them cursed Lai King and her family, yelling and calling them names, but she’d been born two years before the Chinese Exclusion Act and had grown up learning to ignore certain words.
When they neared the boundary of Chinatown, they stepped out of the street and up onto the boardwalk as an open carriage rolled past in the opposite direction, pulled by a single bay horse. The sign on the carriage said Bureau of Health. Two men in white gowns rode inside, their heads covered in white hoods. Only their faces peeked through, forehead to chin. “Gwai,” Lai King whispered in awe. To her they looked like ghosts.
“We’ll be safe at the mission,” her father said to himself as much as to anyone else. “They won’t let anything bad happen to us. Then when this is all over, I can go back to work. Lai King can go back to school. It’s going to be okay.”
Lai King wondered how her classmates were doing, her friends and playmates. She imagined them locked inside their homes. She wished she were back in her apartment. She’d visited the mission home once and it felt like school.
“Maybe the outbreak is not so bad,” her mother said as she looked over her shoulder. “The illness. Maybe it’s just a few sick people, nothing more.”
They rounded a corner and five police officers in dark uniforms blew their whistles, sharp and piercing. The men waved their truncheons as they ordered Lai King and her parents to turn back. Lai King thought the men looked regal in their custodial helmets, their gold buttons polished to a marvelous shine. But they all had white kerchiefs tied around their noses and mouths. Other men stretched ropes across the street, blocking all passage. A large wooden sign dangled from the top rope, rocking in the wind. Painted in red lettering was a word she didn’t know: QUARANTINE.
Lai King watched, confused. She didn’t understand, because dozens of English sailors were allowed to leave. As well as the white merchants and dockworkers, who slipped beneath the ropes, smiling and sighing with relief. That’s when she realized that all the Chinese and Black people were forced to stay. As her mother began to cry, Lai King watched small petals drop from the forget-me-nots, drifting to the filthy pavement like sing can. Stardust, trampled underfoot.
10 Dorothy
(2045)
The first thing Dorothy noticed about Epigenesis was that it didn’t smell like a typical doctor’s clinic. Instead of something cold and antiseptic, there was a hint of warmth, a fragrance, like scented candles, or the dusky notion of dried flowers.
The second thing was that there was no one else in the tiny waiting room, which was fine with her. She’d had her fill of awkward moments sitting in therapist’s offices filled with old magazines and new faces. Everyone avoiding eye contact. Dorothy found that such close proximity to silent strangers always left her feeling naked and vulnerable, as though everyone were thinking, I may have problems, I may need help, but at least I’m not her. Meanwhile a bossa nova version of “Stairway to Heaven” would play on an office sound system, music so awkward, so sublime, she wondered if there wasn’t a dedicated satellite radio channel called Therapy Nation.
The third thing she noticed was a Native woman who opened the glass panel of a reception desk. She smiled and asked Dorothy to sign in on a tablet and take a seat.
When she sat down, Dorothy thought about what her therapist had said when she’d recommended her for treatment. “I think you’re a perfect candidate. Go with an open mind. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. This methodology will open it for you.”
Dorothy wasn’t fond of riddles, so she’d Googled the place, but all she learned was that their process was based on experimental methods used to help restore the failing memories of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. In tests at the University of Washington, Alzheimer’s patients undergoing epigenetic treatment occasionally reported having memories they couldn’t account for—artifacts, contrivances—recollections that weren’t there before. Those seemingly random thoughts were dismissed as synaptic misfires. But over a ten-month period, researchers noticed that those extra memories were never in the present, nor abstract in the future, like lucid dreaming. They were always in the past and always before the lifetime of the individual patient.