After Aston was taken away, Qin Siyu lived at the hospital every day and slept in the dormitory. He never allowed himself to be alone.
He would not even stay with just one other person. There had to be at least three people present.
People came and went at all hours in the hospital. Qin Siyu considered it the safest place for him.
For now, the only thing he could do against Alex Aston and his wife was protect himself.
Everything else—kneeling before Alex Aston and begging the couple to accept them, or scaling the walls of the Aston estate to smuggle Aston out—was something from a movie.
Aston would never agree to his father’s demand that he return to “normal.” If Qin Siyu had the misfortune to fall into Alex’s hands now, he might well end up a corpse.
Qin Siyu had no intention of taking such a risk.
But… Qin Siyu was desperately miserable.
Before people of such a social class, he was powerless.
Of all people, the one he loved had to be named Aston, and had to be the family’s only son.
He waited for two entire weeks.
He could not sleep at all. But he knew he had to, so he wrote himself a prescription for sleeping pills and had a pharmacist fill it.
He did not dare take them in the usual way, however. He was a physician and, as Chief Resident, had operations to perform. Sleeping pills had side effects.
Every day, Qin Siyu took the sleeping pills at six-thirty in the evening and got up at two in the morning, giving his body six hours to clear the medication completely before starting work at eight.
Qin Siyu could not accept even the slightest possibility of sluggishness while he was working.
At work he did not think of Aston. He kept himself occupied to the point of exhaustion.
But the instant he stopped, he seemed to lose his soul.
He had always believed in himself. When faced with a problem, he would struggle with all his strength until he found some way to resolve it, bringing matters gradually under control. Even when things did not go exactly as he wished, at least they would not run completely wild.
But now… he had no idea whatsoever what he could do.
He could only wait.
And when all a person can do is wait for something, there is no way to be at peace.
He kept wandering the hospital like a ghost.
He did not really look at anything or think about anything. He simply circled like a trapped animal.
He could pace around an examination counter, circling it all night.
Eventually, medical staff started whispering. “Dr. Chin… what’s wrong with him? Is he all right? He’s been walking around this counter since two in the morning, all the way until breakfast at seven…”
Realizing he looked like a madman in other people’s eyes, Qin Siyu began wearing out the hours on other floors.
He kept waiting.
Two weeks later, the latest news about Dr. Freeman began to circulate in medical circles.
At first it was vague, with little detail and only among medical professionals. But soon the mainstream newspapers and broadcasters were reporting it everywhere.
A miracle of medicine!
Not only the Kennedys: now even the only son of a wealthy businessman was going to undergo the operation! Rumor said his family was among the richest in the United States!
The reports gave no surname, but they provided details: young, handsome, wealthy, brilliant, recipient of numerous honors and awards, and a rising star in finance. Yet even such a man had “fallen into depravity” and been unable to resist mental illness. He and his parents were suffering terribly, so they had appealed to Dr. Freeman, who had gladly agreed to help. The operation was scheduled for eight in the morning, the day after tomorrow.
The miracle of modern medicine would save another life.
Qin Siyu’s breath stopped when he read it.
Kingsy! Kingsy!
It had to be Kingsy!!!
How could Alex Aston do this?!
He was still so powerless that he could not even get there in time. The earliest flight was the next morning, and although flights were not as long as they had been in the thirties, the journey would still take at least twenty-four hours… and the operation was at eight a.m. the day after tomorrow.
He could only ask the one person he knew for help. Qin Siyu stood in the hospital lobby, telephone in hand, his blood running cold and his fingers trembling. When Cliff answered, Qin Siyu could no longer stand. He fell to his knees, clutching the receiver, and sobbed, “Please… please, Endicott Cliff, stop them… Could you at least try? Don’t let Kingsley undergo that operation!”
Tears covered his face. He kept repeating, “Please, please, stop them… stop Alex Aston… at least… at least make them delay it… don’t let them do it so hastily… please ask them to reconsider…”
People in the hospital stared at him in shock.
A doctor was having a complete emotional collapse right there.
Cliff only sighed, his voice filled with pain too. “I’m sorry, Sean. I can’t.” “Kingsley’s father is extremely authoritarian. Nobody can sway him. Do you know, I heard… Kingsley has already fainted twice during the electric shocks. And he’s such a strong man, physically and mentally. Alex Aston won’t let his son defy him, and he won’t let his son destroy his family.”
After a pause, Cliff went on. “Sean… but I can confirm that the operation will be very safe. Freeman has already performed two hundred of them. I can’t get in touch with Kingsley, but his father, Mr. Aston, told me a little. They’ll be extraordinarily careful with Kingsley’s operation. This time they won’t cut into anything without a clear view. They’ll open the skull. Sean, you’re a surgeon yourself; you know that craniotomy is now a highly developed procedure. Dr. Freeman will make sure he can see properly, then separate just a tiny section of the white-matter fibers joining the prefrontal lobes to the other areas of the brain. Just one millimeter. They won’t touch anything else. They say intelligence, memory, and movement won’t be affected.”
“There’s controversy over it in the medical profession, Endicott! Even if it succeeds, even if he becomes ‘calm,’ will he still be Kingsley? Will he still be Kingsley?”
Cliff was silent for a long time.
“Please…” Qin Siyu said again. “Since you can contact Alex Aston, please tell him the operation is controversial. There are problems with it. I’ve heard that some patients actually—”
“Sean, his family has the best medical team working for them. He’s already consulted leading neurologists.” Cliff’s voice sounded distant as he interrupted, and it, too, held pain. “I truly… have no way to change his parents’ minds.”
In truth, eight years ago he had already foreseen that his friend and the man he loved could never come to a good end. But Kingsley had said then that the two of them were willing to bear whatever the future brought.
Finally Cliff said, “The plan should be extremely safe. Sean, Kingsley was always a man who showed little emotion. I’ve never seen him passionate about anything. After the operation, Kingsley simply… won’t feel that kind of obsessive love for you anymore.”
Qin Siyu’s vision went black. Tears fell to the floor uncontrollably, pattering one after another. Waves of dizziness rolled over him. His body went limp, and he ended up on all fours, like a dog.
The telephone receiver drooped from his hand and swung back and forth, like a rope hanging in hell, like the pendulum of a clock counting down.
He was going to forget him… Kingsy was going to forget him…
A nurse spotted him and cried out, “Dr. Chin! What’s wrong? Are you all right?!”
Qin Siyu was ghastly pale, icy cold, and drenched in waves of cold sweat. The nurse’s voice sounded as though it were coming through a layer of water, blurred and drifting. His breathing was very fast. Knowing he could not hold on, he instructed her, “Please… help me… lie down, and bring me some water.”
The hospital lobby swarmed with people.
Everyone hurried about. Gurney wheels rolled over the floor, the heels of leather shoes clicked against it without pause. Qin Siyu lay with his face turned to one side and watched them.
Amid all that noise, he lay on the cold lobby floor. Sometimes someone glanced at him before rushing deeper into the hospital. It seemed that he alone had nothing urgent to do, nothing left to hope for.
The stark white lights overhead stabbed at his eyes. They illuminated Qin Siyu’s solitary, desolate figure among the ceaseless passing feet, making him look terribly out of place.
Workers from the morgue came out pushing a bed.
Qin Siyu even felt as though he had become a corpse.
They had come to take him away.
Three days later, Qin Siyu returned to California from New York.
He had accomplished nothing.
Even though he knew he could not make it in time, he had spent a great deal of money on a plane ticket and gone to New York anyway. To think that his first flight had been under circumstances like these.
He asked a friend to look into the matter. Some hospitals openly disapproved of the procedure, but others were willing to provide facilities for Freeman’s operations.
Opening someone’s skull ought to be a major undertaking. Qin Siyu asked the friend to search the medical journals for New York hospitals where Dr. Freeman had collaborated and give him several names, beginning with the largest.
But there was too little information. In the end Qin Siyu had to visit the big hospitals himself, one by one.
Once in New York, Qin Siyu went from hospital to hospital, asking questions and trying to find out. He had actually hoped all along that he would never find anything. Then, at nine that evening, quite unexpectedly, a nurse he stopped happened to work in neurosurgery. “Dr. Freeman? The rich businessman’s son? That operation was finished this morning, wasn’t it? Why? What did you want to know?”
“Are you…” Qin Siyu felt his heart stop. “Were you in the operating room?”
“No,” she answered. “Dr. Freeman brought his own team of doctors and nurses.”
Qin Siyu asked bitterly, “Did the operation go well?”
“Yes! Very well!”
“Then,” Qin Siyu asked, “what about the ‘patient’?”
“They observed him in a private room for a while, then took him home,” said the nurse. “His family has a medical team and equipment of its own. He’ll recover better there than here.”
“Did you…” Qin Siyu asked again. “Did you see him after the operation?”
“I did. I saw them in the corridor when they took him to his private room.”
She was clearly a supporter of the surgery. “He was so handsome! I heard he’d had serious emotional problems, but now he’s better!”
After returning to California, Qin Siyu racked his brains all the next day and still could not think of anything he could do.
How could he, on his own, stand against Alex Aston?
Or rather, how could he stand against all of America, against the whole world?
He went back to work in California.
His patients were still waiting for him.
But outside working hours, he drifted about like a lost soul.
That day and the next, while continuing his normal duties, Qin Siyu read the news whenever he had a spare moment.
He was terrified of seeing a report.
After thinking about it again, he still held one faint hope: what if that nurse… wasn’t really a nurse at all?
What if she had been lying to him?
That could happen, couldn’t it?
He kept pleading and praying silently: let the operation have been postponed, let Alex Aston have reconsidered. Or perhaps something had gone wrong during the surgery—Kingsy had only just been subjected to electric shocks. Perhaps his body had been unable to withstand the anesthetic or the procedure, and he was recovering… Should Qin Siyu go to New York again? Then he would prepare to leave. What he might actually be able to change… he would think about later.
On the second and third days after the supposed operation, the newspapers still carried no news. That rekindled a faint hope in Qin Siyu.
Perhaps the operation really had not gone ahead?
He was already planning to request another few days off after his shift and return to New York.
Even if he still could not change anything.
That afternoon, a little after four, shortly before the end of his shift, one of Qin Siyu’s patients died.
The patient had been admitted with a fracture, and Qin Siyu had operated on him. Several days later, however, his condition deteriorated abruptly. A fat embolism blocked a pulmonary artery. He struggled to breathe, became confused, and fell into a coma. The medical team did everything they could, but could not bring him back.
Qin Siyu checked his heartbeat and pupils, put down his instruments, and knew the patient really was dead.
Yes, Qin Siyu thought. Everything had seemed to be going well… then all at once the patient’s condition had worsened, and the shadow of death had fallen in a moment, covering everything. Suddenly there had been nothing anyone could do. Hadn’t he seen enough of this as a physician? Why had he thought they would be spared?
It had happened so suddenly that the patient had been resuscitated in the ward, and died there.
When the examination was over, Qin Siyu raised his eyes.
Everything had happened too quickly. Flowers sent by friends still stood on the bedside cabinet, along with a newspaper the family had been reading.
The newspaper lay there with the print facing outward.
Qin Siyu gave it a glance, and his gaze froze.
There was a photograph taken before Aston’s operation.
His face was not visible. The subject of the photograph was Dr. Freeman, standing by a bed and smiling faintly at the camera, with nurses and doctors standing behind it. Behind Freeman, a little farther away, lay someone on the hospital bed…
The person was not in focus. His body was blurred and no one else would have recognized him. But Qin Siyu knew him far too well.
Kingsy.
Beneath the photograph, the newspaper cheerfully proclaimed:
[Dr. Freeman Succeeds Again! Son of Wealthy Businessman Restored to Health!]
Qin Siyu walked over numbly, lowered his eyes, and scanned two lines.
The newspaper was plainly exultant.
[Prefrontal Leucotomy Demonstrates Its Wonders Once Again… The businessman’s son has awakened and is now emotionally stable. Dr. Freeman reports that the patient is calm and cooperative for the first time, much gentler than before the operation.
His family says he has returned to normal. In the past he maintained an illicit intimate relationship with another man for a long period, causing his family great distress. Now he no longer has those inclinations.
Four days after the procedure, reporters met the patient himself. He is fully conscious and able to perform simple activities, even read books and discuss their contents with others. Evaluation found his thinking indistinguishable from that of an ordinary person. Asked about the past, he said he had been ill then, had lost his reason, and promised his family he would live respectably from now on.
Because of the patient’s special status, at present—]
Qin Siyu stood motionless, staring at the newspaper.
Look at the name.
A reputable publication. An authoritative reporter.
His hands trembled slightly.
The operation had succeeded.
At least Kingsy hadn’t “gotten worse.”
Thank goodness.
Thank goodness.
Just as Cliff had said, he could still work and live normally. He would simply never have feelings for Qin Siyu again.
A long time later Qin Siyu looked out the window. An eagle was flying freely high into the sky.
Qin Siyu thought: at last his own death certificate had arrived.
So this was what it looked like.
How could Kingsy still be Kingsy?
Kingsy was, in truth, already dead.
And what about himself?
The moment he learned the news, he too had died in truth.
In the end, they had still died together.
A nurse entered carrying a form. Seeing Qin Siyu, she asked, “Dr. Chin, has the patient passed away?”
Qin Siyu looked at her and nodded.
The nurse filled something in on the form and asked again, “Dr. Chin, the time of death was…?”
The time of death?
Whose?
Qin Siyu lowered his eyes. After a long while he raised them again and calmly looked at the nurse. Unusually, he even gave the year. “Time of death: January 12, 1942, at 4:15 p.m.”