The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [47]
In the late morning he gives himself a sponge bath and sits at the table next to the window, resting his leg brace on a chair. His sketchbook lies open in front of him, charcoal and pencils to one side. The fog has lifted, and the view is immense: the green humps of the mountains and the endless spread of Kowloon beneath them; planes landing in slow motion and traveling the length of the peninsula before slowing to a crawl; giant container ships sliding silently around the point at Kennedy Town. But the blinds might as well be drawn. He shuts his eyes and wishes for waking dreams. It has been a month and a half since he fell off a motorcycle on Surawong Road in Bangkok, and six months to a year before he will be healed and able to return to Thailand. He presses his hands over his face to shut out the light.
At two he takes the elevator to the street and hails a taxi to drive him east on Hollywood Road, stopping at a building that rises like a mirrored stele out of the antique district. The Wong Hun Fat Rehabilitation Centre, the sign on the office door says. For two hours he lies on a cool floor while a Buddhist nun lifts his leg slowly, a little farther each time, bending the knee so slightly that he is hardly aware of the movement. He breathes deeply, as instructed, and holds his hands cupped together below the navel. His eyes close, and he is surrounded by color fields, blue passing into violet passing into lavender. Sunlight patterns his eyelids; he tastes leaf-mold in the air. The movement that he hasn’t noticed stops. He lifts his head and sees white light patterning a white floor, a gray-robed woman calling him, saying finished, finished.
Her name is Ji Shan Sunim. She is Polish, ordained at a Zen center in Krakow, and came to Hong Kong at the request of a teacher whose name Curtis never quite catches, a slurring of syllables that might be Hindi or Japanese. She lives in a nun’s dormitory in North Point, and takes the number 87 bus to the center every day. After each session she allows him one question before rising to greet the old woman who follows him. She kneels, her hands in her lap; in the light from the window her scalp gleams like wet porcelain.
You must get tired, he says. Shouldn’t you have a longer break? You’ll hurt your hands.
They are not tired now.
Not today, maybe. But they will be.
The body is like a car, she says. Someday a car will break down, yes? But you don’t stop driving it.
Si fu. The old woman’s walker clacks on the tiles. Si fu, leih haih bin dou ah?
Excuse me, she says.
It seems to him there is a tiny hesitation before she stands, as if part of her wants to linger. He wishes she would. Each day, as his body loosens, his eyeballs throbbing in the heat of that imaginary sun, the willingness to paint spreads over him, and exactly at that moment she stops and draws away. His eyes open, his body cools, and he silently forgives her again. How do you know? he wants to ask her. As they speak her eyes never leave the floor.
After his session he crosses Hollywood Road and sits in the window of a noodle shop, drinking tea and scanning the river of passing faces, as if there’s someone in Hong Kong he might recognize. Every face he sees seems fixed in dread; even the young mothers with babies seem anxious, awaiting disaster. His sketchpad sits undisturbed in the bottom of his bag.
Outside the center, the nuns wait for the bus in groups, calling out to