Sinking
- Dec 9, 2020
- 5 min read
by Yunya Yang
The night was solid black outside, as if the room had been dropped deep into the sea like a stone coffin, its weight pulling it down towards the bottomless abyss.
The impenetrable darkness transformed the glass on the window into a massive mirror, reflecting the two people sitting in the room, only partially illuminated by the reading light on the desk, like an unfinished drawing outlined by a pencil.
It was impossible to tell how big the room was, for the dim yellow light only revealed a small circle around the desk. Everything else hid in the unlit void, like nocturnal creatures shying away in the camouflage of the night. The room was still; only the radiator hissed, like a monster breathing heavily in its sleep.
A man sat behind the desk. He laced his long fingers on the desktop, his head bowed as if keeping vigil. A woman sat opposite of him, her face in her hands.
“I can’t do this anymore.” The woman blurted it out, breaking the silence.
The man looked up. “What do you mean, Doctor?”
“I quit.” The woman lifted her face. Her eyes were rimmed in red, and her face scarred by dried streaks of tears. “It’s too much. It’s not right. There will be retributions…I can’t bear it.”
“Retributions?” The man made a garbled noise from his throat. “From whom? Guanyin Buddha?”
The woman shook her head. “I don’t know. From the heavens above.”
“There is no god. It’s all myths. Fiction. You should know this. You’re a party member.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“That is why we need you.”
The woman flinched at the words and turned to look outside the window as if searching for a distraction, or guidance. But of course, there wasn’t any, only her gaunt face looking back at her. For a second, she thought it was somebody else’s face.
She lowered her eyes, avoiding her own reflection.
“One of the women tried to run today,” she said. “She must be close to eight months…she jumped off the operation bed while I was getting the injection ready. I caught her sleeve before she bolted out of the door, but she stripped off the gown and slipped away. She ran naked outside, into the snow, but she didn’t go very far. With the belly, she wasn’t that fast. The nurses brought her back, wailing and kicking. They told me to grab her, but I didn’t know where to grab as she twisted and flipped like a fish trying to get back to the water. Do you know what I’m talking about? Have you gone fishing before?”
The man didn’t reply.
“She was like a fish,” the woman continued. “Her belly too…like a fish’s belly. White and bulging. She screamed the whole time. They all scream, of course. It’s like giving birth.”
She drew a sharp breath and covered her mouth with a hand as if she had let slip something she shouldn’t. “No, no…it’s nothing like giving birth.”
The man stared ahead, past the woman, into the lightless end of the room.
The woman’s breath grew heavy and fell in the same rhythm as the radiator. Every time she inhaled, it sounded like a drowning animal gasping for air.
The man pulled back a drawer, took out a squished paper packet, and slid a cigarette out.
He put it between his dried lips and lit a match. The flickering light brought his face to focus for a brief moment as if filling in color on the penciled drawing, tainting his sagging skin crimson like cured meat.
The woman watched the small flame in the reflection of the window glass, mesmerized. It twinkled like the lantern of a blind, deep-sea fish in the blackness of the ocean.
The man took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled through his nostrils. The smoke shrouded the desk light and painted ghostly shadows on the wall.
“You’re doing your duty, Doctor,” he said.
“It was alive. The…whatever it was, when it came out,” the woman said, as if she didn’t hear the man. “We had to…we had to…”
She curled her fingers, her knuckles white and protruding like the joints of bamboo shoots.
The man held the cigarette between his fingers, immobile. The quivering light burned at the tip, leaving a long, teetering ash trail, which, after clinging desperately on for a moment, fell like snow.
“I can’t let you go, Doctor,” he said. “It’s the national policy. I’m only one link in the chain of command, as are you. We’re only carrying out orders.”
“I’m an executioner.”
The man frowned. “You are a soldier. We’re fighting a war.”
“A war against population. Not a real war.”
“Not a war between countries, but that doesn’t make it any less real.”
“I have blood on my hands.”
“You’re a doctor. You’ll always have blood on your hands.”
“The woman bled to death.”
The man paused, then said, “Every war has its casualties.”
They sat in silence after that. The woman started hiccupping; her chest rose and fell like a balloon in a never-ending cycle of inflation and deflation.
“Your country needs you. It is a challenging job, which should make you more determined to do it well. It’s not easy to be a hero.”
The man took the last drag and pressed the cigarette in the ashtray, its body squashed like a dead caterpillar.
The woman watched the cigarette butt, and a sudden urge to be sick came over her. She grabbed the wastebasket under the desk and erupted into it with such a violence that it startled even herself.
“Doctor?” The man stood up and extended an arm, as if wanting to pat her back, but the woman held up a hand.
“I’m…fine.”
She hugged the basket and rested her head on the rim, panting. A shrill ringing rushed in her ears, first at a deafening volume, then slowly subsided, like ocean waves rolling back, away from the shore, into the vastness beyond.
“I’m fine,” she said again.
The man sat down, took another cigarette out, and lit it.
“Will you stay, Doctor?”
The woman shut her eyes.
“You’ll be honored as a hero.”
She never wanted to be a hero. She only wanted to be a doctor.
“We had no choice. We’re only carrying out orders,” he said in a softer voice this time, as if it was meant more for himself than for her.
“Yes, I will stay.”
The man looked at her for a moment, in the dim light, through the rising smoke.
“Good,” he said, taking a long drag on the cigarette. “Good.”
She leaned on the basket, cradling it close to her body. The foul odor didn’t bother her. It covered the smell of blood that always filled her nostrils.
The room returned to stillness again, submerged in darkness, except for the dim yellow light, like a lamp on a lost fishing boat, moments before the black ocean swallows it whole.
Yunya Yang was born and raised in Central China and moved to the U.S. when she was eighteen. She is an accountant by day and a writer by night. Her work has appeared in Boston Literary Magazine. Find her on Twitter @YangYunya.
