A Map for the Missing(59)

The doctor held up a hand to silence Yitian. He first took Yishou’s temperature, then called for a nurse to help flip Yishou over. He pressed a stethoscope to Yishou’s back.

“What’s that for? Isn’t that only for his heartbeat?”

“I’m checking the lungs,” the doctor grunted. Yitian edged around, looking desperately into his face for a sign of what he was finding, but he could not read any emotion from behind the deep-set, hooded eyelids.

When the doctor pulled up Yishou’s shirt, they saw small bumps, red and bulbous, which formed a rash that sprawled from his armpits to his upper back.

The doctor inhaled sharply. “How long have these been here for?”

“I—we don’t know, sir,” Yitian said. In all these days, he’d never once thought to examine his brother’s skin.

The doctor moved to Yishou’s neck and pressed two fingers against each side. Yitian winced at the sight of the pressure on the swollen flesh, bleaching the red white, but Yishou still did not react.

“Fever, headache, what else? Did his neck seem stiff?”

“He did mention that, a few days ago. But our family all does farmwork, so it’s normal.” Yitian remembered another thing. “And the light. He says it hurts him whenever he opens his eyes.”

The doctor sighed and turned to address them. He hadn’t even flipped Yishou back over. His cheek was pressed against the pillow and his matted hair spread, messy and grasslike, around his head. The harsh rash on his back seemed to glare at and accuse them.

“Almost certainly meningitis,” the doctor said. “If I had to guess, it seems like it was the bacterial kind, based on how quickly the symptoms started and developed.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Yitian’s mother said. “Are you sure, sir?”

“I’ll see if they can run a test.” He looked wearily at a nurse who’d just run into the room and then immediately shuffled back out. “But I’m almost certain.”

“But, sir, isn’t meningitis very rare in people my brother’s age? I’ve heard of it before, but only for children,” Yitian said. As kids, they’d worn amulets of mugwort around their necks to protect them from the disease. In their village, there’d been a plump baby who caught meningitis from another infant during a trip to the county hospital. She lived afterward, but suffered from severe epilepsy and died in a drowning accident when she was thirteen. She’d been overcome by an epileptic episode and the shallow water of the ditch she slipped into had been enough to cause her death.

“It’s true that it’s more common amongst children, but adults can also contract it. Especially if they’re in some sort of crowded, dirty place in the city. Schools, universities, and hospitals are all the sorts of places that are quite fertile for the meningitis bacteria to spread. There was a small outbreak in Hefei recently.”

Yitian could hardly think through his fogged mind as his mother shook her head and said, “No, he hasn’t been anywhere like that. And no one else in our village has it. It can’t be possible.”

Yitian’s father cleared his throat. He stopped his pacing to stare directly at the doctor. “What will happen to him?”

“Your family brought him in late. Very late. Usually, for meningitis, if we can start treatment within the first few days, adults could make a full recovery. But you waited four days to come.”

“I know—I’m sorry, sir,” Yitian said. He stumbled over his words. The feeling of blame was already accumulating in him, and he wanted to do anything to rid himself of it. Hadn’t he done everything he could, based on the knowledge they had? “We’d called a barefoot doctor to our home, and he said that my brother would be fine if we just waited it out.”

“Of course. How many times have I heard this story? The doctors going from home to home, giving the wrong advice. Do those people even have any kind of training? Our hospital wouldn’t be half as full without all their mistakes.”

Finally, the woman who’d been lingering around them managed to pull the doctor away with a question about her vomiting infant son. The doctor muttered that he would send someone to do a meningitis test, but Yitian was sure they’d seen the last of him. It wouldn’t matter, in any case, whether he returned and gave a test or not. It would only confirm what Yitian already knew now, that he’d taken his brother into the city where he’d caught this disease.

A nurse came into the room and began to shoo them out, saying they needed the space for another patient.

“Can you help me flip him over?” Yitian asked. He looked around the room, but he could not find his parents. He could not leave Yishou like that, lying on his stomach, as a person abandoned and uncared for. The nurse, for a moment, had turned her attention to an equipment cabinet. He had to act quickly before they noticed he was still there. He spread his arms wide against Yishou’s back, wincing at the heat of the skin, before heaving his brother’s body up. Yishou grunted, but his arms and head stayed limp and powerless. Yitian was only a fraction of his brother, no match against the weight of Yishou’s body. As he tried to lay Yishou down on his back, his older brother’s torso flipped but the legs did not, and his face landed on its side, contorting and twisting his neck, making it floppy like a fish. Yitian rearranged the legs so they were straight, and then gently held the sides of Yishou’s face to lay the back of his head against the pillow. He smoothed down his hair. At least he could give his brother this posture of dignity. Before leaving the room, he grasped Yishou’s hand and held it, putting his rough hand against his brother’s rougher one.