In the Emergency Room
June marked the beginning of the rainy season in Xia City.
Beneath a sky dense with dark clouds, rain stitched itself across the city, drop after relentless drop, until the dry pavement darkened and gleamed with water.
A gurney sped across the slick ground, its wheels cutting through shallow puddles and flinging up beads of rainwater. Frantic voices followed close behind, family members calling out as doctors issued urgent instructions.
Mu Wan stepped into the hospital lobby with an umbrella in one hand and a carton of hot congee in the other. Warm steam seeped through the paper container, carrying a faint trace of comfort into the cold, chaotic air.
“I’m here. What floor are you on?”
She closed her umbrella and threaded her way through the crowd toward the elevators.
On the phone, Lin Wei gave her the floor and room number. Mu Wan murmured an acknowledgment and glanced up at the display.
The elevator had only just reached the twelfth floor.
It would be a while before it came back down.
Outside, the rain fell harder.
Accidents were more common in weather like this, and several newly arrived patients lay on gurneys nearby, their clothes smeared with blood and grime.
Groans of pain mingled with the cries of frightened relatives and the clipped voices of doctors and nurses. The lobby filled with a terrible kind of liveliness, all panic, pain, and grief.
Lin Wei was still talking on the phone.
Mu Wan answered absently, her gaze following one of the patients as the gurney disappeared into the large treatment room beside the lobby.
The room was spacious, its heavy metal doors thrown open. People moved constantly in and out, white coats flashing through the crowd like brief streaks of light.
Mu Wan watched for a few seconds.
Something about the oppressive atmosphere tightened around her chest. She was about to look away when her attention caught on one quiet corner of the room.
Amid all the movement and noise, that small space seemed unnaturally still.
A man and woman stood beside a hospital bed, both wrapped in bandages. On the bed lay a young boy, his body stained with blood and dirt.
His eyes were closed.
His face had gone gray.
There was no sign of life.
A doctor and a nurse stood on the other side of the bed.
Neither of them was treating him anymore.
The nurse had lowered her head, her eyes rimmed with red.
Beside her, the male doctor bent slightly and took the boy’s blood-and-mud-streaked hand in his.
Mu Wan found herself looking at him.
He was striking in a way that did not demand attention, yet somehow held it.
His features were exceptionally refined, from the high sweep of his brows to the clear, steady eyes beneath them. His nose was straight, his lips thin and composed. There was something cool and rain-washed about him, the austere clarity of bamboo after a storm.
He stood at the center of the chaos, yet somehow apart from it, distant as a mountain beyond the noise of the world.
A few drops of diluted blood stained the cuff of his white coat, slowly spreading across the fabric.
He did not seem to notice.
His long fingers enclosed the boy’s hand. His eyes remained lowered, his expression quiet.
For some reason, the tightness in Mu Wan’s chest eased.
She blinked and suddenly remembered something she had seen years ago.
At a railway station, a passenger had collapsed and died in the waiting hall. Afterward, a Buddhist monk had sat beside the body, holding the dead man’s hand while performing rites for him.
Hospitals were no strangers to death.
Even so, when the doctor finally released the boy’s hand and drew the white sheet over his face, a faint chill settled inside Mu Wan.
The man and woman beside the bed broke into anguished cries.
At that same moment, as though he had sensed her watching, the doctor lifted his head.
Their eyes met.
His eyes were calm and unfathomably deep. His gaze passed over her lightly, cool as wind moving through bamboo, and something inside Mu Wan seemed to still with it.
A heartbeat later, she looked away.
The elevator chimed.
It had finally reached the first floor.
Mu Wan glanced at the three characters above the treatment room.
Emergency Department.
She frowned and spoke into the phone.
“Do you have an emergency department upstairs?”
Lin Wei went silent.
“What emergency department? Which building are you in?”
“The one directly opposite the hospital entrance.”
“That’s the emergency building! I’m in the inpatient building!”
“…”
By the time Mu Wan finally reached Lin Wei’s room, her friend had already unfolded the small over-bed table and was waiting impatiently for dinner.
Lin Wei had undergone an appendectomy two days earlier and was restricted to a liquid diet. While Mu Wan had been away filming, Lin Wei had complained endlessly over the phone about the hospital’s terrible plain congee.
So after wrapping up the shoot in Wen City and returning to Xia City, Mu Wan had barely set down her luggage before stopping at Xu’s Congee Shop and bringing some over.
“How are you feeling?” Mu Wan asked as she set out the bowl and spoon. “Does it still hurt?”
“Only if I pull at the incision.”
Mu Wan dragged over a chair and sat down.
She had only just returned from Wen City, where the weather had been hot and dry, so she was dressed simply in a black T-shirt and white shorts. She crossed her long legs and leaned back, relaxed and unhurried.
Mu Wan was an actress, though hardly a famous one.
Her face was small and finely oval, with a straight nose, full red lips, a delicate chin, and large dark eyes that were naturally alluring without seeming deliberately seductive.
At five foot seven, she was all long legs and a narrow waist, her slender figure softened by generous curves. She was slim without looking fragile, her proportions striking enough to draw attention even when she made no effort to attract it.
Her beauty had a slightly untamed quality to it, reminiscent of a glamorous 1980s Hong Kong screen siren. Vivid without being gaudy, hers was the kind of beauty that drew the eye while somehow remaining just out of reach.
Lin Wei blew on a spoonful of congee before eating it. Then she glanced at Mu Wan.
Mu Wan was staring out the window, apparently lost in thought.
“What are you thinking about?”
Lin Wei waved her spoon in front of her face.
Outside, the rain had softened.
Large droplets gathered along the edge of the window before rolling down the glass, leaving winding trails behind them.
For some reason, they reminded Mu Wan of the doctors moving endlessly through the emergency department.
“I saw a doctor while I was waiting for the elevator,” she said. “There was a little boy who had died. It looked like the doctor was performing some kind of rite for him.”
She told Lin Wei what she had seen.
A doctor belonged to the living.
A rite like that belonged to the dead.
Seeing the two embodied in the same man had struck Mu Wan as strangely contradictory.
Lin Wei, however, did not look surprised.
Instead, her eyes lit up.
“Was Doctor Liu handsome?”
Mu Wan laughed. “You know him?”
She thought of the doctor’s face again.
“Yeah. He was.”
His features had been understated, but difficult to forget.
Especially the way he had looked at her.
“Liu Qianxiu from surgery,” Lin Wei said. “Everyone calls him Daoist Liu. He’s basically the collective crush of every woman in Tang’er Hospital.”
A few days earlier, one of Lin Wei’s coworkers had rushed her to the emergency department, and Liu Qianxiu had been the doctor who examined her.
She had been half-dead with pain at the time.
Apparently, not too far gone to fall in love at first sight.
After surgery, she had immediately cornered a nurse and extracted every scrap of information she could.
“Daoist Liu?” Mu Wan leaned back in her chair. “That’s a pretty distinctive nickname. Why do they call him that?”
“He practices Daoism. I heard he takes four days off every month to retreat to a Daoist temple for spiritual practice.” Lin Wei scooped up another spoonful of congee. “And if someone in the emergency department doesn’t make it, he sometimes performs rites for them.”
She paused.
“But he’s incredibly distant. He barely socializes with anyone. It’s like he has no worldly desires at all. He practically lives like some immortal who wandered down among ordinary people.”
Mu Wan finally understood the impression Liu Qianxiu had left on her.
No wonder there had been something almost otherworldly about him.
“So that’s why.”
She thought for a moment.
“I guess that’s part of Daoist practice. Detachment from worldly desires. Cultivating the mind. Seeking transcendence.”
Mu Wan let the subject drop there.
Talking too much about someone behind his back did not sit well with her.
Besides, she had a favorable impression of Liu Qianxiu.
There was something remarkably untainted about him, a clarity that seemed to go deeper than appearance.
As a doctor, he did everything he could to save his patients.
As a Daoist practitioner, he offered a final rite to those he could not save.
Whether such rituals truly accomplished anything was beside the point.
For grieving families, perhaps they offered a little comfort. A little peace.
Mu Wan suddenly looked at Lin Wei.
“Actually, the name Liu Qianxiu sounds familiar.”
Lin Wei stirred her congee with her spoon.
“The head of the Liu family, one of the Four Young Masters of Xia City, is also named Liu Qianxiu.”
— To be continued in Part 2 —
Edited
by Little Kitty on 19/09/20
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