The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [8]
Alice?
You can stand up, she says in a small voice, and I do.
You are shaking, she says. She puts her arms around me from behind and clasps my chest, pressing her head against my back. I thank you, she says.
She unties the headband.
6 February
Man waves white hands at black sky.
He says arent you happy be alive arent you.
He kneels and kisses floor.
The American Girl
All night, half-asleep, the boy feels the train around him as it moves.
He is pushed tight against the wall of the compartment: his older sister sleeps beside him, next to the rail, curled around her doll. When the train pulls into a station he feels its braking as a series of taps against his body, and then a long, sustained push, as if hands had reached out to restrain him. Once they have stopped, the folding stairs clatter against the platform and the trainman’s boots thump along the walkway. Sanjiang, he shouts. Names the boy has never heard and never will again. Muffled voices, a few stumbling footsteps. Cigarette smoke.
Is this it? he wonders. Is this the end?
Far down the tracks he hears the first whistle, and then a deep vibrationruns through the couplings, a tremor, as if the earth has moved. The train groans, nudging his shoulder as it begins to roll. He releases a deep breath. As they pull away from the platform, the lights of the station flicker against his eyelids and go out.
Standing on the sidewalk, unfolding his cane, Chen sniffs the morning air. There is a certain dampness in it, a tang of soil and new leaves; it blows across his face like an exhalation. The city breathes, he thinks. Spring. He turns his face to the left, north, where he has been told green hills rise above Kowloon. He nods, slaps his cane against the sidewalk, and begins walking.
From the door of his building to Lao Jiang’s apothecary takes two hundred and thirty-four steps.
Passing Grandma Leung’s noodle shop, he lifts his head: the smell of fishballs, pig’s blood, fresh hot soymilk. Eh, Blind Chow! she calls from her window. His name is not Chow. But why correct her? He lifts a finger in the direction of the sound.
At the corner he turns left. A girl scolds her boyfriend for missing a date.
Dim gaai m’hoh yih da din wah—
A bus stops at the corner: whoosh of air brakes.
Newspapers crumple underfoot outside the Jockey Club parlor.
Old man, he tells himself, pay attention. No daydreaming.
A whiff of bitter herbs: he turns sharply and ducks into the shop, folding his cane as he does so.
He and Lao Jiang have worked together so long they hardly need to speak. In the rare event of a new patient Jiang will come into the massage room and tap on Chen’s knee, or ankle, and grunt a few words in Shanghainese. Even that is usually unnecessary, for Chen’s fingers know the source of tension immediately, as soon as they touch the skin: they have long since stopped doing his bidding.
Cantonese opera plays on a tinny transistor in the back room. Some of his old women patients are so talkative they cannot stop themselves, even in his strange company, and so he has known them for years, their agonies and triumphs: thousands won at mah-jongg, sons made managing directors, grandchildren moved to Canada and Australia and America. His mind wanders and comes to rest.
Each day, it seems to him, it becomes harder to resist, as if a trapdoor has been pushed back in the floor of his mind, and light floods in. At first only details come into focus: the ragged edge of a blanket, rust flaking from an iron frame. Faces appear, their lips moving silently, then voices.
I have to go to the bathroom, the boy announces.
At the end of the car, his father mumbles from the bunk below.
He wriggles out of the blankets and scrambles down the rungs to the floor. The cold blazes against his skin. Pulling his shoes on, he gazes in wonder at the etchings of frost on the window glass.
North, he thinks. We are headed north.
He runs, soles thumping along the walkway.
Why, he wonders. Why, why? What good does it do anyone?
Mr. Chen?
He lifts his face toward the sound.
Mr.