The Natural Laws of Good Luck (22 page)

“Hey, Little Brother, this is Joe. I'm going to have triple bypass surgery on my heart.”

Zhong-hua turned his face to the curtain and responded with concern: “Oh!”

“Yeah, they're going to take my heart out and put it on the table.”

Zhong-hua raised his eyebrows and asked the curtain incredulously, “Why?”

“Oh, you can't understand. None of you understand how hard it is. I've smoked for forty years. Now the doctors say I can't. It's a bummer.”

“Yeah, bummer.” Zhong-hua looked momentarily confused but pleased to have a new friend. He leaned a few inches toward the curtain, as much as his condition allowed. “I understand!”

“Thanks, I'm going to need it. You're the man. Bye, Little Brother.” He hung up.

Zhong-hua was still leaning toward the curtain after a long silence. He said, “Bye, Joe. Nice-to-meet-you-Joe.” When there was no answer, Zhong-hua settled back on the pillow and sighed.

The morphine had indeed paralyzed my husband's small intestine. His stitched-up belly stretched bigger and bigger against the sutures as fluids built up inside him. The nurses were very busy with the bypass patient. Every few minutes someone came in to bolster the man's confidence with jokes and allay his fears. Zhong-hua's call button brought no response, and the overworked nurses ignored the messages I left at the desk that my husband was vomiting, that he was alarmingly distended. They did not heed my restrained “Excuse me. Excuse me, nurse.” Nobody expected my husband to have serious problems—the surgeons had done such an excellent job. I put a hand on his belly and felt it hard. His face was a mask of utter misery. His stomach filled with fluid but could not empty. He gagged, and I grabbed a basin. He vomited a full gallon of green fluid. I yelled. A very annoyed nurse tipped her head into the doorframe, then immediately shifted into wide-eyed action. A doctor appeared to hold one side of the basin somberly while I held the other, supporting my husband's head with my free hand while he vomited volumes more of fluid.

The doctor placed a nasogastric tube down Zhong-hua's nose and through his esophagus to his stomach in order to drain the fluid. Because of the NG tube, Zhong-hua could not move his head an inch to the right or left without stinging pain. Because of the catheter in his penis, he could not move his legs without more stinging pain. He
glared at me, and I realized that his morphine-induced paranoia was intensifying. He thought I had conspired with the strange doctor on the other side of the basin. He was certain I had given the go-ahead to force the plastic tube in through his nose. I knew better than to deny it.

We sat morosely through a day and half a night. I dozed off to the intermittent sucking of the NG tube as bile soup climbed jerkily toward a canister fastened to the wall. I awoke to an unmistakable absence of tension. My eyes adjusted in the darkness, and there was Zhong-hua, looking less tortured, even relaxed, sans NG tube.

“You took it out?”

“Right.”

The nurse chose this moment to lift the curtain, and the next thing we knew there was a frantic doctor, white coat flying, accompanied by a sleepy Chinese translator.

“Mr. Lu, we must place this tube back in your nose.”

“No.”

“Mr. Lu, you don't understand. Sign this paper. You must. You must. If you don't, your belly will blow up again. Does he understand? Make him understand, will you! Sign this release giving me permission to reinsert the NG tube, Mr. Lu. I need to quickly put this tube back.” The poor fellow's face was red, and he looked anxiously over his shoulder, as if expecting a rescue squad. There was no rescue from the small, glum translator truthfully conveying a negative. After more pleading, the doctor left angrily with the translator in tow. It was my turn.

“Zhong-hua, if you don't want to follow the doctor's way, then we have to think of another way. Your body isn't working. Do you want to explode like a balloon? Sit up. What do you think? We are going to walk. Can you? I don't care how much you don't want to move or how tired you are. We have to do something. We'll bring everything with us—the IV and the pee bag. Come on! We have to get your intestines to wake up. No more narcotics. Can you take the pain?” He nodded.

Somehow, with my help, he got to his feet; then we hung the catheter and IV on the rolling pole to take with us into the hall. He took small, stiff steps, as though walking on nails. We made it to the elevator of the fifteenth floor, where there was a wide window seat. I sat down sideways on the bench, and Zhong-hua sat between my legs, leaning back against my ribs. I looked through my own reflection down upon the gravel roof of a lower section of the hospital, with its whirling vents, puffing stacks, and lonely seagulls, an unaccommodating heaven that I imagined inhabiting, the same way I had laid on the floor as a child and imagined an upside-down life on the ceiling. People waiting for the elevator seemed unable to see us. I identified more with the seagull pecking sky pebbles. Zhong-hua grew heavier and heavier in my arms, but I murmured that it was no problem. He shuddered and closed his eyes. I felt as if a mountain were dying against my chest.

We continued this walking and resting pattern for forty-eight hours, with many half-hour rests by the window. Slowly, the bag stuck to his side began to fill up, a sign that his small intestine was contracting and moving waste through. We kept on walking. The doctors were very pleased to see the brownish green debris emerge from the detoured plumbing in Zhong-hua's abdomen. I was so relieved, I clapped and cheered. Then Da Jie called.

“Da Jie, where are you? I thought you were coming back.”

“What? Oh, I forget come. Come now, OK?” She appeared two hours later with puffy eyes, rumpled clothes, and her hair flattened to one side of her head and flying up statically on the other. She had spent the last two nights sleeping in the backseat of her car in the parking lot of the casino between gambling sprees. The social worker was able to get us a few more nights in the Holiday Inn. We could pay later.

I went to inform Da Jie we might be able to go home the next day. The Holiday Inn room was hot and noisy because it was right next to the pool. The carpet was damp and smelled like feet and chlorine. Da Jie leaned forward toward the TV poker table
as if she were right there with the players, the only one without clothes.

There was one more problem: an abscess had formed deep beneath the suture line. The surgeons decided to remove a few inches of sutures in order to drain the pus. The hole needed to be left open so that infection could continue to drain. The nurse brought saline solution, gauze, tape, and tweezers and showed me how to clean and bandage the big hole. She gave us stoma bags and glue to stick them on over the stoma, a section of small intestine the doctors had pulled into the outer world and pierced so that stool could exit into the bag. Sutured temporarily to Zhong-hua's side, the stoma bloomed through the incision like a bright red flower bud. He would wear the stoma bag until the next surgery in three months, when the surgeon would remove it and open the man-made rectum for business.

Da Jie spent the last four nights in a rooming house made into an overnight haven for patients and their families. By the time Zhong-hua was discharged, we had been in Boston nineteen days. Da Jie was elated to be going home. She drove all the way across Massachusetts singing Chinese folk songs to cheer up Zhong-hua. The songs sang the praises of a young girl's eyebrows, cheeks, and cherry lips. Zhong-hua's own cracked lips turned up in feeble appreciation. About halfway home Da Jie thought to call her daughter's fiancé, Pete. She had a few numbers programmed into her phone and accidentally called the rooming house. A woman answered and stated that no, she was not Pete. Da Jie tried again, several times. The fourth time, the lady, whose husband had terminal cancer, lost her cool: “I'm not Pete, you stupid bitch!” She slammed the phone down.

Da Jie looked pensive, tilting her head. “Stupid bitch? I is stupid bitch? Good. I like. I think good, but maybe bad. Ellen-ah, what means
bitch
?”

“Well, a bitch is a girl dog, but people also call ladies bitches when they don't like them, especially if they think they are too smart or too strong—you know, like Hillary Clinton.”

“Hillary Clinton? OK, good. I am bitch. I like bitch.”

We talked for a few dozen miles about her family in China and her bothersome sister-in-law in America, who was in the habit of appearing at her house just before dinnertime with her husband and mother and leaving just before cleanup time. “You know what, Ellen-ah, what is my problem? I too nice. Yes! Too nice! Everybody tell me. Do you ah-gree-ah?”

“No, Da Jie, you are not too nice—you are a bitch.”

“Huh?”

“You are a bitch, remember?” Maybe Da Jie did not remember the phone call just minutes ago to Boston or our conversation about Hillary. She was very quiet.

“I'm kidding, Da Jie—
wo zai kai wan xiao
—I'm kidding.”

“Oh, yes, yes.” Da Jie relaxed and laughed shakily like faint bells. After this there were no more folk songs and no more jokes.

I spoke up when our exit came into sight, but Da Jie said, “No, Ellen-ah. Listen to me. I know. You don't know. I know a lot. Just go straight is good way. I know. Listen to me.” I figured eventually she would realize her mistake. She sped on toward New York City and away from home. When we had been driving a full hour longer than the trip should have required, she said, “Oh, home very far this time.”

“Da Jie, I think you are going the wrong way. You are now going south to New York City.”

“Really? I don't think so.” We whizzed past two more exits. “Okaaaay. Maybe you right.” She laughed her irresistible silvery laugh. “You know, my brother not lucky. Some people get body like Cadillac, but he get body like old Chevy. Cannot help. But brother this time OK. He not have cancer, not die. This is happy thing. We don't worry about my small mistake. Buy more gas; lose a lot of money, but brother's body OK! Get one good thing, always need lose something, too. This Chinese rule. Lose something, this means luck change.”

“Yes, Da Jie, let's change our luck! I think we should take all the quarters we have left and throw them out the window.”

“Yes, yes, all throw away!” We both laughed and laughed.

Zhong-hua could not laugh because his Golden Stove was stuffed with gauze and he was cold and in pain. Da Jie took the next exit, paid the toll, and we got back on the highway going north. We left Da Jie off at her house in Albany, and I drove the last leg of the journey.

We arrived home, my husband, me, and our new charge, the hole in his belly. The bag stuck to his side was not as easy to consider an intimate member of the family. We checked dutifully to see if it needed anything done for it, but otherwise, it clung to my husband as a barely tolerated guest. In the morning I looked out upon the cucumber trellises laden with brown vines and obscenely overgrown fruit, bloated and rotten. All the work of hoeing, planting, tying, and watering had come to this putrid display. Nightfall brought consolation with a particularly good view of the rising moon over the pond now that the trees had been razed.

Socrates was dead. My friend had not wanted to tell me over the phone that he had died in his sleep the night after we left for Boston. She had come to feed him and noticed he was listing to the left as he walked. She put him in her car and took him to her house a few miles away. Socrates was sixteen years old and not used to being away from home. My friend said he had barked at the moon for an hour, consecrated the strange surroundings by peeing on the cornerstone, turned a few wobbly circles on the doormat, and settled down with his front paws crossed under his chin. My neighbor Dave drove his truck to fetch him and buried him near the apple tree at the edge of our wilderness.

Twice a day I pulled the gauze from the big hole. What had gone in sterile and white slithered out on the end of my tweezers coated with green slime. I filled the big hole with saline solution, and it became a red-rimmed salt lake the bottom of which was somewhere in the middle of my husband's Sanctuary of Spirits. Dry gauze lowered in on tweezers drank the salt lake dry, and I repacked the chasm with saline gauze and taped over the wound. Every few days we had to peel off the plastic bag from Zhong-hua's side and glue a
new one on over the flower-bud anus in his side. His scrotum was cold and hard like dried figs. His penis was black and blue. The slightest touch of my fingertips burned.

Zhong-hua shuffled back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen. He had lost thirty pounds while in the hospital and had constant cravings. He said he needed to eat the “big-head fish.” The fat red dictionary was not helping us determine the English name of this fish. I hazarded a guess: “Catfish?”

“Not. Chinese people know. You must quickly go to Dong Shi, ask for big-head fish. Quickly go, quickly return.” I drove the forty minutes to Albany to the Chinese market. The guy who stood behind the counter with his sleeves rolled up gripping meat cleavers looked back at me uninterestedly, shaking his head. He was not Chinese. He was Colombian. I approached the cashier, who definitely was Chinese, and asked her in Mandarin,
“Ni you mei you da tou yu?”
She stared at me, then called her husband over. I repeated the question. He called his cousin over, and they all stared blankly, shaking their heads. I told them it was for Lu Zhong-hua, didn't they know him? My sister-in-law was one of their best customers. “What name? What name?
Ting bu dong ni de yisi
. Not understand your means, OK? Sorry!”

I checked back with the Colombian fellow. “How about catfish?” I persisted. “Don't they have big heads?”

The guy shrugged and made eye contact with his comrade filling the cooler with chicken feet. He answered in the shrug language. The first guy said, “Head not so big. Catfish we get Tuesday and Thursday. No catfish today.” I returned on Tuesday, but the catfish were all sold, and only a few small, sad catfish were still swimming in the tank on Thursday. Zhong-hua had specifically instructed me to get a big catfish. I didn't want to greet his gaunt, unsmiling face without a big catfish. I went to Two Brothers Fish Store, Hannaford, Shop 'n Save, and Price Chopper. Price Chopper had a thin white slab of catfish filet on ice. I brought that light offering home. Zhong-hua stared at it.