A Map for the Missing(58)

She looked expectantly at him, but the mention of people who only wanted to watch movies made him suddenly think of Yishou lying in bed alone. Once, when Yishou was younger and had fallen asleep during a movie, he’d cried for hours upon awakening and realizing what had happened. Something didn’t seem right about how ill his brother was, when they’d done all the same things together the day before.

“. . . we’ll go to the Forbidden City in Beijing . . . ,” Hanwen was saying, but he stood up instead of answering her.

“I need to go check on Yishou,” he said. He hardly said goodbye, and ran all the way home.





Twenty-one



By the time they arrived at the county hospital, Yishou was an unconscious shape draped between their arms.

Yitian had never been to a hospital this large before—they’d visited the commune hospital once, when his grandfather was ill, but that had been a sparse and neat place compared to this. This hospital was relentless, uncaring, the smell of antiseptic and sugary vomit assailing his nose, and everywhere the sounds of desperation bouncing off the cement walls. Nurses and doctors ran through the lobby on their way to rooms, no one pausing to look at Yitian and his father. There seemed to be no order to the way that patients were approaching the doctors and when they were acknowledged, but when Yitian dared to question a nurse, she didn’t even turn her head to listen.

Yishou had moaned intermittently on the ride here, but now his eyes were closed and he made no sounds at all. The only sign for Yitian that his brother was alive was the soft breeze of breath he felt when he held his hand directly under Yishou’s nose, but even that was becoming more and more frail.

Four days had passed since they’d returned home from Hefei. The second morning, Yishou had decided that the best way to fight off the illness would be to work. He’d tried to shake the stiffness out of his body in the fields, but as the day progressed, he’d become so tired that he couldn’t even lift his hoe off the ground. In the afternoon, a villager came to summon Yitian and his father, telling them Yishou had collapsed in the fields. When rest didn’t help, they sent for the barefoot doctor. He’d checked Yishou’s tongue for the color and prescribed him a medicinal soup made with ground perilla leaves, to be taken three times a day until the fever subsided. “It may get worse before he gets better. He needs to expel toxins in his system,” he’d said as he packed up his traveling bag and left, telling them he had to return to his own farmwork. That morning, when Yishou shuddered in pain every time he so much as opened his eyes, they’d decided to go to the county hospital.

Now, in the hospital lobby, Yitian’s arms were buckling under his brother’s weight. His father noticed and shifted his body to take Yishou alone. He draped Yishou’s body over his shoulder, a pose normally belonging to parents and their small children, strange to see with two grown men. Yitian stepped aside, embarrassed at his weakness.

Behind him, his mother was wringing her hands. “Look at how many people are here,” she said. Panic made her voice high and frail. “How long will it be until we can see a doctor?”

Yitian went around the lobby, asking people how they could get help. He felt light-headed himself from the smells. “My brother is very sick. He needs treatment immediately,” he said. He pointed to the wall where his parents had gone to wait, sitting directly on the cement floor and holding Yishou between their two laps.

People shrugged; many did not even turn to look at him when he spoke. “Everyone is sick. Everyone here is about to die. Do you think you’re special?” one woman snapped at him. She had the sour-eyed look of one for whom hope had proved itself wingless, and she stared hungrily at Yitian, waiting for his disappointment to join her own.

No one would come to a place like this unless their situation was at a dire tenor. Near his parents, a prone woman was vomiting into a bucket in the middle of the lobby. Her husband, standing beside her, announced to the room that she’d drunk an entire bottle of pesticide, but everyone was ignoring her. “They’re going to let her die,” he cried, but people either didn’t care or were too afraid to look.

The shared feeling of hopelessness in the room didn’t make Yitian worry about Yishou any less. In fact, he found that, at this time, he cared remarkably little about everyone else. Perhaps he would be called selfish, but that did not concern him now. Disregarding their needs for his brother’s was also a form of love.



* * *



—

How long has he been showing symptoms?”

Two hours later, they finally saw a doctor, a middle-aged man whose head was mostly obscured by the yellowing cap he wore over his hair and a surgical mask tied over his nose and mouth. They’d laid Yishou on a cot in the corner of the room.

“Excuse me,” his father said, pushing with his forearm against another woman hovering near the doctor.

“How long has he been showing symptoms?” the doctor repeated.

Yitian looked at his father, ready to defer, as he usually would, in such a circumstance. But when his father opened his mouth, his bottom lip hanging heavy, no words came out.

“Four,” Yitian scrambled to say, because he could see that the doctor, drumming his fingers on an empty clipboard, was impatient.

“Since the vomiting? Or the fever?”

“Both. But he started vomiting before he had a headache. We had a barefoot doctor who came. He said the wind in his chest was off—”