On Such a Full Sea (4 page)

Only his younger brother was unable to look up, for how miserably he was crying, his tears leaving whitish spots on the surface of the red lacquered offering box he held to his chest, a slide show of pictures of Joseph looping on the screen stretched across the front. It was amazing that the boy could stay on his feet. Though they were in a line of three, his parents seemed separated from him, they in their bubble and he in his, with the box he was holding serving as his partner. No doubt he felt partly responsible for pushing Joseph to take them to play outside, and though no one should ever feel right in blaming him, did more than a few make a point of shoving their envelopes into the slot with an extra-hard pat? Did we? If there was the barest audible
ttok
when we pushed ours in, we regret it now.

We bring all this up about Joseph and his family and our own displays because it makes us mindful of how solemnly composed Fan was as she bowed to his mother and his father, and how she slipped in her own envelope (even as her household’s offering sufficed), touching the boy’s shoulder for a longish beat. From the food tables—Fan must have been the sole mourner who didn’t eat—we couldn’t help but notice how she stationed herself an appropriate distance from Joseph’s brother but clearly with the intention of standing there
with him
, and though no one spoke to or made eye contact with Fan, we were well aware of her presence. After that, the line seemed to move a bit more slowly, people taking their time with their envelopes and maybe even nodding sympathetically to the boy before hustling over to the tables. The remarkable thing, looking back on it, was that nobody commented on Fan. Not a one of us uttered a word amid the glottal murmurs of chewing and swallowing and the scraping of plastic forks on plastic plates. Maybe it was because we were famished—glimpsing mortality can be a surprisingly appetizing sauce—or because we were being pushed along the buffet by the shuffling throng armed with plates, or because of what had recently happened with Reg, but our hesitance to acknowledge her became itself a part of the meal.

At some point Fan left the boy’s side and came down toward the buffet line. Most everyone noticed this and seemed to pause in what they were doing. And in a voice that surprised for its clarity and reach she said, quite oddly:

Where you are.

By now everybody had turned to her. Her hands were curled into loose fists and she said the words again, this time softer, as though she were speaking to herself rather than addressing any crowd. Again no one said a word. She then left via the back gate of the yard with those who had finished eating, leaving us to wonder what she was talking about.

The wake lasted for another hour or so, and probably would have gone on for hours longer had the skies not suddenly clotted up and the winds blown in yet another immense storm system, one that would hover for weeks in a slowly unwinding gyre, the sun blocked out the whole time so that all you could see in your waking and your sleep was not brightness or darkness but a waxen shimmer, as though everything were stuck behind a grimy piece of glass. We B-Mors are accustomed to spending time indoors and underground, but knowing that there was only grayness and mists above the grow houses or subterranean shops proved wearying. And while under this moody, thwarted light, we began to discuss, in the most casual way, what Fan’s statement exactly meant.
Where you are
. Some took it as the beginning of a thought that Fan couldn’t quite finish, others as mere gibberish, that she had stood too long in the line and should have eaten something. One especially misguided fellow believed she was speaking exclusively to him and was asking that he save her a folding seat!

But most of us agreed it was posed not as a question but as the ending to a phrase. Such as “Everything you desire can be found . . .” and “Look not elsewhere but simply . . .” plus other examples people came up with that, not surprisingly, accorded with their character or current outlook, like the terminally ill man who proposed, “One’s destiny lies not in the past nor the future but . . . ,” none of which was, of course, uttered by Fan but that somehow in the end became attributed to her, at least in our feeling, which began to bloom with surprising fullness only after she had been long gone from B-Mor, a feeling that she was, in fact, looking after us, perhaps even advising us about something crucial.

It was at this point that the first signs of a collective interest in Fan appeared. Of course, she was not the first B-Mor to have left these kind confines but she was certainly the youngest (and littlest!) to do so on her own. Every other instance was someone who was forced out because of a certain scandal or crime, and only after that person had exhausted all means, official and otherwise, in the hope of being pardoned. Nobody sane would ever do otherwise. Why invite ready hardship or possible doom? And yet Fan was as sane—and comfortably situated—as any young woman in the prime of her B-Mor life. She was quietly admired for her tank skills. For her innate gracefulness and gentility. She was sociable enough, and filial enough, which is as much as anyone can expect. There was not a molecule of wrongness about her.

Which may be why Fan captured our imagination. The very imagination, to be honest, that never seems terribly vital or necessary when things are going right, when we are eating well and sleeping well and lacking only certain exalted luxuries. For doesn’t B-Mor as conceived and developed and now constituted obviate the need for such purposeful dreaming?

But now look at all the unusual activity. Someone got ahold of the video archives of the feed at the main gate the day she departed and posted it on the grow-facility page, embedding it in an ad for a take-out
chaat
shop in the underground mall. You clicked it to get your free-drink-with-meal coupon and instead of a beep and a code there was a silent vid of Fan, viewed slightly from above and in three-quarter profile, a small backpack slung over one shoulder, an umbrella in hand, and dressed in a bulky dark-hued counties style, so unlike the colorful loose-fitting pajama-type outfits B-Mors usually wear. Beyond the shelter of the entrance you could see the rain coming down in drenching curtains—yet another storm had blown in—and then being whipped sideways by winds so strong that the sentry very quickly scanned and checked her out, not bothering to see that she wasn’t a counties peddler who was having no luck in the miserable weather and was giving up for the day.

And that was it. Merely a few seconds of Fan, standing before the sentry booth, looking nothing like she was about to mount an expedition. Her expression as glum as cold rain. Word spread about the ad—it was a real shop, whose owner contended he knew nothing and that his ad had been hijacked—and until it was removed several hours later, it was the most popular clip on the B-Mor web, outpacing even that night’s showing of the boys’ and girls’ swim championships. And though it made no sense whatsoever, crowds soon descended on that otherwise ordinary snack shop, the long line of people attracting more people to the line, until finally the owner decided to lease a much bigger space in order to offer table service, which for a brief time did a great business, until suddenly it didn’t, and he had to shut down.

Another camera showed Fan walking out the main gate and taking the access road out of B-Mor to the main tollway. The official record ends there. But the story of what happened afterward is well-known, or at least it has been recounted by everyone in B-Mor—and maybe beyond—many times over, in messages and postings and vids and songs and, yes, in plain words, too, spoken to one another in the quieter moments of the evening, when the muscles are all used up to the point of near numbness and we feel more as though we are piloting our bodies rather than being at one with them, cooped up at the top and looking outward and uncertain of what is real and what is perceived. And in this state of mind we can’t help but build upon what is known, our elaborations not fantastical or untrue but at times vulnerable to our wishes for her, and for ourselves.

So Fan went this way: instead of heading north or south on the main coastal tollway she veered westward, onto the olden roads, thoroughfares that once meandered through farmland and forests and that linked antique-style settlements that the Charter villages are modeled after and you can really only see in movies now, communities where people strolled with shaggy dogs and children licked ice cream cones and where the benches were occupied by the contented elderly or smooching lovers and trains came and went all day, shuttling people back and forth to their jobs.

But what Fan encountered that sodden evening was nothing like that. It was—and is—a landscape of bushy weeds grown so thick and high their hollows are often used as rooms by wanderers and thieves. Weeds are the trees because in most of the inhabited sections the trees have been cut down and in the warmer months the punky reek of their pollen overdoses the breezeless air. It seems nearly impossible to breathe. The derelict houses that anchored the streets have long been bulldozed and carted away, the once paved streets devolved to a more elemental state, the asphalt ground down to drifts of blackened dust. The more passable streets are pocked by calf-deep potholes and waves of buckles from the serial deluges and freezes and droughts, and because of their poor condition, the truckers and Charters move about exclusively on the secured, fenced tollways that few counties drivers can afford, and are often banned from anyhow, for justified reasons of their slower, much older vehicles that are breaking down constantly, hoods up and steaming. So counties drivers travel fitfully on the leftover roadways, swerving and mincing along, and one of these, maneuvering in the blinding gray chaos of that early evening’s downpour, squarely struck Fan.

She was knocked into a ditch half filled with rainwater, her temple striking a partly buried chunk of curb. She would have cried out from the pain running from the top of her thighbone to the point of her hip but the blow to her head was a thunderclap and all she could do was numbly move her fingers. The car, an old VW electro-diesel, kept on for twenty meters before stopping. It reversed and the passenger window rolled down halfway and a woman’s scratchy voice pronounced, It’s no deer.

A dog? a man asked.

Looks like a little girl, she answered.

Silence.

Is she dead?

Not yet. She’s moving a little.

Silence again. Then the driver’s door creaked open.

No way I’m nursing her back to health, if that’s what you’re thinking.

The man ignored her. He trudged around the front of the car without an umbrella and stood over Fan, his head and shoulders partly shielding her from the dense warm drops of the rain. She kicked her leg to try to move but could only lamely push mud against one side of the ditch.

Goddamnit, Quig, the woman cursed.

He pressed his foot down upon Fan’s ankle, pinning it beneath the water. Fan looked up but in the dimness and rain could just make out the contours of his face under the dark shadow of his baseball cap’s bill. He was bearded and had a wide frame to his jaw, and his nose looked like it had been broken multiple times, and the expression in his eyes was that of someone who has seen the worst of this life and would not be disturbed to see whatever measure more.

Let’s go! We have another three hours’ driving at least, and I’m starving!

Be quiet, Loreen.

Something in his tone silenced her, and when he reached down to Fan with his rough-hewn hands, both the woman in the car and Fan flinched, for what he might do. But instead he cupped her beneath the knees and arms, and lifted her swiftly enough that she didn’t have time to resist. With one arm holding her, he lifted the rear hatch of the station wagon and then laid her in beside a greasy tangle of ropes and tools. She tried to kick at him but a shot of pain in her thigh practically choked her and she lost consciousness as he shut the tailgate.

When she came to, it was darkest night. They were still driving, a bump or deep rut having jarred her awake. The car air was humid and smelled of mildew and chain oil and of the two counties people, who didn’t wash as regularly as B-Mors, their clothing as well as themselves. Their odor was so keen and alive it was as though they were twinned and sitting on either side of her. Plus, everything was damp where she lay because of her soaked clothes and the steady drip coming from the top of the tailgate. Her right leg felt like a twenty-kilo sack filled with broken glass but it was her head that hurt even more, the whole side of her face clanging with every mar in the road. She told them she was going to be sick and the woman cursed her but the car braked and the man opened the hatch and tugged her by the hair so she could throw up onto the ground. She splashed his boots but he didn’t seem to care. When she was done, he shoved her back in and Fan fell again into a daze as they drove on in the steady rain northwestward, up and through the lightless hills, toward where once Maryland had become West Virginia had become Pennsylvania, a huge swath of open counties land where no B-Mors have ever gone.

Their destination was the hilly, sparsely populated “county” referred to as the Smokes. We did not know about it then but of course do now. The origins of the name are unclear, but most say that it derives from the name of a once prominent local family, Smolk, whose people used to own a great deal of the land and many various small businesses; others simply point to the fact that nearly every present inhabitant, whether adult or child, smokes a locally cultivated weed that is supposedly a powerful antioxidant; the rest will note the prevailing practice of cookery there, which is to smoke everything they eat, and even drink, the favorite beverage being a homemade beer made from smoked grains.

The drive that night took longer than even Loreen had estimated due to their having to take detours around impassable roads, and it felt to Fan, drugged by an injection that Quig administered mid-trip when she could not stop moaning—and then shouting—from the sawing pain in her thigh, that it was a journey of days. For someone born and raised exclusively in B-Mor, there’s really no occasion for making trips of such duration, and it’s amazing to consider that this was the circumstance of her first true venture beyond the gates: sopped to the core, a ringing in her ears, perhaps a hairline fracture in her hip or leg, and being taken by strangers to a place that promised only hardship, or worse.

And enveloped in the strange, cool oil of the man’s drug, Fan must have dreamed. She dreamed hard and vividly, as we have, that the thick ropes on which she lay were the fronds of a sea plant that ensnared her as she drifted to the bottom, this willowy tangle of arms that now cradled and fed her. Kept her alive. There was a taste in her mouth like sour almonds. She nestled herself down even deeper, her leg now right again, and as one will, she had a welling of gratitude for the nurturing, this feeling that erased all thoughts of B-Mor behind her and of the open counties ahead, momentarily erasing even thoughts of Reg, whose voice and images she’d loaded onto the album card she’d sewn inside the pocket of her vest, plus some of his favorite oldies songs, which she would play in the card’s tinny voice, just to make out a chorus, “Only the young . . .” In a word, she was alone for the first time in her life, as if she were in a state of nature like the girl who lived by herself on an island in that ancient movie Fan once saw, hunting and fishing and swimming. What was her name? Fan could not remember. Could she have been called Fan? This Fan who could take care of herself, who could wield the spear, dive from the high rock, who could plunge into the deepest waters and hold her breath for as long as she wanted? But beneath her, the kindly fronds suddenly ossified, turning into muscled shoots. Chattering blindly at first, they found her. These ravenous eels. And as they gnawed at the flesh on her back, they lifted her, pushing her up and out of the water, all the weight returning to her and collecting in her leg. She was frantically wrestling the creatures when the woman reached back and hit her in the head with the tail end of a large flashlight. Fan fought some more and she was struck again, hard enough this time to take her breath away.

When Fan came to, she was in the man’s arms, being lifted from the car. She may have been drugged again for she could only move her eyes. She could not quite speak. A strong breeze crossed them and, aside from the man’s animal odor, the air was damp but smelled green and fresh with what she didn’t yet know was the scent of young pines. She could hardly see a thing. There was complete cloud cover and it was as black as night gets, for out in the counties after sunset the settlements go wholly dark, the roads and buildings unlighted, the few shops shuttered and closed. They had driven up and around the peak of a hill, finally stopping in a cleared patch of flatter land. Around her she could make out the shapes of other vehicles and in the background the outline of a structure, a house built low to the ground and with wings on either side, one of which the man entered after the woman opened a door. The woman lighted the way and he brought Fan inside and laid her on a table.

I’m going to sleep, Loreen said.

Crank on the generator, he told her.

She turned the light on his face and he squinted, his expression one of limited tolerance. She flashed on Fan.

I don’t know what you mean to do with her but I’m so fed up and tired I don’t care. I’m hungry! So I’m getting myself something and going to bed.

Get the generator on. Then come back.

Get it on yourself!

Do it.

She cursed at him and left. For a while, Fan and Quig were just there in the dark but then a distant whirring could be heard and Quig pulled a chain and a shop light above her flickered twice and then came on. When her eyes adjusted, Fan could see in the penumbra that they were in a kitchen of sorts, fitted with a short run of cabinets, a freestanding utility sink, a burner plate, a large microwave on the counter. He asked what her name was and she was surprised that she wanted to tell him, though she wasn’t able. But he was a frightening-looking man. He was big, much taller and broader than most of the men in B-Mor, probably in his fifties, darkly bearded and mustached but with wild streaks of gray. When he removed his cap, he was balding, the smooth, wide dome of his head bulbous and very pale, as well as tattooed with many fine jagged lines: a pattern of cracks. Her extremities began to itch and prickle, and when he reached for her leg, Fan jumped, bringing on a hot shear of pain. He placed his large hands on her ankles, but gently, his touch oddly pacifying as he removed her wet sneakers, her wet socks. She bucked and tried to twist away when he unbuttoned her trousers but he pressed his hand on her hip and said, Don’t move. He then lifted her with the other hand beneath the small of her back as he inched down the soaked, binding fabric. He did not touch her underwear. When her trousers were off, he examined her injury, pressing gingerly as he probed the splotchy, deep bruise on the outside of her thigh. He was as serious and focused as any nurse practitioner in B-Mor. He bound it tightly with a bandage and then left.

Loreen reappeared while he was gone. She scrounged about a drawer and found a quick-eat pouch of pork and beans. It was dim in the room and she looked older than Quig but maybe it was because she was heavier, her hair long and scraggly. She had a mouthful of gray crooked teeth. She cut off the top of the pouch and ate little spoonfuls out of it cold as she stared at Fan, talking to her between chews.

Where the hell did you think you were going?

You can’t be more than eleven or twelve.

You shouldn’t feel good that he’s bothering. He’s got plans for you, like he’s got for everyone.

Quig returned with a sack of assorted items and tools, including a handsaw, a drill, a length of soft cord, bungees, and then an old rake with mostly broken tines. He unscrewed the rake head from the plastic handle and then held the handle against the inside of her leg, marking its length. He turned it around and did the same with the unmarked end against the outside of her leg. Then he sawed the two pieces to size. These were the splints, which he joined with screws to a short crosspiece at the bottom; her foot would sit on this. With the bungees, he bound the splints to her leg, Loreen holding everything in place while he wound it around. He rigged the cord to secure her foot to the crosspiece and then twisted it until there was a tugging force on her leg; this was the only way, he would tell her later, that it would heal right, keeping it in traction. When it was done, Quig carried her to a small room of shelves and bins that was almost completely filled with random equipment and appliance and car parts, but there was a cot in the corner with a sleeping bag and he placed her on top of it. He hadn’t said more than two words to her, nor said anything now, just giving her another injection, this one to make her sleep. She was losing consciousness when Loreen appeared and tugged the sleeping bag out from beneath her, saying it was her son’s. She tossed a thin, musty blanket atop her.

Better heal up quick, Loreen said, looming. Her breath smelled of alcohol and was sugar-sweet, from the beans. Or you won’t be around long.