Stealing Time (10 page)

"Already too much," he protested.

When the clever doctor realized no more money was forthcoming, he made a quick diagnosis. He said that in spite of the extremely reasonable fee and the absent patient, he was certain that April's trouble derived from the liver.

"The liver?" Sai frowned. Hadn't he said it was the heart?

"Yes, it's the liver. The liver is the reservoir of stamina. That is the place of
hun
—intuition. The liver is in the yin location of the abdomen. It stores blood and belongs to the yang element of wood; thus it is called the
shaoyang
of yin."

Sai nodded as if she understood every word. It was just that she didn't agree. She didn't think April's problem was yin. Yin was yielding, and April was not that.

"The trouble is in your daughter's heart. But the wood element of spring corresponds to the liver. So the problem arises from her liver."

Aieeyee! Sai's head swam. How did he know that? He looked so young. His hair stuck up like Elvis Presley's, or a movie star's. Sai could see there was hair spray in it. She wondered if a young master of classical medicine should be using hair spray.

The young master interrupted her thoughts. "There are five elemental phases, five parts of the year: spring, summer, late summer, autumn, and winter. Each has its excesses and deficiencies."

Yes, yes, but what did that have to do with April's spending her nights with a Spanish man?

"In order to properly utilize the knowledge of the five elemental phases, one must calculate the arrival time of the season and observe normal and abnormal patterns. Since your daughter is ill in spring, we must calculate from the first day of spring on the Chinese calendar. If the first day of spring this year had not yet arrived but the weather was already warm—as it was this year—we must consider this an excess of fire. In your daughter's case the fire excess would humiliate the water element and damage the normalcy of the season. It would overcontrol the normal
qi
of metal. This is called
qi
yin or reckless
qi."

Ah, now they were getting somewhere. But then the young doctor of the Yellow Emperor's classic medicine started talking about the variability of heaven and earth, and Sai was confused again.

He said she must bring April to him so he could take her pulse. If she was in a truly advanced state of reckless
qi,
the radial pulse could be as much as five times as large as normal. At that point her yin will have collapsed.

"And if both the carotid and radial pulses are five times larger than normal, this condition is called
guan le
or obstructed. That means yin and yang have become extreme and stagnant. The prenatal and postnatal
ging
essence
qi
have become exhausted; the eventual consequence is death."

Sai swooned and nearly fell off her chair. Was April's heart beating five times as fast as normal? Sai had no idea. But then the young master reassured her again. For another hundred dollars she could obtain a powder that would slow down April's heart and save her life. This seemed an unavoidable expense. Sai figured if she could save April's life she could get the money back from her when she was well.

Neither Sai nor Ja Fa was entirely satisfied with this diagnosis, however. They felt they needed a second opinion and took the PATH train to New Jersey, where they spent Tuesday night with the Dong family and consulted another well-known Chinese doctor. This one inspired greater confidence in spite of charging a much lower fee. Me Nan was a bargain at only twenty-five dollars. She was one of the so-called barefoot doctors, also just recently arrived in this country, but she worked in a cleaning service during the week and had a boyfriend with only one hand. His other hand was made of wood and covered with a black glove that made him look very official when he opened the door of their apartment.

Me Nan gave Sai a cup of tea and asked many questions about April. She wanted to know the quality of her hair, its thickness and vibrancy. The color of her face and the tone of her flesh. She also wanted to know what else was going on in April's life, in addition to the Mexican police boyfriend, that might also be contributing to the impairment of her judgment.

"Uh, uh, uh," she commented as she listened to Sai's discourse on the matter.

"Good healthy hair. Pale face. Suspicious eyes, been that way from birth. Ugly, but not so ugly that she could not have a good man if she had a better disposition."

"Uh, uh, uh!" the doctor exclaimed. She gave Sai another cup of very black tea (the cheap kind) and asked if twenty-five dollars was too much.

Sai showed Me Nan the money and told of her sorrow that her daughter was a policeman and her pride that the girl was a good policeman. NYPD could not solve any important cases without her.

The doctor from China listened to the cases with interest and found in one of them the cause of April's complaint. "Liver. Yes, yes. It is the liver."

All this time Ja Fa Woo waited in the other room with the one-handed man. He did not want to hear any more theories. He wanted to spank his daughter. When she heard "liver" Sai thought of the hair-sprayed Chinatown doctor and nodded. "Yes, it had been warm and dry before the first day of spring."

"No, that is not it." Me Nan, the barefoot doctor, did not seem to care about the temperature before the first day of spring, but she made a great deal of the fact that April had been twice chilled and thrown out of a window back in January and had been given a large box of chocolates for Valentine's Day in February.

"When the evil wind invades the body it generally turns to heat and consumes the body's
qi, jing
essence, and blood," she said.

Sai frowned. That sounded bad.

"When the blood becomes depleted, the liver is not normal and malfunctions."

"But if it was not the warm air before spring, what could be the cause, a devil, a ghost?" Sai wanted to know.

"No, no, nothing as malignant as that. Cold invading the body in winter will incubate and manifest as febrile disease in spring because everything rises at that time of year."

Sai sighed with relief. April had caught a cold.

The barefoot doctor held up her hand. "
And
improper use of the five flavors. The chocolates in February made too much sweet taste and disturbed the heart
qi,
causing it to become restless and congested."

Sai thought back on the chocolates and marveled at her own robust state of health. She herself had eaten most of them, but then again she hadn't gotten her feet wet and chased criminals in the snow. "What is the cure?" she asked, thinking another twenty-five dollars was not too much to pay if April could throw off the Spanish love disease.

For only two dollars more Sai received a plastic bag of sour herbs that Sai must make into tea. The tea would both counteract the liver disease and make her daughter smell forever distasteful to the foreign devil.

"Ah, ah, ah." Sai listened with satisfaction. On the two trains going back to Astoria, Queens, she thought about the other additions she had to make to April's diet. Plums, chives, small beans like mung or adzuki. Dragon bones and dog meat. With a shiver, she wondered how far she would go to save April from this bad relationship. She hoped it would not be necessary to sacrifice her beloved French poodle puppy. Dim Sum, that had only just become reliable about holding her pee pee through the night. For this reason she was glad April wasn't there when they got home.

CHAPTER
10

R
oosevelt Field was a huge place. Milton Hua told his wife, Nanci, it was the largest shopping mall in America. When she'd asked if it was anything like the ugly and foul-smelling shopping mall on Bowery in Chinatown, just at the mouth of the Manhattan Bridge that led out to Brooklyn, he'd laughed. No, no, this was a
Mall,
with a capital M. Big, really big. Bigger than Chinatown and Little Italy and Greenwich Village and SoHo and even Wall Street all put together. It was the mother and father of all malls. He was very proud.

Garden City, Long Island, next to Roosevelt Field, was where Nanci and Milton had moved last winter when it was still bleak and cold, and no green showed on the trees or on the lawns in front of the houses. Now they had a yard full of tulips and jonquils. They had moved to Garden City because a new section of Roosevelt Field was being built, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow had been offered to Milton because he was the smartest son in his family and the first to go out on his own. The pot of gold for him was a house, a car, and a brand-new Chinese restaurant to run in that business Mecca, Roosevelt Field, on the other side of the Queens line in Nassau County. What was in it for Nanci was the loss of the only home she'd ever known, the only job she'd ever wanted, and her independence. Outside, the taxi horn honked.

"You okay with this?" she called to her neighbor, who was reading a magazine in her kitchen and who had promised to stay until her return.

"No problem," Emmie called.

Nonetheless, Nanci was deeply troubled as she slammed the door of the brick house that was Milton's dream come true. The door was solid wood and the heavy thud it made shut out everything in her life she'd valued.

Everything was beautiful, from the little peaked roof over the front door, painted red for luck, to the pale tiles in the kitchen painted with all the herbs and vegetables prized in an Italian kitchen, to the stone fireplace in the living room, which Nanci would never use because of the fire that had killed her father in Chinatown when she was fifteen. It had everything; it was comfortable; and it was far, far from the apartment where she and Milton used to live, which also happened to be close enough for her to walk to her job at the Chatham Square Library even in the rain and snow. It was far from her cousin, too, and Nanci knew that her neglect was responsible for the problem she had now.

"Hey, lady, don't keep me waiting," the taxi driver yelled out the window.

She took a last look at the house, where her neighbor was keeping watch, and she hurried out to the car, which was the kind of wreck Milton would not want her riding in. Milton had a brand-new BMW. Nanci didn't know how to drive it, but even if she had, he wouldn't have let her take it into the city on this mission. He was angry; he'd told her to stay where she was. But Nanci's cousin Lin, difficult from the moment she'd arrived from China, had to be located immediately. Nanci kept replaying the events of yesterday in her mind: Lin calling her early in the morning and asking Nanci to come and get her; Nanci driving in with Milton and seeing Lin sitting on the curb in Chinatown like a homeless person, waiting for them with her possessions in a cheap plastic laundry basket; Lin putting the basket in the car without a word, then refusing to get in herself. And finally, Lin turning her back and hurrying away down the street.

"Oh, let her go," Milton had said, furious at the inconvenience and bad manners. "I have to get back to work." So she'd let him turn around and drive back to Garden City without a clue what had just happened, or why.

"Where to?" The driver was a big angry man with a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead.

"The station," Nanci told him.

"Which station?"

"Penn Station."

"I ain't goin' all the way into Manhattan."

"No, no. I want to take the train into Manhattan."

"Okay, little girl, what line?"

Nanci Hua was twenty-five. Nobody had called her a little girl in a long time. "Does it make a difference?" she asked angrily.

"Yeah, it does. Three stations, three fares. The trains go different times from each one and some you gotta change in Jamaica. So make up your mind, I can't sit here all day."

They were in Garden City, so she said, "Garden City station." She was in a hurry; she didn't have time for this.

He didn't say anything, just drove in a jerky stop-start way that made her feel carsick after the first block. In seven minutes he pulled up and braked hard at a station clearly marked "Mineola." She had no idea where Mineola was.

"That will be nine dollars," he demanded.

She gave him the money. At the station, there was an automatic ticket machine. She had to figure out the number of the station where she was going and the time of day she was traveling. It cost $6.50. At Penn Station, she had to go up a flight of stairs and find the subway. Another $1.50 for the token. She didn't know what subway to take, but the Canal Street stop was where she was going. Seven minutes after arriving in Manhattan, she got off there and climbed out of the tunnel into the light. It had cost her seventeen dollars to get home.

In the warming spring air, the Lower East Side was teeming with people. Nanci didn't have to get her bearings. The Bowery was on one side of Chatham Square; on the other side were East Broadway, Allen Street, Delancey, Orchard, Ludlow, and the rest of the Lower East Side that used to be all Jewish, then became Puerto Rican, and now more and more was Asian. The factory where Lin had worked when she arrived in America was on Allen Street. Nanci rushed past the library at 33 East Broadway, where she'd met Milton when she was twenty and they'd fallen in love. She wasn't thinking about that now. When she hit Allen, her heart started pounding. Soon she would have some answers.