On Such a Full Sea (6 page)

Finally he said, You really from B-Mor?

Fan nodded. It hadn’t occurred to her until that moment that she hadn’t uttered more than a few words since walking out from the gates. She had not meant to keep such a silence but here she was with a sensation of stitchedness upon her mouth and there was no reason to try to break it until she had to.

They say it’s nice there. Someday I’m going to see it.

She finished her drink and held it out, shaking it.

You want another?

She nodded again.

He skipped away and quickly returned, this time with two drink boxes in each hand. This easy bounty surprised her and made her worry for them both, in case he’d done wrong to retrieve them. But she drank two more anyway, one right after the other, while he asked her numerous questions about B-Mor that oddly enough could all be answered with a simple shake or nod of the head, which was perhaps an apt reflection of the workings of his mind but also his instinct telling him that that’s all he would get out of her. He asked, Did all the children go to school? Did everyone end up working in the “factories”? Did they ever run out of things to eat? Were the streets and parks as neat and clean as they say? Did people really live to old age? Yes, yes, no, yes, sort of; and then she gave replies to a score of other queries both childish and knowing. He was excited to talk to her and had turned over the large white toilet bucket that had been left for Fan as his own seat and would have gone on querying her indefinitely had Loreen’s voice not sawed through the air.

Sewey!

The boy rose slowly to his feet. I give out the numbers, he grumbled.

Sewey! You still in there?

Okay, Ma! he yelled.

Okay nothing! Get your ass out here! Now!

I’ll bring more drinks later, he said, a dull grin marking his face. Then he left her alone, locking her in once again.

•   •   •

FOR THE FEW DAYS
Fan lived on flavored soy milk and graham crackers and peanut brittle and the odd piece of chicken jerky, Sewey was her sole sustained contact with the world. The injury was more minor than Quig had surmised, for her leg was only moderately painful and already seemed to be healing. She kept this fact to herself, an instinct for discretion overriding any fears she had for what might befall her, good leg or no. Quig came briefly to examine her leg and the splint, but he appeared both times in the middle of the night, his mini-flashlight rousing her from sleep, her heart bounding in a fitful dash; and before she could form any words, he’d have retightened the cord and checked the splint bindings and extinguished the light and left, depositing her back in her dreams. And what were those dreams? They were tableaus of the unknown, naturally, visions of anxiety and miserable solitude, the kind you might have when you are a child and clenched by high fever, when you see your loved ones from the bottom of a salt pit and they are as far off as the moon, when your arms are too heavy to lift, much less wave, and your voice has no carry. Fan’s dreams were all this but shot through as well with what surely were figments of a self-doubt characterized in her mind by the silhouette of our row houses set against a blood-orange haze of sky, the line of the roofs deviating by certain centimeters as they spanned the endless street, the segments discernibly shifting but never quite broken.

During those first visits from Sewey, Fan learned about life in the compound. She hardly had to ask any questions; Sewey was a born talker, the kind of talker you meet and have to nod at frequently and right off think about how to slip away from, but of course, Fan was going nowhere and Sewey had the companion he’d always longed for and no adults or older kids around to tell him to shut up. Fan was not just the quiet type but someone with a bountiful store of patience who didn’t mind following the endless branches of his thoughts as they reached skyward and backward and around the corner, toward whatever sun he alone felt the warmth of and could see. He brought another old bucket for a seat (she using hers to relieve herself, which he happily emptied and hosed out at day’s end), while she ate or drank or mostly just lay there and listened to Sewey talk while playing with something he called a yo-yo, a translucent orange plastic disc with a string wound about its split middle that he made go up and down, up and down, and sometimes would let spin in place, magically suspended a few centimeters above the floor, before flicking it back up.

And he told her more or less this: that they were in Quig’s place, and had been for as long as he could remember. Sewey was born here, in fact: Loreen was indeed his mother. She had come to give birth to him and was lucky she had because he needed to be cut out of her to be born and Quig was the only person in the Smokes and within a two-day’s drive around who could do it, at least without killing the mother most of the time. Loreen had then stayed on, at first to work off the debt she owed Quig, eventually becoming his main assistant and scheduler. It was the most important job at Quig’s because of the dozens of people who showed up every day with injuries from bad accidents like severe cuts and burns and broken bones, not even mentioning the pains from the C-illnesses that pretty much afflicted every adult. Each arrival was an emergency—it had to be, to burn fuel for the winding trek into these hills—and each arrival knew to bring money or gold or jewelry or else some special offer of barter or services. Loreen’s job was to assign an order to them determined by injury but mostly by what they could offer to move up a few spots or even to the head of the line. Naturally there were constant renegotiations: if someone came and got a place ahead of you, you could offer something more, or else different. It was your decision, and then Loreen’s, and of course, ultimately Quig’s, Sewey tasked as the messenger whenever the batteries for the two-ways went out, conveying word of a young man with two fingers crushed and near amputated offering twenty dollars to cut them off cleanly, or a lady with a festering rash covering half her back who will give him a gold wedding band, or an older man with a terrible pain in his side who will leave his pretty daughter for three days in exchange for surgery, four if the “doctor” could also pull a bad tooth, and every once in a while a younger person might be left there, indefinitely, as payment; it went like this all day and every day, Sewey describing it with a much younger child’s innocent delight, the terribly sick and injured queued up beneath the ferocious sun or pelting rain to have Quig take a look and say if he could fix them. Most times he could, which is why so many people were journeying to the Smokes, word of his skills having spread across the region over the last fifteen or so years after Quig had left the big Charter village down south where he once lived.

Apparently, Quig had not been a physician in his village, but rather a veterinarian with a large, successful practice. With a few partners, he owned an animal hospital and operated a small fleet of house-call vans, the business thriving until that infamous year of the bird and swine flu epidemics that hit in rapid succession and crossed the species barrier to infect and kill dozens of Charters in a village out west. In the ensuing panic across the Charter Association every last home-raised fowl and toy swine was destroyed and soon after all the dogs and even the cats and ornamental birds, with a permanent ban on all nonmarine pets instituted, and soon thereafter even on pet fish, just to be safe. His profession was gone overnight. He and his wife eventually lost their condo to the bank and were living month to month in a trades- and services-people’s dormitory when they were caught in a sting selling animal tranquilizers at a health club. They were arrested, swiftly tried and convicted, their sentence immediate banishment; Quig and his wife had a young daughter and the three of them had to leave behind whatever they couldn’t fit into their car, the very same that Fan rode in the back of that first drenching night. Apparently, his wife and daughter did not last long.

They got dead like right away, Sewey told her now. And adding as if quoting: How it always goes.

Fan asked him what happened, but he shook his head.

Momma won’t say. And she told me to never ask him and to never bring it up. So we shouldn’t.

They were quiet for a minute, Sewey unfurling his yo-yo up and down, getting it to hover, skitter across the floor, snap back.

Momma says we got a good thing here, even if B-Mors or Charters would never believe it. Is that why you came out here? To see if it was as awful as people say?

Fan didn’t answer. While it didn’t matter because the rhetorical was Sewey’s optimal mode, as he got his wind and proceeded to ramble about how sometimes people died before they could be seen by Quig, literally collapsing while waiting, and how if they had come alone it was Sewey’s job to go through their clothes for anything of value before summoning certain of Quig’s men to haul the body away, it strikes us that Fan must have posed his question to herself again. It couldn’t have been just Reg she had gone to search out. She had no real leads as to where he might be, or if he was even alive. So why would any sane person leave our cloister for such uncertainties? He was the impetus, yes, the veritable without which, but not the whole story. One person or thing can never comprise that, no matter how much one is cherished, no matter how much one is loved. A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.

So let us keep our attention on the small. Which means, for the moment, that we should consider Reg with special focus. To be sure, Reg was unaware of himself as anything but a keeper of Building Six vegetable beds F-8 through F-24, a fourth-generation member of the Xi-Jang household, and the first and only boyfriend of Fan.

Let’s not forget he meant the world to her, and even if that speaks more to the limited extent of her experience than his personal qualities, we ought to remind ourselves of how fetching a young man he was in sum. Very tall, as noted, around 180 centimeters not counting the fluffy pad of his hair, which made him seem at least six or seven centimeters taller. We have, of course, described his amazing skin, its hue and hand. He was by nature filial to his household, bringing home whenever he could hard candies for the younger ones and sticky rice cakes for his elders, and then without exception (after maybe playing with Joseph et al.) taking out Fan on their free-days, most often spending the entire afternoon in the subterranean mall shopping for stickers and costume jewelry and other trinkets and splitting a lychee smoothie and basket of spicy-sweet fried chicken wings with her. He always treated for the movies or games or photo-booth images of themselves that each carried in an old-fashioned hand-sized folding album, one of our favorite shots showing Reg having to tilt far down to sip his straw from their shared drink, Fan craning up for hers, their smooth cheeks drawn in. Both are looking at the camera with a mirthful conspiracy in their eyes that is part of the animated moment but also suggests how wonderfully unadulterated their romance was, as yet free of the grit of life that accumulates, inexorably, no matter what you do to screen it out. Call it first love, puppy love, but in this case Fan and Reg didn’t just rush away on their free-day to the pillowed compartment of a mini-inn like so many of our youth (and not-youth) now do and on the roaring pyre of their lust self-immolate. Fan and Reg were as keen on each other as any, let us say that. The difference lies in their easeful lingering, in their letting the time simply pass, thereby unbinding themselves from the false insistence of the hours. They were not the only couple, of course, to do this, but it was plainly heartening to see good young people, out in public, enjoying in quiet thrall the company of the other while welcoming the rest of us to draw upon their contentment, the gleam of which broadcasts wider than one can ever believe, which warms from within.

Since they’ve been gone, B-Mor has not been the same place. We have mentioned the murals featuring their portraits, guerrilla-painted under cover of night, with other less prominent notations around the blocks becoming more and more a part of our everyday life. Does it seem that the streets these days are more frequently blemished, at least between the twice-daily sweepings, by the litter of bottle tops and taco wrappers and, amazing to say, gobs of spit (the habit of expectorating long thought eradicated after countless years of education and social reinforcement!), or that the queues at the movie theaters and school sporting events aren’t as orderly as you expect, distinctly more wedge than file, or that even inside the grow facilities, where nothing so much as a few liters of deviation is tolerated in those massive tanks, significant numbers of fry fish have been going missing, presumably to be nurtured in illegal home nurseries.

Just the other week an older fellow and his wife were caught by inspectors of the directorate with a catfish-raising operation set up in their basement; they were visited because of what the inspectors believed was a faulty water meter, and when they were led down to the basement by an unknowing child, they could hardly believe the elaborate thicket of tubs and piping and filters filling the room right up to the ceiling. To spare the rest of their household the old couple took full responsibility, immediately sacrificing themselves, and when asked how they thought they could get away with such a blatant violation, the wife purportedly said, We knew it couldn’t last, but who cares anyway.

Who cares anyway?

This is a startling attitude, one that you might not even hear muttered by some preternaturally indolent, thrice-rejected facilities applicant whose only remaining choices are a janitorial position at the shopping mall and a potentially hazardous job at the wastewater treatment plants. But so baldly voiced, and then by a fish tank alumna, whose pension is modest but certainly adequate and forever secure? This amazes. Enough to make one think ahead to a perhaps inevitable epoch, when the character and disposition of this place might have changed so profoundly as to be untenable. Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Reg, of course, was not one to entertain such ideations. It wasn’t in his makeup. What he possessed instead, it is now clear, was much rarer, something that occurs in B-Mor and other cousin settlements maybe only a few times in a generation, if at all.

For Reg, the rumor goes, was C-free.

Yes, it is hard to believe.

Our gangly, bumbling, perennially smiling Reg. Free of the curse! Free of any rogue neoplasms, in either fact or destiny. Naturally, there is a record of every inhabitant’s annual blood panel, which unlike the general physicals have not been suspended, protein, sugar, fat, hormone, vitamin, and numerous other levels collected and tabulated to track and identify trends across the B-Mor population, rather than any individual’s state of health; but always included are tests for known markers of disease. Eventually everyone will express it, the blood panels show this, unless they’re done in by something else, like poor young drowned Joseph or stroke-afflicted Ruby. Our tainted world looms within us, every one.

Most Charters can afford the latest drugs and interventional therapies, such that very few perish directly from a form of the disease; on average they live quite a bit longer than we do, ten or so years. But most will succumb instead to something known as the Crash, a degenerative condition in which the major organs begin to fail, one after another, caused by the accrued ill side effects of the serial therapies, or maybe the therapies themselves (no one really knows, though study has been continuous), until complete shutdown ensues, and there’s nothing left to be done. We suppose that there are a few of us who would, given the means, endure the serial treatments and procedures that Charters now consider a natural part of the experience of life, applied measure after measure, each one increasingly heroic. That what remains of our dwindling resources should be devoted by all rights to you, or you.

The rest of us, however, recognize the advantages of not knowing when one’s day will come. Better to be fine up to the moment a severe fever or backache or rash flares up and lingers, when it’s too late for anything but the quiet room of palliatives, the kind lantern of a picture viewer, and steady visitations from one’s kin and closest friends, whose tears flow not so much in sadness as prideful recognition of your role in the legacy of our cadre. For you have done your job, you have labored and nurtured, you have helped secure the foundations of B-Mor in this fraught civilization without heed to your own dreams, ever modest, unfinished.

And you will never die alone, something that even Charters cannot say, what with how intent they are to outlive one another.

But to pass from mere old age! To drift away in one’s sleep or pull up a chair at the food court with the not-quite-idle thought, I’ll just shut my eyes for a second. What a blessing that must be for one and all. And to think that Reg might have that chance, indeed, makes sense in the way of a karmic embodiment, in that he was an exceedingly ingenuous soul, a true babe of the woods whose striking sandy-hazel eyes cast more broad sheen than sparkle.

In fact, it’s funny that Reg should end up being the one who was so cellularly pure. The lines of his family, the Xi-Jang clan, go back right to the beginning of B-Mor, the Jangs among the originals who landed in the destitute city that very first hour. After the initial period of strife with the handful of remaining inhabitants finally died down, one of the Jang boys fell in love with a girl from one of the holdout native families, surname Willis, and married her, producing several children. There’s no record of further mixing for the Jangs, just an extensive linking during those early years with the Xi clan of Shining Tomorrow Road, but there are inevitable jokes and snickerings about certain undiluted features that show up in every generation of the clan, like Reg’s amazing head of Afro-type hair, which clearly derive from that Willis girl.

How indelible, blood. Which is why, after Reg went missing, the rest of his household was apparently shuttled by special bus to the clinic for a few days of testing and retesting, everyone from the walker-ambling grannies to the swaddled babes scanned and pricked, and closely observed afterward by platoons of purple-jumpsuited Charter researchers seeking to determine whether some clan practice of hygiene or domiciling or even cuisine could somehow explain the perfect anomaly of Reg. They couldn’t, though every so often we will hear that the younger Xi-Jangs have been summoned from whatever facility or mall where they might be and bused to the clinic for ultimately fruitless examinations, going so far as to corral other B-Mor clans whose members are believed to have certain genetic filaments woven through their beings. Word of this quickly spread, presumably to the negative, but now one hears that among those of Fan’s and Reg’s age, in the midst of their prime marrying years, the more “native-looking” young B-Mors have become remarkably popular.

This, needless to say, is an ironic development. It is astounding that one could ever imagine that the dance clubs and tearooms and game parlors would be dotted by young men who visited the ladies’ salons to have their hair teased wildly à la Reg, or that there would be a companion run by both sexes on bronzers at the pharmacy, or that the prevailing style of outerwear would feature something called a hoodie, which some enterprising teen discovered in the vid archives and had his mother design and produced in a counties factory (and sold by the dozen, like cinnamon-sugar
malasadas
), and which transforms any respectable, demure person into a shifty, slump-shouldered gnome.

There was a time—not as long ago as one would like to think—when people of Reg’s appearance would have been talked about openly, right in their faces, as if they didn’t have eyes or ears. Maybe there would be a young mother and her not-purely-from-the-originals kids strolling through the park, and the mere sight of them might elicit a comment by some busybody auntie to her friend, They can still breathe through such flat little noses! or Even the winter sun makes them darker, or And such an attractive woman! Such talk didn’t much disrupt the atmosphere of whatever park, or mall, or facility lunchroom, and though not applauded or admired, it was certainly, like some extra measure of mugginess on an otherwise pleasant day, not found to be intolerable.

When we were much younger, and as yet unaware of certain aspects of B-Mor, there was an uncle of ours who lived in one of the clan row houses on the block. His name was Kellen Yip. He and his wife, Virginia, didn’t have a family of their own—they wanted children but were unable to reproduce—and for a while he often played with us on free-day or after his shift in our street contests of tag and soccer. Uncle Kellen was our favorite among those uncles and aunts (really they were second and third older cousins) who treated us fondly enough but saw us mostly as a pack of pesky sweaty-heads to be fed and duly shushed off. He was a slight man, perhaps no more than fifty-five kilos fully dressed, but he was fast and athletic, and to view him now is to realize how adept he was at gearing himself down to our skill level. He could coax the ball from foot to knee to shoulder like it was a circus animal, and if we showed mettle and were aggressive and quick e
nough, he’d leave the ball vulnerable so we could win it. What a feeling that was! What a surge of elation and pride and maybe, too, an arrogance tinged with that slightest instinctual contempt for the defeated, at least until he mussed our hair and trumpeted our names as we streaked away.

Afterward he would sit on the stoop with us and “talk story” about olden times while Auntie Virginia poured cups of iced tea to go with the boiled peanuts she’d bring out in a white plastic bowl. Through the muted crackling of the dampened shells, he’d describe how things were for the originals, who were, of course, before his time but whom he’d heard about from his great-grandparents. His stories weren’t exactly the ones you studied in school or watched vids of at the historical museum, the oft-documented stuff about how by dint of their collective will and the discipline of their leaders in keeping everyone focused on the job the originals transformed the desperate nothingness about them.

Uncle Kellen was a truck driver who transported fresh B-Mor goods to Charter villages and from those collected any unsold produce plus second-hand clothing and furniture and other discards to sellers out in the counties. He would take a big gulp of his cold drink and wipe his brow with the back of his hand and you could see the droplets of perspiration sparkling in his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, just like one of us but old, and he might begin by asking one of us an ordinary question about B-Mor history such as who was the first original to open a private business, to which we eager-to-please students would shout the answer (Wu Gangshur!), and then what he sold (kitchen and bathroom plumbing supplies!), but then he would remind us that there were, in fact, numerous existing businesses when the originals arrived, businesses run by the smattering of natives who had stayed on, whose deeds and leases to their properties were unilaterally voided and reassigned to the (then nascent) directorate.