The Foreigner Read Online Free

arrived at the hospital after a long, hazy day of meetings and could not quite register what the man was saying as he put a piece of X-ray film in my hands.
    "What’s this?" I asked.
    Again he spoke, urgent, directing the film toward the overhead light and moving a pencil across it. The image was indecipherable to me, tissues of white on black, like galaxies.
    "Her pelvic bone," said the doctor. "Eaten away. There. And there."
    I stared, could not make sense of it. "And?"
    " ’And?’" The doctor withdrew the film, blew out a breath. "Mr. Chang, why hasn’t she come in before? With a cancer this advanced, we don’t know where to start."
    "I didn’t know," I whispered. "She never said a word."
    "No pain?" He sounded skeptical. "No fatigue?"
    "She wouldn’t have said." I thought of her trembling hand around the teacup the night of my birthday dinner. "She was taking herbs. Chinese medicines. I suppose she was treating herself."
    "Herbs?" He looked like he was going to kill me.
    His pager went off. He glanced down at it briefly, moved toward the door. Then relented, slightly. "I’m very sorry, Mr. Chang. I’ll be in tomorrow morning to go over her course of treatment with you."
    "Wait!"
    He paused, half out in the corridor.
    "You said… Is she… in pain?" I asked. The idea had bothered me since the night she had been admitted.
    "Maybe," he said. Then, reluctant: "Well, yes. Probably." He ran a hand over his thinning hair, came forward, patted my arm reassuringly with a big paw. "But she’s too far along to know it."
    When he was gone, I drew my chair up to the bedside and took her hand. The nurses came and went, their footsteps sharp and echoing in the halls.
    I don’t know how long I sat there. At dusk, I thought I felt her stir a little. She made a small sound in the back of her throat.
    "Mother?"
    But it was nothing, only a catch of her breath. She lay there, sleeping deeply in her bed, beneath the surface of consciousness, like a person floating just below the waterline in a river. I felt, suddenly and very surely, that I could wake her up if I wanted to; I could call her up out of that subterranean world of dreams. But then whatever pain she was suffering would become real to her, reclaimed along with her motel and her account books and her pride and sorrows. Already, perhaps, she had suffered for months without saying so.
    The room had gotten colder; shadows drew close around me. In retrospect it seems that a hand other than mine had grasped the tubing and loosed the clamp enough to allow the morphine drip to accelerate—1.00, 1.50, 1.75 milliliters. The evening sky had darkened the room enough that objects appeared gray and impersonal. I have no recollection of intent. I remember carefully removing my shoes and then lying down on the bed next to my mother, trying to warm her thin, curled body.
    And when, in the morning, I awoke, she was staring at me, head fallen to one side, looking into my face with uncharacteristic fondness, a soft, cloudy expression. Her lips were parted as if to speak, but whatever she meant to say to me I would never know. Years ago, in the motel parking lot, I’d come across an injured gypsy moth, hand-size; ants had swarmed around it, industriously breaking down the feathered body and fins while the great laboring creature flexed its wings mightily, like the slow blink of an eye, or the beat of a heart, failing. Each day there was a little less of it. Like the death of an emperor, or the slow passing of a legend into nothing—a thready skeleton, its splendor now gone.
     
     
    "EMERSON CHANG?"
    The receptionist looked up crossly from her desk, a cigarette in hand.
    "Yes?"
    She puffed at me. "You can go in. Mr. Carcinet is ready for you."
    I was at the lawyer’s, a week or two after the memorial service. My mother had named Pierre Carcinet the executor of her will. The man had been a friend of my father’s when my father was alive, and although my mother had never liked Mr. Carcinet