The Waiting Room - Part II
Last week, while in the waiting room for a doctor’s appointment, our narrator is confronted by a mysterious woman who says, “I need your help to die.” After a disappointing and inconclusive doctor’s visit, our narrator leaves with the grandma and decides to think about it.
I’m at the hospital again the next day. The doctor turns in surprise when I enter, as if he didn’t just summon me from the waiting room. I can see a gold chain and imitation Yeezys under his white robe. Again, he addresses my scan instead of my face as he reports he talked to his colleagues, some of the best pulmonologists, radiologists, and oncologists in the country—maybe even the world. “They were my classmates,” he brags. I notice the framed diploma behind him. Next to it is an even larger framed photo of the doctor posing to simulate an optical illusion next to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, except his hands are inches off, leaving a gap of sky and cloud between his palms and the tower, as if the building was falling on him as opposed to him propping it up.
“No one has seen anything like this before.” He sounds proud.
The medical assistants took another set of scans earlier and confirmed what I already knew: the holes are moving every day.
Today, my small intestine bears the spots. The biggest hole remains on my left lung, but it has grown spikes: a sea urchin drifting near my aorta.
“We will need to keep monitoring,” the doctor says.
“For how long?” I cringe at my tone, which comes out a lot whinier than I intend.
“We need them to remain in place for at least three days before we can go in and examine them. I’m afraid if we run tests on them now, they will cause damage to your organs. You will have to come in every day for a new diagnostic.”
“For how long?” I push.
He looks at me in a way that indicates he thinks the holes are in my brain.
“For as long as we need.”
*****
After our back-to-back hospital visits, the grandma and I go out for lunch at a trendy restaurant where they serve sizzling steaks on black cast iron plates atop mountains of thick spaghetti swirled with confusing brown meat sauce. Everyone there is under 20-years-old and I wonder if she had preexisting knowledge of the place or if she chose it to impress me. In any case, we stick out as a couple of oddballs among groups of laughing high schoolers.
The restaurant has a self-serve section with all-you-can-eat curry rice, fried dumplings, corn chowder, black tea, and—strangely—caramel popcorn. I grab us some tea, dumplings, and chowder as we wait for our orders.
“Have you thought more about helping me?” the grandma says, scooping the viscous soup into her mouth. Corn dribbles down her chin.
“I have,” I say solemnly.
She plucks out the pea stuck between her front teeth with her long pinky nail and the no-fucks-left-to-give attitude of an octogenarian.
“And your answer?”
The truth: I understand her desire for death. But I don’t want to be the one responsible for it.
“What would you need me to do?” I counter.
Her eyes glisten as she pulls a capsule from her Gucci tote, adorned with two ¢ signs instead of c’s. I can see the pill’s powder through its transparent casing: orange dust against the purple veins of her palms.
“This pill,” she says, holding it up to the warm yellow bulb dangling on a thin wire between us. “Will turn me into any animal. I think I will choose a bird. A crane, maybe.”
“Why a crane?” I have so many questions but somehow this one exits my mouth first.
“So I can finally have long legs.” She guffaws. “Also, don’t you think I kind of look like one?”
The grandma turns to her side, modeling her profile to me. It’s true; with her crimson hair and long, flat nose, I can see the resemblance. Whereas the rest of her body sits stout, her neck extends gracefully, past the point of logic, giving the air of an elegant sandhill.
“A nurse, when she saw how hopeless my case was, snuck this to me from the laboratory where she volunteers as a translator. She told me she saw with her own eyes an old man with a broken back transform into the strongest Taiwanese miountain bear.” She shakes her head as if she witnessed the incident herself. “Anyway, I need your help to open my window and take care of notifying my children when I transform, so I can fly away with peace in my heart.”
I imagine the scene: her limp body on a sad floral mattress, me propping open a window to fumigate the stench of mothballs and cheap perfume, bird shit and bleach, from her apartment. A curious hope commands my tongue. “Can you get me a pill too?”
The grandma frowns, clasping the pill in her palm as if to prevent my theft. “What do you need a pill for? You’re young, not even married.” Her disapproval deepens the wrinkles on her face.
“I want to try being another animal other than human,” I say. I’ve always envied Bucky’s contentedness. How he went from room to room just to fall asleep on different surfaces. The ecstatic pleasure from a treat or a walk—always yes please yes please yes please. It has probably been years since my last yes please. The grandma’s eyebrows crease in suspicion, her eyes holding the questions her mouth subdues.
“No. That is not why you’re here. You’re here to help me, not join me. Now eat your dumplings.” The conversation ends. I sulk like a spoiled schoolgirl and stab the skin of a dumpling with a single chopstick, twisting into the squishy pork filling. The grandma gets up to go to the bathroom for a third time.
I gaze down at the film that’s started to form on top of my unslurped soup and grab my phone, my thumbs’ muscle memory taking me to Facebook, which has become a watering hole of political rampages and fundraisers of late. I click on a former colleague’s link: “Help bring miracles to the Miller family!” The fundraiser reads:
On December 15, a mere ten days from Christmas, tragedy befell the Miller family.
When Bradley Miller, the patriarch and sole breadwinner of the God-loving family of five, went outside during church to take a phone call and didn’t return, his youngest daughter, eight-year-old Deborah, ran outside to find him. He would never miss the hymns, she reasoned. They were his favorite! Little Debbie was shocked to find her father face down in the lobby, still alive with a pulse but barely breathing. What ensued was a rapture of screams, sirens, and an emergency craniotomy surgery on the left side of Bradley’s brain.
Post-procedure, Bradley was unconscious for two weeks, leaving the family distressed and the church choir without its beloved, bellowing tenor. Doctors are unable to ascertain what’s causing these hematomas to keep swelling and infecting Bradley’s cranium, and he remains in the care of Mercy General for close observation and trials.
In this time of adversity, we appeal to your Christmas spirit and your compassionate and charitable hearts to support the Miller family—Debbie and Martha and Mary and Chester—and return Bradley’s soul from the clutches of mysterious evil. If a donation is not within your means, please keep us in your prayers.
Attached are a few close-ups of an intubated Bradley with his eyes closed, as well as an old Christmas photo of the shining, blond-haired, blue-eyed family with a harsh-looking and uncooperative German Shepherd, all dressed in red flannel pajamas on a matching picnic blanket. I remember Bradley from our monthly sales updates; he was known as a bulldozer who spoke over women and stole their ideas as his own. I click the golden Donate Now button and send the Millers $30. The website thanks me for my donation and recommends three more: Help Harry Mullins get a new kidney! Donate to Jonah’s fight! Quadruple paraplegic needs your help! Donate, donate, donate. Thank you! Support Harish now! Fund Martha’s fifth surgery! Let’s save Brianna’s Life! My phone screen floods with thumbnails of healthy and smiling selfies, intubated and unconscious patients, surgery scars and burn victims, sleeping babies and sick toddlers. The lump in my throat morphs into a dull paralysis as I click Confirm Checkout a fifth time.
“Not hungry, ma?” The grandma points to my uneaten steak, jolting me back to the restaurant, to Taiwan, to universal healthcare. I put my phone face down and shake my head. She stabs her fork into the flesh and transfers it to her empty plate, happily chiseling around bone. For a sick woman, she sure has quite the appetite. When I remember I’m a sick woman too, the queasy feeling comes back.
“What are you doing today?” she asks between bites. “Want to come see my daughter?”
“I thought your daughter was in America.”
“That’s the alive one. I mean the dead one, the one in the temple. I need to say my goodbyes before I go.”
Her casual tone again makes me grimace. Other than my hospital visits and administrative appointments, my days have mostly consisted of sitting in various movie theaters and trying to teach myself Chinese by reading the subtitles during Hollywood films while mindlessly munching sugary, hard-shelled popcorn.
“Why not?” I say. Grandma licks the ketchup off her wide grin.
Jun Chou is a solar-powered human, Brooklyn-based writer, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop 2025 Margins Fellow. Her writing has previously appeared in Electric Literature, Cake Zine, Hobart, and is upcoming in Honey Literary. She also interviews creatives of all disciplines as a regular contributor to The Creative Independent. During the day, she improves recipe discovery for The New York Times Cooking. Other times you can find her belting karaoke, adding to her Letterboxd, rock climbing, or drafting her debut novel.