doesn’t want you, I forbid you to think of me, I forbid you to seek any comfort in another. I forbid you to wonder why I made you or who I am or where I’ve gone to. I forbid you to speak to me. I forbid you to show your yellow eyes.”)
In Leviticus it is said, “Now whoever shall be defiled with leprosy … shall have his mouth covered with a cloth … and he shall dwell alone without the camp.”
(I dream my mouth is covered with white cloth. When I try to speak only muffled sounds come out, animal and cryptic. I’m covered with dark fur, I’m hiding in a cave, my eyes peer darkly forward. Later I’m behind a row of bushes. There are piles of books, but when I pick them up my lips go numb, my throat festers, fills with blood.)
Nearly nine out of every ten of the infected never show any sign of the disease.
(If I hadn’t shown who I am … but how could I not have? This lumbering body, black lips, yellow eyes … Yet Ai Tai To showed who he was, and the others didn’t shun him.)
In advanced stages many don’t feel pain, heat, or cold and so suffer from wounds that go unnoticed.
(Odd to think about that particular form of suffering—suffering from what one doesn’t feel.)
Many eventually go blind.
Leper colonies were located on islands or in remote areas. In the Middle Ages such dwellings administered by a Christian order were called lazar houses, after the parable of Lazarus the beggar.
(And yet they had each other …)
Bartholomaeus Anglicus enumerated leprosy’s various causes: the bite of a venomous worm, unclean and corrupt wine, highly spiced meat “as of long use of strong pepre and garlyke,” melancholic meat, coitus, the conception of a child in “menstrual tyme.” “Lepra cometh of dyvers causes … for the evil is contagious, and effecteth other men.”
Those in whom the disease lay dormant for more than nine months were issued a “quiescent certificate,” then allowed to return home. This rarely happened.
(I carry my begging bowl and clapper. I hide my face behind my hood, kneel outside your gate in sunlight, don’t hold out my hand, wait for you to pass. I don’t want to come in.)
In 1847 Dr. Cornelius Danielssen and Carl Wilhelm Boeck published their Atlas of Leprosy, a color-illustrated volume of changes that occur in human faces.
For years they kept detailed notes: “Duration of illness—4 to 5 years. Suffered great pain during shepherding, principally early in Spring whereupon the illness broke out in the form of many blisters on his feet. Both corneas are scarred. Eyebrows gone, facial skin evenly infected and thickened, purplish-blue hue chiefly on the brow. Many small reddish-brown nodules on the hands and feet. Much lack of sensation.”
In 1873 Dr. Armauer Hansen of Norway identified the bacillus now known as Mycobacterium leprae. Shortly afterward, leprosy was renamed Hansen’s disease.
Today, a single dose of Rifampicin, Clofazimine, or Dapsone can kill 99.9% of the bacteria.
Only half of those who are ill have access to these drugs.
(It seems there are so many forms of prison, slavery, deprivation.)
(When Ai Tai To wandered off, he didn’t say where he was going. Hands numb, feet blistered, toes mushroom-shaped and sore, he walked out of the known world, leaving the state, power, privilege, behind him. Did he go to where no one would look into his face, where he wouldn’t meet, not ever, the face of another? Where he fed himself from trees, streams, maybe a small garden? What I think of most isn’t the deformity of his face or hands or feet, but the silence that accompanied him, the lack of explanation. The silence that he left behind.)
DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER
Dear Father,
I write to you from a small village northwest of Peking, at the foot of Xiangshan Hill. Of course you’ll never read this. It’s over 3 years since I left without saying goodbye or letting you know I’d be leaving and where I might go (I hardly knew myself). Most likely you think I’m dead.
My home is made of mud bricks and the roots of reeds. The roof is thatched straw supported by branches of cypress and pine. When I wake I see their inscrutable language arching above me, rough and lovely. My floor is dirt. The house is all one room.
In spring the dust-storms blow in. “Shachenbao” they’re called. They cover everything with a fine pale layer of grit. Streets, houses, tools, utensils. Animals walk as