The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(48)

Nanchoy closed his eyes as Afong raised the knife.

“Well then, you should know, that boy we wrote to, the one that you care so much about. He’s alive, Afong,” Nanchoy whispered, his breath becoming liquid. “It’s true. He was going to come find you.”

She froze, felt an ache in her chest.

“But”—Nanchoy struggled to swallow, struggled to breathe, struggled to laugh, as he fought to get the words out past his cracked lips—“I told him you were dead.”

Nanchoy opened his eyes and grinned.

Afong hesitated for a moment as though his words were picks, poking, probing, before finally unlocking the door to a place inside her where she closeted her rage, her hopelessness, the sorrow that was too frightening to let loose. When she looked into that place, she screamed and drove the knife into his chest, feeling it scrape bone.

The light went out of his eyes as he exhaled, a long, slow hiss, but his face remained stuck in that hideous smile, a rictus of contempt.

She pulled the knife out, dropped it to the floor.

She wanted to undo her entire life. She wanted to shake Nanchoy and make him undo what he had done. Then she noticed blood on her shoes, her fingers. She looked up and caught herself in the mirror, saw the reflections of people in the doorway behind her. Other boarders, wide-eyed, horrified, gasping through mouths that hung open.

She heard a woman whisper, “What happened to that poor man?”

Yao Han. Forgive me.

Afong snatched her valise, the tin cup she used for drinking. She slipped through the stunned gathering in the hallway, who backed away as though her misfortune were contagious. She found her way down the stairs, through the parlor, out into the street where rain was pouring from the sky. She limped away, soaking wet, freezing, sinking beneath the waves, drowning again, extinguishing once and for all the flickering candle of hope. She stumbled away from who she was, who she once wanted to be, disappearing into the dark night, vanishing from the newspapers, the headlines, forever.





12 Dorothy




(2045)

How are you feeling?” Dr. Shedhorn asked as Dorothy was being awakened and reintroduced to her surroundings. She looked around, disoriented, the room spinning.

“I think I’m going to throw up.”

She vomited what seemed like buckets of her childhood, turning her inside out, but instead of bile she expelled laughter and loneliness, joyful prose and faded obituaries, spotlight moments as the center of attention, and holidays spent alone, forgotten.

Eventually the room stopped moving.

“You’re taking to this treatment extraordinarily well,” Dr. Shedhorn said as she scrolled through the data retrieved from an array of monitors.

“You’re joking, right?” Dorothy asked, wiping her chin. “I haven’t felt this way since…” She looked down and touched her stomach, then looked up, mortified. “Since I was pregnant with my daughter, Annabel. I had terrible morning sickness.” Dorothy held her head in her hands. “No. No. No. No…” I can’t be pregnant. Not now.

“I’m not joking and you’re not pregnant, Dorothy,” Dr. Shedhorn reassured her. “I know this because we look at your bloodwork each week before treatment to be certain. You’re probably feeling this way because you’re more receptive to this than any of my other patients. Far more receptive. I used to do studies where patients would take microdoses of MDMA, which, therapeutically, is like putting your psyche under a microscope. But this is much deeper and sustained. Your brain activity is off the charts.”

“Why?” Dorothy asked, relieved, but also noting concern in the doctor’s voice, as though she were a mechanic who’d tuned up a car only to find it could now go three hundred mph. The performance was as impressive as it was potentially dangerous.

“I’m not sure,” Dr. Shedhorn said, hesitating. “Your right inferior parietal cortex, which is normally dormant during REM sleep, is fully active. In layman’s terms, most people are passive in their dreams. Yours, for some reason, are quite active.”

Active? Maybe that’s because my reality is one of abject passivity, Dorothy thought as she looked at the time.



* * *



Standing in the rain, Dorothy felt a bit better. She felt unmoored, but adrift on a calm sea. Which felt better than her years in therapy, sorting through the bits of her adolescence as though she were reaching into a bag of broken glass. To Dorothy, epigenetic treatment was more like young Alice stepping through the looking glass and everything on the other side was not just raw emotion that needed to be processed, but emotions laden with portents and meaning, then scrambled as though by the Jabberwock. Everything was poetry that only made sense nehw daer drawkcab.

When thunder rumbled in the distance, she gave up on Louis coming to get her and drifted in the direction of the nearest subway stop. She walked, trying to figure out a way to describe to Louis what she’d just been through. She imagined standing soaking wet, yelling at him, but even in her own daydreams she was left mute. Her mouth moving, her angry words unable to reach Louis as he turned away, his back toward her, as always, invested in something else, usually himself.

As she passed an alley, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and she felt a tingling down her shoulder blades. She felt a wave of sorrow and shuddered. Her eyes felt molten even before she stepped back and peered into the narrow, garbage-strewn passageway with overflowing dumpsters, boarded-up windows, broken, rusty remnants of fire escapes, and potholes that were now puddles, shimmering with gasoline rainbows. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of urban Seattle was a rag doll figure of a woman, legs out in front of her, bare feet splayed like the broken hands of a clock, her arms resting lifelessly on the filthy pavement, thumbs out, palms up. The pose reminded Dorothy of a photo she’d once seen taken in the locker room of a losing football team. The skinny placekicker crumpled on the floor, back against the wall, catatonic with defeat, having attempted to drive the winning kick through the uprights only to have the ball sail wide right, costing everyone on his team the championship game.