On Such A Full Sea

3

The day Fan left was soon after the last big flooding. Naturally, there is a record of her departure but no one paid much mind to it at the time. We have mild floods early each autumn because of the hurricanes that sweep up from the South Atlantic and arrive here as somewhat diminished but still formidable storms, but it was especially bad then, as there were several storms back to back to back, with the rainwater having eventually nowhere to go. We remember it well because a number of B-Mors perished during the third and final storm, including a popular twelve-year-old boy named Joseph, who died while trying to save his brother’s friend from drowning. It was a tragic occurrence that shook everyone in B-Mor, and perhaps, it turns out, Fan most of all.

For it had hardly been more than a week since Reg disappeared, and poor Joseph had been his friend. They weren’t “best friends” but lived on the same block, and Reg had known Joseph from the time the boy was an infant and they still regularly spent time together. Of course, Reg was nineteen and the substantial difference in their ages would have normally precluded any such terming, at least by the older one, but Reg was young at heart, as they say, and not in the least self-conscious about hanging out and playing with whoever happened to be out on the street. On their free-days Fan might scooter over there to pick up Reg but then happily sit and watch for a while as he kicked the soccer ball around with Joseph and his gang, Reg the only non-peer. He was much taller and more maturely built than all of them but they had the advantage of nimbleness and speed (Reg, as has been noted, not being the most agile of fellows), for every shot Reg blocked by simply craning out his pontoonlike foot, Joseph and the others scooted a pass between his legs or deftly maneuvered the ball around his too-upright frame, Fan unable to suppress her giggles whenever Reg stumbled and nearly lost his balance, his lankiness unsuited to quick pivots and reversals.

Naturally there were moments Reg would steam with frustration, as anyone swatting at gnats would, especially if one of the boys got past him with the same old feint or won the ball from him too easily. But there was never any taunting or lingering funny feeling, and when he said he had to go, the boys would plead for him to stay through one more goal and turn with him to Fan and await her signal, sending up a stout cheer when she said Sure, which she always did. When they were finally done, they’d each leap up and double high-five Reg’s hands raised high, and in the sharpness of the smacks Fan could hear how pumped they were, how literally uplifted, how much bigger and brighter they must have felt themselves to be by virtue of his wholly generous being.

And maybe, if only in retrospect, we felt that way, too, whenever we saw Reg and Fan riding their electric scooters side by side, often close enough to hold hands (Reg having no balance issues here), their easeful gliding down the long alleys of these streets a demonstration of our good order. For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.

In the days between when Reg went absent and the accident with the boys, we would be hoping to see Fan doing okay on her own. As we’ve already noted, she didn’t seem overly concerned, she was quietly biding the time, doing the appropriate things in terms of asking questions and pursuing available avenues, and yet in the mall or at the facility one could see she seemed, ironically, even smaller than before, for not being always next to Reg. He sized her, if this can be said, the way a planet does its moon, the two bodies perhaps much differing within their scale but nothing like they would be once adrift in the profound vastness of space.

Though plenty cozy, B-Mor can be a lonesome place.

And when Reg’s young friend, Joseph, was suddenly lost in that last big storm, one could see how it was a lot to take. Here is what happened: Joseph was watching his brother and his brother’s friend that afternoon, both sets of parents at work in the grow house, but the Wi-Fi had gone out because of the heavy rains and so they had been stuck inside all day without any gaming or vids; but then there was a sudden break in the cloud cover — it was one of those swirling weather systems that are rapidly changeable — and the younger boys begged to go out. Joseph agreed, and when they got to the park, it started to rain lightly but in a brilliant sun shower and rainbow. When it turned into a full-blown downpour, they decided what the heck, let’s have some fun, happily getting soaked to the bone as they played.

Then they apparently came upon a shallow, newly formed pond in a low-lying area near the entrance of the park, the muddied water running off from a nearby swollen stream, and to their glee there were what seemed a thousand fish bristling about the surface. As any boys might, they decided to try to catch some, Joseph wielding a few downed leafy branches to corral them, while his brother and friend tried to snatch them with their bare hands. Of course, they weren’t catching them to eat — these were our fish, but released for an ornamental life in the ponds (only counties people would ever eat wild fish, plus we have the benefit of purchasing our own prized fish at a significant discount from what Charters have to pay) — the three boys just having a blast like boys have since the beginning of time, shouting in triumph whenever one actually caught a fish, the rain coming down in sheets but unable to dampen any part of them.

And they were frolicking like that, without a care, because what dangers could Joseph have anticipated in the thigh-deep water, which was very slowly rising, other than maybe a jab from the pointy ends of a dorsal fin? Though even that was not a concern because of the training all B-Mor children receive, including units in piscine biology, hatchery operations, and free-diving techniques, this last area mostly meant to identify future divers. Joseph had, in fact, dived with Fan on several occasions, as she sometimes demonstrated her techniques for those classes. Joseph might have become a diver, as he was a superbly athletic boy with tangles of orange hair (his line no doubt including some blood from the first European settlers in the area) and the captain of the only Junior Bs soccer team that ever made it to the regional quarterfinals, nearly defeating a Charter squad that ultimately won the championship. In fact, school sporting contests are the only real extended contacts we have with Charters and the few better-organized counties areas, as otherwise there would be a sore lack of new playoff competition. Joseph, in this regard, was something of our champion, and Reg and Fan would watch him play matches whenever they could, this boy who had that special ability to configure himself, dynamically and instantly, to whatever was at hand.

This was likely his doom, for another boy might not have had the instinctive confidence to do what Joseph did when the water started to recede in that impromptu pond. Despite the torrents of rain, the level was going down, which would have seemed strange if the boys had even noticed, and they kept on wading after the fish, the schools of which seemed to be heading toward one end of the pond. The younger boys were in the lead, hurdling with slowed strides through the water, when for some reason the fish were turning around and swimming back through their legs, which delighted them. But Joseph could see why the fish were turning back: a hidden drainage pipe that ran beneath the entrance road had opened up. It had likely been dammed by some branches but it was now free and making a horrible gulping sound that you could hear even above the threshing rain.

The boys tried to run against the suddenly fierce current but the friend slipped and fell beneath the surface. And then he was gone. Sucked into the pipe. Joseph tugged his brother to the shallows and then without saying another word dove in, letting the strong flow of the brown water take him.

He can’t have known, none of us could, that his brother’s friend had already been shot out the other end of the pipe, to the far side of the embanked road, coughing and frightened and with a belly full of dirty water but otherwise fine. But Joseph, three years older, just that bit wider, got stuck three-quarters of the way through, and though fighting as he must have to push himself back out, the force of the water held him in place.

After an hour, emergency services was finally able to extract him, almost losing one of their own men in the process. Despite the duration, they attempted to revive him, but it was no use. When they brought Joseph back to his household, they say, he was the most startling shade of blue, transparent but still darkened, as if he’d been dyed by the cold evening sky.

Oh, the lament on the blocks! The outpouring! As mentioned, there were others who died during the storm: a couple who drowned in their vehicle when they tried to ford a submerged intersection; a man who was electrocuted as he attempted to pump out his flooded basement with a self-modified vacuum cleaner; some people who were inexplicably rowboating in the harbor and whose vessel immediately sank. The observances for these people were suitably somber and modest (and perhaps especially subdued, for the faintly embarrassing circumstances of their deaths), but for Joseph it seemed that every row house in B-Mor emptied onto the streets for his ceremony, all of us gathering outside his family’s row house in an awesome silence, the only sound the shushing of hundreds and hundreds of rubber-slipper-shod feet as we waited our turn to view his body.

Fan had a place in the line along with most of her clan, listening to them talk about Joseph’s wasted future. Usually this sort of chatter is merely just that, the idle blather of pipe dreams, but it was agreed Joseph really could have been one of those few who end up making a life as a Charter. For there are rare instances of B-Mors being recruited by Charter talent scouts for looks or athletic prowess — Joseph’s parents had been contacted after his stellar performance in the soccer playoffs — to be models or actors or professional athletes. The only other way was, of course, to do extremely well on the yearly aptitude Exam that the Charters let our children take at the age of twelve, then allowing those who place in the top 2 percent of Charter scores to be eligible for promotion and adoption by a Charter family. Such performance on the test was even rarer, though members of Fan’s clan could brag — and often did — that one of theirs had been promoted, if years ago; a sibling of Fan’s, in fact, a boy named Liwei, whom she had never known because of the difference in their ages.

When Fan ascended to the top of the stoop, we could all see her. Maybe some mourner inside was taking an especially long time over the casket because Fan seemed to be perched there forever. It was a sunny day post storm and she wore the wraparound sunglasses she preferred, her bob of black hair curling under ever so slightly at the ends to cup the delicate lines of her jaw, and you could almost imagine her as one of those people who end up doing something that was far beyond what we B-Mors can ever expect, such as being a programs personality or an actor. Again, Fan was not beautiful but rather distinctive in her presence, which was one of more than merely being petite but like a distillation, this purity by way of exquisite scale, and to view her perfect little hand clutching the railing, and the tense purse of her mouth as she awaited her turn inside, was enough to tap a fresh well of admiration in your heart.

For the viewing, everybody was routed through the kitchen and eventually deposited in the shared alley that separates the rear yards of the houses. Fan saw exactly what we saw: there he was, reclined in a heavy cardboard coffin in the cramped front living room, asleep in his death robes, the amazing color of his face courtesy of Tang, the senior B-Mor mortician. And maybe it was to compensate for the stone hue of his subject, or just because he’d lost his touch, but old Tang truly went too far, for poor Joseph looked as though he had just trotted off the field after a hard-fought match. He appeared too alive, (perhaps literally) flushed with lifeblood, as if he might pop up at any moment and ask for a sports drink. Then, too, someone had placed a mini soccer ball in his hand and you could see that Joseph had a real grip on it, the soft plastic surface ever slightly deformed, and though it was just a toy ball, the sensation we had as we stood beside him was that he was squeezing us, not menacingly or in admonition like the dead normally would, but with the gentlest press of solidarity.

I know, Joseph seemed to say. I know.

Then we shuffled into the adjacent kitchen where one of his aunts ushered people out to the small rear yard. There on long tables they had put out the customary feast, though this time including some homemade delicacies like Shanxi-style smoked pork belly, stuff you hardly ever see these days. The fatty, peppery scent of the dish was absolutely transporting and would have been cause for a wink of wicked glee at another wake, but at Joseph’s it was a cloud you kept wishing would blow away, so you could taste only woe. The smell was too good, too luscious, our salty tears an embittering drink for our tingly, watering mouths, and we would have tipped down the whole platter at once to repel the emptiness had his parents and now lone brother not stood right there like totems in their severe mourning costumes and white gloves. His mother thanked each of us for coming and his father, also athletic in youth if not as gifted as Joseph, received our bows with eyes not vacant or blank but very much the opposite; you could see in them how packed full they were of all things Joseph, manifold glints of him on the field and in his tank-diving training, plus whatever else everyone hoped he might have accomplished beyond B-Mor, had he ever gotten the chance.

Only his younger brother was unable to look up, for how miserably he was crying, his tears leaving whitish spots on the surface of the red lacquered offering box he held to his chest, a slide show of pictures of Joseph looping on the screen stretched across the front. It was amazing that the boy could stay on his feet. Though they were in a line of three, his parents seemed separated from him, they in their bubble and he in his, with the box he was holding serving as his partner. No doubt he felt partly responsible for pushing Joseph to take them to play outside, and though no one should ever feel right in blaming him, did more than a few make a point of shoving their envelopes into the slot with an extra-hard pat? Did we? If there was the barest audible ttok when we pushed ours in, we regret it now.

We bring all this up about Joseph and his family and our own displays because it makes us mindful of how solemnly composed Fan was as she bowed to his mother and his father, and how she slipped in her own envelope (even as her household’s offering sufficed), touching the boy’s shoulder for a longish beat. From the food tables — Fan must have been the sole mourner who didn’t eat — we couldn’t help but notice how she stationed herself an appropriate distance from Joseph’s brother but clearly with the intention of standing there with him, and though no one spoke to or made eye contact with Fan, we were well aware of her presence. After that, the line seemed to move a bit more slowly, people taking their time with their envelopes and maybe even nodding sympathetically to the boy before hustling over to the tables. The remarkable thing, looking back on it, was that nobody commented on Fan. Not a one of us uttered a word amid the glottal murmurs of chewing and swallowing and the scraping of plastic forks on plastic plates. Maybe it was because we were famished — glimpsing mortality can be a surprisingly appetizing sauce — or because we were being pushed along the buffet by the shuffling throng armed with plates, or because of what had recently happened with Reg, but our hesitance to acknowledge her became itself a part of the meal.

At some point Fan left the boy’s side and came down toward the buffet line. Most everyone noticed this and seemed to pause in what they were doing. And in a voice that surprised for its clarity and reach she said, quite oddly:

Where you are.

By now everybody had turned to her. Her hands were curled into loose fists and she said the words again, this time softer, as though she were speaking to herself rather than addressing any crowd. Again no one said a word. She then left via the back gate of the yard with those who had finished eating, leaving us to wonder what she was talking about.

The wake lasted for another hour or so, and probably would have gone on for hours longer had the skies not suddenly clotted up and the winds blown in yet another immense storm system, one that would hover for weeks in a slowly unwinding gyre, the sun blocked out the whole time so that all you could see in your waking and your sleep was not brightness or darkness but a waxen shimmer, as though everything were stuck behind a grimy piece of glass. We B-Mors are accustomed to spending time indoors and underground, but knowing that there was only grayness and mists above the grow houses or subterranean shops proved wearying. And while under this moody, thwarted light, we began to discuss, in the most casual way, what Fan’s statement exactly meant. Where you are. Some took it as the beginning of a thought that Fan couldn’t quite finish, others as mere gibberish, that she had stood too long in the line and should have eaten something. One especially misguided fellow believed she was speaking exclusively to him and was asking that he save her a folding seat!

But most of us agreed it was posed not as a question but as the ending to a phrase. Such as “Everything you desire can be found…” and “Look not elsewhere but simply…” plus other examples people came up with that, not surprisingly, accorded with their character or current outlook, like the terminally ill man who proposed, “One’s destiny lies not in the past nor the future but…,” none of which was, of course, uttered by Fan but that somehow in the end became attributed to her, at least in our feeling, which began to bloom with surprising fullness only after she had been long gone from B-Mor, a feeling that she was, in fact, looking after us, perhaps even advising us about something crucial.

It was at this point that the first signs of a collective interest in Fan appeared. Of course, she was not the first B-Mor to have left these kind confines but she was certainly the youngest (and littlest!) to do so on her own. Every other instance was someone who was forced out because of a certain scandal or crime, and only after that person had exhausted all means, official and otherwise, in the hope of being pardoned. Nobody sane would ever do otherwise. Why invite ready hardship or possible doom? And yet Fan was as sane — and comfortably situated — as any young woman in the prime of her B-Mor life. She was quietly admired for her tank skills. For her innate gracefulness and gentility. She was sociable enough, and filial enough, which is as much as anyone can expect. There was not a molecule of wrongness about her.

Which may be why Fan captured our imagination. The very imagination, to be honest, that never seems terribly vital or necessary when things are going right, when we are eating well and sleeping well and lacking only certain exalted luxuries. For doesn’t B-Mor as conceived and developed and now constituted obviate the need for such purposeful dreaming?

But now look at all the unusual activity. Someone got ahold of the video archives of the feed at the main gate the day she departed and posted it on the grow-facility page, embedding it in an ad for a take-out chaat shop in the underground mall. You clicked it to get your free-drink-with-meal coupon and instead of a beep and a code there was a silent vid of Fan, viewed slightly from above and in three-quarter profile, a small backpack slung over one shoulder, an umbrella in hand, and dressed in a bulky dark-hued counties style, so unlike the colorful loose-fitting pajama-type outfits B-Mors usually wear. Beyond the shelter of the entrance you could see the rain coming down in drenching curtains — yet another storm had blown in — and then being whipped sideways by winds so strong that the sentry very quickly scanned and checked her out, not bothering to see that she wasn’t a counties peddler who was having no luck in the miserable weather and was giving up for the day.

And that was it. Merely a few seconds of Fan, standing before the sentry booth, looking nothing like she was about to mount an expedition. Her expression as glum as cold rain. Word spread about the ad — it was a real shop, whose owner contended he knew nothing and that his ad had been hijacked — and until it was removed several hours later, it was the most popular clip on the B-Mor web, outpacing even that night’s showing of the boys’ and girls’ swim championships. And though it made no sense whatsoever, crowds soon descended on that otherwise ordinary snack shop, the long line of people attracting more people to the line, until finally the owner decided to lease a much bigger space in order to offer table service, which for a brief time did a great business, until suddenly it didn’t, and he had to shut down.

Another camera showed Fan walking out the main gate and taking the access road out of B-Mor to the main tollway. The official record ends there. But the story of what happened afterward is well-known, or at least it has been recounted by everyone in B-Mor — and maybe beyond — many times over, in messages and postings and vids and songs and, yes, in plain words, too, spoken to one another in the quieter moments of the evening, when the muscles are all used up to the point of near numbness and we feel more as though we are piloting our bodies rather than being at one with them, cooped up at the top and looking outward and uncertain of what is real and what is perceived. And in this state of mind we can’t help but build upon what is known, our elaborations not fantastical or untrue but at times vulnerable to our wishes for her, and for ourselves.