On Such a Full Sea (30 page)

There weren’t other pursuits for our Fan, of course, as it was only ever one boy or girl in any generation of a household who was allotted such opportunities, and only if they showed highest promise, a custom that Oliver had clearly forgotten or had never noticed. But Fan didn’t tell him this, nor that when the first few times she dove as a little girl she nearly drowned. Nor did she tell him how much indeed she had loved it anyway, just as he was positing, even before she was able to describe the feeling to anyone in the household, and through force of will and mastery of her fears had made herself into a fine diver. Or that she sometimes trembled at the prospect of having been cut from the tank-diving track, despite all her efforts.

She told him there was nothing she found more enjoyable.

You’re lucky, Fan. But what will you do now? There’s no work like that here.

I’ll find something else, she said. You can still play the violin so well.

I like that I can, he said, not in the least bragging. But if I never played it again, I wouldn’t even think about it. I hadn’t, for years, until the other night, when I was actually playing. Do you find that strange?

This indeed puzzled Fan, as he had played so very beautifully, making a kind of music she had not encountered on any evening program or even at the underground mall during the New Year celebrations, when B-Mor’s best musicians would perform swingy, upbeat pieces, the instrument seeming to become creaturely the moment Oliver tucked it under his chin, it seemingly animated by its own wants and voice. She had never felt such pure, lovely, sad sound.

Each day they would jog together like this, and each day Oliver would ask something about B-Mor, what things were like in the facilities and at the mall, what people in the clan were up to, though not inquiring too deeply into any particular person. If there was a theme to his queries about an uncle or cousin or one of their parents, it was about how they had gotten on over the years, how they’d aged physically and which C-illnesses they’d suffered and how they managed the early mandatory retirement and what they did with their free-days. When Fan asked what he remembered of the older people doing around the row houses and stoops, he said smoking and drinking tea and gossiping and eating snacks and watching the programs and farting and belching, to which Fan said, Yes, that’s what they still do, to which he shook his head and laughed, though with a quizzical expression that made Fan think he believed she was trying to tell him something else.

In fact, he responded to much of what she said in this way, with a half-incredulous grin that quickly compressed into a tiny pout of wonder, just as if a monk had uttered a particularly imponderable koan for him to unravel. But he continued to ask all about B-Mor, never anything serious or weighty like school or facilities issues or the directorate, but about what kinds of eateries there were in the mall these days, or the kinds of street games the children were playing, or facts he didn’t get to know because he left too early to be interested in, for example, how the retirees going on a lifetime global were chosen, or what music and vids and games teenagers liked best, and where they went to meet for dates, and whether it still mattered which clan you were from, or which neighborhood, for someone to like you in that way. He was trying to get a feel again for what basic life in B-Mor was like, the day to day to day, which Fan thought he would certainly find dull and common but that he seemed to get more curious about as they spoke, wanting the most insignificant details that Fan herself could hardly recall (if she ever noticed them), like the colors of the sash and uniform of the salesgirls at the department store (crème and mocha), and the price of a
mochi
(hardly changed), and if the great aunties still used those long-bristled Stone Age hand brooms that the counties peddlers brought in to sell to sweep the walk in front of the houses (yes). In fact, their light jogs, which had eased to walks, became a shared act of cataloguing the many patterns and textures of B-Mor life, a modest cloth indeed, but one that Oliver kept wanting to examine and handle and measure against his newly aroused memories.

For in recent years, and as the promise of his research solidified, he had been thinking more and more of his time in B-Mor with a deepening glow of nostalgia, though one surely too warm and bright and that he was skeptical of, being trained as a scientist. He told Fan how after he was Chartered, as it was known here, he had truly not thought of B-Mor at all, not because he wanted to forget it, but because after all the celebrations and commemorations and absolute good-byes—there were no see-you-laters, no au revoirs—the feeling he had was that he was embarking on his own private global, out past any atmosphere, and leaving behind a world at which he could not gaze back, as it had already been erased. Everyone knows how hard it is for any Charter kid to do well, but he was a newcomer with surprisingly indifferent foster parents who were more interested in keeping than raising him, and so he realized that there was just himself, that he was the only person who would educate this unfledged boy.

In the first overwhelming and chaotic weeks of his new life at school and swim practice he’d come home and, after a mostly silent meal, retreat to his room and stand before the mirror in his dressing room full of new clothes and berate himself for the various mistakes and idiocies he’d committed and revealed that day. He hated the new name he’d been given and he channeled his fury at this pathetic Oliver, calling him out for his failings, starting with his vocabulary, which he’d prided himself on in B-Mor but was shockingly lacking here. He even misused the words he had, no teacher in B-Mor ever correcting him, confusing paramount with tantamount, egress and aegis, his teacher holding forth upon their etymologies for the class, to his utter humiliation. He was excellent at math but found he was a half year behind his new classmates, most of whom were not gifted at all, and he stayed up all night for a week to teach himself the units he was missing, soon enough leaping past them, though he never let on. And while in the pool he was nearly as fast as the others, he realized how much harder he was working because of his faulty technique and mechanics, his teammates languidly pulling themselves through the water with butter-smooth strokes while he brutally chopped at it, as his coach said, like a madman having a fit.

But he learned. He could not help but learn, as vigilant as he was for any sliver of instruction or advice. And this is what Oliver revealed to Fan he was best at, his truest gift: he was instantly able to determine who possessed expertise or useful knowledge, and then glean from them whatever he could, even if they were against him, which most everyone was at the beginning, his classmates and teammates and coaches and even his violin teacher, who had never worked with a Chartered student before. The only one who had been immediately welcoming to him was a very quiet but self-collected Vikram Upendra, who noted an error in a second-order partial differential equation Oliver had written out for the class, mentioning it to Oliver only afterward to make fun of their conceited instructor, who believed himself a rare genius who should have been designing propulsion systems or proprietary trading platforms.

Oliver admired Vik’s mind, for sure, but mostly for how unruffled he was, how he let everything come to him and then made it fit into his own idiosyncratic measure. This could never be Oliver’s way, but hanging out with Vik helped him understand the value of not always pushing and striving at full tilt, that there were situations best handled by patience or throttling back or maybe—and this had never occurred to him—by doing nothing at all. The funny thing was that there was a worrisome period in which his research seemed to have stalled, until one day he asked himself what Vik might do and proceeded to halve his large staff so they could concentrate their efforts on simpler approaches to the problem. Soon thereafter there was a breakthrough, and whether it was mere coincidence didn’t matter, because in Oliver’s own mind, Vik had a credit in his success.

It’s why I could do nothing to him the day of the party, he confessed to Fan. They had stopped as usual at the coffee bar, Oliver having his iced Americano, Fan a tangerine juice.

I was going to punch him out. I was going to strangle him. But I couldn’t. He said he was sorry, which I could see he genuinely was. That was it. That was my friend Vik. He could have tried to excuse himself, he could have easily pointed out how lonely Betty had been these last few years when I was working at the lab at night after seeing patients. Every weekend, too. It was why they began spending a lot of time together again, just as friends would, which they didn’t try to hide and I was actually grateful for. Betty seemed much happier. And you know what? She was. I wasn’t a very present or attentive husband and father then. Before that, too.

Fan said it seemed he was quite present and attentive now.

He nodded, though somewhat absently, as surely screening in his mind was a set of pictures he would see from time to time, and forever, whether he wanted to or not.

After a pause, he said: Have you talked to Vik? Wait. You don’t have to tell me. I don’t even know why I want to know.

She said, Maybe you wish to be friends again.

Oliver thought about it. He said, I guess I do. All these years, Vik was my only real friend. But it’s too late now. It’s gone. And besides, it would be too awkward around Betty, with us acting like nothing was wrong. I appreciate it that you haven’t said anything to her. You may think this is odd. But I don’t ever want her to have to apologize to me.

It was then that Oliver got very quiet, not shedding tears but shuddering very finely, as if he were earthen inside and loosely caked and just about to shear. Fan saw how much he was resisting, and to bolster him placed her hand beside his on the café table, the simple sight of which seemed to calm him down, the two opposing forms differently sized but too similar in the proportions of the fingers to the palm, the chafed, uneven rises of knuckle, the way their thumbs turned a little too far inward, for their being anything else but true kin.

During the next couple of weeks, Fan grew ever ingrained into the life of the Cheungs, such that it felt to them that she had always been a part of their family. They all kept saying how much they loved her presence, her indulging play with the children, how she helped Betty make design decisions and kept Oliver exercising, which relieved his stress. Even the helpers adored her, as she never minded picking up after Josey or lending a hand with the dishes. This all came easily to her, of course, being someone who was raised in a crowded household in B-Mor, embodying for Betty and Oliver all the reasons that they were expending astounding efforts and sums on this project.

The effort was all theirs but the sums, we should now note, had begun to dwarf what was actually in their accounts (especially given that they’d just built what had been a new house), as the deal with the pharmacorp had been agreed to in principle but with the minor contractual details, as one can expect with ever-complicating lawyers, still being haggled over. Of course, none of this mattered, as after word of the sale, every major Charter bank had come to the Cheungs hawking huge bridge loans at rates so low anyone would have jumped at the offers. Borrowed or not, a sizable new lode of money is a powerful thing, as everyone knows, not just the quickest balm but a device of dreams, an imagination machine that churns out the exact products of your wishing, one right after the other, so that it’s all one can do to keep up the conjuring. Maybe that’s why in B-Mor it’s always been so costly to borrow money (besides being nearly impossible to make a windfall), which we see now may be a boon, to keep us from pitfalls, of course, but also ever grounded. Our eyes on smaller prizes.

And if we understand Fan in this way, it makes sense enough that she did not prod Oliver and Betty on the question of Reg. She was well aware how all-consumed they were with the light-speed progression of the work, the two houses at this point appearing just like the architect’s full-color renderings (though in truth the serial simulations barely preceded the stages of construction), the design finally set so that each house had three entrances (a primary and two flanking) and the simple window pattern of a B-Mor structure, one atop the other on each of the three floors, the façades now cased in real bricks that had been aged in specialized weathering barns. The interiors were coming along as well, Fan doing a daily walk-through with Oliver and Betty and their architects or foremen during the shift changeover of workmen in the late afternoon, ascending the central stair of each bay as it took them to the landings of a floor’s four rooms that would soon be as plush as the trailers but were distinct compartments, the plan so unlike the overabundant airiness of the former structure. The difference here was that you could move through the various doors and openings between the bays, go up and down and across from wherever you were, the bedrooms and parlors repeated except for the very large kitchen and communal dining room in each house, which would be anchored by a long, rough-hewn plank table for up to sixteen (the pair being made right now, in fact, by a woodworker at Seneca Circus).

But even with everything moving at a breathtaking pace, Fan still tried to remind Oliver as often as she could to please follow up with this or that colleague or friend, and while he never seemed irritated by her requests or replied with any curtness, she couldn’t help but wonder whether he was intentionally not taking their calls or deleting their messages or indeed had never gotten in touch with them at all. For while she didn’t want to think it, from his perspective what benefit would it be to speed up this process of searching for her Reg? Whether they located him and could bring him here, or else found the whole hope was futile, either way would only serve to hasten the arrival of the moment when Fan must decide whether to stay with them or go. And as we recount her travails, it’s not difficult to surmise that this is the basic form of the question, no matter where she was, in B-Mor or the counties or in the soft glove of a Charter: Why did she go? Why didn’t she stay? What ill condition does she see?

It’s funny to say, but maybe if she knew how interested we had become in her absence, she might never have gone.

Though there are signs. Here in B-Mor, where the autumn sun shines in its unmitigated fullness, we see the lengthened shadows of the gathered throng and are grateful for them, as it’s this darkness that now mostly blankets the streets and makes them seem full, our numbers sadly dwindled. There’s still noisemaking and chanting, a chorale breaking out here and there, if with a less strident song. It’s the same with the postings, and the chattering in the mall, as if a certain diminishment had settled into our cells and ceded the keenest color, the keenest heat, as with the first fading leaves now twittering on the lean-branched trees. The only things literally growing are the oddly styled heads you come upon quite regularly of late, the shifting, sheepish eyes of those no longer keeping up their clean-shaven scalps, their renascent hair unruly and confused in its swirls.

We briefly followed one of these persons last weekend, an attractive young woman in her late teens or early twenties, good skin and clear, pretty eyes, being curious as to what she might be doing with that part of her day. We trailed her for an hour in the underground mall, where she browsed the sale racks of blue jeans and glamour tees, then visited a cheap jewelry kiosk where she was clearly acquainted with the clerk, purchasing a shiny accessory for her handscreen before meeting a neatly dressed (and normally coiffed) couple at a tea stall. They took tea and some cookies, and the two women seemed to have some laughs at the expense of the man, who took the ribbing well enough. Then the man noted the time and the couple quickly got up to leave, perhaps for a movie, inviting her to come along, but she declined, happily shoo-shooing them away.

She first checked her handscreen for a while, then put it away and simply watched the streams of people through the clear partition that separated the tables of the tea stall from the mall corridor, her expression difficult to read, neither bored nor wistful nor in any way intrigued. And yet there was something about her in that moment of regard that gave us pause. She was quite enrapt, we were certain, even as her face remained almost totally blank, just as a drinking glass remains unchanged when filled with water but of course is not at all the same.

For we know the moment, too: to have given over to the full onrush of a feeling, to have ridden up the wall of the curl and maybe, if we’re reckless or brave enough, done the deed, essentially turning our insides out. And for a period—this young woman’s lasting perhaps a few weeks—heady with the rich feed of new and unexpected hopes, we make a whole world of that feeling, such that we can hardly imagine how it was before, or could ever be again, so that the smallest things we say or do seem touched with a destined aura. We connect with you who lingers in our path. We forget that every fervor will subside.

The young woman paid her bill and left, and as she stepped on the escalator rising to the street level, someone said loudly enough for her to hear, What about Fan?

She turned and looked about, unsure as to who had spoken. She looked suddenly so stricken and wan, as if her very conscience had leaped out from her chest and cuffed her. The escalator delivered her to the top and she glanced about nervously before scampering away.

It was awful, for someone to have singled out this poor soul, this girl who had only enacted with earnestness and the wonder of a pup those things we couldn’t bring forth or otherwise contrive for ourselves. We must picture her as feeling hounded all the way home, passing the old-timers in the parlor without even her usual blithe Hey, ba, going up to the room she shared with two sisters but who were fortunately away and with unknowing irony doing just as we do in our secret night, our heads gravely cradled, towing rough fingers through the strands.

So what about our Fan? What was her disposition as she stood on the new street the bulldozers had graded between the houses and filled with gravel, bawdy-storied crews having installed drainage and laid out the formwork for the sidewalks? Betty had instructed the architects to consult Fan whenever possible, telling the almost identically dressed and spectacled trio (two men and a woman) that what it felt like out here was as important as in any room of the houses. This is where Josey and the twins and their cousins and their pals would spend much of their most cherished time, racing about, as Fan had described, in a game of tag using the stoops as safe bases, or playing soccer with the curbs as sidelines and ragged grow-house jumpsuits dropped down as goals, or simply sitting enervated beneath the mean summer glare, squinting and dry mouthed, waiting for the ice cream man to putter by on his three-wheeled scooter with its rear icebox full of treats (there was no such vendor here in the Charter but certainly one could be arranged). It was all being knit together before Fan’s eyes, its imminence convincing her at least of the generous vision and spirit of these newfound kin, and perhaps engendering something deeper in her, too, those feelings none of us who are truly living can always master and which thus grace us, if also leaving us vulnerable.

It turns out, though, that Fan was more vulnerable than she could know. For Oliver was indeed taking all his colleagues’ calls, and calling them all back, and then pushing to be referred to others who might be better positioned and connected to those who might actually know something. At first it was squarely annoying how difficult it was to find out almost anything about this Reg, by every account a thoroughly ordinary low-level facility worker, Oliver’s frustration in fact boiling over during a call to a lab friend, when in an arrogant fit of pique he accused the fellow of indolence for not coming up with more useful results. But soon enough, as it grew clear how the channels of his always reliable school and medical network were seemingly being blocked, Oliver became intrigued. The more resistance or obfuscation or dead-ending he encountered, the more it sparked his mind with a deepening fascination, a fascination that soon altered his approach, such that he saw the problem as one of not just exerting pointed social pressures or unpacking certain linkages but embracing the phenomenon of a complex and special aberration, upon which he would apply the force of his research methodologies, structuring and casting his inquiries to probe certain notions and to isolate and test corollaries to see how they led back to a former line or else suggested a new one.

He mentioned none of these activities to Fan, in part telling himself that to do so without a ready or even provisional means of finding Reg would be irresponsible, and maybe downright cruel (despite the fact that he admired Fan for being Fan, which is to say the kind of person who would keep the right perspective on such qualified information). The other part was less generous; for soon enough, one of these lines, Oliver concluded, confirmed at least this: that while really no one could or would say where this Reg was, including someone very high up in the directorate, it was clear he’d become a primary object of curiosity for the very pharmacorp that was buying Asimil. This made perfect sense, if what he was now hearing back about the boy was true. There was Asimil and there was Reg; a life of serial therapies, or maybe none at all. The former would be astronomically expensive. But which was actually more valuable in the end? If he were running the pharmacorp, he would be running the numbers, having it penciled out, but regardless he’d want Reg in his hands, for sure (he’d easily confirmed that both his parents had died of C-illnesses and that Reg was an only child), to determine what in his makeup was leading people to believe he was C-free forever, although how, without his whole life having been lived and studied, could you ever be certain? Maybe you’d have to keep him forever.

Another week or so went by. By now the hardscape was completed, the sidewalks set and lined with granite curbing, and the roadway paved in the same light gray hue of our very own streets, and then laced with just enough mica to emit the slightest glitter. The young gingko trees were planted and staked. In fact, they decided not to roll out much sod on the double property but instead put in a large playground for all the children of the neighborhood to use, even if there weren’t that many. Oliver had a street sign made up and affixed to the top of a black-painted steel gaslight post set at the head of the drive, the old-style letters embossed and hand-painted:
BETTY’S LANE
. Inside, the houses were nearly completed, with the installation of cabinetry and appliances and electronics and the finishes of the floors. All the rooms had already been painted or papered, the bedrooms laid in with carpeting.

Fan’s rooms in her bay’s three floors—all twelve of them, not including the baths—were painted in white. As with the other rooms in the houses, Betty had multiple scenarios for various beautiful and elegant color schemes for her walls and trim from which to choose, a mix of paints and wallpapers, curtains and rugs and throws, but Fan asked to have it done in plain white, the default, bulk white paint contractors used in the service people’s dorms and public restrooms, which was the same white paint the originals in B-Mor had been given truckloads of long ago and that we never stopped using. She chose it for the sake of familiarity but also because the selecting of all those very particular colors seemed to her a tacit acceptance of a future in which she could not quite promise she would be.