ONE
At the ticket booth, Victor watched the nurse count out several bills from a crisp white envelope. Pushing them through a slot, she received in return two tickets with the destination, New Orleans, Louisiana, printed in black ink on yellow card stock. She slid them both, along with the remaining cash, into her pocketbook “for safekeeping,” she said, and clicked the brass clasp shut.
It was six days after Victor officially became a leper. He stood, rubbing sleep from his eyes under a smoke-smudged mural of the constellations—a crab, a lion, a scorpion, a bull, and a man with his arm raised, ready to club it. A silent ambulance had whisked him uptown through the dark Manhattan streets from Bellevue to Grand Central Terminal so early that the city was still half asleep.
Already standing ramrod straight, Ba drew himself up a millimeter more. His jaw tightened, and Victor could tell his father was bothered by the nurse implying that he couldn’t be trusted with the tickets. What did she think he was going to do—run off with them and go to Louisiana himself?
“Let’s go,” said Ba. He took the lead through the warren of underground tunnels to the departure platform, walking so fast that Victor could barely keep up.
Ducking his head, he pulled down the bill of his Dodgers cap as people rushed past, hoping they wouldn’t be able to tell that something was wrong with him. The nurse boarded an empty passenger car marked “Restricted Area: Authorized Personnel Only.” Hanging halfway out the door, she gestured for him to hurry, but Victor stayed rooted to the spot, trying to memorize his father’s face, the sharp edges of his cheekbones, the sternness of his jaw, as if looking at him for the last time. The doctors said his condition was curable, but who knew if that was true?
“Don’t make trouble. I’ll send some money soon,” Ba said in Toisanese.
“You don’t have to,” said Victor. They didn’t have much to spare, not with the hospital bills they already had to pay, but Ba waved him off.
“Go,” he said, “before the train leaves without you.”
Victor looked down at his faded tennis shoes before lifting his eyes to see Ba tap his forefinger against the brim of his best gray trilby. In response, Victor stood at attention, chin up, chest out, shoulders back, and stomach in, just like Ba had taught him, and gave a full military salute, noting the twitch of a smile at the corner of Ba’s mouth.
“At ease,” said Ba in English.
This was an old routine they’d begun on the journey from China to New York when Victor and his brother, Henry, had pretended they were soldiers and Ba was their commanding officer. It seemed to Victor now that the ritual was as much for Ba’s sake as it was for his own, not in spite of the fact but because they were both terrified, and they couldn’t afford to feel it.
Victor’s eyes began to blur. He bit his lip and held back his tears, knowing how much it would disappoint Ba if he cried. He was sure his father wished he were tough and strong like Henry, like boys were supposed to be. He wished he were like that, too.
Turning to the train, he hesitated, wanting suddenly to fling his arms around his father and cling to him, but as passengers jostled one another on the platform, streaming into nearby cars, he trudged up the steps. The nurse was struggling with their bags at the luggage rack. Behind him, the click of a dead bolt made him jump when a porter locked them in from the outside. The train spluttered and puffed, the whistle sang its high, clear note, and by the time Victor and the nurse had settled on seats across from each other at the window, they were moving. Victor pressed his nose against the glass, straining to see the fast-fading platform in case Ba was still standing there waving. But all that was left of him was the back of a man in a gray suit getting smaller and smaller, walking away.
The tunnel swallowed the train as it slid underground, deep beneath the Hudson River, where the dark turned the window into a mirror. In it, staring back at Victor, was a face he didn’t quite recognize, with puffy cheeks and eyelids to match. The fingers that touched it looked like sausages whose skins were about to burst. The swelling was always worse in the mornings. At the station, he’d felt monstrous, afraid people would take one look at him and know what he had—what he was—but here with the nurse in their private car, he could relax, even though the door wasn’t locked for his comfort, but to keep the public safe from him.
Earlier that summer, when Ba’s girlfriend, Ruth, pointed out a small rosy lesion on his chest at the pool, he’d thought it was just a rash, but when it didn’t go away, she got worried. Ba agreed to let her take him to a doctor, not their regular one in Chinatown, but a skin specialist in the Bronx. The doctor didn’t seem too concerned until more lesions popped up. From the way he peered at those new sores, first through his glasses and then more closely without them, Victor knew something was very wrong. A biopsy was sent off to a lab, and a few days later, Victor was sent to Bellevue, where the doctors gave him the terrible news: he had leprosy. Because he would need aggressive drug treatment and an operation on his nerves, one of the doctors, who’d been a medical officer at Carville, urged Ba to send him to the institution. Ma, who was still in China, had always said he had the hands of a scholar, long-fingered and delicate as birds. What would she say if she saw them now? He could hardly believe these throbbing mitts belonged to him.
It wasn’t just the lesions. There were other changes, too. He was getting fevers from out of nowhere, bursts of heat followed by chills. Waves of nausea and fatigue would overcome him when he’d been fine the moment before. And even though his asthma never flared up in the summer, he was having trouble breathing. Things got even stranger when he started to lose the feeling in his arms.
One day, on a delivery run for Ba’s laundry, a pin poking through a package of shirts had scraped his skin, and it was only when he saw the blood on his wrist that he knew he was hurt. But he hadn’t worried too much about it until his fingers swelled up not long after that, when he woke up one morning to find them tender to the touch, as if they were full of fluid. Rooting around in Ba’s sewing kit for a fine-tipped needle, he thought he could relieve the pressure like he did when he popped a pimple or lanced a blister. But when the needle pricked his thumb, a searing sensation tore through his hand.
His body had gone haywire; the contradiction of feeling nothing on his arms while lightning bolts of pain were striking his hands made no sense. How could anyone feel too little and too much at the same time? It made him think he was imagining it. Or that he was going crazy.
As horrified as he was to have leprosy, a part of him was relieved to at least get an explanation for what was happening to him, though as soon as the lab results came in, people began to treat him differently. Ba and Henry got quiet on their visits, their faces solemn and still, while Ruth hovered over him, filling the silence with a constant stream of talk. Even though the doctors told them the disease was rarely contagious, the nurses started to wear gloves in his room, and a couple of times, he caught a group of young men in white coats peeking at him through the glass panel of the door. Inside, he was the same as he’d always been, but with a single test, he’d become something else. A creature so scary and dangerous that he had to be banished from New York to live with other outcasts like him.
The Bible said leprosy came from sin. In China, he once saw a beggar whose face had been covered in a grotesque mask of sores. When he asked Ma about it, she said the gods must have been punishing the man for sleeping with prostitutes or dead people. Victor hadn’t slept with anyone, of course, dead or alive. And what kind of sin could he have committed to deserve such a punishment unless it was for not being a Christian? But there were tons of non-Christians in the world and they didn’t all have leprosy. The doctors said ninety-five percent of the population was immune and he was just one of the unlucky five percent.
The bathroom door swung open, slamming against the wall. A sewer smell crept up the aisle. Victor wrinkled his nose and watched the nurse get up to shut it, holding on to the seats to steady herself as the train hit a curve. A part of him still couldn’t believe he was going to Louisiana to live in a federal institution. He didn’t want to leave New York, just like he hadn’t wanted to leave China, but after the argument in the hospital a few days ago, it became clear that he didn’t have much of a choice.
In his room at Bellevue, Victor had watched Ba sift through the papers and pamphlets in the file the doctor had given them.
“If we take him to the place on Staten Island, he could still live at home. The doctor called it an out…” Ba stumbled, groping for the word.
“Outpatient facility,” finished Ruth, peering over his shoulder and pointing. “It says here it’s for checkups and services after discharge. And for mild cases. You heard the doctor. His case isn’t mild. He would have to go to the clinic every day. That’s what? Two, three hours on the subway? Plus, he needs an operation.”
Victor didn’t want to think about surgery, but with the pain in his hands and the numbness in his arms getting worse every day, he knew he’d have to have it one way or another, either here or at Carville. The doctors kept talking to Ruth about Victor’s case instead of Ba, who stood close by with his arms folded. And when she wasn’t there, they spoke slower and louder, as if they thought he wouldn’t be able to understand them otherwise. Victor was about to ask Ruth to explain his treatment plan again when he started to cough.
A glass of water stood sweating on his bedside table. He made an awkward grasp at it and fumbled as pain shot through his fingers, the skin there tight and burning. Rushing over to help, Ruth squeezed past Henry, whose whole body seemed to tense up when her full skirt brushed against his leg. She put the glass in Victor’s hand and watched him gulp down the water before wiping his brow with the wet washcloth the nurse had left. Though the window was open, the hot, humid air of New York City in late summer did nothing to cool down the room.
“If he gets the operation here,” Ruth continued, tucking a loose, dark curl behind her ear, “you’ll have to pay for it yourself. But Carville is run by the government, so everything there is free.”
Ba’s eyebrows rose at the word “free.” He nodded, fanning himself with the file. “I was thinking about taking out a loan, but the interest is very high. And we have to be careful or people will find out.”
Victor frowned. He didn’t know how much everything would cost, but the other day, he’d overheard Ba whispering to Ruth about his hospital bills. If Ba was already having trouble with those, how would he be able to send Ma and Grandmother their monthly stipend in China with the added expense of the surgery?
“What people?” Ruth pursed her lips. “Who cares what they think?”
“Ridiculous,” muttered Henry in Toisanese. His eyes narrowed like a hawk’s, putting Victor on edge.
“English,” warned Ba. His nearly identical features echoed his elder son’s.
“Maybe your mistress should learn to speak Chinese.” Henry cut his eyes at Ruth and switched to English. “If people find out, we’ll all pay for it, not just Victor.”
“This kind of sickness makes people afraid,” agreed Ba. “If they know he has it, they will blame the whole family, maybe say all the Chinese have it.”
“He’ll have to leave school,” said Henry.
“Not if he goes to Carville. There’s a school for patients,” Ruth said, plucking one of the pamphlets out of the stack and showing him a picture of a small group of surprisingly healthy-looking teenagers smiling in a classroom. “See? Plenty of kids his age, too.”
“What’s the point if they’re locking him up for the rest of high school anyway?” said Henry.
Victor shot Ruth a worried look. That wasn’t what the doctors had said.
“That’s not going to happen,” she snapped at Henry before catching Victor’s eye. “You’re going to be cured. The doctors said some people get well in just a few months. If you go to Carville, they’ll fix you right up and you’ll be home before you know it.” She tossed the pamphlet on the pile of papers Ba was still holding and, turning back to Henry, she enunciated every word: “Do not scare your brother like that.”
Henry’s chest puffed up like a rooster’s, but before he could speak, Ba jumped in. “If people find out about that place, he will never get a job, never get married, even if they let him come home. And we will have problems, too.”
By reflex, Victor’s fingers grasped the rough cotton sheet covering his legs and immediately let go from the sting. Henry made it sound like his future depended on keeping his illness a secret. Was leprosy really so horrible that it would ruin his life whether or not he got well? And what would it do to his family?
“Come on, Sam,” Ruth scoffed. “It’s 1954, not 1354.”
“You don’t understand. Customers would stop coming to the laundry. We could lose everything.”
Ruth shook her head. “I think you’re making too much of this.”
“Then why are they shipping him off to a leper colony?” Henry interrupted.
“Wait a second,” Victor began, but no one was listening to him.
“It’s a residential facility,” Ruth corrected Henry. “An institution for Hansen’s disease. The best in the country.”
“Who cares what they call it?” said Henry. “None of this would have happened if it weren’t for you.”
“Excuse me?” Ruth’s voice went loud and high as beads of sweat popped out all along her hairline. Her eyes darted over to Ba and widened.
“Henry,” said Ba, but Henry was on a roll.
“You wouldn’t let Victor see our own doctor. You took him to some jerk who just sent him to the hospital. And now the government wants to lock him up someplace we’ve never heard of. It’s a thousand miles away, in the South, where they hate us even more than they do here. You say it’s so great, but how do you know?” Henry cocked his head to the side.
“Listen,” she said, “this isn’t a cough or a sprained ankle. Chinese herbs can’t cure leprosy. And Dr. Wu doesn’t even have a medical license. Believe me, I checked.”
“This isn’t your family,” Henry barked. Tiny specks of spit flew through the air. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
The color drained from Ruth’s face, her bloodred lipstick making it look extra pale. She brought her hand to her throat as if to protect herself, but she didn’t seem to know how to respond. None of them did. Henry’s feelings about Ruth were no secret, but Victor had never heard him talk to her like this.
A car honked, followed by the whooshing sound of traffic, and Victor, who hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise, was fed up. None of this would’ve been happening if it weren’t for him, but nobody would admit it.
“Doesn’t anyone care what I think?” Victor said, his skin hot and tight on his face. They all turned to him now, looking down at him in the bed.
“You’re just a kid,” said Henry.
“I’m almost sixteen. And it’s my life.”
“Of course we care,” said Ruth.
“You shouldn’t even be here,” Henry snapped. “You’re not our mother.”
“Enough,” said Ba, silencing Henry. He turned to Victor. “What do you want to do?”
Ba had never asked him that question before. All he’d ever done was give him orders and expect him to obey. Victor was eight when Ba had taken him and Henry from China, leaving Ma and Grandmother behind, and it hadn’t exactly been easy for him to settle in. Now that New York finally felt like home, he was about to get uprooted again, and this time, he wouldn’t have any family with him. At Carville, he would be alone.
Victor tried to imagine what it would be like in the Bronx if he couldn’t go to school or make deliveries for the laundry, and could only go back and forth to the clinic on Staten Island. He pictured himself watching other people living their lives through the windows of subways and buses while he, the family secret, would be kept in hiding. If he stayed, Ba would have to find a way to pay his medical bills and figure out how to get him to his appointments. Plus, the family’s business and reputation would be in danger. The problem wasn’t just that he was sick with something hard to treat like cancer or even something contagious like polio or TB. People would have felt sorry for him if he had any of those things, but once they knew he had leprosy, even Henry and Ba seemed to flinch whenever they saw him. The very idea of it disgusted people so much that it made Victor feel like he was disgusting, too. In a way, the shame of that was worse than what the disease was doing to his body, especially since he’d become such a burden.
Copyright © 2023 by Wendy Chin-Tanner
