The Insect Prescription

Su Yuan has walked the hospital corridors for twelve years, and everyone calls him the Insect Doctor—not because he treats insects, but because he always clears away, one by one, the tiny threads of cause and effect that crawl into people's bodies where no one else can see. A man of few words, he never lets go of a tattered old medical text, its pages blackened at the edges, holding only half a sentence with neither head nor tail. The department's lights grow dimmer year by year. As the red stamps on evaluation forms become harder and harder to obtain, Su Yuan tucks the remnant volume into his inner pocket and heads north, following the gaps between the broken lines on the page. Beneath the snowline of Changbai Mountain, insects lie dormant in the ice; in the desert to the west, camels crunch out a grating sound; further south, in the crevices of the South China Sea's reefs, abalone and coral guard years that no one claims. Three stations, like three half-sentences scattered by the wind—he picks them up one by one, listens one by one. What the remnant scroll seeks is not a prescription, but to speak, for someone who waited a lifetime, the words left unsaid—to the water, to the sand, to the snow. Su Yuan walks slowly, but he walks true. In this cold narration there is no crying out in pain, only a healer's most plain settling of accounts with life and death—some illnesses grow in the body, and some illnesses grow in the silence of an era. — Description from novelcodex.org