The thickest of silken envelopes would soon arrive for me as well. Tomato red, fiery red, the red of oxygen-rich blood. I noticed the postmark date for this invite was weeks ago, so it must have gotten delayed. Time of the bash was set in two weeks, at the end of Spring Festival Golden Week on February 1.
It was soon to be the year of the rat and an embroidered piece of the invite explained what the coming zodiac year entailed. Men born in the year of the rat are curious, handy, and adaptive to new environments. Women born in the year of the rat are organized, neat, and place a great value on family life. Notable people who are rats: fútbol superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, basketball all-star LeBron James, and the Great One, Wayne Gretzky. Please join us at our home to celebrate history, family, and the importance of coming together.
I wondered why Fang stopped there. He could have continued to list notable people born in the year of the rat. It took only a minute of googling on my part to find more.
Civil rights activist Rosa Parks.
Computer scientist Alan Turing.
Former president Richard Nixon.
The world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the Sheep.
Dad.
* * *
—
AT THE END OF DECEMBER, some people in China, in the city of Wuhan, had contracted pneumonia, a cluster of cases stemming from a visit to a fish market earlier that month. Cases continued throughout January, and details about them were scarce. Except that it turned out not to be pneumonia and to be a new kind of disease, from an unknown virus, possibly derived from bats that were being sold illegally at the market. I didn’t know whether I should be paying attention or not. I’d never been to Wuhan and was no virologist. My mother hadn’t texted me about it, nor my brother. The local news touched on it briefly and went straight into weather and traffic delays. The international news spent a minute longer on China and then moved to turmoil in the Middle East.
But viruses have always fascinated me, and I couldn’t look at a New York skyline without thinking of them. The water towers on many buildings reminded me of bacteriophages, or viruses that infect bacteria, with a capsid-bound head and legs that can attach themselves to the host and force entry. Fascinating to me that viruses could infect living cells and take over, but not be living themselves. Only carriers of genetic code, only genes bound by membrane. Not being alive means that viruses are ungovernable by evolutionary laws like survival of the fittest or reproductive strength. So, without this basic constraint and purpose, how have they persisted through millennia, invading cell after cell? Plagues, the outcomes are always bad for animals, for humans, but viruses themselves are neither good nor bad. They have no moral compass or desire to live, and so the only reason I had for their existence was random chance.
* * *
—
ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 17, at around 3:00 p.m., the time our office seemed to have the most visitors, a woman I’d never met came in and asked if she could have a few moments of my time. Another attending was here, but she was on the other side of the room, wearing large, noise-canceling headphones that looked like earmuffs and plowing through her emails at a hundred words a minute.
Where should I sit? the woman asked, and I gestured to Reese’s empty chair. Reese had a messy desk that I tried not to look at. Pens were scattered everywhere and papers fanned out, brown rings where coffee mugs used to be. Some of his shelving had collapsed yesterday, over his desk and keyboard. Against my advice, he had stuck them to the wall with Command strips instead of real screws.
The woman took notice and said the desk was in violation of several health codes, hinging on unsafe.
My co-worker is not well, I said.
Who? She asked and after I told her, she wrote a note to herself, on a small spiral notebook, that she had in her black blazer pocket.
I asked if she was a detective. Had Reese perished on vacation and an ongoing investigation been started?
She said no, not a detective, and that my office mate who, in the workplace, should be more correctly referred to as Dr. Mayhew, was doing better. Like all of us with respect to wellness, he was taking it one day at a time.
But I’m not here to discuss Dr. Mayhew, she continued, and produced from her black tote a manila folder that had my full name, first and last, handwritten on the tab. I’d watched enough television now to know. Appearance of a mysterious blazered woman was never good, compounded with your name on a tab was worse. But I was taken aback that employee records were still being kept manually, that this folder, my folder, had been filled in and written on, then put into a physical cabinet to be plucked out for today, and that there were still cabinets around and not supercooled rooms with banks of supercooled processors.
I asked the woman about all this.
We’re HR, she said, not Mission Impossible.
I laughed, because this time I got the reference. I’d seen one of those movies, I said. Disavowed. Crazy stunts. Boom, bam, pow.
She smiled at me, but it was an uncomfortable smile, like she knew something I didn’t and wasn’t looking forward to what was ahead. Then she opened my file and started to read from it. It was my CV and certifications, a short paragraph of biographical information.
You have a brother in Greenwich, parents in Shanghai, though your father recently passed, our most sincere condolences.
I tilted my head and asked how she’d heard about that.
About what?
My father.
It’s stated here in your file.
But how did it get in my file? I hadn’t told HR in any official capacity; I hadn’t updated any biographical information since I was hired.
She straightened the papers in my file. Now the four sheets of paper were perfectly stacked.
Is this information incorrect? she asked.
I said no.
Then she didn’t see the issue. The woman’s eyes were uneven, in that one sat slightly higher than the other. Her cheeks had a layer of fine peach fuzz.
Recently we processed your raise, she said. Thank you for your hard work and dedication to our hospital. Your director deeply respects and advocates for you. He has identified you as a must-keep personnel, so we will do our best.
But, the woman continued, when we processed your raise, we did notice some inconsistencies. For instance, we noticed that after visiting China for two days last September, you resumed work that immediate Monday.
The director’s paranoia became my own, and my mind jumped to whether this woman was here to punish me for having taken an unsanctioned trip to a foreign land. I’d learned about the McCarthy era in school and how ever since the words communism and red have become synonymous with China and its people. Some patients liked to know if I was born here, if English was my first language, and I worried that this woman was here to ask the third follow-up question that those patients never thought of but an unsolicited mailing from a random Asian cultural center had: Still, despite being born here and fluent, were you ever part of the CCP, and if so, do you plan to quit?
Visiting China is now okay, I stated, stiffening my back and imagining myself, as the doorman had taught me, in the center of an elevator going up. Borders are open and international relations, at least superficially, are not awful. But had I forgotten to submit a travel form to them or to the internal board of review?
She said it wasn’t that, and I could visit China as much as I liked. Neither HR nor the IRB was the TSA.
A toss-up, who had more power in this hospital, HR or the IRB or accounts payable, though each group would probably name itself. Had I ever met an IRB or an accounts payable employee? No. And this was the closest I’d ever been to any HR personnel.
I asked if her coming today had anything to do with Wuhan.
Wuhan?
I stayed in Shanghai and nowhere else, I said. I explained that the two cities are far apart and as different as Omaha and Manhattan. Wuhan being Omaha, an inland city filled with nice midwestern people who took on industry jobs and believed in a hard day’s work. It isn’t their fault, I said abruptly, about the situation now developing there.
She raised her eyebrows and asked which situation was I referring to?