I focus on letting my body melt into nothing so the qi will have a free path. I imagine myself only flowing qi, no body, no bones, no weight at all. I don't know where the needles are exactly, I only remember how it felt when the doctor pushed them in, giving them that last reassuring push into the qi where the quick pierce of pain is. Lying and looking up at the harsh light on the ceiling, my consciousness on my body, I think of a map with a few push pins stuck into it, marking a specific memory or trip in a huge landscape of unexplored space.
It's the firm, confident way the doctor sticks these needles in that makes me love her so. 孙利秋 （Sun Liqiu, her first name means Advantageous Autumn) is fast, sometimes a finger finds the point, or measures from a bone or a joint, but usually the needles just fly in. There's no time to talk about how I feel, or explain what I reasoned out on the bus about how my dream last night may suggest a deficiency in my spleen. There are never enough beds or enough time. If I have a question, I must find room to fit it in between the flying needles. She's young and direct and quick. "You haven't come in a long time", she says as she picks up the box of needles that I left for her on the foot of the bed. "Have you been busy?" "I come once a week". "It's not okay. In one week you have to come three times."
The timer on the heat lamp over my stomach rings, and the heat dies out. The assistant, a hip girl who wears black puma sneakers and looks stylish and natural in her long white doctor's robe, comes in and turns the dial with a pair of a needle nose pliers because the knob is missing.
My bed is the third, and there are four beds squeezed into a tiny room. They are separated by dirty white curtains, and I have to balance on the bed to wiggle in and out of clothes, careful of the floor where I've often seen needles. I stack my things in a pile on the floor and hope nothing drifts under my neighbor's curtain.
I hear the woman on my right. She is getting boguan'r (拨罐儿）and she has a cough; with each movement the glass cups stuck to her back clash together. On my left a cell phone rings a popular Chinese pop song that gets louder and louder until the caller finally hangs up. In the front of the office there is the usual loud smalltalk: a woman is talking to the doctor about a mutual acquaintance's body type- "you know O blood types, they need to sleep a lot"- but soon the conversation drifts into money, as almost all conversations in Beijing eventually do, and I stop listening. I hear the cash register ringing outside in the atrium, and behind the paper thin wall at my head someone is slapping someone's shoulders and back. The sounds of the streets are a comforting drone outside. the pillow under my head must be stuffed with sand. A sharp tweak of energy comes and goes near a needle on the upper left side of my stomach- it feels like electricity. Someone else joins the conversation in the front, and the woman next to me yells because her heat lamp is burning her.
I get boguan too, and the cups suck and twist my back- I think of a hot plateau of red rocks... it's been a long time since anyone twisted the skin on my arm and I've forgotten what it's called, but the image of the plateau reminds me of Indians. "Indian Burn". I look it up later and find that it's also called "Chinese Burn". The vacuum inside the cups slowly twist my skin in opposing directions. My mind goes from plateaus to a Victorian canopy bed in an English estate where a sick person is being treated with leeches.
As I stumble up the 3rd ring road to the bus stop thinking how to fit in three times a week, I realize I forgot my box of needles.
