Air (or Have Not Have)

CHAPTER 6

Mae walked back down Lower Street just before three A.M. She was looking down at her feet, in the moonlight, to avoid stumbling on the old cobbles.

Something happened inside her eyes. It seemed as if the surface of the road swelled up flickering. She felt herself swell, grow larger, but more diffuse, as mist.

Suddenly the road was paved, with yellow light reflected from its smooth asphalt surface.

Mae looked up to see a street lamp, towering over Lower Street on a high concrete pole. When had there been a streetlight on Lower Street? Or a concrete pole?

Mae looked around and saw the town, spilling down the hillside like a necklace, all strings and spangles of light.

Below, in the valley where once there had been a marsh, a neon sign glowed: hotel nearness, it said. Next to it was some kind of shop, blazing out blue fluorescent light over its own whitewashed wall and the road. A bright red awning hid the things in its window. Children yelled somewhere, running. Children stayed in the village these days. Why leave? All the world was here now. Because of Air, the children stayed. Mae saw her great-grandchildren every day.

Where am I? Where is this?

The air smelled of car exhaust and was full of noise: televisions, back-firing cars, and an ambulance siren.

Mae was old and irritated by a bad back and she was thinking: This is where it was: this is where my house once stood. My house with Joe.

Climbing up this steep hill had cost her. She had fallen months before and her back was still not right. She still tried to walk in a sprightly way, though crumpled, stiff and sore.

It was here, old Mae thought, here that we met, here it all happened. Here I was reborn.

A wind rose, carrying with it the sound of blown reeds. The wind seemed to lift Mae up with it.

Mr Ken stood waiting in the courtyard gate.

And the old woman saw Mr Ken. To her, he was a ghost from the past. Old Mae choked, put a hand to her mouth. Everything: heart, eyes, gorge, seemed to swell with panic and love.

There he was, her Mr Ken. He wore a sweatshirt – she remembered it now clear as day – and his good trousers with the spandex band instead of a belt.

The wind blew stronger. The sense of panic and loss were taken with it, along with the streetlights.

And Mae collapsed, not like dust settling, but like a house of cards all at once. And it seemed she pulled the world with her. It had all fallen back into place as she knew it.

What? Mae thought. What was that? She clamped a hand to her forehead. It was a gust of madness.

Air, thought Mae.

Air goes into the future as well?

She looked about her. There was no Hotel Nearness. The hills were dark; the rural streets were silent.

Maybe, she thought, maybe I should not go into Air too often.

Mr Ken put a hand to his lips, and paused, questioning, to give her a chance to refuse.

Mae's response was simply to walk towards the valley. He followed. There were no listening lights at three in the morning.

The wind in the reeds was like the sound of a waterfall, like everything tumbling out of her head. They walked in silence. Just outside the village, in the sound of the wind, he felt safe to speak.

'I thought you might not come,' he said. 'Your house was dark. Where have you been?'

'In the future,' she heard herself say. She thought, and then confirmed it: 'I've been into the future.'

'Watching television?'

Mae felt distant. Maybe she was just tired. She shook her head. She didn't want him to talk. She wanted to listen to the world, the wind, and the moon. She could hear the moon move through clouds.

'Mae. What do you mean?'

She was not looking at him; she was looking up, away. 'Kizuldah will become just like everywhere else. We will have stores and street-lights and parking lots.' She turned and looked back at the darkened, silent silhouettes of houses, and already regretted it, mourned her village.

His handsome face was crossed with concern. You are a husband inside, Mae thought: kind, decent, capable of love. So why was she not responding?

'I'm very sleepy,' she said, as an excuse, as a lie, as the truth. Mae was feeling suddenly contrary.

He took her hand. 'Are you worried?' he asked. His eyes were searching her face for something.

The woman who had a lover and brandished knives suddenly unsheathed herself.

'What do you think of when you remember Tui?' she demanded.

His head hung for a moment. 'She was my wife.' He struggled. 'She was always frail. She did not like…' The rolling of his hand somehow indicated sex. 'It made her shake. I thought that was love, but later I knew it was fear. I don't know what frightened her.'

Mae sighed. 'She was always a frightened little thing. We used to pick on her. It was not right, but we said she had fleas.'

'I remember,' he said, in soft surprise. Had he really forgotten that?

'You never teased her. You were always a good boy,' said Mae. It was not said entirely with respect. But then it is difficult to be bad when your grandmother runs the school.

'I remember the things you would make,' Mr Ken said. 'My grandmother would sometimes show them to me specially. I thought they were beautiful.'

'What things?' she said. People always talked about the things Mae made as a child. It meant they didn't have to say: You were slow at your letters.

Mr Ken said, 'You would find old shells, and make a necklace. Once you made peas in their shells, out of library paste. I thought they were wonderful. Grandmother tried to bake them, to save them, and they broke, remember?'

Mae began to understand. He was saying he had wanted her even in those days and had not spoken. The truth was that she had not much noticed him back then. When had Ken Kuei gone from the quiet, staring boy to the broad-shouldered handsome man? Joe had been the one when they were young. Joe was like a knifeblade. Young and sharp, the rebel. Maybe he had been the fashion expert then.

'You married very young,' Ken Kuei said.

He was trying to say that he had been screwing up his courage when the announcement of their wedding had come.

Mae said, 'You should have been quicker.'

'I know,' he said, quietly. He stopped. 'Do you want to do this?' he asked.

Mae shrugged. 'I am here.'

'You don't seem happy.'

Happy? Whoever said life would be happy? His wife had just killed herself. 'No, I'm not, I never am,' she said, her fingers digging into her hair. 'You will have to get used to that.'

They stepped down off a bank, down into reeds. She tried to feel anything at all. Maybe she was just tired.

Maybe I just want to know what it is all for, if everything is to be swallowed up, if we are all reduced like those old photographs of Eloi. History turns us into exposed meat.

Sex, like history, stripped away who you were. You do what everyone else does, overwhelmed by base nature. Sex would blow away their selves, Chung Mae, Ken Kuei, like favorite scarves lost in the wind.

Mae was the one who initiated it. Perhaps she just wanted it over. She pulled his face to hers, they kissed. The ground was damp in patches. The tops of the reeds danced as if in excitement, in honour of the moon. The clouds were strange. They were stippled around the moon, like splattered mud-plaster.

Mae noticed that even while Mr Ken offered the beauty of his flat stomach and round thighs, he was slower this time. He worked himself up through many minutes, while she looked at the moon. Through his endurance, Mae was finally brought once again to the state she had never achieved with Joe. She became no one, just a body.

But she had learned: A lessening of desire in the man makes him work harder, longer, so the woman got more out of it. Joe was always done in an instant.

She said, 'We'd better go, it must be getting late.'

'Or getting early,' he chuckled, and put his forehead on hers again. It was a gesture of – what – relief? gratitude? surrender? It made her smile because already parts of him were becoming familiar.

Mr Shenyalar began to sing from his tower. The sky was already silver as she slipped back into her disordered house.

Inside, it was tiny and dark. The ground floor looked posed, like a museum exhibit, except that it smelled of Joe and was full of his snoring.

It was only then that the love came, the love she had been trying not to feel. It came torn out of her, like a baby ripped raw out of the womb. She missed Mr Ken; she wanted him there, not to screw, but to talk to about the past, the village, and all the things she could never talk about to Joe.

Her marriage was over.

She couldn't bear to get into bed with Joe, so she set about cooking his breakfast. She cooked in hatred, weeping as she oiled the pan and boiled the noodles.

Siao and Old Mr Chung tumbled down out of the loft and she dumped noodles onto their plates and she thought of the ridges of callus on Mr Ken's palms. She remembered his soft voice, the strength of him, the hesitant words.

Joe got up an hour later, hung over and silent. Finally he left to go, he said, to work.

Mae sat in a chair feeling drained and exhausted and baffled by herself. I wasted our night, she thought, as if holding it to herself. And I've got my Question Map to do. How am I to do a Question Map? I can't write.

She was half asleep when the thought came: It's a manager's job to manage. There's always going to be something you don't know how to do. Just find someone who does.

It was a beautiful new thought for Mae. Of course, just find someone who can. It warmed and comforted her and made the world seem tranquil and forgiving.

Mae went to sleep and woke up as someone new.