Guardian

The small horror of watching your father undress in front of you, one painful button by one painful button, as he struggles to get his 'bad arm' out of a stubborn sleeve―the small horror grows, because you have nowhere else to look, nowhere else to be, that at 9.58 a.m. this Tuesday morning, one random April of yet another random year, this is where you ought to be, here, watching your father undress as he limps his way onto the therapist's couch.

The small horror grows. He is now half naked on the couch, lying with controlled tension, jaws clenched, eyes yellowed with anxiety, the stench of his discomfort stronger than that of herbs and Chinese medication drafting around us. I sit ramrod straight on the stool; there is nowhere else to look, nothing else to see except this: I wish I could melt into the white-washed walls. Like an animal, I think miserably, seeing how naked and vulnerable my father suddenly is. Like a dog at the vet's office, eyes wide and staring and stark with confusion. But because he is human and my father, there is also enough embarrassment for the both of us.

'You see this,' says the massage therapist, who is working her nimble fingers into a particularly insipid expanse of flesh on my father's back, 'you see this? This is bad.' It takes a few moments for me to realise that she is talking to me―to me, as though her patient's condition has rendered him deaf, and he cannot hear us.

I nod obediently. This is bad. What a tone. Like someone buying a pound of pork or beef at the market, and upon realisation that the meat isn't fresh enough―this is bad. I cannot see my father's face anymore because he is lying face down. But a vein protrudes on his arm―close-fisted and heavy-hearted under the sheets, he must be in secret despair.

I am not sure what to say, where to look, how to pretend this is all okay. So I nod again, clutching my bag very close to my chest, as though agreeing with the therapist's assessment―this is bad―will somehow validate my cause here, today, in this little office, where my father is being stripped and worked on like a pound of meat.