Kwan Yin in the ER

Like a mist curtaining from the surface of a black deep pond, I rise up into voices, slabs of hard sound, scrapes of metal, thuds and clinks. I realize I lie on my side. And just across from me, on a wheeled table like mine (we are two reclining figures on a tomb) in this huge brightness that allows us no modest hiding of blemish or sag, there looking back at me is a man whose skin gathers the light at his naked shin.

He is as dark as the pond from which I have risen, but his skin, unlike that deadness, gleams with highlights of warm mahogany. He is trying to pull himself to a sitting position, elbows jabbing air, the hospital gown falling back from his wrinkled thigh. No one comes to help us, we're utterly alone with each other here in the bowels of Highland Hospital, the long crowded corridor and warren of rooms that is Emergency.

Now we are joined by an intern clutching a clipboard. She has a lovely Asian face like Kwan Yin, goddess of compassion.

"What symptoms are you having?" she asks me.

I can't quite manage a response. One day I had begun to vomit and then couldn't stop: Didn't I already tell two groups of interns about this?

I lie back, imagining this white-coated young woman in the elaborate headdress and flowing robe that Kwan Yin wears, her dress blown by the sea wind. Kwan Yin of the South Seas, savior of fishermen--help me through this storm. In ancient times, in each of the bays and inlets of Southern China, there resided a local goddess. She would be called upon in the midst of rain and lightning and violent seas to rescue the fishermen from danger. When Buddhism came to China, these salvific female figures were reborn as Kwan Yin.

My week of not eating and regular retching did feel like a perilous journey. Racked by my body's revulsion, I had found my capacity to meditate fading away. I arrived in a condition beyond choice and discernment. If I was still an actor in my own drama--that pale wispy production--it went something like this: Imagine looking at a stage, dim and shrouded, with willow trees and distant moon, a fountain amid dark shrubs, a spooky 19th-century stage set, fit for the appearance of ghosts. Then, enter a shadowy figure who announces in a thready voice, "I will try to eat again." That was the only willed action I had participated in for the last several days; the rest--the vomiting, the falling asleep, the waking up--all happened by itself.

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