On Such a Full Sea (10 page)

Which is why, when you think about it, there should be no sense in the notion that our Charter customers have lost a taste for B-Mor goods; they are
their
goods, after all, of wholly their conception, from genesis onward. We have simply made their wishes real. For what could be more important? Other settlements near and far-flung provide their clothing and gadgets and furnishings and so on, but we sustain them fundamentally, we enable their children to thrive, while all along offering them full confidence that there are no compromising or exogenous elements, nothing but the fortifications exactly specified by them and them alone.

And yet now there was noise of a new movement in the Charter villages, what the proponents were calling Back to Soil; it’s said that select teams of Charter experts had identified certain experimental plots in the open counties, and even planted them, presumably to see what the qualities of what they raised and grew in a totally “natural” way might be. The fact that “natural” is no longer a dirty word is amazing, seeing how the Charters had pretty much given up on everything outside their gates and ours, leaving it to the livestock and agro-companies whose artificially boosted yields are purchased by the ever-numerous counties masses, both here and abroad. Most every canton of the world ecology, in their view, had been contaminated beyond remediation, at least for the foreseeable future, which is why a place like B-Mor was developed at all, and then replicated many times over after our successes.

Ensure the input to ensure the output!

Back to Soil, we have to explain to our young ones, is a reprise of an old philosophy about the unequaled purity of naturally growing things, that a particular and endemic matrix of earth and water and air and sun will result in the ideal expression of whatever one is growing, in color, structure, taste, and, of course, the most critical quality of all, which can only be healthfulness. The definition of healthfulness, of course, is different for Charters from what it is for us, and quite different still for counties folk, who can’t hope for anything beyond the basic functions and have to trade away too much when needing attention (if they’re lucky) from someone like Quig. We B-Mors are looked after pretty well, but once a potentially terminal episode is diagnosed and treated, it will not be treated again, unlike for Charters, who have enough wealth to visit their specialists as often as they wish, theoretically ad infinitum, or at least until their bodies eventually succumb to the accrued effect of the interventions. Nobody goes C-free—nobody—an axiom that we B-Mors and counties people have surely accepted but that Charters probably never will, given the obscuring veil their essentially inexhaustible resources can throw over reality.

Which brings us back to our most humble Reg.

Reg, whose gangly, sapling-like figure seemed ill suited to most every occasion and task, whose brightest sparks were borne of heart rather than mind, whose place in the annals of B-Mor before his disappearance was like any of ours, which is to say genealogical, and no more. For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic.

But by now Reg—or more specifically, the idea of Reg being C-free—had overtaken B-Mor. The place reposed anew. Was there more birdsong in the air? Did the streets show a heightened gleam? With the directorate gone silent, all that remained was our imagination, which had been ours alone but somehow felt completely unfettered now, like an old swaybacked mare whose pasture fence has been dismantled; she runs no faster but there’s a lift to the breeze, a ready vault to the ground, and with the high motoring in her chest, she is almost certain that she will sprout wings and fly.

So we must picture Reg in a Charter laboratory, sampling from a buffet of typical B-Mor dishes prepared solely for him. Through a straw he sips a tall salt
lassi
in between nibbles. He hasn’t gained any weight for his naturally speedy metabolism and his homesickness and most of all his lovesickness for Fan, even as he can’t help but eat ingenuously and with enthusiasm. A troupe of physicians monitors him from behind a glassed booth, debating the interplay of his genetic panel, his blood and hormone levels, even his posture and demeanor, trying to unlock the secret of his constitution. Is it his minuscule inflammation factor, several deviations below the mean? Is it his particular fusion of original and native blood? The fact that he eschews alcohol? Spicy foods? Or is it the discovery, when the caterers took in the dishes, that the young man did not touch the fish.

Come again?

The caterers are instructed to provide fish again in several different preparations. It’s verified. Again he does not eat any of it, not a morsel of sweet cheek, not a flake of the tail. The fish is ours, of course, fillet of #1 B-Mor primes, and when they ask Reg how long it has been since he’s consumed any fish, he tells them he never has, as he’s put off by the smell, which to him has the odor of a pair of old slippers left out in the rain. Indeed, he cannot be too close to Fan if she hasn’t shampooed her hair after working in the tanks, though he doesn’t mention this to the experts, saying only that perhaps he’d been fed fish as an infant, though he cannot remember for certain.

For the researchers, this is startling information. They can’t quite believe it; for who in B-Mor would decline their single most prized product, drastically discounted for them and which not even every Charter could afford to have daily? Not to mention that it was a primary source of pure, low-fat protein in B-Mor, where red meats and fowl are served only for special holidays and celebrations.

Almost immediately public health surveys were ordered in the Charters and in B-Mor and its sister facilities to track the correlation between levels of fish consumption and every form of the disease, and though they would uncover nothing substantive, near countless other mandatory surveys were developed and distributed, testing hypotheses about various vegetables, grains, sweeteners, salts, et cetera, until there was almost nothing left to be examined and they returned to the inquiry into fish, which set off a mini-panic in the Charter villages and a precipitous decline in sales. Suddenly nobody had much of a taste for our fish. Within weeks, the Charter distributors halved their B-Mor orders. Tanks went unharvested, the volume of water per head steadily decreasing, and our pampered, exquisite #1 primes began to jostle for room, they started to nip at one another. Soon they couldn’t help but bite, and when the first of them was gravely injured, the others didn’t hang back as they might have before but pounced in a frenzy of flashing fins and teeth.

For a period, they sold the overgrown fish at B-Mor stalls, three for the price of two, then two for one, which was cause for great rejoicing and a rash of household gatherings and block parties until certain murmurs about what was happening in the tanks bubbled up and we, too, began to question why the fish were so plentiful and cheap. At the dinner tables the younger children were soon complaining about eating too much fish, for there was fish salad and fish fritters and countless tureens of fish soup, the air swam with the dead-sea aroma of salted fillets drying in the breeze like pennants, until in our dreams there were no more fish left and we turned to one another and wondered how we could feel so full yet so forlorn.

Was it Reg we were yearning for? Was it Fan? Yes. Let it be heard. We can speak it now. There are many who say there’s no point, that these sentiments will eventually drift away like so much smoke, and they are most likely right. But if we resolve not to quell ourselves, to keep up the talk, to preserve the good picture of the pair in our minds no matter how contrary to the designs of the directorate it might be, this practice alone invigorates us, raises us up, even if there is nowhere else we wish to go.

And perhaps in the end this is the best reason to keep thinking about Fan and her trials, to exercise mental discipline in the face of what must be the most serious challenge to B-Mor since the originals first landed. An existential threat. For what would we do to support ourselves if the Charters, chasing the dream of being C-free, finally deemed our products to be unacceptable? For decades they’ve had drugs and treatments to address every expression of the dreaded C but still there is no blanket prevention, no inoculation, no ultimate cure. Is this a defect of their science and medicine, or of a philosophy that holds that nothing is beyond their reach? Either way, it left us like this: We could perhaps feed ourselves but what of our housing, our power and water, our schools and training centers and most especially our clinics? How could we assure our communal well-being?

The truth is that we could not. As conceived, as constituted, we may in fact be of a design unsustainable. Which is why we needed Fan, in both idea and person. For within her was the one promise that could deliver us, the seed of all our futures, Charters’ and B-Mors’ and even of the shunned souls out in the counties, at the moment Quig’s foremost.

One morning in the predawn Loreen roused Fan from her spot next to a sweaty-headed slumbering Star and ordered her to pack a bag. They were going to go with Quig on a trip for a couple of nights. Loreen didn’t have to explain what was happening—she’d outlined the possibility several days before—but the reason for her presence was a mystery. Fan had no choice, so she didn’t ask any questions and simply readied her few things. Within the hour the three of them were in a newer SUV kicking up a storm of dust on the road that led down to the bottom of the hill. The weather had been hot and dry for a long time but now it seemed a genuine drought had descended upon the Smokes. The rains came infrequently, and when they did come, they were brief. The streams had all but disappeared and the level of the two wells of the compound had dropped below a meter and the men were arguing about where they ought to dig a third. Cold Pond, where Fan swam with Sewey and Eli, was plagued with spongy islands of bright green algae, and even after the water drawn from it was boiled, the essence of something reptilian or freshly born from the mud stuck to the tongue in an undying rime.

They were heading for a Charter village far north, somewhere near what used to be a city called Syracuse. Apparently, the residents of this Charter were not as rich as those closer to the coasts, though, of course, by open counties or B-Mor standards they were still untouchably wealthy. Last year one of these residents had been treated by Quig; the man was driving through the area on an old bypass road and in swerving to avoid a thigh-deep pothole crashed his car into a tree. Quig saved his leg from amputation, and once recovered, the fellow invited Quig to work and live in his Charter village. Quig had no interest in returning to Charter life, but now fresh water was a problem and he required a heavier drilling rig than could be hired nearby to plumb the solid fields of granite beneath their land, and so had contacted the former patient, who was the owner of a major mining corporation.

There was no talk in the car except for the murmuring conversation Loreen was having under her breath as she knitted Sewey a sweater for the winter. Along with the painkillers she was regularly popping for a bad tooth, the knitting acted like some kind of mood drug on her, as she conversed with uncharacteristic levity and patience with a voice she was hearing in her head. Her companion was none other than a younger, sweeter version of herself, and with this still joyous but innocent girl Loreen was maternal and generous. It was difficult to make out every mewling word but she gave boiled-down advice on how to deal with overzealous boys (Keep your knees together) and techniques of basic cooking (Prewarm the pan) and what to do in the event you disturb a nest of hornets (Hold your breath and run like the wind), and it was only after she joined the next ball of yarn that she stopped talking, having fallen asleep, her ratty hair pressed flat against the window, the tips of her needles slowly uncrossing. In the backseat Fan watched the countryside drift by—the counties road was typically cruddy and hazardous—while Quig stared straight ahead with his rakelike hand propped on the wheel, earbuds lodged, listening to what sounded like old-time fiddle music, twangy and swinging. Eli had loaned her a handscreen for the trip but because of the unsteady speed of the car she couldn’t read very long without feeling sick. Of course, there was the bigger thing, too, that was roiling her gut, as she wanted to ask more questions about why she was accompanying him, but she was both afraid of him and of the reason, the most chilling possibility being that he was intending to sell or barter her.

For Quig had just traded some people away, two young men who were around Fan’s age (she was still successfully pretending to be much younger). They had come to the compound the previous week with a relation in need of emergency attention, who’d obviously decided to hand them over to Quig. They were undoubtedly brothers, sharing the same frontward stoop to their bony shoulders and a thick dark brush of monobrow. They were kept strictly inside the main house until Quig exchanged them for a fairly new vehicle equipped with four-wheel drive (which is what the three of them were traveling in now), the brothers carted off in what looked to her like a Charter medical van. They were led from the main house by a few of Quig’s men, and though they weren’t handcuffed, the expression on their faces as they stepped up into the rear compartment was the slack-eyed wonder of the damned. Fan’s heart panged with the image of Reg probably having to bend down so as not to strike his head on the door frame, and how confused and scared he must have been, not understanding why they were taking him away. Of course, she didn’t yet understand, either, what exactly was going on, but she’d overheard Loreen trying to explain to a pushy new arrival that people under a certain age were not automatically taken in trade here at Quig’s, despite the rumors that the compound was an intake facility for some purported “Charter call” for youths. And while Loreen appeared genuinely irritated and put out, hadn’t she eventually led the three teenagers being offered by the stubborn, shrill woman to the examination rooms, where Quig surely saw them? And although they soon departed with the woman and nothing else came of it, were not other healthy young people in the days since brought straight to the head of the line?

Fan didn’t remember Quig administering any blood tests on her, but in those first woozy hours she would not have noticed. He certainly hadn’t said or done anything to indicate he had discovered something special about her, like she was C-free forever, which, of course, she wasn’t. Like everyone else in B-Mor, she had been periodically tested, the last time being a year before, which was when she and Reg were just starting to talk about their future together, about marriage and children and with which of their households they might reside. By custom they would normally stay with Reg’s people, but their double row house was already at overcapacity and so was Fan’s, and they were musing about starting from scratch in a less established neighborhood of B-Mor, though realizing they would be at its head.

This was somewhat comical to them, as neither was the type to take up such a mantle, but the more they thought about it the more they felt that they should try, as they had solid jobs in the facility and could afford the loan and, most important, finally came to understand that they would be better off on their own. They were probably right to think this. We won’t say it or admit that we know, but we can all appreciate how people with some part of Reg’s native line can be very subtly or unwittingly lodged in the lee of prime conditions. Everyone knows that certain spots in the tray don’t quite receive the same flows of water and air, where perhaps the nutrients are either diluted or oddly concentrated, and the green shoots there might on first glance look fine but are, in fact, just that bit leggier, more prone to blight. We have raised this notion previously and bring it up again because it seems obvious now that Fan was not only searching out Reg because he was the father of her child and likely future husband but also that she was testing herself, seeing whether she could truly follow through on her intention of leaving B-Mor behind forever. One could argue that only if you defy from within are your demonstrations valid, but perhaps her plan was for us to have to focus on ourselves, what we and we alone would have to shoulder.

It’s not that we’re too fearful or comfortable, too cautious or reluctant, but that, as we have never experienced life outside these bounds (save for what’s glimpsed in the evening programs or, if we’re lucky, on our once-in-a-lifetime global-flight tour), the reach of our thoughts has a near ceiling. Imagination might not be limitless. It’s still tethered to the universe of what we know, and as wild as our dreams might be, we can’t help but read them with the same grounded circumspection that guided our forebears when they mapped out our walls. Fan, though, made a leap, which was a startling thing in itself.

Something she couldn’t explain, then, made her say to Quig from the backseat of the car: Whatever you’re looking for, I’ll help you find.

He didn’t answer right away, tapping at the wheel with his long fingers. Loreen was dozing, her jaw sunk, her tarnished lower teeth jammed together like kernels on a stunted ear of corn.

You’re going to help me find a well drill?

No, she said. The other thing.

The other thing, he repeated, his tone raised.

Yes, she said. This was, in fact, only the second conversation they’d had.

How do you imagine helping, little girl, if you don’t even know what I’m looking for?

You’ll have to tell me.

And if I did tell you, what would you do first?

I’d ask you to teach me how to drive.

He chuckled, the first time she’d heard him do that. He sounded exactly like one of her uncles who always had a pocketful of honey-sesame candies to give out.

And why would I do that?

So you can keep your eye out for what you’re looking for.

In the rearview mirror she saw he almost smiled. They drove in silence for another half hour when he pulled over and got out to pee. Loreen awoke and teetered out, too, half asleep, and drifted off into the bushes. Fan waited until they were both out of sight to find a spot to relieve herself, noting that her belly was as flat as ever, despite having missed her period. She was not even five weeks on. When she was done, she stepped out to the clearing while buttoning up her shorts, only to find Quig standing there, waiting.

Thought maybe you ran off.

I didn’t.

I guess that’s right, he said, his face deeply shadowed beneath the bill of his faded blue baseball cap, the cloudless sky glaring above them.

Fan stood dead still.

But he looked at her somberly and said, Let’s go.

When they got to the car, Loreen was leaning against the passenger door, her fleshy arms crossed, and before she could say anything, Quig told her Fan would be sitting up front for a while. Loreen made the sound in her throat that Fan heard whenever she was annoyed at someone in the line, but she just grabbed her knitting from the seat and climbed in the back, where she set up her pillow against the inside of the door so she could stretch out her legs. As Quig pulled onto the road, Loreen went right back to her knitting, her murmurs resuming at a slightly lower pitch as though she were growing impatient with her charge, if still doting. She certainly hadn’t been the same brambly Loreen of late, and it was obvious why; Sewey had been very sick again, the second time now in the last few weeks, and though nobody in the compound was saying anything, it was pretty much accepted that what was wrong with him was his blood (as it usually was with the younger ones), a form that was certainly treatable but so fantastically expensive to do so that the drug might as well be a global, it was so far out of reach. Plus, she had been under the weather herself, having been up many nights looking after him. Sewey’s most recent fever broke a few days before and Loreen was on this trip in part to see if she could somehow get her hands on the particular geno-chemo at this Charter, though not, of course, by paying for it. Naturally, her expectations were very low, as they are with all counties people (as is with us B-Mors, too) when it comes to the sentence of this C-fated life, and although she would try her best, the resignation, as for all of us, would come swiftly and finally once she was thwarted. There is no point otherwise.

Quig did not comment on Sewey as he drove, nor upon anything having to do with the compound or where they were heading. All he seemed interested in was describing the various parts and functions of the car to Fan. Of course, she had been in passenger vehicles before but they were B-Mor minibuses and taxis and she’d never actually sat in the front of one until now, everyone going around on scooters and bikes. When Quig heard this, his solemn, roughened face appeared to light up, and without her asking, he explained how everything worked, from the gearbox to the pedals to the dashboard to the steering wheel, then went over all the gauges and knobs and buttons, even the power seat-controls, which Fan worked on her own side, moving back and forth and up and down. He had her move her seat up as far as it could go and extend her right leg and he handed her a plastic container of dried fruit Loreen had packed for the trip to use as a steering wheel so she could practice matching the turns. It was silly at first but Quig was serious and reminded her to keep her eye not on him but on the road and the more she focused the more it seemed her actions began to have a magical bearing on the car; on the sharper curves she slowed down and she pressed her foot against the firewall when they had a clean straightaway and she wound gingerly through a bunkering of potholes on the ruined main street of an abandoned town. They drove through that town and another in the rolling countryside wilted and bleached out from the lack of rains, the saw of Loreen’s reprised sleep-breathing sounding just as husky and dry. Fan’s arms began to ache from holding up the container but she was beginning to enjoy herself, too, feeling an unlikely liberty and exhilaration, which if you think about it, can be seen as a good approximation of this life, where control is more believed than actual.