Free Boy in the Twilight by Yu Hua Page A

stood there side by side, looking at him as he lay there in a powerless rage. “Can it be Dad doesn’t want to do the operation?” I asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    Tears welled up in our father’s eyes. “Be good boys,” he moaned, struggling to get his words out. “Hurry … hurry and fetch … Mom. Tell Mom to come …”
    We’d been hoping Father would operate on himself like a hero, and now here he was, crying! We looked at him a moment longer, and then my brother took my hand and we ran out the door, down the stairs and along the full length of the alley. This time we didn’t think up our own plan of action—we went to fetch Mom.
    By the time our father was carried into the operating theater, his appendix was perforated and his stomach was filled with pus. He developed peritonitis and had to spend weeks and weeks in a hospital bed, and then convalesce at home for another month before he could again don a white smock and resume his job as doctor. But he could never again be a surgeon, for his energy was spent: if he were to stand at theoperating table for an hour he would grow faint and his eyes would blur. He had gone thin overnight and never regained the weight he lost. When he walked, there was no longer that spring to his stride, and though he might take a big first step he would only go half as far with his second. When winter came, he seemed to have a constant cold. So from then on he could be only a doctor of internal medicine, and he would sit at a desk every day, chatting idly with the patients, scrawling routine prescriptions. After he got off work he would walk slowly homeward, rubbing his hands with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol. When we went to bed in the evenings, we would often hear him grumbling to our mother. “People think you have given me two sons, but appendixes are all they are. At the best of times they are of no worldly use, and when push comes to shove they are practically the death of you.”

M ID -A IR C OLLISIONS
    On an evening in August, the room was stifling hot. My wife and I were sitting in front of a rattling electric fan. I held the remote in my hand and changed the channels one by one, and then ran through them again in reverse sequence. My back was soaked in sweat and I was in an irritable mood. My wife, on the other hand, was quite composed, sitting there perfectly still. On her shiny forehead I couldn’t see even a bead of sweat, and she seemed to be illustrating the old saying “Your body feels cool, mind calm as a pool.” But I wasn’t happy with things: since I’d got married, in fact, I had begun to be
unhappy
with things. Cursing under my breath, I banged away at the keys, converting the TV picture into a series of flashes, making my young eyes go blurry. I cursed the summer heat, the TV programs, the lousy rattling fan, the dinner I had just eaten, the underwear drying on the balcony … My wife kept her composure: so long as I was in this room, so long as I was keeping her company, then however much I cussed, whatever crazy thing I did, she would be perfectly at ease. If I were to walk out of this room, leave her and go off on my own, she would be singing a different tune. She would feel uneasy, she would be miserable; she would make a song-and-dance, all upset and tearful. That’s marriage for you. I can never leave her for a second. That’s my job as a husband, till ripe old age and death us do part.
    My friend Morning Tang knocked on the door. He used his fingers, his fist, his feet, maybe even his knees—at any rate hemade a hammering noise on the door. It was as though I heard a bugle call or a rooster crow, for I jumped up from the floor, opened the door, and saw before me Morning Tang, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year. “Morning Tang, you rascal!” I cried.
    Morning Tang was looking very dapper in baggy pants and a rust-colored jacket, but he had a funny smile on his face. He took a step forward, but stopped short. “Come on in,” I