On Such A Full Sea

18

The funny thing about the tale of Fan is that much of what happened to her happened to her. She showed plenty of her own volition, really more than any of us could ever dream up, and yet at the same time her tale demonstrates how those who met her often took it upon themselves to help her, without really any hesitation. Without always a ready self-interest. Every once in a while there are figures who draw such attention, even when they aren’t especially charismatic, or visionary, or subtly, cleverly aggressive in insinuating an agenda into the larger imagination. For some reason, we want to see them succeed. We want them to flourish, even if that flourishing is something we’ll never personally witness. They draw our energies so steadily and thoroughly that only toward the finish of events can we recognize the extent of our exertions, and how those exertions in sum might have taken the form of a movement.

We have noted the sundry demonstrations such as the chattering commentary on the web boards, snide and earnest and critical, if rarely outraged; the strange acting out at the ponds as well as other, more disquieting, expressions, as seen in the plight of sorry Cousin Gordon; or the most recent sign, which is that a notable number of people are shaving their heads, men and women alike, some old and even a few children.

That’s right. Bald heads are popping up here and there at the mall and in the facilities and maybe even at your own morning meal, when daylight enters at such an angle that the reflection off the clean-shorn pate momentarily casts upon the usually dimmed, cheerless room an illumination that seems generated from within, this lustrous fire. You pause at every sighting, that paleness bobbing across the street, or leaned over the rail of the catwalk above the grow beds, and if you’re close enough, you can’t help but take an extra-long look at the particular scalp and try to read the sheen and textures of that most vulnerable-looking skin, for a clue to why this person has done this to himself. Do they have something in common? Are they nubbier than normal or creased in a similar but distinctive way? Do they appear just that bit transparent so that you’re almost believing you can see the workings of their recusant thoughts? And does it seem that the faces of these people are more unyielding than what the rest of us offer to one another, which is not exactly warmth but rather what you expect in the wordless company of an old friend or cousin, that easy nonchalance?

But something is different; they might be sharing a snack with a companion or browsing a rack of dresses and yet what comes through is a hardness, a blocking, this clear sense that they can no longer share. They are suddenly apart from us, as well as from one another, for there appears to be no secret society bonding them. They are lone agents in a nonexistent organization. They are playing a solo. Perhaps because of this, they appear all the more anchored, all the more unitary. But do not automatically think they have become “individualistic” or, in fact, aim to be. It’s not that. Of course, someday soon they’ll grow their hair again, and we’ll have forgotten that it was ever gone. And, in time, so will they.

For now we wait and wonder. We wonder when it will be that we slip away one ordinary evening when everyone else is busy with their programs or games, and find ourselves before the bathroom mirror, turning this way and that, regarding everything and nothing with our minds strangely blank, and work the powered razor or blade. The first pass is horrid, as you would expect, though not for how awful it looks, but for how it feels, the sensation of an animal slowly prying itself from its shell. You shrink with the exposure, the chill of the air. You’re not ready for this. But as you clean up the rest, make it even and smooth, you begin to understand. You understand that the time has come for you to go downstairs in the morning and sit in your customary spot by the far corner of the table and eat without any self-fanfare, and just as you had earlier, let everyone take in the alteration, let yourself become one more notation. For at some point each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

Is this what the Girls realized when they deemed that Fan must be allowed to go on her destined way? As with everything, they decided this together, although it was surely catalyzed by Six. One morning Six rose many hours before the rest of them and by the mere glow of the nightlights drew and fully colored the picture that she said was “crowding” her mind. Some of them gasped on seeing it, if simply for how large it was; the scene was nearly three times the width and length of the abutting images, the great stamp of it jutting out into the rest of the wall’s blankness like a continent suddenly born from the depths. The run of the panels was forever altered. But immediately they agreed it was her most beautiful work. Its scale had allowed her a freer hand, and although you could not make out any pencil lines, one could almost imagine Six’s movements, the wider arcs and glides of her arm, with the enlarged fields of the figures and shapes not uniformly markered (for that would have looked blotted and primitive) but rather painstakingly flecked with numerous proximal shades of a color, for richness and depth of hue. The scene itself was an underwater realm bristling not with creatures or fish but with a dense forest of marine plants, wispy tendriled corals and bushy anemones and in the center of the panel, broad ribbons of electric aqua-green seaweed flowing wildly upward, seven of the thick shoots transforming into seven faceless girls, with Fan, of normal body, being pushed by their number to the surface and reaching for another pair of hands, which at this point were only loosely sketched.

I wanted to wait for you before finishing Reg’s, Six said to Fan. I wanted to get them right.

Once Fan described them, Six did get them right, all the way down to Reg’s spindly wrists, and the stubby nails of his long fingers, and the tender-fleshed pads at the base of his thumbs, so much so that Fan could almost feel a lifting to go along with the pangs. She was thankful that Six hadn’t rendered the rest of him, the sensitive, gifted girl perhaps understanding that it would be too much for Fan if he loomed there fully on the wall. Indeed, Fan had left her album card with his images back at the Smokes (it had died anyway, with no way to recharge it), though in truth she had probably done so to deny herself too easy a means of viewing him, which would only amplify her longing, something she had plenty of from the beginning. And too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality.

First, they made a formal request of Miss Cathy. This was much more complicated than it might seem, for they had never done such a thing before. Aside from leaving a brief weekly listing of foodstuffs on her night table, and a monthly one for basic toiletries and some nail supplies, they’d never asked her directly for anything, everything else such as paper goods and cleaning supplies being sent up in the dumbwaiter (presumably by Mala). They took their turn out in the little bed and really there was nothing else to ask of Miss Cathy, who was “keeping” them, as this uncommon but growing Charter practice was called. The Girls were lodged in the same way beloved pets were once kept by their owners, who, of course, did not query them as to what they might desire. And while the Girls professed undying devotion to Miss Cathy, none of them relished the idea of having to ask her for so drastic a thing as Fan’s release, which might as well have been like petitioning the Sun not to set this day.

Still, it was decided that Three should do it, as she was the most outspoken of them, and because it was her turn to sleep out in Miss Cathy’s suite anyway. But when she slipped back inside their room the next morning, she was as upset and shaken as any of them had ever seen her, telling them how instantly cross Miss Cathy had become, and then deeply hurt by the idea that the Girls were even considering that she had anything but their best welfare in mind. Fan was a part of them now forever. In fact, Miss Cathy decided that no one would stay out with her for an entire week, effectively barring all of them. This caused an immediate panic in the group, for she had never done such a thing before, and poor old Two, who was perhaps the most fragile of them, became so anxious that she had to be given nighttime ibuprofen dissolved in some ginger tea to stop her obsessive throat-clearing, which is how her nervousness expressed itself. Miss Cathy had, of course, taken off a week or two when she and Mister Leo went on a rare vacation, but she had never been home without having one of them sleep out.

While they were all comforting Two as she sipped her tea on the circular sofa, Fan told them that they should not concern themselves with her plight and that she would somehow find a way to reunite with Reg. They protested, bemoaning her lot, though finally assented with kindly murmurs and exhortations, hugging her in turn. Of course, their aim of liberating Fan was not in the least diminished. And after years of intimate domiciling, a shared glance among them was enough to cement the understanding that only they would constitute the solution.

The first attempt was mostly exploratory. Six and Seven, perhaps wanting to be daring, intentionally ate some moldy Korean rice cakes they had unearthed in the back of the pantry closet, in the hopes that they’d become ill enough for Miss Cathy to call the medical center for help. An ambulance had come a couple of years before, when Three suffered an attack of appendicitis, with the EMTs waiting outside Miss Cathy’s suite; the doors were briefly unlocked for them then, several girls carrying Three to the gurney in the corridor. But now Six and Seven only got ill enough from the dduk to throw up and suffer a half day’s bout of diarrhea, after which they felt fine. Miss Cathy could not even be alerted.

The second try was more serious. Four and Five, who most often prepared the meals, were making a cold bean salad for a lunch. But when Four opened one of the cans of kidney beans — it was slightly bulged on the bottom, so that it wobbled as she clipped the can opener onto it — a horrific, apocalyptic smell filled the small kitchen. They had to turn on the hood fan, though it did little good; the smell was practically vicious, similar to the awful odor last summer when an animal died in the venting for their room, but ten times as potent, sickly sharp and alive. We can imagine them holding their noses, and looking at each other to see if one of them might be willing to eat it. But it was far too foul. Finally, Four was about to zip up the can in a plastic baggie to throw out when Five suggested that they make a spicy curry out of it for themselves. They got to work, adding a good can of beans to the fry, trebling the dry spices and chilis, until the dish became in fact somewhat edible, being at least intense and fiery. Indeed Five kept saying how they ought to make it this way always, even ladling a second helping on her slice of bread.

The two waited. But nothing happened. Nothing happened during the afternoon or when they were cleaning up the dishes or while they played their nightly game of hearts. They’d served everyone else instant ramen. After the cards, everyone got ready for bed, each taking a turn at the toilet and then the basins to floss and brush her teeth and wash and lotion her face and hands and brush each other’s hair. It went exactly as it did every night, an orderly march through the stations. Nothing went wrong through the night.

Instead, the trouble began the next morning, when Five suddenly lost her balance and had to prop herself on the counter of the vanity. She kept insisting she was fine, she just felt light-headed, taking a drink from the faucet with her cupped palm, when Four leaned over the very same basin and retched so forcefully that the spew splashed up and flecked the mirror. They told the rest what they’d done. Five had to lie down, but Four felt better and the rest of them decided they would get on with the day and their work at the wall. But within an hour both girls had to get up and run to the bathroom to vomit, each looking heavy-lidded and talking in a funny way, like they had a little square of cloth stuck on their tongues. Five was unable to keep her eyes open, even though she wasn’t sleepy at all. Her shoulders felt stiff and tingly. She was very thirsty but had no fever. And while she seemed sound of mind, she said she was seeing two of everything. Or maybe three.

Two of the girls went to the suite door and urgently knocked for Miss Cathy. When the door finally opened, it was not Miss Cathy but Mala, which surprised and pleased them, as they saw her only every other month, when she was allowed to come up and visit for a while. At the moment Miss Cathy was out in the garden with Mister Leo, and the frantic raps on the door had compelled Mala to open up, despite how angry Miss Cathy would surely be were she to find out. Mala asked what was happening and they told her, saying Four and Five needed a doctor.

When she came inside, she gave Fan and the others a quick embrace. Then she examined the stricken ones, checking them, Fan thought, with the same care she would her very own daughters. She tested each girl’s forehead with her lips, took a sniff of their breath, then gently pinched their arms to see how dehydrated they were. Four clung to her, moaning her name pitiably as if from underwater; Five was too weak to do anything. Mala gently assured them that they would be all right. To the rest of them, however, Mala did not say anything afterward, simply telling them to wait. It was not quite an hour later that she returned. This time it was with a man, a lean, fit, tall young doctor from the medical center.

The fellow — stitched into the breast pocket of his scrubs was V. Upendra, M.D. — seemed put out at first for having to make this outcall, and then by who the patients turned out to be, his chin stiffening at the strangeness of the large, open bunk room. But once he began examining Five, who could now hardly raise her chest to inhale, he camped beside her on both knees, his eyes narrowing as he took her pulse and temperature and listened to her heart. He asked what exactly they’d ingested and when. He processed the information with full attention and gravity. Then he asked Mala to have the owner of the house come up right away, and she went down to fetch Miss Cathy.

While they waited, he looked about the room, Fan getting some water for the sickened girls. The five other girls — two of whom were older than he was — had retreated to one arc of the circular sofa, bunching together. They had not encountered any outsiders since Three’s appendicitis, and perhaps no one else for years before that, and so they were thoroughly unsettled by the presence of this man, who was unshaven and looking like he was at the end of a double shift in his wrinkled scrubs, though still certainly handsome. In fact, they could hardly look at him, keeping their gazes lowered, all except for Six, who snuck long looks at him.

Fan couldn’t help but think he was similar to Reg, at least in frame, bony-shouldered and bony-elbowed, though, of course, he had commanded the room when he had first come in, merely by the ease and authority of his posture, something Reg — or most any other B-Mor — couldn’t do if he tried. Or perhaps it was simply a Charter thing.

What’s that? he asked Fan. He was looking at the wall.

Fan told him it was what the others were doing, not sure now how else to describe it.

Not you?

Fan said she was only helping a little. He walked to the wall and surveyed it, instinctively beginning at the corner and following its progression around to the second wall. The Girls nervously tittered as he viewed it, for they suddenly realized that a stranger was perusing their innermost thoughts and dreams. Two covered her face entirely and then all the others did the same. The young doctor was not paying any attention to them, however, despite the fact that he could have easily matched a scene to a girl. He was clearly fascinated by the wall, its many shapes and colors, and when he reached the panels in which Fan first appeared, he seemed to pause, checking back for her in the previous images. He stood for a while before the largest scene of her being pushed upward.

What’s your name? he asked Fan, and she told him.

You’re not one of them, are you?

Our Fan offered neither expression nor word.

I figured, he said, regarding her intently. Did she feel a thrum in her chest when confronted so? Was it his light brown skin? His blue eyes, almost like Reg’s, as deep as a sparkling island sky? His lips full but defined, the head of densely dark wavy hair? Yet there was something about him, not at all superficial, that spoke to her of Reg. Perhaps it was a core of sanguine innocence beneath all the Charter self-assurance, a node of vulnerability that had not been trained away, dissolved.

You don’t move like the others, he said, glancing over at the Girls. They were peeking now at him again. They go around like they’re following something. Little heeding steps. You’re not a Charter, though. That’s obvious. But then you’re no counties person, either. You’re from a facility, aren’t you? Which one?

But before she could answer, or not answer, Mala and Miss Cathy appeared. The Girls instantly rose and schooled about Miss Cathy, and for some reason they began to cry, shaken perhaps by the sudden and unprecedented fullness of the gathering. Miss Cathy, who didn’t appear put out or perturbed at all, spanned them with her arms, her manner that of an all-loving school headmistress, patting each girl on the head to try to calm her. Once done, she broke from their ranks and in her willowy dressing gown fluttered to the beds of Four and Five, practically ignoring the young doctor until the moment she spoke to him.

So why can’t you help my girls? she said.

They can’t be treated here, he replied, clearly annoyed by her tone. But this didn’t deter him from explaining the situation to her fully; their lack of fever was a clue, and that while only lab tests at the medical center could confirm it, he suspected it was botulism, which was something that occurred rarely, and then only out in the counties. They were breathing poorly as well, and if it was indeed botulism, they might eventually require a ventilator.

A ventilator? Miss Cathy said.

Yes, the doctor told her. They could lose the ability to breathe. They could die.

Miss Cathy nodded. Then she asked him to arrange to have ventilators delivered, and have the testing done here, as she didn’t want the Girls to be separated. But he said that was not possible.

Then please ask your superior.

I’m the superior, he told her. Apparently he was the ER chief, and had only come because the outcalls resident had suddenly taken ill. It was a simple choice; she could have them transported, or they would remain here.

Miss Cathy said, It’s my decision, yes?

Assuming you’re their keeper.

I’m their keeper, she answered.

We know, of course, that Miss Cathy deemed the two would remain in place, to which the rest of the girls, shaken as they’d never been before with real confusion and fright, could only assent. It was happier for all of them, especially Miss Cathy, to believe that the sickness would pass. Even Four and Five tried to agree, waving from their beds. It had been most difficult, Miss Cathy now recalled for them, when Three developed an infection from the burst appendix and had to stay at the medical center for a week. With one of them missing, they couldn’t sleep. They couldn’t eat. Even the wall work went badly. Nothing was right.

Mala asked Miss Cathy to reconsider, but the woman literally blocked her ears, no doubt startled to hear such questioning from her helper. It may have been the very first such instance. Mala pleaded some more and Miss Cathy finally shouted, Enough! Mala shrank. Miss Cathy now mentioned to the Girls that she had been planning to bathe and wondered if they wished to be with her afterward, to do their hair and nails. They cooed in happy panic; it was a rare treat to be invited for a beauty session in her suite. Before leaving, they all kissed the sickened girls, Miss Cathy telling Fan to stay and watch over them and call the doctor if necessary.

Upendra, who had been gathering his things, reiterated that it would only be an ambulance returning to transport them to the medical center, as there was nothing more here for any doctor to do. Miss Cathy didn’t respond, though her tight huddling with the Girls reminded one and all that they were in one another’s care, just as they always had been, just as they always would be. They disappeared into her suite. Mala had to go downstairs, so she would let Upendra out. But before he left the Girls’ room, the young doctor took Fan aside, handling her by the elbow, kindly but with grip enough that she could distinctly feel each pad of his fingers pressing on the joint and bone.

You don’t have to stay here if you aren’t hers to keep. You know that, right?

She nodded.

He waited for her say something, perhaps to ask him for help, but she remained silent.

Okay, then, he said, seemingly unsettled by the moment. He was going to say something else but then he simply left. The Girls’ room door was locked shut. Fan must have known, if anyone would, that she wasn’t Miss Cathy’s to “keep.” She wasn’t anyone’s to keep, perhaps not even Reg’s, which is in part why we admired her so. Yet there are times when one must simply endure, as was the case now, with Fan alone watching the two sick dear girls, their color already going to slate.