On Such A Full Sea

17

Whenever we tell the story of Fan, details are apt to change. You don’t mean to alter anything; in fact, your intention is the very opposite, you want nothing more than to be an echo of the previous speaker, who, you decide, did a perfectly super job. And try as you might to match the very tone of the telling, the bellow of certain episodes and the half-breathed whisper of others, isn’t it the truth that, despite your fealty to the story, a moment will arise that compels a freelancing, perhaps even rebellious, urge?

Of course, those moments will vary depending on who you are. Like everyone else, we have a sensitivity to particular incidents, which can strike a nerve. For example, when we hear about Miss Cathy’s girls surrounding Fan, we’re as startled as anyone else, the same hard knot instantly twisting in our chests as in yours; and yet we can’t help but add a little of our own special imprint, a tiny re-marking here, a slight miscoloration there, and sometimes even more than that if the feeling is intense enough.

For what comes to us when we picture Fan’s last circumstance is not solely worry or fright or repulsion but also a fascination with this unlikely gathering, which, we are quite sure now, did not alarm Fan as much as one might assume. And why not? The Girls were only nice to her. She was certainly in shock when they appeared and quickly conveyed her back into their room behind the curtain, helping her change out of her regular clothing into a nightshirt exactly matching theirs, even squeezing toothpaste onto a new toothbrush and placing it in her hand. They brushed her hair and washed her feet and lightly misted her with a fruity, candy-sweet perfume. She would sleep in the bed next to Miss Cathy’s bed for several nights before moving in with them, after which they would resume their nightly schedule of taking a turn to sleep in the bed outside.

Apparently Miss Cathy could not sleep if sleeping alone in her room, and when she didn’t rest well enough, the following day was often very difficult because of the pall of her mood, which perhaps prompted the Girls to bring Fan right back out to Miss Cathy, who was already in her own bed, eyeshade on. Fan realized how chilly it was in the room — the AC constantly pushed icy air down from the vents — and she turned off the lamp and slipped beneath the tightly tucked sheet and blanket of the tiny bed. She found she had to lie on her side and bring up her knees a little to keep her feet from overhanging the edge, which she would have done anyway to keep from shivering, as the cotton nightshirt was thin and the sheeting was starchy and cold. Miss Cathy had a fluffy duvet covering her and Fan wondered if she was supposed to freeze and thus be compelled to climb up into the big bed. In fact, for nearly all of the night the woman did not stir, which Fan knew because she could not fall asleep herself, given the frigid temperature and the high beam of her own vigilance. What perverse episode lay ahead for her now? How might she have to defend herself? And how would she ever manage to escape, which she needed to do soon? She was at last thinking about Mala as she finally did relent and lose consciousness, wondering if the woman had been wholly false in her kindness and feeling, acting out yet another round of temporary friendship that would reside as a set of glimmers in her bedside viewer, to be accessed when it appealed.

Miss Cathy did, however, wake Fan up in the night. A light tug on her shoulder roused her and she instinctively curled up at the sight of the woman above; the bedroom was faintly lit by moonlight and the expression on Miss Cathy’s face was of a ghoul, lifeless but hungering, her eyes half lidded, her mouth slackly ajar. But all the woman did was nudge Fan off, and the moment she cleared the bed and stood up, Miss Cathy took her place. The woman even expropriated Fan’s meager blanket and wrapped herself in it as she curled into a tight ball, which was the only way she could fit, this sonorous mound of a whorl. Fan did not quite know what to do. After a while, she climbed up into the huge, high bed and got under the heavy duvet, which was still warm and dampish from Miss Cathy, the downy pillow laced with the powdery, floral scent of her facial cream; and she must have fallen asleep within a minute, for the next time she stirred it was morning and Miss Cathy was gone from the little bed and the Girls were enveloping her with their excited warbles and trills and their many petting hands, conveying her straight back into their lair.

They sat with her on a circular sofa in the middle of the very large, airy room and introduced themselves by number, One through Seven. Fan could keep them straight for it was the order of both their coming to the house and their ages, One being the eldest and so on down the line, although their identically altered eyes made it harder at first. Fan had heard of girls and boys doing this long, long ago to make themselves look like their favorite anime characters but had never seen it done. Apparently early on One and Two had asked Miss Cathy if they could have their eyes done and then each successive girl wanted it as well soon after her arrival. Their bizarrely large eyes made them look deeply attentive, like some puppy or doe who craves only your company and succor. But there was also a welling of wistfulness in those big brown discs, as if they were all quietly longing for someone or something, that they would always be searching.

As for their names, they’d had their original ones before, but once there were three of them, it seemed best to shrug off the markers of the near and distant past, and start anew, this world of a room peopled only by themselves and, of course, anchored by Miss Cathy, who rarely came inside but always received one of them nightly. And what happened with Fan, said Five, was exactly how it went each night, Miss Cathy arising at some point to switch places, something about the temperature and smell of a girl’s just-vacated bed helping Miss Cathy to go back to sleep after she awoke from her nightly bad dream.

The Girls didn’t seem to know what had happened to Mister Leo, and Fan did not say anything, perhaps concerned that such news would be too disruptive, or simply because of her characteristic reticence. What is clear is that she joined their grouping without resistance, the only worry being that they would assume she’d want to have her own eyes done, too. But none mentioned it. They seemed simply pleased to have a new addition, a brand-new sister, and Fan let herself be appended on their line when they asked if she would be their most propitious number Eight.

Of course, there was an eighth bed already made up for her, the last along the wall. All the beds were made up exactly like the one next to Miss Cathy’s, with a white sheet and thin flannel blanket, and they were the same shrunken size. At the foot of each was a small white plastic set of drawers on black plastic wheels, just enough storage for perhaps underclothes and socks, some toiletries, maybe a few pieces of jewelry, and an extra nightshirt. It could have been like a barracks but the huge square room was bright and fresh smelling, despite having no windows or even a skylight. This now explained the massing above the garages, which was covered in ivy and looked like the broad tower of a granary and which Fan had assumed housed a personal gymnasium or some such thing. The space was well lighted by numerous can fixtures set in the double-height vaulted ceiling, as well as by the lamps on the night tables beside each bed. The carpeting was wall-to-wall and white, though more like the white of an animal, vaguely richer in tone, and in fact, Fan would learn that it was made of many sheep hides all stitched together, practically a small herd. She’d never seen a live sheep, so she didn’t know that they could look like this. The carpet was wonderfully plush on the feet, which was good, as they only went barefoot. The four expansive walls were white, too, except that approximately one and a half of the panels had been painted from ceiling to floor.

It was this Fan kept glancing at, for there was something strange about it, and the Girls tittered with glee as they vied to show it to her. It was their work, Three said — she was broad shouldered and had sparkling teeth and was obviously the most strident of them — and this was how they spent most of their waking hours. From the center of the room you couldn’t make out any particular images or shapes; in fact, the walls appeared to Fan as a murk of brown-blue, with random crosshatchings and blotches of brighter tones, which seemed the oddest and slowest way to paint a wall, if it truly took up most of their day. There were several stepladders at the edge of the painted section and Fan drifted toward those, but Three insisted that she should start at the “beginning,” at one of the corners near the curtained French doors.

The nature of their work became apparent as Fan drew closer. It was miraculous, in a way. We have mentioned the “guerrilla” images of Fan and Reg that have popped up on the walls of B-Mor in the last couple of months, billboard-sized portraits of the pair that are mostly simple and crudely executed, and then another kind you see more and more of late, abstracted or surreal images of such things as a pair of weeping lovers’ hands, or the widened maw of a pond carp, or a floral burst that in a certain light looks like an immense suppurating sore, all of which, we have begun to feel, are now an expected feature of a B-Mor stroll. They are eventually whitewashed or papered over, and if the individual expressions won’t permanently linger in our minds, the ready regeneration of them does, this irrepressible urge.

But an urge was trebled in the handiwork of the Girls. The work covered every square centimeter of the nearly four-meter-high wall. It was not paint that they used but colored magic markers, of which Miss Cathy had provided thousands, in every possible hue and a half-dozen widths, and that filled three rolling towers organized by gradations in the spectrum. Fan had to get up fairly close to make out what was depicted, which was basically the story of their lives, separately and together. The mural was begun when there were two of them, and so naturally the initial images, drawn in the style of anime, showed One and Two in their much younger days, the very first scene being a pair of nightshirted girls crouched down in the corner of a room with markers in hand, dabbing at the wall, the skin of the bottoms of their feet crinkled as they knelt, the picture they were working on being the very picture of their kneeling selves but in the appropriate minuscule dimension. The size of this and the rest of the scenes was small, no wider than the span between a young girl’s shoulders, and half as high, though in comparison with the great panels of wall, it was tiny, a mere footprint in a field, as if they understood before they started that this would be their enduring task.

How they did it was this: One and Two (and now Six as well) would sketch out in faint pencil specific moments from their lives, for example, how they were separated from or lost their original families, how they came to Seneca to work in this house, how with each new arrival, the girl who worked with Mala was then sent up to Miss Cathy’s suite to live with the rest, the scenes rendered from bottom to top in a narrow column and then shifting to run down before they went up again and so on. The scenes were not separated by borders or other framing but rather magically melded into one another, via all sides, a detail of background or figuration of one threading into the fabric of the next so that the whole appeared to be roiling in a continuous, visceral flow.

The quality of rendering was impressive, as polished as in any of the anime movies regularly playing in the B-Mor mall, the figures and objects and backgrounds not simply in the right proportion and perspective but rich of presence and sentiment. The scenes with Mister Leo were moodier, of course, but no less finely executed. The noteworthy detail about his panels was that he never appeared whole but rather as an insinuation or part; in one scene, for example, of one of the girls ironing napkins in the kitchen, a line of wine goblets on the shelf behind her kept watch, their bellies twinkling with his eyes. Or another, showing Three vacuuming the seat of a stuffed chair whose arms looked just like his, right down to the stout pink fingers. Or just Mister Leo’s mouth, five-o’clock-shadowed, saying HERE through his heavy, almost womanly lips. And the few that showed his face were in the motif of a group portrait, their number growing with each arrival, nightshirted and barefoot and so skillfully captured you could distinguish them from one another simply by their posture, except that each girl possessed not her own face but Mister Leo’s impassive, once handsome visage, now repeated in a line.

They had her pose for the newest version. The latest columns were still marked out in pencil, and while the others, laddered high and low, colored in the scenes behind her, Six sketched Fan into their group. The girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, wore thick spectacles and had a faint shading of dark hair on her upper lip, but there was no concealing how pretty she was, her especially dark, glistening eyes and high, sharp cheeks, and how talented she was, her hand moving over the blank white space with speed and assurance, like a tiny champion skater, the other girls almost instantly appearing in their present sizes and shapes. Fan, after being appraised by a brief but locked-in glance, swiftly came into being with the exact splayed angle of her feet and her petite hands and the curt bob of her hair. For the moment Six left their faces blank, working instead on the background, the detail as ornate and filigreed as the sheeting of the Girls’ nightshirts was plain, and as it came to life, Fan could see that it was an underwater garden, wildly overgrown, of entwined sea plants and fabulous creatures such as tusked fish and many-headed eels and fat man-o’-wars whose insides contained miniature worlds of the same, though the sheer density of the images made the scene appear more like a design than a place.

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.

Sure! Six said. She got right to work, starting with a panel of Fan on the road with a ghostly beanpole of a boy floating out on the horizon. The Girls were instantly enamored of his cheery face, his puffy, imperfect Afro.

He’s as cute as a play doll! one of the girls cried.

He is a play doll, but tall!

He looks so kind and sweet!

He is kind and sweet, Fan said, with enough pause in her voice that the Girls magnetically clustered about her, their warm breath slightly tangy from the dried fruits they constantly snacked on.

Tell us more!

Fan did, saying how Reg did not enjoy being alone, and how he would hold her hand through an entire evening program, whether it was scary or not. How he never hesitated to walk right through the middle of a puddle.

He’s perfect! Two said, to which One responded by saying she thought him perfect, too.

What have you learned of his whereabouts? Three asked. Anything?

She shook her head.

No! Nothing?

She shook her head again, causing a pall to shade the Girls’ faces. And with one voice they groaned, keyed in purest sorrow.

Please don’t worry, sisters, Fan said. I will find him.

But how?

Fan said: Bo Liwei.

Who?

She told them more, and they were doubly astounded. A brother? And one who lived in this Charter or one nearby? Three said that if he was a true Charter he might be powerful or have powerful friends, and so could at least learn something of Reg.

It’s what I must hope, Fan said.

Right away Six quickly drew the scenes of Fan approaching Liwei, his face like hers but squarer-jawed, leaner, heartbreak in his eyes. How agonizing! How wistful and ironic! It was almost unbearable to see, even in the faint pencil, Six able to render the moments with so much saturated longing that Fan herself felt something like a shallows in her chest. It was then that the Girls realized what they must do: help Fan. And to help her, they agreed, meant that she must leave them. Four and Five wanted her to be away for just a short while, but then return. One and Two unhelpfully suggested she wait a few months, as they had gotten into their heads that it was already winter. Seven, with surprising astuteness, asked if Fan still had a pair of her own outdoor shoes. Six was mum as usual, already back at the wall, doodling. Finally, Three made a decree: Fan must depart as soon as possible, as there was no more time to waste.