我的第一篇英文小说（其实也是我第一篇严格意义上的小说，不论什么文）。多的不说了，放在这里为的是接受批评，赞美的话也来者不拒，呵呵。管他阿q还是做秀。

Suicidal Inclination

“These days Dr. Yeh looked rather strange.” I mumbled with my mouth full, since it was lunchtime. The sun beam slanted in through the window, projecting the shadow of the trees on the grey porcelain tile floor of this dental office. No patient in the waiting room at this time of day, as usual, for all the parents were hurrying off to pick up their kids from schools, and obviously their sweethearts with cavities or braces on their teeth were also still too early to be here. It was a small pediatric dental office run by a Taiwanese dentist, Dr. Yeh, who had been working in this small Chinese community in Elmhurst for over twenty years. We opened two days a week, and the other four days the doctor was in the other two offices scattered elsewhere in the city.

“Why?” said Ai Ling, Dr. Yeh’s assistant, who spewed out a small fish bone on the lid of her lunch box.

“Well, for cleaning he usually does scaling and root planning, but today he only did prophylaxis. You know, insurance companies pay more for scaling.”

“I haven’t thought about that…but really, I don’t know, today he looked tired though. I saw him always leaning on the chair so I asked him if he wasn’t feeling well. He only said he didn’t have enough sleep.”

“Do you know why?”

“He didn’t say that, you know, he’s always niggardly with speech.”

“But aren’t you just the opposite.”

“Well, yeah, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you’re supposed to ask, was it?” Ai Ling approached my ears and whispered, “However, I wouldn’t be in a good mood either if I had a wife like Mrs. Yeh.”

The doorbell cut through our drowsy afternoon with a ringing, and we continued with our second half of the day. I routinely stepped on the footstool and searched for the patient’s dental record, jumped down, made a phone call to the insurance company to make sure that they could be billed. Sometimes I felt so bored. I hated to be talking on the phone with those agents and I hated to jump up and down like an acrobat to get their dental records and I hated all the paperwork that I needed to fill out and I hated to make appointments for every patient and just to smile and smile and smile. Everything was just repetition repetition repetition.

But that was my life.

That evening I got an unexpected phone call from Mrs. Yeh, who told me with her soft Taiwanese Mandarin, that they recently raised the price for all major procedures, from Root Canal Therapy for adults to Orthodontics for kids. I jotted it down quickly and was about to politely greet her goodnight, when she complained to me that it was hard to budget even a doctor’s household. Mortgage for their new house in Long Island, tuitions paid for their two kids’ private schools and everything else. “You know what my friend says? ‘Why do you go to work and have your kid baby-sat? Your husband is a doctor!’” she grieved, as I looked for some sympathy to show her at the bottom of my small intestine yet found nothing. “That’s none of my business.” I hung up, speaking to myself as I printed out the new fee schedule and put it up on the outer side of the bench. The spinning of the excavator roared in my ears, and I knew that it would continue. It literally haunted this office, from 11 to 8, sometimes 9, and I knew there were two other places like this in this city. And yet Mrs. Yeh was still complaining. Something came up to my mind… Wait, why didn’t he sleep well last night? Why didn’t he follow the normal procedures today? Something grazed the surface of my lake of heart like a dragonfly, yet it was so subtle that I hardly even notice.

After one hour’s commute I was sitting in my psychology class, almost mesmerized as usual. My eyelids started to protest against gravity in order to keep myself awake as soon as the lecture started. Sometimes my right hand might lose grip of my pen, whose sound would put consciousness back into my body with a thrill in the spine. I should record his lecture so that I could use the recording to heal my insomnia at night, I thought. Not even a prescription from the psychiatrist needed. These days I was almost driven nuts by my strange sleep patterns. Every night when my lousy neighborhood finally cooled down and became amiable and quite, the sleepiness that entangled me during the day would suddenly vaporize, and the symptoms were like a year and a half ago when I was still adjusting to a 12-hour difference of time zone.

When the word sneaked into my ear, suicide, my consciousness soon self-restored, noticing that there were numerous spirits floating like me, like that. “Why do people commit suicide? Not because they were depressed or enduring anxiety, but it is because that they were hopeless.” Asserted the professor, who was obviously encouraged by the anti-lethargic effect of this question and went on throwing a question out in the midst of students, “But do you know people from what profession are the most likely to commit suicide? It’s Dentist.”

A few students laughed, although I didn’t know what was funny about it. Dentist? I chewed the word with my teeth. “Is it because they always cause a lot of pain to others?” a voice from the back of the class. “Because they always see people in pain?” said another. “They have too much money and don’t know how to spend?” People were guessing, debating, and laughing. But I knew the answer.

All the same the next day, except for the subway was running a little late. I trotted all the way across the big parking lot in front of the shopping mall near my job, I was almost breathless, and I prayed inside that he hadn’t arrived yet so that my lateness would not be discovered. Ai Ling won’t turn me in either. The sun was already high and for the first time I heeded that it was really a huge parking lot. Five minutes later I opened the door to the office and found that it was so amiable and quiet. Ai Ling was reading newspaper and she heaved her chin when she heard the creaking of the door behind me, staring straightly into my soul. I made a gesture of V and slipped into my seat. My immortal seat.

There was already a patient sitting on the couch, who went on reading his World Journal after giving me a short glance, finding that the arrival wasn’t the doctor. It was 11:10 and I made a decision that I should enjoy my life. I scrutinized slowly and carefully at every piece of mail that were taken freshly from the mailbox, all of which were addressed to the same addressee, Lee C Yeh, D.D.S. Money, money, bill, New Yorker, invisible braces ad, returned X-rays from Medicaid, unknown letter, coupons from Macy’s, prior approval letter, electricity bill, money, money, money and money. I categorized and ranked them on his desk so it would be easy for him to refer to. Finishing this I looked at the clock, surprised by the long hand that was pointing to 30.

“Is Dr. Yeh coming?” The patient finished reading his newspaper and asked in Cantonese. I wasn’t sure if he was asking me, for I didn’t speak Cantonese although I understood when I heard it. I didn't know if I should answer him in Mandarin Chinese or in English, and the time that I swayed between the two made the answer already unnecessary. Weird. He had never been that late before. I was a little bit upset and I looked out of the window into the street. Ai Ling was talking on her cell under a tree. The sun was broiling the tar-paved road on which one or two pedestrians walked sparsely by. What happened to Dr. Yeh? It was already 40 minutes.

Ai Ling came in with her phone dead and she plugged in the charger on the desk. Realizing that the patient was watching her, she spared a smile and said to him in Cantonese: “It is strange! I hope it is not some accident!”

Her word was like a bolt that split near my ears. Accident? The word that resonated in my heart was another one. No, no, that was not possible. I didn’t believe it. It couldn’t be so coincident, I spoke to myself, yet more and more evidences that were self-accumulated during these a couple of days were then making more and more sense to me. Why didn’t he do the procedures as he had usually done? Maybe he didn’t love his wife. Yes, yes, the first day they had a fight and that’s why he didn’t sleep well, and yesterday he was completely bored so that he didn’t even bother about money anymore. Apparently it was just so natural that he had the inclination to be bored, and then hopeless, and then, something.

I mocked myself to be fussy and too imaginative, and continued to focus my sight on the street, expecting for a miracle to happen. It was 11:45. I saw a woman coming toward our door and for a moment I thought she was Mrs. Yeh, who came to tell us that Dr. Yeh had killed himself dead. But one second later I recognized that she was Ms. Chin, an old patient of Dr. Yeh. She stepped on the stoop and knocked at the door. Senselessly I pressed the button under my desk.

“Sorry I am late!” She yelled it out loud as soon as she entered. “You know what? I spent half an hour getting my car parked. This is crazy! So, are you guys waiting for me?” I was thinking of how to respond while the first patient answered her in English, “Doctor, outside; Here, I wait, one hour!” Ms. Chin looked confused and looked at me instead.

“Yes, I mean, no, he is not in, but I am sure that he’s on his way…” I waffled as I was still struggling in my mind, and almost abruptly the door was opened without my pressing the button under my desk.

It was Dr. Yeh. I was so stupid. I thought he was dead. He triumphed in with big strides and there were a couple beads of sweat on his forehead. He greeted the two patients “How are you?” and walked toward me, laying the appointment book heavily on the bench. I heard only a word jumping out of his taut mouth, “Parking.”

The excavator started spinning again. Soon I immerged into working on a set of denied payments and forgot about the whole story quickly, as if nothing happened. There wasn’t anything happened indeed. In the afternoon the doctor came to my desk again and saw the new fee schedule. I was about to tell him about the phone call from Mrs. Yeh as he bent down and read it, when he asked me for a pen. I handed him one. He grabbed it from me and bent down again, drew a couple of lines on the paper and wrote something on it. Then he gazed at it for a while and handed the pen back to me and left.

I went around the bench to see what he wrote on the schedule. A few blue-inked lines crossed out the prices, followed by a set of new prices, which were all deducted by approximately 20 percent from the crossed-out prices.

It was already 9 at night after we sent off our last patient. Fortunately I didn’t have class that night. But unfortunately outside the window it was raining cats and dogs.

“It’s raining outside. Where do you live? In Flushing? I can give you a ride then.” I wasn’t sure if I want to be staying with this silent man, yet judging from the volume of the rain I guessed I had no other choice. He stepped out first and turned off all the lights before I locked the door behind me. I had no idea where he parked his car, yet he was already walking in the rain toward the huge parking lot. So I simply followed him, hoping that he had parked his car near our office.

We then entered the parking lot, and only a few cars remained there in solitude. I was always hoping his car would be the next car, and yet he walked so fast and I couldn’t even catch up with him, while paddling through small and big ponds of different sizes seemed so dangerous. Under the dim street light I saw that water splashed under his heels and soon his pants were covered with mud a couple of inches from the bottom. We passed one car after another. Toward the opposite end of the parking lot, there was only one car and I deemed it must be his, yet he walked by it with no stop. Finally he stopped. It was an old black van, and it was outside of the parking lot by a side street beside the shopping mall. The sign outside the parking lot that said 5 dollars per hour loomed ghostly in the rainy night.