The Crazed Read Online Free PDF Page A

me that her name was Mali Chen and that she had just graduated from a nursing school in Shanghai. A metropolitan girl, I thought, no wonder she looks frail and anemic.
    Opening the door of the sickroom, I was surprised to see Mr. Yang sitting on the bed with one foot tucked under him. Strands of gray hair stuck out above his temples, making his face appear broader. How could he sit up by himself? Had somebody slipped in when I was away? Impossible. He must have done this on his own.
    Mr. Yang was still humming something that I couldn’t make out at first. Then lifting his voice, he chanted in gasps, “How powerful the tall cranes are! They can pick up tons of steel easily . . .”
    I realized he was impersonating the retired stevedore in an aria from the revolutionary opera
The Harbor,
praising the brawn of some newly installed cranes, but his voice was too smooth and too thin to express the proletarian mettle. I hadn’t known he could sing Beijing opera. He had seldom gone to the theater and must have learned the snatch from the radio.
    “See, the pill is still here,” Nurse Chen said to me and pointed to a small cup on the bedside cabinet. It contained a large yellowish tablet, probably barbiturate.
    While she was preparing the injection, I removed the quilt from Mr. Yang’s legs and got hold of the string of his pajamas, which was a long shoelace. He stopped short. Before I could untie his pants, he opened his eyes—only to see the syringe spurting a white thread of liquid. His face turned horror-stricken, though Nurse Chen forced a smile and said enticingly, “Well, Professor Yang, it’s time to have some—”
    “Help! Help! Mur-der! They want to poison me!” he screamed, his eyes glinting. He kicked his right leg but was unable to raise his arms. He was gasping, agape like a spent fish.
    The nurse looked scared, her eyebrows pinched together. She turned to me and asked, “Do you think we can still make him take the needle?”
    I didn’t answer. Mr. Yang kept howling, “Save me! They’re assassinating me!”
    “Stop this, please!” I begged him in an undertone.
    “Help me!”
    “You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”
    “Don’t kill me!”
    Nurse Chen took apart the syringe, dropped the needle back into the oval metal case, emptied the medicine into the spittoon, and wrapped everything up. “I think we’d better leave him alone,” she said with a toss of her head. “Let him cool off by himself. Every time we try to put him to sleep, we only upset him more.”
    I said nothing. Anger was surging in my chest, but I checked my impulse to yell at him.
    “Well now, I must be going,” she continued. “Don’t disturb him. It’ll take a while for this one to become himself again.” She put the injection kit under her arm and said to me casually, “Bye-bye now.” She left, her heels clicking away toward the stairwell.
    Professor Yang started sobbing; tears leaked out of his closed lids, trickling down his cheeks and stubbly chin. He whimpered something incoherently. I listened for a moment and felt he seemed to be begging mercy from someone, who might be an imagined murderer. He went on wagging his head and grunting like a piglet; his words had turned to gibberish.
    This mustn’t continue. I decided to give him the sedative pill no matter how hard he resisted. With a spoon I set about grinding the tablet in the porcelain cup until it became powder. On the cabinet stood an opened bottle of orangeade. I poured some of it into the cup and stirred the concoction for a minute, then sat down beside him. “Mr. Yang, drink this please,” I pleaded and raised the cup to his lips.
    He opened his eyes and saw the juice. He said, “You want to poison me, I know. I refuse to take it.”
    “Come on, it’s just orangeade. See, I also drink some myself.” I lifted the spoon to my mouth and made a gurgling sound as a parent would do to convince a child. “Ah, it’s so delicious. Please try it, just a