On Such a Full Sea (21 page)

After a while, Fan asked Six why she had decided on this to draw.

I’m not sure, Six said, her tone unlike the others’, not nearly as high-pitched or girly. I looked at you and just thought of the sea.

Have you ever seen it?

Only on programs, she said. Have you?

No.

The others had, of course, been listening and began to pipe in about how they had been or not been to the sea, whether they liked to swim or were afraid of the water, or what kind of fish they would be if they had to live as fish, all of them instantly agreeing they would be manta rays, winging their way through the water in a silent squadron. Six assented but didn’t say anything, continuing her drawing while the others went on about what they had discussed earlier or the day before, all while coloring, which Fan had now joined them in. She was handed just one marker, and whenever her color was needed, she filled in a space or the hatch of a shading, the chatter around her echoing in the large room like in the aviary of the one zoo in B-Mor, which had no large creatures but lots of birds and reptiles, the sound oddly both distant and cacophonous, so that Fan later realized how her ears ached with the ringing.

And she realized that they had not left this room since their respective arrivals in this suite, not even once, the glow of their skin just that of an eggshell, but on its inside, a limpid, silken white. It was why Mala would sometimes receive an extra order of foodstuffs from the delivery van and put it away herself in one of the pantries of the house kitchen. The groceries were sent up to the Girls via a dumbwaiter that opened up into their small but functional galley kitchen near the bathroom, where they prepared their own simple meals. The bathroom was outfitted with two basins and two toilets and two shower stalls, plus a closet with a washer and dryer, though all that needed to be laundered were the bed linens and towels and nightshirts. For exercise they practiced a special mix of tai chi and yoga that Miss Cathy had read about in a magazine and instituted into their day, though they all suffered to varying degrees from sore joints and fragile bones and periodic bouts of an intense dragging weariness that Fan would later learn were all caused by lack of sunlight. In fact, they were definitely stooped in their posture, slope-shouldered and none very tall, which made them look even more like blood sisters than they already did. Fan herself felt fine, maybe extra-fine because of the pregnancy, her joints seemingly more flexible as she led the exercises. Her skin was certainly more supple, her hair more luminous, her chest seeming to have become fuller, though in a way only she could notice and feel. And she was beginning to yearn for the water again, to stretch her arms, motor forth with her powerful kick, but not in the confines of a tank.

Fan would have expected that one or two of the Girls would have long rebelled at spending a life in a room, would have begged, say, the dentist, to help them steal away, but the funny thing about this existence is that once firmly settled we occupy it with less guard than we know. We watch ourselves routinely brushing our teeth, or coloring the wall, or blowing off the burn from a steaming yarn of soup noodles, and for every moment there is a companion moment that elides onto it, a secret span that deepens the original’s stamp. We feel ever obliged by everyday charges and tasks. They conscript us more and more. We find world enough in a frame. Until at last we take our places at the wheel, or wall, or line, having somewhere forgotten that we can look up.

At first Fan went right along with the rub of the days. A week passed, then two. The Girls had been especially pleased that she asked Miss Cathy if she could move to their room a full day early, spending only two nights out in the main bedroom. She responded to being called Eight right away, but the truth was that each Girl had already begun calling her Fan. Three and Four always seemed to be sitting next to her at meals. Seven followed her around. Six loved the shape of her eyes, saying they were like the daintiest pea pods, and even drew a special panel of them alone, floating above a field of waving girls’ hands. And aside from her own wall coloring, with which she was very careful and slow, knowing herself not to be naturally skilled, Fan helped out as much as she could with the few chores they allowed her, such as the sweeping and dusting, and then in assisting Four, who led the daily period of exercise.

Fan was strong and limber, practically in world-class condition compared with their chronically achy and weak array, instantly able to do what they considered to be the most difficult poses, and soon enough Four asked Fan if she would lead the session. Fan got them to try simpler, if more strenuous, exercises like push-ups and sit-ups and deep knee bends, and although it was tough at first (especially for the older ones) and a couple of them even half fainted, they grew accustomed to the burn in their arms and thighs, and to the dew of sweat dampening their brows and the cloth between their shoulder blades, and soon they were counting out the increasing number of reps they could do in an urging, tweeting chorus. They grew stronger for certain but the greatest change was in their level of energy, they seemed to be quicker in rising from bed, or stepping in and out of the shower, or even while taking their meals with their newly piqued appetites, when the play of their chopsticks over the platters seemed more vigorous and pitched.

Soon work on the mural was moving faster, too, Six having to draw several new scenes a day instead of just one, the girls behind her more focused and engaged, sometimes even nudging one another because of their tighter assembly. In fact, there was a genuine flare-up between Four and Five, who bickered about whose shade of blue marker was most like the color of the blank screens of Mister Leo’s office, this for a scene portraying Fan’s first solo encounter with him. This was the way of the mural; it reflected whatever was happening at the moment, and by reading it from the beginning, Fan could trace the looping arcs of their time and how each girl had come but also whatever was of interest or concern, becoming a more intricate map of their consciousness as it was emended and evolved.

For example, the scenes before Three appeared were generally straightforward and even childlike in their depiction of their lives before they came to the house and then after they began working with Mala, the renderings of chores and games and girlish pastimes shown simply and often sentimentally, happy girls ironing or painting their nails or brushing each other’s hair. Mister Leo was not yet shown as an ominous presence, but once Three appeared on the wall, those “parts” of him showed up, too; the broader mood of the renderings seemed to shift as well, the emotions of the Girls becoming more patent, raw, the backgrounds sharpened by bolder colors and menacing geometrical shapes, and then new images of long-suffering Miss Cathy as their beacon, their savior, respectively delivering them from the prison of Mister Leo’s downstairs world.

Indeed, they didn’t seem to blame Miss Cathy for standing by while her husband took a turn with each of them, and though at first this bothered Fan, she soon understood why: to them Miss Cathy was their wounded and vulnerable big sister, if one distant, stuck in an ugly misery herself, and from some of the mural scenes, it was evident she had been compromised, too, in her youth, by a gaunt-faced man in a business suit, who may have been her father or stepfather. He showed up here and there along the wall, stiffly eating at the dinner table, a murky silhouette in a nighttime doorway.

The primary problem, of course, was that they were locked in. Only Miss Cathy (and Mala), by a mere touch of her fingertips, specifically right index and thumb, could unlock the suite doors. And now her schedule had changed; after awaking in late morning and going through her ablutions, she went downstairs in her housedress and then didn’t return until evening. With Mister Leo incapacitated, you would think that her days would fully extend, open up to catch the best air and light, but the funny thing about a life is how eventually it will adhere to certain routines of mind, those tracks or grooves laid down in special pressure and heat.

She had already lost interest in shopping with Fan, and lunching out, and getting together with her few acquaintances, realizing now that what was most important was that her husband have her company. It was no matter if that company was gentle or sharp, if she spoon-fed him or let Tico do the job, if she shaved his chin with utter care while humming the melody of a favorite song or if she badly nicked him, if she alerted Tico that he had to empty his bowels or simply stood by as his face contorted with the strain while he was slumped in his wheelchair, letting him brew in the stink. She felt the compulsion to be there, to let him always see her face. But she was growing nervous again, too, tight and jumpy for stretches and then rooting for a period beneath an almost discernible cloud, through which you could tell she needed him, too, for no matter how homely or grotesque the bond was unassailable, having been once pure.

The other matter was indeed how fully the others took to Fan, this Lucky One the latest but also the Last, the role of which instantly elevated her along with the quality we all can’t help but recognize and admire: that effortless anchoring of being, that nascent stillness that typically occurs only in nature. They tended to gather around her, slyly jockeying about the marker tower so they could take the one that would have them coloring right beside her, or be at hand with the ladle to add more broth to her bowl. Though they did not change the position of her bed, they took turns sleeping in the bed of Seven (who was the youngest and quite liked moving about each night) to whisper numerous queries about her life and views, and recount their more curious dreams and then gently rouse her in the morning with an especially wide-eyed smile and their customary greeting, a sweetly harmonized croon: “New-day, new-day.” And then one day someone noticed that the group portrait of the eight of them featured not Mister Leo’s face but each of their own. When they asked Six why this was so, she simply told them she was tired of drawing his face. But of course, they all knew that Fan was the difference.

Another sort of person might have thoughtlessly disrupted their corpus, but Fan was careful not to bestow or withhold any special attention. In part, she accomplished this by regularly moving about the room, breaking from the mural work to take a cup of tea or use the toilet, and then linger alongside whoever was busy in the kitchen or bathroom before returning to the wall. There was no stratagem to this, no intention of gaining favor or influence or trying to engineer her own escape by employing them as cover or diversion. Indeed, Fan was growing fearful for what she might leave behind in these hardly grown-up girls, who seemed too fragile as individuals to endure any change or trauma like a sundering of their group. They had been practically orphans to begin with, toss-offs from the counties who were damaged by Mister Leo and then quartered in a literally hobbling protective custody.

Yet it was not simply the limits of the room but also their own order that had formed them, the expressions of which Fan could see played out on the wall. For there was now nothing that
could
happen to them, no new experiences whatsoever save their routine, and aside from the more plain, commemorative images that appeared whenever a new girl entered their realm, the scenes portrayed in certain detail the fantastical alternative lives of each: picture tales of the broods of children One and Two bore (and even those they sadly had to bury, a pair from a sleeping sickness and one, of all things, by a fall from a tree), or of the dazzling acting career of Four, who starred in an imagined long-running program about women cattle ranchers in Argentina, or the unsung missions of Three, who brought much needed basic dentistry to counties children by opening a string of spotlessly clean free clinics. And if the trajectories of these seven interlacing mangas were variously modest, heroic, unlikely, they were also thoroughly voluble and peculiar and dense enough in their particulars that after hours of study Fan herself began to feel that it all must have transpired. And she supposed that in a manner it had, and with enough vigor that their yearnings were sated.

Naturally, they began pushing for Fan to reveal what “happens” to her. Six was excited to begin drawing it out, the coloring of Fan’s arrival and attendant documentation already completed. They kept clamoring:
We want to know where you go!
Finally, Fan said she had some ideas but that they were not yet fully formed. This was half true; the distant future indeed was blank, but Fan’s sighting of the near was as concrete as anyone’s, we B-Mors and now others know this well, she was as clear-eyed as the fortune-card readers in our malls purport to be. A self-visualizer, as they say, one who engenders the path on which she’ll tread by dint of her pure focus, her unwavering belief. And so she would have had to describe how she led them out of this room, out of this house, perhaps even through the secured gates of the village altogether; but of course she did not. Who could know how they might react? Who could anticipate the shape of their fascination, its hot gleam or trembling?

She didn’t want to incite anything like a rebellion. She figured any direct push against Miss Cathy would be futile, given their utter acclimation to their lot and devotion to her. Miss Cathy was not their antagonist. There was no antagonist per se, not even Mister Leo, who for them was the most distant star in the most distant galaxy, undying yet irradiant. She had still not revealed that he was a bare fraction of his former self, again afraid of the psychic consequences. Instead, she began to tell them about Reg, of her love for him—hiding her true age, at least from them, seemed no longer necessary—and that he had disappeared, and how she was still, in fact, on her journey to find him.

The information unsettled them, with One almost unable to comprehend the idea that he was not a story boy; she kept asking what happened to him next. Fan responded by asking Six to sketch him out.

You mean right now? Six said.

Only if you want to.