(10) Emotional Processes:
Largely keeps to her own thoughts, showing no interest in what goes on around her. Pays no attention to others. Sometimes will not even answer doctor's questions.
(11) Motivation and Behavior:
Generally inactive, spends much time in bed, makes no effort to communicate with others, doesn't look after herself well. Once in a while her old energy returns. On one occasion she suddenly embraced one of the doctors and said, "Yin Han, let's get married." (Yin Han was name of patient's former boyfriend.) When her father unexpectedly came to see her, behaved as if she did not know him, saying, "Leave me alone, leave me alone" – nothing else.
…
Patient's first hospitalization; light care.
Doctor: Qi Luo
I began an intense scrutiny of these records, digging deeply into every entry and taking copious notes.
One day as I was working away at this, I got all excited as I recalled Nostradamus's prophecy. I started figuring the time left.
It was already the spring of 1992, with seven years to go until 1999. I really like the number seven, and nine was my absolute favorite of all numbers. But that wasn't important. I did a little figuring – seven years is 2,555 days, only 61,320 hours, and I had to straighten out all these questions before I died.
Time was pressing, and I didn't know if there were any shortcuts.
Not long after that, I had a perfectly normal dream.
The character in the dream was my then self, but the time was pushed back to when Mother, Father, and I were all still living together. It was at the time in my childhood when we lived in the house with the huge date tree in the courtyard. The wet courtyard was carpeted with lush green leaves blown down by the wind, the branches of the tree stretching like great long arms, the longest arms in the world, from the east wall right across to rest firmly on the west wall of the courtyard, and the ground was sprinkled with sweet dates as fat and round as little pigs.
That opportunistic cat that I had so hated in my childhood also put in an appearance, strutting self-importantly back and forth in front of me.
Everything in the scene was from my childhood.
I dreamed that I was getting ready to go to a palace I had never been to before, a palace with shining golden walls that everyone else knew about but I didn't. And I still didn't know how to get there. From the map I could see that it was a long, long way away. Then that opportunistic cat paraded over in front of me to tell me about a little path. He said it was much shorter and would save me a lot of time and energy. Because I didn't trust him, I phoned the palace to make sure. They said the little path would take me to the palace, but that when I got there it wouldn't be the same palace anymore.
When I woke up, the symbolic message of the dream was obvious.
It let me see that there are no shortcuts in this world, so I started to work furiously on the material on my desk.
How ironic it was that just when I felt that every day might indeed be my last, my story had finally begun.
For an entire year I put everything into my work. I spent the greater part of every day recalling and setting down my personal history, or burying myself deep in thought. Probably because there were so few things in that apartment that had any energy or life in them, the feeling began to affect me. It felt as if my blood were congealing, and even my period was affected, the cycle getting longer and longer, my period coming later and later.
At first I paid no attention to this problem. But after a while, I began thinking that maybe, just as with mental illness, my body was signaling me that it was involved in a struggle against forces harmful to its health. So I decided to go and see Qi Luo.
By this time Qi Luo and I had become genuine friends, not just doctor-patient "friends."
He gave me a little bottle of pills with the medical name "levoromethylnorethindrone," or, in lay terms, birth-control pills.
"What kind of a joke is this?" I asked. "I spend the whole day locked up in an empty house like a vestal virgin, yet you want me to take birth-control pills?"
He laughed. "You don't understand. Aside from preventing the implantation of eggs in your uterus, they regulate your body's production of endocrinal hormones." That, I could understand.
Before I went to bed that night, I swallowed that little round yellow birth-control pill, and turning to look at my empty, guiltless bed, I couldn't stop laughing. I laughed and laughed. I laughed until tears were streaming down my face.
It seemed like that little pill did not want to do what it was told. It stuck in my throat where it jiggled about, refusing to go down, as if it were enjoying some preposterous joke.
After that, my long, arduous research began in earnest, and my dogged persistence at this endless and draining work left me exhausted.
21 The Lonely Are A Shameless Lot…
Life, like grass, needs moisture because our cells cannot survive without it; therefore, life can exist only in mire.
"It's the season of love – everybody, everybody, hug hug hug… the lonely are a shameless lot." Since the beginning of the '90s, everybody in Beijing has been singing this song. You hear it everywhere you go, in the shops and on the streets.
Perhaps they have to give their lives some meaning or purpose in order to carry on.
But I have to admit, I'm without doubt one of the "shameless" ones. Rather than keeping up with the beat of the times and throwing open my door to the season of love, I find that I have closed my door even tighter. And I have a love that runs totally counter to the times – in my bathroom. To be precise, my bathtub.
In such a big apartment, such an unexpected place to find love!
It all began one day when I was having my bath. As I lay soaking in the tub, in the water's warm and eager arms, all my loneliness and fatigue melted away.
After my mother and my beloved friends left me, I felt that the bathtub and I were all that remained, but this was the first time I had lain like a lover in its embrace. In that quiet and still apartment, only it could clasp me in its arms and make me forget the past, make me forget my isolation. I leaned against the tub quietly like a thirsting plant nursing its way back to succulent life.
I lingered there for a long time, and, coddled in the languid mists, I fell asleep.
The gurgle of the drain awakened me. I must have dislodged the plug with my foot.
I raised my head and looked around. As the steamy clouds of mist dissipated, the pristine white tiles began to reappear, looking like crisp biscuits that seemed to fill the air with a fresh fragrance. With the leaky faucet, its neck solicitously bowed, drip-drip, drop-dropping like a quietly reiterated "hello, hello, hello," and the grumbly surging of the toilet tank like the hubbub of a noisy street, I could never feel lonely again. Especially with the wooden rack on the wall above the tub with all my favorite cosmetics on the top shelf and a pile of books and magazines on the bottom, so I could read while taking a bath.
What an unusual and marvelous place!
In this apartment, aside from me, it is the only thing that is still alive.