Country Driving [88]
“I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” The boy’s voice rose as if he were going to cry. He cried all the time—he had the whining air of a city kid who knows how to get what he wants. The mother opened a wooden cabinet next to the bed and took out a hospital tray of half-eaten pork and rice. The boy set to it eagerly. Wei Jia was still sleeping. My cell phone rang.
“It’s pretty good news,” the American woman said to me. She had discovered that our hospital used the same blood bank as her company; the only difference was that our hospital didn’t test as thoroughly. “I talked with doctors here,” she said. “They haven’t ever come up with a positive for H.I.V. That blood bank has been safe so far.”
I thanked her and hung up. On impulse, I called Ted Scott, my doctor friend in San Francisco, and a cheerful voice picked up: “Hi! This is Ted, sorry I can’t come to the phone right now…” I had no idea what time it was; later he told me that he was working the swing shift at the ER. I stared at my phone, trying to think of somebody else I could talk to. I wanted to hear that we had done everything possible, that it would all turn out fine. But there was nobody else: Mei banfa. Finally I looked up at Wei Ziqi.
“I think it’s OK,” I said.
We went downstairs to the hospital’s payment division. Clerks sat behind windows like tellers at a bank, and cash was everywhere: packed into drawers, strewn across tables, spinning in counting machines. In China the largest bill is only one hundred yuan, the equivalent of about twelve dollars, and any major purchase requires a huge stack of cash. I had brought eight thousand yuan—a sheaf as thick as a novel in manuscript. I pulled the money out of my bag and handed it over to a clerk, who tossed it into a machine without a word.
Upstairs, after I gave the receipt to the nurse, the doctors began to prepare for the transfusion. I knew the medical people didn’t want me around, so I told Wei Ziqi and Cao Chunmei I’d come back tomorrow. Wei Jia had woken up; the boy looked pale but he gave me a smile. I promised that once he got better we’d go to the zoo. I caught a cab home, took a shower, and had dinner alone. In the evening the numbness lifted and all at once, sitting in my empty apartment, I felt so helpless I could hardly breathe.
AFTER THE TRANSFUSION, WEI Jia’s fever broke. Within two days his platelet count returned to normal, and it held steady for the rest of the week. The bone-marrow test showed no leukemia. The doctors decided that the condition was in fact ITP, and the worst threat had passed.
At the end of that week a group of relatives came to visit. There were four men: Wei Jia’s maternal grandfather, his great-uncle, another uncle, and a distant relative named Li Ziwen. All but one of the men had arrived directly from the countryside, and they wore peasant clothes of military green and dark blue. The great-uncle was seventy-one years old and he told me that he hadn’t been to Beijing for almost three decades. Li Ziwen was the only city resident—he had grown up in Haizikou, across the pass from Sancha, but as a young man he had joined the military. After a decade of service he had accepted a government-assigned job in the capital, and now he had risen to become a low-ranking official. He wore black leather loafers with the Playboy logo and a sweater that said “Wolsey” on the breast. He had lost the leanness of the countryside—a soft cadre belly spilled over his belt.
The men entered the hospital room and gathered around the bed. Wei Jia sat cross-legged; he had been reading a picture book. Cao Jifu, the grandfather, put his hand on the boy’s back and spoke softly to him. The sudden attention made Wei Jia shy and he bowed his head. The sheets had not been changed for more than a week and they were covered with red-brown stains from all the blood tests.
After a few minutes somebody mentioned lunch. Li Ziwen, the city dweller, reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills: all hundreds. He dropped the money onto the bed.
“Use this for the child,” he said.
Wei Ziqi