‘Does it hurt?’
‘Ouch!’
I slowed down and entered her gently, a little dry, even cold, but gradually a slight warmth rose up and slowly enveloped me, like her eyes at the moment, framed by tears.
I closed my eyes, a little bit mesmerized, after all, she was a woman as beautiful as white jade, but immediately opened my eyes again with alertness, the door was closed, the other beds in the room were empty, the window blinds were down, and there was a gap of silvery-white moonlight shining on us, and on her face… and the tears had already crossed over her cheeks, and she was hesitantly lingering on…
The moonlight flashed on her teardrops, and I was shocked! As if there is what flash in the pupils swept, blankly looking around, there is no light in the room, the corridor on the daylight Cheng is still a dead white, inside the house only blackout lighting small green light faintly bright, like a motionless fireflies.
Her fingers seized the muscles in my arm with a slight effort, and I increased my speed slightly as her brow slowly unfurled, like a slowly opening flower in a slow TV mirror – in fact, her whole being was a flower, a fragile, fragile little white flower.
I close my eyes and see the image of flowers falling all over the ground, a poignant, even despairing image, if only to know that they won’t bloom again next year.
Lying under my body at the moment is a woman who is completely paralyzed from the neck down.
I was really taken aback when they brought her to the hospital, and as an intern, I wouldn’t have been shocked by the hustle and bustle of the emergency room, much less the sight of a patient’s bleeding and twisted limbs, but she was just so beautiful! Too beautiful to be a woman of this world.
Snow-white skin, let a person suspect that she is always on the freezing point; pretty face, let a person biased that should not be her into the hospital; more peculiar is that kind of fairy temperament, as if never eat earthly fire like, I at first suspected that some people are mischievous, sent the wax museum in an extremely realistic and evocative of a statue in.
However, not far from the plastic image, a major car accident, her little Corsa into a pile of scrap metal, and she was severely damaged due to cervical vertebrae, completely below the neck, probably never move, I read in her medical record card: born in 1980, not yet twenty years old, God has deprived her of the right to laugh and leap in this life.
I hid in the lounge and practiced hundreds of times.
”I’m sorry, we did our best.”
‘Your daughter may not be very mobile for quite some time.’
‘It’s not necessarily hopeless to recover, it’s… hard to say.’
It is indeed hard to tell, especially after I found out that she has no family at all.
Even though I’ve known the name ‘orphan’ for a long time, it’s still hard for me to believe that a person would have no relatives whatsoever in the world, could that be the reason why she’s so ‘cold’.
‘Tell me the truth.’
‘Don’t lie to me about a word of it.’
‘Am I… not going to be able to move anymore?’
I was so cold that I was interrogated as if I were a prisoner, and I answered truthfully, suppressing a slight huff, without even saying anything to comfort me.
‘Sure you can do rehab, but there’s not much hope, like that Superman Levi or something, it’s better to be just that and nothing more.’
I support leaning against the wall, another patient with a wheelchair, she did not look away, biting her lower lip, snow-white face with a slight greenish color, see my heart again is intolerable.
‘I want to ask you for something.’
I was indeed surprised and delighted to hear her say so. According to the nurses, she made hardly a sound, and even when the pain was excruciating and she was sweating, she refused to ask for help, even to urinate or defecate, and patients in such a condition usually wailed or complained all day long, or asked for this or that for the sake of solitude and fear, but only she remained a statue of silence.
‘Sometimes it’s almost like she’s made of marble when you look at her lying there.’ The young nurse, who was new to the area like me, said, sticking her tongue out.
I look back at her in the hospital bed, not moved in the least.
‘Doesn’t anyone even visit her? Friends?’
‘Yes! A few women, who came and didn’t say a word, stood in silence for a long time, then took a deep look at her and left, and the atmosphere was… worse than if she had cried!’
I thus pitied her all the more, and was kind and doubly caring to her, and though there was but little I could do, and her icy countenance remained unchanged, at least a little light came into her gray eyes one morning when I went to her bedside.
Her voice was faint, so I lowered myself and attached my ear.
‘Please make love to me.’
”Harjo!” I sneezed so hard that the other patients and families in the ward looked over to see a hastily fleeing internist.
That’s all she’ll say to me every day from now on.
It was my duty as a physician not to ignore this patient, let alone accept this absolute violation of medical ethics, no matter how much the resident, the attending, or even the chief nursing officer insulted and despised me for my clumsiness, I was a sworn physician after all. But I couldn’t accuse her, refute her, or even tell anyone.
No one will believe it when they say that a beautiful patient who can’t move from the neck down asks to have sex with you? In the hospital room? Or are you just crazy with lust and want to take advantage of her? Whether she is sincere and voluntary or not, as long as I do it, damn it, and it’s death by a thousand cuts damn it is me.
But I couldn’t help but ask her why. On a night when there were no other patients in her ward, the nurses were dozing off, and I was the only one on duty, she told me quietly about her traumatic life: her parents died when she was young, she was abused by her adoptive father for a long time when she was a child, and her adoptive mother attempted to marry (or in fact sell) her to a mentally retarded man. As soon as she graduated from junior high school, she left home in a hurry, working and studying to make ends meet, and because of her bad heart and often harassed for her beauty, she stayed away from all men and worked furiously, wanting to save up enough money to go traveling around the world, and never come back to the place that caused her so much pain and sadness.
‘Nothing is possible now.’
‘All my life, I couldn’t get what I wanted.’
‘Not even love, if someone, at least, comes to love.’
I’m not a promiscuous person, but also by her said the nose sour, God is indeed too unfair! I couldn’t help but grab her chipped hand, and her facial expression struggled for a moment, perhaps because she wanted to respond to me but couldn’t.
‘Please come and love me, just once.’
‘I won’t tell anyone, I’ll just be grateful to you for the rest of my life.’
‘Consider it a celebration of my twentieth… birthday, okay?’
Still shaking my head, I walked slowly away, and when I couldn’t bear to turn around again, I saw that she was already full of tears.
I swept piles and piles of medical books off the shelves, resenting the fact that they could not help me save a kind and helpless person, and that the only thing that could give her a little comfort in her miserable life, and reduce her legacy, was something that was absolutely forbidden in the tenets of medicine, so what was the point of working for decades to get into a medical college, and seven years of hard study to become a doctor?
That night I lost sleep, closed my eyes are her pale face, gradually lost blood color of the lips opened: ‘Please make love to me.’
After that she stopped talking, not even to me, just shedding tears whenever she saw me, and even the patients and nurses next door noticed something strange, and as soon as they saw her shedding tears, they all turned their heads together to look at me, and although I did nothing, I was so ashamed that I couldn’t stand it.
I am ashamed, or precisely because I have done nothing.
The bottle of lilies at her bedside was withered, and the little nurse told me no one had come to visit for a long time, as if she herself didn’t want her friends to come.
‘It was as if she didn’t want to live, she refused to take her medication, I had to pour it in, I turned her over and rubbed her back, she wouldn’t cooperate either, and when I fed her, I soon realized that almost all of it was thrown up in the garbage can.’
‘No wonder, so youthful and beautiful, I would not want to live if I did.’
‘It’s hard to have the will to live without someone to love.’
One sentence struck my conflicted heart again! If I really agreed to have sex with her, would she even be loved, even if she had been loved? On the night of my shift alone, I paced back and forth in the corridor, like an anxious beast, and before I knew it, I was outside her hospital room.
There seems to be the sound of conversation inside, today transferred two to the hospice, her ward should be the only one left again, and now is not the meeting time, I look at the night nurse lying on the counter, quietly opened the door.
It was the window that was left open, the blinds rattling in the cold wind, the whistling wind sounding like someone roaring, and I closed the window gently, glancing at her before I left.
She opened her eyes, which she thought were asleep, and tears quickly flooded the frames of her eyes, ‘Yes, I promise… to make love to you.’ I swallowed hard, and for the first and last time, I saw a smile on her face, like a slow ripple in a pool of spring water…
I questioned her with my gaze and she nodded gently.
A torrent of water rushed out and I was finally fully inside her being! Her body shook slightly, her nails clenched deep into my white physician’s gown, almost piercing the skin of my back; it must have been a violent and everlasting shock for her! I myself was shaken as strongly as if for the first time, as a woman of tragic destiny attempted to grasp from me the only and last happiness of her life.
I didn’t realize that what I can give is not my medical skills, my love, but my most insignificant, daily production of energy, I don’t know what to be happy about, I just still look out of the room like a frightened rat, the fluorescent lights on the corridor are still white, no shadows passing by, no sound of footsteps, I am safe and sound to complete the biggest adventure of my life.
Was it for her beauty? I don’t admit that this is the death of a peony, it is purely because of my own damn fragile and vulnerable heart. My former medical school classmates used to make fun of me for being so soft-hearted that I couldn’t even kill a mouse, and if I had the opportunity to treat a seriously ill patient, I would have cried more than the patient’s family, right?
‘Does a doctor have to be bloodless and unloving?’
I hissed in my youthful exuberance, the words still ringing in my ears, that I had practiced the love of a doctor in such a worldly way, and still feeling like I was taking advantage of the blush, I withdrew, full of shame, and straightened out the physician’s gown that I had not dared to remove, and when I reached out to help her with it, ‘No, I want to stay inside… longer.’ Her expression was as sincere as that of a little girl in love.
There was nothing I could insist on, and I patted her cheek: ”Okay.”
‘Take care.’ ‘See you later.’ Without saying any of these words, I silently turned around and walked out of the room.
‘Thank you.’ She whispered, but it sounded loud as thunder, and I shut the door to my room sharply, thankfully the corridor was still dead silent, with a broken fluorescent light flickering on and off at the end, and I eased my pace over that way, one foot heavy, one light.
‘That lady is looking for you.’
I’ve been wandering around all day, avoiding her room on purpose because I don’t know how to see her, I dreamt all night yesterday that she said ‘thank you’ over and over again, so we did it over and over again, but then someone else, an old professor from the hospital I think, with white hair, stared at me and said over and over again ‘Damn’…
‘Who? Which lady?’
‘Which other one? The one who cried as soon as she saw you! By the way, how exactly do you bully people?”
What bullying? She volunteered – I couldn’t say that for the life of me, so I gave the little nurse a hard stare and dragged my heavy feet to her bed.
She still wanted me to attach myself to it, and I looked back to see that there was no one else in the hospital room before I slowly lowered myself down.
‘I’m going to sue you for rape.’
”Harjo!” I sneezed a huge sneeze and my whole body jumped in surprise as if I had been hit by a high voltage, only to see that she had a cold face and she wasn’t kidding.
”That’s right, you will say that I volunteered, but do you have any proof? No. No matter how you look at it, people think that it was you, the intern doctor, who fell for the patient’s beauty and raped her while she was paralyzed and unable to resist.”
I couldn’t believe my ears, how did the original alabaster and poor girl transform into a demon overnight and aggressively attack me with a miserable white face?
”You can’t do that even if I want to, what kind of doctor has met up with a patient in the ward? Besides, now I’m suing you for rape, you’re finished! Your career, your future, will be ruined, and you’ll go to jail for at least a few years…”
She was as beautiful as ever, and said these intimidating words without snorting her teeth, but I was cold from the soles of my feet all the way up, with the fear of stirring up a zombie.
‘Of course I have proof! Look at that blackout lighting behind you, don’t you think there’s an extra little black dot? That’s right, that’s the pinhole camera, and you and I… all the way through your rape of me… it’s all recorded, hard evidence.’
Fairy jump! I didn’t expect people to come prepared, I am really stupid! Nowadays, women are too poisonous. In the newspaper, I have read that a woman who was paralyzed from the neck down instigated her lover to kill her husband, but I did not expect that a woman who was paralyzed from the neck down was still in the mood to design other people’s wealth.
‘Of course someone helped me, how else would I have removed your semen for evidence? You only remembered to look outside to see if there was anyone, but you didn’t notice under the bed. I’ve heard that only the smartest people get into medical school, but I guess it’s not so good!”
She should have laughed at this point. I was filled with remorse, regret, panic… I couldn’t help but cry out in agony at the thought of my life being ruined, even more so than her, and I fell to my knees right on the spot.
‘There’s no need to beg me, and it’s not your money that I want, what use is money to me? I just don’t want my life to end like this, so I have to catch someone to bury with me, you can only blame your own bad luck, hahaha…”
She really laughed like a blood-sucking ghost, and I couldn’t wait to grab her by the neck. In vain I gave her so much love and care, in vain I took the risk to fulfill her lifelong wish, but in the end I fell into her terrible trap. Oh my god! Is this the end of me? Jailed in prison, locked up with those cowards, coming out as a punk with a previous conviction, not to mention not having a physician to work for, even if I went to work part-time, people wouldn’t want a psychopathic maniac who raped a crippled woman!
She stopped talking, her face returned to a completely calm expression, let me kneel on the cold floor and begged bitterly, soft and hard, just not moved at all, heard the nurses talking and laughing from afar, I abruptly stood up! Gazed fiercely at the bed of this snake beauty, the heart secretly made a decision.
I stood by her bedside on moonlit nights, looking at her with eyes that were no longer tender and caring, and I came to see her one last time.
Now to either her death, or I live the situation, rather than letting her destroy me, I would like to do her first, anyway, the physician to kill is much easier than to save a person, anyway, she is not benevolent in the first, do not blame me for not righteousness, anyway, betting on not being caught than being accused of rape definitely want to go to jail for a greater chance. She has no family, no one will care about the cause of her death; as for the co-conspirator, we can only see the trick, maybe see my ruthless, scared not to dare to act rashly is not certain; in short, since she said ‘to sue me for rape’ can be seen or not sue, then I let her never sue it!
If she hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have had a chance! It seems that she may not be so smart! I wanted to call PAVULON for her, but it took a long time and I was afraid that she would have a chance to call for help; if I called CYANIDE, I was afraid that the body would turn black and be suspected; then it was simple to use potassium, since her heart was not good in the first place, suddenly dying of a heart attack shouldn’t be a strange thing, right?
I double-checked to make sure no one was nearby and no one had seen me come in, grabbed the syringe with my gloves and eased the potassium that would immediately stop her heartbeat in over the cork of the IV bottle she was hooked up to, strangely my hands didn’t shake at all, it looked like I could be a good doctor, I really could.
She suddenly opened her eyes! The eyes were unusually clear, becoming the only source of light in the darkness, and I was startled! But without stopping the movement of her hands, her gaze followed my arm to the syringe to the IV bottle to the tube that was delivering the rosy liquid to her, and then back to my face, her expression becoming surprisingly soft, just like the moment I entered her last night.
‘Thank you.’
I was sitting in the corridor of the hospital with one glove still in my hand, the other glove and the syringe had been lost somewhere in the panic, the counter of the nurse on duty was empty, only an alarm clock ticking, an occasional moan of a patient came from the large ward, and in this bed in front of me lay a woman who had decided the fate of my life, and who had lost her voice.
The liquid from the IV bottle was still entering her body drop by drop; the bag under her bed was opened, but the only thing in it was the clothes she had on when she was admitted to the hospital; the blackout light on the wall had been removed, and it was just an ordinary light with no difference; the guest book at the duty counter had been blown over by the wind, and except for the few days when she was just hospitalized, no one had come to see her for a long time… All these so-called video recordings, All the so-called videotaping, evidence storage, and the trap of suing me for rape were all fabricated by her.
After saying ‘thank you’, she calmly watched the drip flow, and I froze as if the ‘stop’ button had been pressed, and heard her voice grow faint: ‘I don’t want to live a life like this. I don’t want to live, but I can’t kill myself, so I have to rely on you. You’re a good person, you wouldn’t have done it otherwise…”
Her head suddenly tilted to the side, and her black hair cascaded to the side, covering half of her snow-white cheeks, revealing only one eye, which gazed fixedly at me, and never moved again.
I’m a good man, am I a good man? I can’t save a person, I killed a person, the person I killed instead said I was a good person, I am a good person, am I a good person? I mumbled and walked out of the hospital building, there was no one outside, only the cold moonlight all over the place.