Dream of the Blue Room (16 page)

TWENTY-TWO

I wake with Dave’s arms around me, the sheets kicked off the bed, our feet entangled. So many mornings, in the early years of our marriage, I lay in bed and watched him sleep, thinking how perfect it all was, how fragile. Those mornings I feared for his safety. I thought of accidents he might have as he sped through the busy streets, imagined the ambulance crashing head-first into a taxi, tires spinning, lights flashing, Dave’s seatbelt snapping, his head smashing through the windshield. I imagined all the neighborhoods he went to in the line of duty, places even the cops avoided, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, places where he would have only his uniform to protect him. I thought of knives and handguns, infected needles that might puncture his skin. I woke, each morning, praying that he wouldn’t be taken from me. I thought of all the ways that life might snap in two, destroying the clarity and order of our world. Never in those days did I fathom that loss comes gradually, so slowly you barely notice; never did it occur to me that things can simply dissolve.

I breathe in the smell of him, that bittersweet scent of soap and sleep. I lift his arms from my body, climb quietly out of bed, shower and dress without waking him, and kiss him on the forehead before leaving our cabin.

I am standing on deck at 5:30 in the morning, the tin cradled in my arms, when The Voice comes over the loudspeaker: “Please everyone come to deck as we begin fascinating journey through magnificent gorges.” I had planned to scatter the ashes here before the other passengers awoke, but it’s too late. Within minutes people have begun emerging from their cabins, zombie-like, their faces still marked with sleep. I tuck the tin under my jacket. Graham appears beside me.

Before us, a concrete wall looms, the lock of Gezhou Dam, just a few miles downstream from the new dam site. We pass through a narrow steel gateway into a wide body of water in which ships of all sizes have gathered. The sluice closes behind us. There is the sound of a releasing, water rushing in, and the ship begins to rise. It feels as if we are on an enormous elevator. Despite the early hour, the bridge above us is crowded with onlookers—the usual assortment of crumpled workers and lackluster soldiers, along with lithe elderly people doing their morning stretches. They wave and exchange greetings with the passengers. There are already a few vendors milling about, trying to sell postcards and jade trinkets, dried eel snacks and steamed buns. Bells ring, lights flash, and another set of massive doors opens. In the space of five minutes we rise seventy feet.

I can hear the noise of construction before the dam itself comes into view. Then, perfectly timed with the appearance of the dam site through a dust-soaked drizzle, The Voice announces, “We now enter world-famous Three Gorges Dam. Exploit the Yangtze. Energy for the People.” A concrete wall lines one side of the river. Enormous cranes reach heavenward, their necks disappearing into the smoky haze.

Graham points to a narrow pass far ahead through which the dark river gushes. “The wall’s going right there,” he says. “It’s going to be six hundred feet tall.” In his voice there is both awe and embarrassment. “To think, some of those cranes use my safety devices.”

What looms before us now looks like some cold war–era industrial nightmare. The hillsides, shattered by explosives, are craggy banks of eroding soil dotted with tumble-down workers’ shacks and piles of dirt and granite. Graham lends me his binoculars; through them I can make out small human figures dangling precariously from bamboo scaffolding.

“That used to be a mountain,” Graham says. “They sliced it in half to build the locks. A 10,000-ton ship will be able to steer into the pair of locks, ascend from river to reservoir, and emerge on the other side in a lake as placid as your bathtub.”

Saws hum, drills clamor, an explosion echoes through the valley. The air is gray and grainy. Simply to breathe is a challenge. My eyes water, my throat burns. And I’m here for less than a day. The Chinese government claims that it has employed 75,000 people for the construction of this dam. I think of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Bhopal. The government boasts of megawatts of electricity generated, the width and depth of the lake, the number of new apartment buildings erected for evacuees. But one important element has been left out of the equation—the human costs.

I gaze out in astonishment. “How can the people let this happen?”

“What do you expect them to do?” Graham laughs. “Paint signs? Stage a sit-in?”

“Well…”

“In 1992, 180 people from the Democratic Youth Party in Kaixian County did oppose the dam. They were arrested and charged with sabotage and counterrevolutionary activity. You know, the government-sanctioned opinion about Mao is that he was seventy percent right, thirty percent wrong. But he introduced to China an atmosphere of paranoia that it has yet to get over.”

“Whatever happened to the 180?”

“No one’s seen them since.”

A small band of passengers is crowded around Elvis Paris, who is lauding the glory of the dam. He points to a mass of rock and gravel and concrete littered with cranes and drilling rigs. “This used to be Zhongbao Island,” Elvis says. “Thanks to modern engineering, useless island is now foundation for world’s greatest dam.”

The
Red Victoria
presses on toward the narrow pass. The river seems too much for us. Here, it is deep and very fast. I see the cranes, the concrete, the mounds of blasted granite. I hear the din of drills and chisels. But these bare facts are not enough to convince me. I cannot believe that this fast and powerful river will simply stop, paralyzed behind a manmade wall. I know nothing of physics, mathematics, the intricate workings of engineering, but I can see and feel the power of this ancient and magnificent river. Instinct tells me that it may not be so easily tamed.

Soon we’re approaching Xiling Gorge. Graham translates a series of huge Chinese characters painted in white on the sheer side of a cliff:
Serve the People. Develop the Three Gorges
. Layers of green hills rise out of the water. Through the mist I can make out small houses huddled close to the water, and, behind them, steep terraced hills. Solitary figures stand atop bamboo rafts, using long poles to navigate the swirling rapids at the edge of the river. Flat-bottomed boats pass us, headed downstream with loads of golden hay. Skinny goats wander the hillsides, foraging. The air is chilly, just the vaguest shadow of the sun visible through the fog.

The Voice calls out the names of attractions along the way: Sanyou Cave, Three Knives, Shadow of Lamp, Ox Temple. Behind the temple a mountain rises. “Look close at the mountain and you will see strong young man leading ox,” The Voice says. Then there is Kongling Shoal, also known as the Gate of Hell, because many boats have wrecked on its dangerous reefs.

The cliffs rise sheer and steep. In some places the bases of the mountains are so close together that I am certain we will not be able to pass, but each time it seems that we are headed for disaster, the ship turns at just the right moment, to just the right degree, and we continue upstream. I feel enclosed in some strange dream—the green mountains, the pale mist, the heavy tin tucked under my jacket.

“Look,” Graham says, “the tracker paths.” He points to notches cut into the rock along the cliffs and explains how trackers used to haul boats through the gorges. They formed lines on either side of the river, every one of them tied round the waist with a single length of rope, so that each man was linked to all the others. If a man fell, the line kept going. He would die on the line, being dragged behind. Tens of thousands lost their lives.

“Where are they now?”

“Replaced by powerful engines. I saw them here as late as the early eighties. A haunting sight—an army of skeletons scaling sheer cliff walls. They hardly seemed human.”

I imagine sticklike men struggling up the steep mountain path, dragging huge ships behind them, tons of human and material cargo. It is easy to understand the Chinese love affair with progress. For the people along the river, progress must represent luxury, an end to human suffering.

After a few minutes of silence, Graham nudges me. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing. You?”

“Lots of things. Mostly I’m thinking how lucky I was to find you.”

“There’s something I should tell you. Last night…”

“Don’t,” he says. “It doesn’t matter.” After a pause, he turns to me. “If I were to ask you for a favor, would you do it?”

“Of course.”

“Even if it’s unpleasant?”

“What are you talking about?”

He turns and puts his hands on my shoulders, fixes me with that disconcerting stare. “Promise me.”

The sun is blinding. The river looks endless. The cliffs threaten to swallow us up. “Of course,” I hear myself say. “Anything.”

TWENTY-THREE

The tour brochure promised that we would pass through Wu and Qutang Gorges in the daylight, but now that half of the passengers are gone, the captain is taking our itinerary lightly. Tonight—a full moon shrouded in yellow mist, its pale light moving over the blackness of the river. Cliff faces climb vertically from the water. Below deck, the muffled sound of karaoke, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” off-beat and out of tune. Earlier, I wandered into the Double Happiness Room and found Elvis Paris teaching passengers to dance the Macarena. Dave and Stacy were there, clapping their hands and swinging their hips and looking like they belonged together.

At one point, Stacy noticed me in the doorway. In between songs, she wandered over and asked me for a cigarette.

“Sorry,” I said. “I quit six years ago.”

“How’d you do it?”

“Chocolate.”

“Oh.” She looked at me for a minute, as if she was trying to come up with the right words, then said, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“You know, about Dave. It’s a shitty thing to do. I always promised myself I wouldn’t be that kind of person… you know, the kind who steals someone’s husband.”

I wondered if it could be considered theft when the object of desire was so willing to be taken. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, I asked, “Why are you doing it?”

“Dave’s so nice. Nobody’s ever been that nice to me, except psychiatrists. He doesn’t seem to want anything.”

“Everybody wants something.”

Just then Dave walked over. He had his hands on his hips, and his face was flushed from dancing. He looked happy and slightly embarrassed. “Please tell me you didn’t take pictures.”

“A whole roll,” I said. “Just wait till the guys at the hospital see them.”

Stacy laughed, then Dave. I followed. The laughter felt vaguely sacrilegious, like the time I broke out in giggles at my Great Aunt Isabelle’s funeral. I wondered if I was the only one on the verge of tears.

Now, it is half past midnight. A cold wind whistles through the gorges.

It feels good to be alone for a moment. The wind dies. The mist turns to rain. In the dark, beneath a blood-red moon, there is magic to this place. The disaster of the dam construction is only a distant memory here. The river and these high black walls of stone seem eternal, surely not subject to the whims of man. Most places I have been, whether urban or rural, grand or mediocre, have shared a common theme—the feeling that they are, in the great scheme of things, temporary points on a topography prone to change. But these gorges are an altogether different matter. It is impossible to believe that this landscape will disappear, that before the end of this decade the Yangtze will be stilled. Even now I feel the river pressing against us, the ancient flow of it urging us back in the direction from which we came. I imagine its origin high in the Tibetan Plateau, the pure white snow of Central Asia melting to feed this dark river of mud. It is as if all those cranes and ditches, those unsightly piles of dirt, the blasted granite and hardened concrete and millions of tons of gravel, are simply props on the gigantic stage that China has erected in the name of national pride.

I hold the tin to my chest. It is too dark to make out the pictures, but I know them by heart—each tiny detail, every insignificant thing. In the one taken in Amanda Ruth’s dorm room at Montevallo, the lampshade beside the bed is slightly crooked. The toe of her right boot is scuffed in the picture of the junior high marching band. I could name the exact items in each photograph, the placement of Amanda Ruth’s hands, the quality of the light, the shadow of another figure intersecting the frame. But it isn’t just the photos that are engraved on my brain with a permanence that is alternately comforting and disturbing. I remember her gestures so clearly—the graceful manner in which she walked, placing one foot precisely in front of the other, like an acrobat on a high wire; the absentminded way she traced the birthmark on her right thigh with a single finger; how she would brush a strand of hair from her face with the back of her hand.

It has taken me fourteen years to get here. Fourteen years of Amanda Ruth, a shadow at the back of my mind, a cold stone I carry at the center of my chest, a pain in the side, a promise. Fourteen years I’ve waited for some sign that it’s okay to let her go. I think I have expected to hear her voice calling softly through the fog. I think I expected, one night, to turn and see the figure of her there, slender and shadowed in the moonlight, waving good-bye. “Get on with your life,” she would say, laughing as she turned and stepped into the dark—her face would fade first, then her hair, an outstretched hand, the hem of her skirt, the tender back of her bare foot. Of course, no sign came. She never whispered to me from dark corners. She never faded, the way the dead are supposed to do; over the years, the image of her only grew clearer.

And now I’m left on this river, her river, with a mission. I have not heard from her, but I must let her go. She’s dead and can’t forgive me. I must forgive myself.

The lid of the tin is tight. I pry at it with my fingers, but it won’t budge. I take a coin from my pocket and work around the edges. Finally, the lid gives. Inside, there’s a second barrier—a cheap plastic bag. I try to open it, but my fingernails are of no use. I dig into it with my teeth, the way Amanda Ruth used to attack a bag of potato chips. I struggle for a moment. Suddenly, the plastic rips, and Amanda Ruth’s ashes go flying in all directions.

You envision an event in your mind for years. You have certain expectations about how that moment will play out. You plan a somber ritual, a flash of enlightenment, perhaps, a moment weighted with meaning. Maybe you even believe there will be voices from above, clouds splitting to let the sunlight through. You tell yourself that the natural world will play along, that everything will go as planned. But big moments have a tendency for anticlimax—the kiss following “I do” is an uninspired peck, the graduation diploma bears someone else’s name. Instead of a silent morning in China, dawn breaking over a glassy river, ashes fluttering like white confetti, you find that the ashes look like pebbles and bone, a solid substance with surprising heft and texture. Pebbles plink off the ship’s railing, slide down your shirt, scatter downwind in the direction of the karaoke bar, where someone is belting out a Jimmy Buffett tune.

It starts as a giggle, then explodes into something uncontrollable, a hard long belly laugh. Tears run down my face. I laugh so hard my stomach hurts. Amanda Ruth would like it this way, the somber ceremony gone awry. For years a voice in my mind has spoken to her, keeping up a running monologue, a voice so familiar to me now that I do not go a day without hearing its soft cadence in my head, like prayers sent by the faithful to a God they believe is listening. I find myself speaking aloud.

“How do you like that, Amanda Ruth? I bring you all the way to China just to hear someone sing ‘Wasting Away in Margaritaville.’” The bag is not yet empty. I lean as far as I dare over the stern and let the ashes go flying. I shake my shirt and more ashes scatter over the railing.

I remember an afternoon at Demopolis River, when Amanda Ruth wore a sundress with small blue buttons down the front and danced to this very song. Barefoot in the deep green grass, she dipped and swayed and shook her head, and held her arms out for me to join. I watched her—the sun reflecting off that smooth brown skin, her hair shining with river water. I knew then, as surely as I knew my own name, that I loved her completely.