Toward the North Page 10

  One day at the end of our walk, she became utterly dispirited. She said that she was afraid to go home. But we had to return home. On the way home, the sky clouded over. I had to keep talking to make her happy. When we crossed an intersection, I spotted a branch overhanging a wooden fence that surrounded a family garden. There was red fruit growing on the top of the branch that looked like Hawthorn fruit. I reached out my hand and plucked a few berries to give her to look at, and while taking a bite I asked, “What is this fruit? I wonder what it tastes like.” The fruit was extremely sour, causing me to grimace.

  My wife’s countenance changed at once, and she scolded me, asking me why I took a bite so thoughtlessly. What if it was poisonous? Normally, she would scold me with a few sentences and let it go at that. But now I noticed that the expression in her eyes was unduly animated, and saliva had collected at the corners of her mouth. I grabbed her by the shoulders and made her calm down. I felt the muscles of her back tense up like iron. A feeling of fear suddenly overwhelmed me. The situation was becoming critical.

  Youssef, the birdman, had come back. I went out and saw his bird-painted van parked in my driveway. He greeted me from a distance and told me that the last time he was in my backyard, a blue jay and a cardinal that had been captured in his cages had tested positive for the West Nile virus.

  Moreover, the Ministry of Health had already been informed about our neighbour Swanny’s death. This year she was North America’s fifty-first casualty of the disease. The Ministry of Health had designated this area as high risk. And, starting tomorrow, a program of mosquito extermination would be underway over an extensive area.

  Youssef was holding a big bundle of printed material, which he attached to a lamp post at the curb. On it were pictures of birds, and the poster informed people that if they find a dead bird, they must report it to the Ministry of Health so that it can be tracked and investigated. Other instructions included: Don’t secretly dispose of the bird. To protect against mosquito bites, don’t stay outdoors at dusk with uncovered skin. If you do go outdoors for an activity, apply mosquito repellent.

  The birdman led me into the backyard. He pointed to some things that could hold water, like old flower pots, and told me that these things will breed mosquito larvae. I held up a flower pot and examined it carefully. I could see several red thread-like larvae wriggling in the water. He also had me take a look at the tree branch with the green caterpillars. Their bodies seemed much bigger than before. The birdman told me that city hall had already leased the plane. Tomorrow, they would begin the aerial spraying of insecticide.

  The next day, I told my wife to stay in the house and not to go outdoors for exercise. At about nine o’clock the next morning, I heard a plane flying at a low altitude in our vicinity, probably spraying the insecticide to kill the green caterpillars. At noon, a large contingent of people wearing white protective clothing entered our neighbourhood. It looked as frightening as a scene in the movies with Ku Klux Klan members. I saw two fumigation personnel enter the backyard carrying two electric sprayers on their backs. They squirted a mist of white spray everywhere. One of them saw me standing inside the window and raised two fingers toward me in a “V” sign. I had closed the windows and doors tightly and only used the air conditioner for ventilation, but still the house was filled with the strong smell of chemicals.

  In the evening, the family doctor’s secretary “Flat Head” phoned to say that tomorrow morning Dr. Xu wanted to see me. I asked her whether or not the test results had come in. She said yes, but to leave specific questions for Dr. Xu. She declined to comment further and just hung up.

  The phone call from “Flat Head” was definitely not a good sign. When the family doctor notifies you halfway through the waiting period, then the test results may show there is a problem. It had only been seven days since the blood test, so that confirmed that there was something wrong. My heart sank. I really did not understand how my wife’s luck could be so bad, to merely touch a dead bird and be infected with the virus. But now there was no way I could tell her that everything was all right. My wife became very quiet, her complexion paled, and her body seemed to shrink noticeably. I comforted her by telling her not to be too nervous. We still didn’t know all the facts. We should wait until tomorrow to find out what Dr. Xu had to say. Even if there was a problem, she should not be afraid. Fear would only make the problem worse.

  Thinking back, that night was the most uncomfortable that I can ever remember. I lay in bed with my mind racing and a splitting headache. I imagined my roof and eaves outside were covered with birds whispering in secretive voices. The birds seemed jubilant. They were flying around inside my room, worming their way into my quilt, and drilling into my brain. I was sleeping inside a foul-smelling nest. Later, I dreamed about animal footprints in the snow in the backyard. I dreamed that there was an animal pacing back and forth in the middle of the yard. It was an animal in the cat family—its whole body was pitch-black and it bared ferocious fangs.

  I heard my wife crying. It was not a dream. She was actually crying. She said she was so afraid that she wanted to return to China. I said, “Okay, we’ll go and buy a plane ticket back home tomorrow.” But she said no to this because China doesn’t have the West Nile disease and they wouldn’t be able to treat that kind of illness. Then I said, “Let’s not even think about these things ahead of time. We can sort it out tomorrow after we see Dr. Xu.”

  The next morning, my wife and I arrived at the doctor’s office. We had to register first with “Flat Head,” who was extremely busy. She was wearing a telephone headset, but owing to the flatness of her head, the two sides were too narrow, and the earphones kept sliding to one side. Finally, “Flat Head” said to me, “Dr. Xu wants to see you, not your wife.” At that moment, my head exploded. I thought that my wife’s condition must be so serious that the doctor was afraid she would not be able to handle the strain, so, first he would speak to a family member about the problem. My wife was thinking the same thing, and said to me that under the circumstances, she was not afraid, and it would be better to know the details as soon as possible. Then my wife held my hand tightly and walked into Dr. Xu’s examination room as if entering an execution chamber. Dr. Xu looked at my wife and said, “Your blood test reports are in, and there are no problems. Everything is normal, and you are in good health.” Then Dr. Xu turned to me and said, “Your blood has tested positive for the West Nile virus. To stop the infection, you must have specialized treatment at once.”

  When I heard Dr. Xu say this, my first reaction was to roar with laughter. How is this possible? So now it is me that is infected with the West Nile disease. I am glad my wife is not sick. If her blood tests had been positive, she would have fallen apart for sure.

  In this muddled way, I learned that I was the one infected with the West Nile virus. Since I was the first instance of an Asian immigrant to be infected, the Ministry of Health treated my case with special attention. After being placed in the North York General Hospital and given rigorous monitoring, I became a research subject. Every three hours a nurse would come and take my temperature, blood pressure, blood sugar content, pulse, and so on. And every morning the head doctor, wearing a white gauze mask along with a group of similarly clad people, would come to see me. They asked me many questions and then started to draw blood for tests. I remember that nearly every morning I would have several vials of blood drawn. As a result, after a few days, as soon as I saw the nurses who took the blood, I wanted to run away. This made me think back to thirty or so more years ago, to my family’s pitiful chicken.

  At that time, it was common for people in China to get injections of chicken blood. My mother suffered from many illnesses. Every day, she had me go and catch our only chicken and draw its blood to inject into her. I remember that when I went to catch it, that chicken would struggle desperately to escape. By the time I caught it, its fear was so intense that I remember the scene to this day. And now, w
hen the nurses come to draw my blood, I felt myself behaving in the same way as that terrified chicken of years gone by.

  I probably became infected with the West Nile virus when I was bitten by a mosquito while I was planting flowers in the garden. This type of mosquito is called a bird-biting mosquito. They prefer to suck bird blood, but if they see a human body stripped to the waist and covered with smelly sweat, it is only natural that they would also want to take a few bites. Before sucking the blood out, the mosquito will first discharge anticoagulant serums into the body of the person whose blood is being sucked. It was in this way that bird blood was injected into my body.

  When you come to think about this, it is really a remarkable thing—in my body there was actually bird blood! I didn’t know what sort of bird the blood comes from. I hoped it wasn’t from a noisy sparrow or from an ugly and inauspicious crow. An owl or an American vulture wouldn’t be nice, either. If it were a swan’s or a grey-faced goose’s or a flamingo’s or an albatross’ blood, I would have felt a little bit better. For the past few days I had been thinking about this puzzle continuously. My skin had a strange itchiness, and it felt like many fine down-like feathers were about to emerge. I didn’t know whether this illusion was a symptom produced by the West Nile virus disease or not.

  However, a week later, the doctors overturned my theory about getting the virus from a mosquito. Altogether, there were three virology specialists who participated in the analysis of my case. From the results produced by cultivating my blood serum, they discovered that the genetic variations of the virus found in my blood stream differed from the current mutation. The virus had been dormant in my body for more than two years; therefore, I could not have been infected by a mosquito bite this summer.

  Since the doctors were deeply concerned about tracing the source of my body’s viral infection, they made an extremely detailed inquiry into my activities during that summer two years ago. The doctors wanted me to look back to this time period to the people I had come into contact with and to the places I had been. This investigation might reveal the conditions under which I had contracted the viral infection. I explained to the doctors that that summer, other than studying at English Classes for Adults, I just walked around, played ball, went fishing and visited the library and the museum. I inevitably started talking about how the Group of Seven’s landscape painting triggered an interest in going to fish and to sightsee in the Northern Great Lakes area. I told them that there were many water fowl, forests, and reed marshes in those places. My mind flooded with the intense memory of the woman beside the lake, but I intentionally did not say anything about her. I could not help myself and asked this one question, “Do West Nile virus sufferers have nosebleeds?”

  The doctor answered my question saying, “This is a possibility. Sometimes, in certain West Nile patients with a low white blood cell count, the capillaries will rupture over large areas, causing nasal bleeding.” Immediately the doctor followed up his explanation and asked me, “During that period of time, did you come into contact with a person who had a bleeding nose? Or do you, yourself, have any unusual conditions to tell us?”

  I said, “Nothing … just a casual question … nothing more.” For some reason, I just didn’t want to tell other people about this experience.

  But the doctor could evidently see from my body language that I was hiding something. He said, “A patient has an obligation to give a frank, honest, and detailed medical history to the doctor. This is particularly important if it related to a contagious disease that may cause death. This kind of circumstance is similar to an eyewitness in a law case. There is a duty toward the administration of justice to give objective testimony. To refuse to give evidence or to give false testimony will lead to serious consequences.” But I still hemmed and hawed, reluctant to talk about this matter. This was a very personal question. It also occurred to me that if my medical history were somehow connected to the woman by the lake, I would not be able to explain this matter to my wife.

  Two days later, the nurses told me that I was going to have a Holographic Brain Memory Scan. I had never heard of this sort of test. I had already had an ultrasound, a CAT scan, an MRI and so on, which were all available at the North York Hospital. Later I realized that this test was not going to be at the hospital. We had to go to the University of Toronto’s newly built Medical Science and Psychology Laboratory. I went by ambulance, sirens blaring, escorted by uniformed ambulance personnel and a doctor.

  One hour later, the ambulance entered a courtyard with an elegant and quiet garden, and stopped in front of an enormous building. I went into the laboratory. It was a futuristic room, and I felt like I was in the middle of an interstellar spaceship station in the Milky Way. The nurses here must be specially selected to be young and beautiful in order to put the patient completely at ease. I was taken to a machine, and many electrodes were placed over my whole body, with a number of electrodes especially concentrated on my head. Then, I was given an injection of medicine. A metallic taste started to ripple through my whole body like a wave. Together with a lot of buzzing sounds, my chair was pushed forward. All at once I became very sleepy. And then everything went black.

  When I regained consciousness, I felt like I was soaring in the air and surrounded by many large birds that were flying with me. But I couldn’t make out what was in front of me because of the thick clouds and mist. I flew for a long time, and then I followed the flock of birds out of the clouds. I saw the lake and the forest. Suddenly wheeling, I thought I caught a glimpse of the cottage on the lakeside and the long, wooden dock. I seemed to be under some kind of spell and was being pulled toward the house. I saw the woman who had been beside the lake. She looked so touchingly weak and beautiful with blood dripping from the usual place. When I was with her, I was overcome with delight. I only recall a slight vestige of that joy now, and am not able to repeat the particular details because the doctor dimmed those memories. It was not until after this test was over that I realized its purpose.

  During the course of the experiment, my dream was, in fact, controlled by the laboratory doctor and shown on a computer monitor. The doctor had me fly into a dream world panorama where he could see my dream’s desires. Circling from a high-altitude position, when the computer mouse pointed a little, I would fly toward the lakeside cottage just like a guided missile. This was really a frightening experiment. The doctor could clearly see my entire fantasy world! I believe that that type of pleasurable meeting with the woman by the lake would make one’s face blush. And every image had been recorded on disc. On top of that, when he had finished the experiment, he had wiped away my memory of the dream, leaving behind only a trace as a prompt.

  Sure enough, when the doctor had a chat with me after the experiment, he put his finger right on the unusual events that happened to me two summers ago when I was fishing at Algonquin Park. After undergoing the test, I felt no need to continue to conceal this affair. I told him all I remembered. And I also spoke out about my own feelings and ideas concerning the transmission of the West Nile virus. Since my fingers that had been cut open by the fishing line, perhaps I got infected with the virus when I stopped the woman’s bleeding beside the lake. The doctor did not say anything at all. He just kept writing things down. Then the doctor said that they would look for the women at the lake and investigate whether or not she was the source of my body’s West Nile virus. I felt agitated and said to the doctor, “I hope that when they find the woman by the lake, they will not disturb her.”

  Two weeks later, I left North York Hospital. It was arranged for me to be placed in a convalescent centre in the Algonquin region to recuperate. This place is situated in the forest, facing a misty bay. The doctors told me that I belonged to the group of latent West Nile virus cases and at present had no symptoms. In the future, perhaps the disease would surface, but perhaps it would not. I didn’t need to take medicine or have any injections because there wasn’t any medicine to deal with
this virus. It mainly depended on one’s own immunity and ability to resist the disease. Of course, the fresh, pure air of the forest, the abundant sunshine, and the suitable physical exercise would be a great help in restoring my health. The doctors didn’t reveal to me whether or not they found the woman at the lake, but I felt that they made arrangements to allow me to return to the place that was the source of this event. It seems this was a kind of psychological therapy.

  I didn’t feel sick. Other than a slightly raised temperature, no other clinical symptoms were evident. Every day I would work out in the gym, read books in the library, or take walks in the forest. My favourite thing to do was to paddle a canoe by myself on the lake. The lakes in Algonquin Park cover a huge area, with a circumference of several hundred kilometres and thousands of small islands. They say the lakes appeared during the late glacial geological period. I spent all day long paddling the canoe on the nearby lake, gradually getting to know the surrounding geographic area. I went along the shore to try and look for that cottage, but couldn’t remember the exact location.

  One day, I finally caught sight of a house that actually matched the cottage in my memory, but I didn’t see the dock that I had been fishing from. This lakeside cottage seemed as though it were abandoned. Many white water birds were perched on the house, and many more birds were just landing. That day the lake was shrouded in a dense white fog. The birds looked like sheets of paper in the mist, or like snowflakes drifting down to land on the cottage. And at that moment I felt an inconsolable sorrow in my heart. I continued paddling the canoe closer to the shore by the house. One after the other, the birds continued to drift down. Some landed on my canoe. A few settled on my shoulders.