Among Others

But he didn’t say so, and he isn’t reproachful about it at all. He said he didn’t stay in Poland because he could feel the dead everywhere, as if they could come around any corner. I understand that. I almost talked to him about magic, then, about the thing I did to have a karass, about Mor wandering around with the fairies. I might have if there had been time. But Daniel came in and said they should be going to catch the train, so I said goodbye.
    Sam kissed me, and he put his hand on my head and said a blessing in Hebrew. He didn’t ask, but I didn’t mind. At the end of it he looked at me and smiled his wrinkled old smile and said, “You’ll be all right.” It was remarkably reassuring. I can hear it now. “You’ll be all right.” As if he could know.
    I can smell the snowdrops. I’m so glad he came.
    T UESDAY 22 ND J ANUARY 1980
    Sam was right about the acupuncture.
    It is, in fact, magic. The whole thing is. They call it “chi,” but they don’t even pretend it isn’t magic. The man who does it is English, which surprised me after all the fear of wily orientals the aunts tried to put into the procedure. He was trained in Bury St. Edmunds, which is in the Fens, near Cambridge, by people who had been trained in Hong Kong. He had framed certificates, like a doctor. On the ceiling was a map of the acupuncture points of the human body. I got to look at it a lot, because most of the time I was lying on the table with huge enormous needles stuck in me, not moving.
    It doesn’t hurt at all. You can’t feel them, even though they’re really long and they’re really stuck in you. What did happen was that when the last one went in, the pain stopped, like turning off a switch. If I could learn to do that! One of them, in my ankle, he put in slightly the wrong place first, and I did feel it, not real pain, but like a pinprick. I didn’t say anything, but he immediately moved it to a spot a fraction of a centimeter to the side and I couldn’t feel it. It’s body-magic plain enough.
    Even if it just turned the pain off for the hour I was there, it would have been worth the thirty pounds, to me anyway. But it wasn’t. I’m not miraculously cured or anything, but I hobbled up the stairs to his room and I walked down them, no worse than before they put me on the rack. He wants me to go every week for six weeks. He said that today he was just doing what he could for the pain, but if he saw me regularly he might be able to see what was wrong and do something about it. He admired my stick—I’ve been using the fairy one, as it seems to give me more strength than the metal one, as well as being less ugly.
    “Take me back to school,” I said to Daniel as we walked back to the car. A pale wintry sun was shining and the rose-gold buildings of Shrewsbury were flushed with it. If we’d set out right away, I could have been in school in time to go off to book club as normal after prep.
    “Not until we see how you are tomorrow,” he said. “But how about a Chinese meal, as Chinese medicine seems to agree with you?”
    So we went to a restaurant called the Red Lotus and ate spare ribs and prawn toast and chicken fried rice and chow mein and beef in oyster sauce. It was all delicious, the best food I’ve had for years, maybe ever. I ate until I was full to bursting. While we were eating I told Daniel about the convention in Glasgow, Albacon, this year’s Eastercon, and about what Wim had said about the Worldcon in Brighton and how he’d met Robert Silverberg and done nothing but talk about books for five days. He said he didn’t think his sisters would let him get away at Easter, but he agreed that I could go, and said he’d pay!
    In a way, I would like to rescue Daniel from his sisters. He has been good to me, and I suppose it might be his duty as a father, but why should he feel any of that? I would like to rescue him, but I don’t think I can, and I think that trying would provoke war with them, whereas if they think I won’t interfere they might leave me alone. Trying to rescue Daniel I might entangle myself. I am my own priority here, I have to be. They’re not going to agree to him going to Glasgow. It’s good that they agreed to acupuncture and a meal in a Chinese restaurant, and they probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for dear old Sam.
    With the bill, they brought us fortune cookies. Mine said “All is not yet lost,” which I thought very cheerful. It’s just like the line in