On Such A Full Sea

24

Sometimes of late, we get scared. it’s surprising when it happens, because it’s often at a moment when our feeling should be the opposite of fear or panicked worry, a moment, for example, such as the other afternoon, when many of us were having a free-day, plenty of folks enjoying the temperate weather and sitting beneath a peerless clear sky in our rear plots or on the stoops, the children engaging one another in their street games with sweaty-headed abandon, scooting and dashing between the various food-hawker carts that seemingly materialize in precise accordance with our as yet unregistered hankerings. And just when we have a treat in hand, this most humble savor that nevertheless speaks so aptly to our clement realm, we wonder why it is that we now pause and loll the morsel on our tongues until it’s common mush, why there’s a shivering in the belly, which should otherwise be ever ready, avid.

It’s irrational, for sure, maybe even mad, but as our recent hopes for B-Mor have evolved, everything else has begun to seem precarious. Suddenly all the sturdy engineering and constructing, from the originals to now, feels as though it’s been resting upon an insufficient base, the same way a thoroughly elaborate and convincing dream can hinge upon an entirely impossible premise, which, once examined, exposes the rest as a mirage. The pilings are dust, the slab a matrix of silken spiderwebbing, and the very place we reside, our narrow row houses that have stood stalwartly wall-to-wall through a checkered history of caring and neglect, are but cells in a chimera, some bloodless being in whose myth we have believed too deeply and too long.

What we have left is our assembly, and therein lies the unexpected trepidation. We have lashed ourselves together, we are cheek by jowl but now in an entirely different way, yet we can’t help but murmur the question that is surfacing in all our eyes: so who are we now? Yes, we are figuring out our conduct — the demonstrations, the speeches, the murals, even the improvisational work slowdowns by the more daring teams — but none of that retrofits or instructs us on how to think about what we believe in and why. For what are we aiming for, in the end? To be more like Charters? To have built, each of us, some private fortress impenetrable to everyone save a few cousin achievers? We allow that it’s simple instinct to wish to be secured against all manner of riot, whether natural or human, and to strive however long — and sometimes ruthlessly — to make that so. We’re not the kind to decry such pursuits and the fruits that might come of them, even when they are so luscious and rarefied that they become the cardinal imperative, the first and last passion. We won’t fret when someone perches upon his lofty black rock; he can look down without having to endure any harsh caws from us.

At the same time, however, it chills us to think that despite how much we care about one another, and trust that we always will, some fundamental shift is under way. The more we modify longstanding assumptions and practices of B-Mor, the more we can’t help but worry that rather than evolving our corpus we’re in fact undermining it, just as some unrelenting C-illness would rewrite the normal patterns with an adverse instruction set of its own. These days you can even hear the refrain of a certain wild sentiment, basically summarized to this: that someday we’ll have out-Chartered the Charters, that they’ll be bunched about in the cool shadows of our walls, queuing all around to get through our main gate. As much as we’d like to see it — can you imagine? — we pause with what it would mean for us, what price we would have exacted from one another, to become so special and dear.

Perhaps we have already seen a form of this inversion, in what Fan would next encounter with Oliver and Betty. For it was amazing to us, and to Fan, what two focused, otherwise unencumbered Charter people could make happen for themselves so quickly and well. Yes, they were smart, yes, they were talented, yes, they now had such means as to simply require leveling their gaze at a desired “outcome” and deeming it be so, but the thing about Oliver and Betty was how unceasing they were in their formulation and management of the new master plan, applying themselves as though putting on a full-court press, covering every angle and lane, though theirs was more like an offensive pressure, relentlessly pushing as if they were trying to overcome a huge deficit, despite how far they were already ahead.

From a command center in a fully outfitted and climate-controlled trailer they rented from a commercial construction firm and had parked in front of the house, they (along with several bright new assistants) directed the numerous projects and subprojects, each of which required permitting and zoning variances and the vetting and hiring of contractors and their constant coordination to make it run and develop without not just undue delay but really any delay at all, so successful they were (with both incentives and their charms) in getting the excavators and carpenters and plumbers and electricians to take full ownership over what they were doing, as if it were their very own massive twinned house where they would live long and with fulfillment until a gentle good death.

Within two days of Fan’s residing there, the Cheungs had already purchased the property next door and had its house razed, the owners so thrilled with the price that they only bothered to take their clothes and most cherished personal items, leaving the furniture and rugs and plates and everything else to be demolished and scooped up into the dumpsters that were backed in and out through an entire day and night, the deep-deep-deep seeming to disturb the neighbors more than the crashing of the debris so that Oliver had the loaders dismantle their horns. Their own brand-new house was dismantled within the week as well, the shell left standing but almost nothing else, although their furnishings and artwork were moved to storage as Betty had spent the last year choosing them. They could have easily waited and resided there while the other was being built, but it was decided that the houses should be constructed and renovated together for sake of consistency and efficiency and to satisfy Oliver and Betty’s desire to begin the Next Stage as soon as possible.

So other trailers were trucked in and situated on the far side of the sister property to house the family and the helpers and Fan, quarters that Fan assumed the Cheungs would find barely acceptable but that turned out to be as luxuriously appointed as their home and, in fact, at an even higher standard (they’d built and furnished the house pre-deal, after all): the trailers, Betty told her, were meant for housing evening-program stars when they were shooting in remote locations, and were made by the same company who built the planes that flew the upper-atmosphere globals, the interiors of the double-wide trailers lined in natural marbles and leathers and rich silks and hardwoods. There was a kitchen trailer for the cooks so the family would be assured of having its meals and snacks and beverages prepared exactly as Betty wanted them sourced and prepared, plus an exercise and virtual-activity trailer where Fan and Josey always spent time right before dinner. Though the trailers were much smaller than the family was used to and the first few days were difficult (the twins seemingly crying nonstop, Josey crabby and nervous, Oliver and Betty suddenly so busy and stressed that they began to snap at each other and everyone else, though not at Fan), they soon began to appreciate these less exalted proportions, where there wasn’t so much space around them; they felt like they were finally living inside, even safer and more secure, especially with the volumes of noise and dust and all the other probably C-accelerating chemicals and particulates stirred up by the construction. And maybe because the trailers were made just like the globals, they were upper-atmosphere quiet and pressurized with purified ionized air.

Fan tracked the progress of the project perhaps as closely as anyone, what with the children not really caring and the helpers out of sorts with the changes in routines and Betty and Oliver neck deep in every detail, watching the stages of the work from the foundation pours to the framing in what seemed to be a time-lapse vid, the new building going up literally overnight (there were so many tradesmen bolting and joining the metal alloy studs that they jostled one another for room), and then sheathed like the original house while the complex innards of both structures were fashioned and fed in, all the labors and change orders and supply drop-offs and debris pickups going on simultaneously like an orchestra tuning up, but under Oliver and Betty’s guidance not making any of that daft, unhinged music, instead sounding out a somehow harmonic, not unbeautiful tone. It was almost magical to behold, and although Fan still harbored many-sided reservations about her brother and his wife, she was like any of us would be, which was awed not just by the inexorable progression of this Genesis-scale undertaking but by their unshakable belief that they were the very people who should bring it off. In B-Mor such self-faith, such a singular audacity, would have been dismissed or mocked, not only because we so value humility or consensus but because most everything we want has already been placed within our reach.

We must say that Fan was heartened by their striving, their devotion, and felt closer to them and their children and the helpers for it. She was our good Fan after all, she wanted to believe in their ultimate decency, to be a generous sister and auntie, and couldn’t help but also think that a small fraction of their efforts and concentrations applied on her behalf would eventually lead to her reuniting with Reg. This was actually being planned for by Betty, who already had her architects draw in a new extension to the original house that contained a full set of suites, with a dedicated entrance, and that was labeled in the plans as Bay Fan/Reg. There was much more space in the extension than just for two, which was surely just Betty anticipating, rationally thinking things through; they did not know the way Fan was, nor did she want them to know. She was wary as she had always been that such a disclosure could only compromise her, though with Betty and Oliver, who seemed so pleased and appreciative of her presence, she was beginning to imagine a disclosure of her state, naturally wondering, too, if in telling them they would want to help her even more.

With Oliver — whom she could not quite bring herself yet to address as Liwei, as Betty did, as even he was now introducing himself — she was spending more time than anyone, including Betty, who was now camped at the center of the armies of salespeople who came to the command trailer bearing samples of their lighting and plumbing fixtures and bolts of fabrics and carpeting and wallpaper. She had to figure out the countless combinations of such items and the resulting design scenarios, altering course depending on what was available and when and in what quantities, luckily cost not being a factor. Meanwhile Oliver was overseeing the construction and the shuttling in of manpower and machinery, as well as donning a hard hat for part of each day and nailing or soldering something (though this, he admitted, was a noticeable drag on the schedule). He was exceedingly busy, but was also taking some time each day for himself, something Betty was encouraging him to do now that he wasn’t going to work anymore. She proposed that he rekindle his past interests, which he took seriously and with enthusiasm, swimming and taking out his old violin — he played for the family on their first night in the trailers — but as he confessed to her during a break when he and Fan took a light jog around the neighborhood and down to the main square, he wasn’t sure if those had been truly his interests at all.

He recounted to Fan that once assigned to a Charter foster family, a childless older couple (whom he had not been in contact with for a long time), he’d continued with the violin lessons and swim team he’d been doing in B-Mor, plus started a genetics club at the secondary school (where he met Vik, eventually convincing him to start swimming competitively because of his wingspan) and was involved with a social-service group that gave free math tutoring on the weekends to the children who lived in the service people’s dorms.

I certainly found them engaging and enjoyable, Oliver told her. He took a sip from his iced coffee (which was all he drank besides a little wine in the evenings). But can I say that those were the things I really wanted to do? I started on the violin and swimming so early that that was never a question, and because I was good at both, there was no thought that they weren’t the right activities. The other things I chose because there again I was very good at them and wouldn’t waste my time or anyone else’s, plus they fit in with my vita for medical studies. So does something you’re excellent at and that people admire you for and that does some good for all make for an “interest”?

Fan said she didn’t see why not.

It certainly can, he replied. But all that doesn’t confirm that it really is. Maybe it should mean you can’t love it, because what if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted, and then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit. But that you still come back for more. You’re good at free diving, right? That must be why they put you in the tanks. But did you always like it, even before it was clear that that’s what you should do? Was it something you loved? Or were there other things that you were doing that you might have enjoyed even more?

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.