On Such A Full Sea

4

So Fan went this way: instead of heading north or south on the main coastal tollway she veered westward, onto the olden roads, thoroughfares that once meandered through farmland and forests and that linked antique-style settlements that the Charter villages are modeled after and you can really only see in movies now, communities where people strolled with shaggy dogs and children licked ice cream cones and where the benches were occupied by the contented elderly or smooching lovers and trains came and went all day, shuttling people back and forth to their jobs.

But what Fan encountered that sodden evening was nothing like that. It was — and is — a landscape of bushy weeds grown so thick and high their hollows are often used as rooms by wanderers and thieves. Weeds are the trees because in most of the inhabited sections the trees have been cut down and in the warmer months the punky reek of their pollen overdoses the breezeless air. It seems nearly impossible to breathe. The derelict houses that anchored the streets have long been bulldozed and carted away, the once paved streets devolved to a more elemental state, the asphalt ground down to drifts of blackened dust. The more passable streets are pocked by calf-deep potholes and waves of buckles from the serial deluges and freezes and droughts, and because of their poor condition, the truckers and Charters move about exclusively on the secured, fenced tollways that few counties drivers can afford, and are often banned from anyhow, for justified reasons of their slower, much older vehicles that are breaking down constantly, hoods up and steaming. So counties drivers travel fitfully on the leftover roadways, swerving and mincing along, and one of these, maneuvering in the blinding gray chaos of that early evening’s downpour, squarely struck Fan.

She was knocked into a ditch half filled with rainwater, her temple striking a partly buried chunk of curb. She would have cried out from the pain running from the top of her thighbone to the point of her hip but the blow to her head was a thunderclap and all she could do was numbly move her fingers. The car, an old VW electro-diesel, kept on for twenty meters before stopping. It reversed and the passenger window rolled down halfway and a woman’s scratchy voice pronounced, It’s no deer.

A dog? a man asked.

Looks like a little girl, she answered.

Silence.

Is she dead?

Not yet. She’s moving a little.

Silence again. Then the driver’s door creaked open.

No way I’m nursing her back to health, if that’s what you’re thinking.

The man ignored her. He trudged around the front of the car without an umbrella and stood over Fan, his head and shoulders partly shielding her from the dense warm drops of the rain. She kicked her leg to try to move but could only lamely push mud against one side of the ditch.

Goddamnit, Quig, the woman cursed.

He pressed his foot down upon Fan’s ankle, pinning it beneath the water. Fan looked up but in the dimness and rain could just make out the contours of his face under the dark shadow of his baseball cap’s bill. He was bearded and had a wide frame to his jaw, and his nose looked like it had been broken multiple times, and the expression in his eyes was that of someone who has seen the worst of this life and would not be disturbed to see whatever measure more.

Let’s go! We have another three hours’ driving at least, and I’m starving!

Be quiet, Loreen.

Something in his tone silenced her, and when he reached down to Fan with his rough-hewn hands, both the woman in the car and Fan flinched, for what he might do. But instead he cupped her beneath the knees and arms, and lifted her swiftly enough that she didn’t have time to resist. With one arm holding her, he lifted the rear hatch of the station wagon and then laid her in beside a greasy tangle of ropes and tools. She tried to kick at him but a shot of pain in her thigh practically choked her and she lost consciousness as he shut the tailgate.

When she came to, it was darkest night. They were still driving, a bump or deep rut having jarred her awake. The car air was humid and smelled of mildew and chain oil and of the two counties people, who didn’t wash as regularly as B-Mors, their clothing as well as themselves. Their odor was so keen and alive it was as though they were twinned and sitting on either side of her. Plus, everything was damp where she lay because of her soaked clothes and the steady drip coming from the top of the tailgate. Her right leg felt like a twenty-kilo sack filled with broken glass but it was her head that hurt even more, the whole side of her face clanging with every mar in the road. She told them she was going to be sick and the woman cursed her but the car braked and the man opened the hatch and tugged her by the hair so she could throw up onto the ground. She splashed his boots but he didn’t seem to care. When she was done, he shoved her back in and Fan fell again into a daze as they drove on in the steady rain northwestward, up and through the lightless hills, toward where once Maryland had become West Virginia had become Pennsylvania, a huge swath of open counties land where no B-Mors have ever gone.

Their destination was the hilly, sparsely populated “county” referred to as the Smokes. We did not know about it then but of course do now. The origins of the name are unclear, but most say that it derives from the name of a once prominent local family, Smolk, whose people used to own a great deal of the land and many various small businesses; others simply point to the fact that nearly every present inhabitant, whether adult or child, smokes a locally cultivated weed that is supposedly a powerful antioxidant; the rest will note the prevailing practice of cookery there, which is to smoke everything they eat, and even drink, the favorite beverage being a homemade beer made from smoked grains.

The drive that night took longer than even Loreen had estimated due to their having to take detours around impassable roads, and it felt to Fan, drugged by an injection that Quig administered mid-trip when she could not stop moaning — and then shouting — from the sawing pain in her thigh, that it was a journey of days. For someone born and raised exclusively in B-Mor, there’s really no occasion for making trips of such duration, and it’s amazing to consider that this was the circumstance of her first true venture beyond the gates: sopped to the core, a ringing in her ears, perhaps a hairline fracture in her hip or leg, and being taken by strangers to a place that promised only hardship, or worse.

And enveloped in the strange, cool oil of the man’s drug, Fan must have dreamed. She dreamed hard and vividly, as we have, that the thick ropes on which she lay were the fronds of a sea plant that ensnared her as she drifted to the bottom, this willowy tangle of arms that now cradled and fed her. Kept her alive. There was a taste in her mouth like sour almonds. She nestled herself down even deeper, her leg now right again, and as one will, she had a welling of gratitude for the nurturing, this feeling that erased all thoughts of B-Mor behind her and of the open counties ahead, momentarily erasing even thoughts of Reg, whose voice and images she’d loaded onto the album card she’d sewn inside the pocket of her vest, plus some of his favorite oldies songs, which she would play in the card’s tinny voice, just to make out a chorus, “Only the young…” In a word, she was alone for the first time in her life, as if she were in a state of nature like the girl who lived by herself on an island in that ancient movie Fan once saw, hunting and fishing and swimming. What was her name? Fan could not remember. Could she have been called Fan? This Fan who could take care of herself, who could wield the spear, dive from the high rock, who could plunge into the deepest waters and hold her breath for as long as she wanted? But beneath her, the kindly fronds suddenly ossified, turning into muscled shoots. Chattering blindly at first, they found her. These ravenous eels. And as they gnawed at the flesh on her back, they lifted her, pushing her up and out of the water, all the weight returning to her and collecting in her leg. She was frantically wrestling the creatures when the woman reached back and hit her in the head with the tail end of a large flashlight. Fan fought some more and she was struck again, hard enough this time to take her breath away.

When Fan came to, she was in the man’s arms, being lifted from the car. She may have been drugged again for she could only move her eyes. She could not quite speak. A strong breeze crossed them and, aside from the man’s animal odor, the air was damp but smelled green and fresh with what she didn’t yet know was the scent of young pines. She could hardly see a thing. There was complete cloud cover and it was as black as night gets, for out in the counties after sunset the settlements go wholly dark, the roads and buildings unlighted, the few shops shuttered and closed. They had driven up and around the peak of a hill, finally stopping in a cleared patch of flatter land. Around her she could make out the shapes of other vehicles and in the background the outline of a structure, a house built low to the ground and with wings on either side, one of which the man entered after the woman opened a door. The woman lighted the way and he brought Fan inside and laid her on a table.

I’m going to sleep, Loreen said.

Crank on the generator, he told her.

She turned the light on his face and he squinted, his expression one of limited tolerance. She flashed on Fan.

I don’t know what you mean to do with her but I’m so fed up and tired I don’t care. I’m hungry! So I’m getting myself something and going to bed.

Get the generator on. Then come back.

Get it on yourself!

Do it.

She cursed at him and left. For a while, Fan and Quig were just there in the dark but then a distant whirring could be heard and Quig pulled a chain and a shop light above her flickered twice and then came on. When her eyes adjusted, Fan could see in the penumbra that they were in a kitchen of sorts, fitted with a short run of cabinets, a freestanding utility sink, a burner plate, a large microwave on the counter. He asked what her name was and she was surprised that she wanted to tell him, though she wasn’t able. But he was a frightening-looking man. He was big, much taller and broader than most of the men in B-Mor, probably in his fifties, darkly bearded and mustached but with wild streaks of gray. When he removed his cap, he was balding, the smooth, wide dome of his head bulbous and very pale, as well as tattooed with many fine jagged lines: a pattern of cracks. Her extremities began to itch and prickle, and when he reached for her leg, Fan jumped, bringing on a hot shear of pain. He placed his large hands on her ankles, but gently, his touch oddly pacifying as he removed her wet sneakers, her wet socks. She bucked and tried to twist away when he unbuttoned her trousers but he pressed his hand on her hip and said, Don’t move. He then lifted her with the other hand beneath the small of her back as he inched down the soaked, binding fabric. He did not touch her underwear. When her trousers were off, he examined her injury, pressing gingerly as he probed the splotchy, deep bruise on the outside of her thigh. He was as serious and focused as any nurse practitioner in B-Mor. He bound it tightly with a bandage and then left.

Loreen reappeared while he was gone. She scrounged about a drawer and found a quick-eat pouch of pork and beans. It was dim in the room and she looked older than Quig but maybe it was because she was heavier, her hair long and scraggly. She had a mouthful of gray crooked teeth. She cut off the top of the pouch and ate little spoonfuls out of it cold as she stared at Fan, talking to her between chews.

Where the hell did you think you were going?

You can’t be more than eleven or twelve.

You shouldn’t feel good that he’s bothering. He’s got plans for you, like he’s got for everyone.

Quig returned with a sack of assorted items and tools, including a handsaw, a drill, a length of soft cord, bungees, and then an old rake with mostly broken tines. He unscrewed the rake head from the plastic handle and then held the handle against the inside of her leg, marking its length. He turned it around and did the same with the unmarked end against the outside of her leg. Then he sawed the two pieces to size. These were the splints, which he joined with screws to a short crosspiece at the bottom; her foot would sit on this. With the bungees, he bound the splints to her leg, Loreen holding everything in place while he wound it around. He rigged the cord to secure her foot to the crosspiece and then twisted it until there was a tugging force on her leg; this was the only way, he would tell her later, that it would heal right, keeping it in traction. When it was done, Quig carried her to a small room of shelves and bins that was almost completely filled with random equipment and appliance and car parts, but there was a cot in the corner with a sleeping bag and he placed her on top of it. He hadn’t said more than two words to her, nor said anything now, just giving her another injection, this one to make her sleep. She was losing consciousness when Loreen appeared and tugged the sleeping bag out from beneath her, saying it was her son’s. She tossed a thin, musty blanket atop her.

Better heal up quick, Loreen said, looming. Her breath smelled of alcohol and was sugar-sweet, from the beans. Or you won’t be around long.

For all of us here, it is difficult not to think often about that first night of Fan’s. Even now, after all that’s transpired, we still discuss how we might have fared in her place, being maybe seriously injured, stuck in a faraway counties house deep in the Smokes, and not knowing what would happen next. It’s an unnerving scenario. In fact, the circumstance is so far beyond what any of us could imagine that it seems like some evening-programs story line dreamed up with the help of one of those edgier young B-Mors you hear about these days, who, of course, still work in our facilities but “consult” for the Charter creators of such shows and sometimes even take a hand in writing them. Maybe Charter people don’t ultimately care about what happens outside their gates, but they’re certainly curious, and so you see more and more characters like us popping up in the shows, if not in starring roles. We’re mostly bystanders or else hardworking service people for Charter heroes and heroines, but sometimes more prominent foils, too, like a recent character in St. Clair Beach named Ji-lan, a beautiful woman from D-Troy, the big midwestern facility, who captures the heart of a married Charter executive and causes him much delicious and humiliating trouble. And though suffering plenty, he weathers his self-inflicted misfortune, and it’s no surprise that it’s Ji-lan who loses all in the end, everyone learning a harsh lesson in what can happen when you stray too far beyond your circle.

It’s funny, for although Ji-lan is nothing at all like Fan in either person or her situation (Ji-lan being a tall, statuesque femme fatale, mercurial and passionate, who would not hesitate to wreck the lives of others if it meant her gain), it’s almost impossible not to think of our petite, gentle Fan as the inspiration for her character. Perhaps it’s the actress’s Fan-like hairstyle that’s a cue for us, or the similar way she sometimes rides sidesaddle on her scooter (though in Ji-lan’s case it’s clearly due to the very short cut of her skirts), but whatever it is, the impression is unmistakable. Fan, of course, never knew of these developments in the show, if she ever watched the show at all. Being as modest as she was, she probably would have shaken her head at the notion of any perceived concordances, maybe even chuckled at the huge gap between the sinister sparkle of Ji-lan’s exploits and the dismal reality of her situation, what with her profound injury and the ragged conditions and being under the care of the ill-tempered Loreen and the mysterious and seemingly volatile Quig, whose standing in the Smokes, it would turn out, was much higher than he cared to let on.

When Fan awoke the next morning in the room of spare parts, she felt sick to her stomach and leaned over the side of the cot and gagged, though only a slick of spit fell from her mouth onto the dingy, scarred floorboards. It was nausea in the wake of the night’s painkillers, and probably some hunger, too, as she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous afternoon. Her leg was in the splint Quig had rigged, but she couldn’t quite bear to examine it yet and so didn’t remove the blanket. Instead she looked around the room. It had a salvaged clerestory pane installed near the top of the wall, which let in a good amount of the morning light; one could see the various plastic and metal and wire-sprouting parts set off by type with an unexpected neatness, stationed in rows rather than jammed in; in fact, the feel was somewhat similar to a parts room the maintenance workers have at the grow facility, though theirs is obviously much larger and cleaner and brighter, the atmosphere scrubbed of any foreign matter or organisms that could taint the planting beds or fish tanks. Here the air was closed off and smelled of dust and chain oil and dry-rotted wood and was laced, as was everything, with a rank counties perfume, but it was the sensibility of order, if only an order masked by roughness and grime, that Fan latched on to and could quell the brunt of her fear with and so attempt to keep her mind composed and steady. For she had to believe what we all would have believed, given our schooling and our shows, which is that she would be used up in hard labor — if not much, much worse — and only after an interminable sentence of such use, disposed of. In fact, one of the sayings B-Mors will sometimes offer to someone on an errand or trip outside the gates is Don’t become xiãng-cháng! — Don’t become sausage! — a bit of black humor that comes from a famous episode of a now classic evening program in which a group of foolhardy B-Mor teenagers goes camping out in the counties before the commencement of their facilities careers and end up having their livers cut out and made into you know what.

That’s sensationalized, to be sure, and yet there are all sorts of rumors and anecdotes and semiofficial reports that over the decades have grown into a bank of lore about the counties that each of us adds to whenever we repeat that saying or others with which we admonish our naturally curious children. Thank goodness they are curious! It’s a sign of healthy minds. And while it may be obvious, it’s our responsibility to educate them to the idea that romancing the unknown is attended by myriad possibilities, too, shepherding them through those heady periods of urge and instinct when they think they can soar, and deliver them, we hope whole, to a place where perspective begins to reign, where they know that the groggy old bear at the zoo will instantly wake the moment you step inside the cage.

But Fan, we have come to learn, was one of our number who was well aware of perils but pushed forward anyway, not rashly or arrogantly but with what might be thought of as a kind of inner faith. And as terrified as she might have been as she lay in that room, perhaps regretting herself to the core, she had already resolved not to show any fear, no matter what was in store for her. So when footfalls approached the other side of the door, Fan tried the best she could to sit up in the sagging cot, propping herself on an elbow and lifting her head so as not to look as feeble and vulnerable as she felt. A padlock was tugged at several times and the door opened and it was Loreen, holding a plastic mug with a spoon stuck in it, which she waved before Fan. Instant oatmeal.

You’re supposed to eat.

Fan nodded.

Well, you going to or not?

Fan leaned over and picked up the mug and slowly ate, twisting in the cot so she could take half spoons of the gruel. It was tepid and only partly reconstituted, certain flecks of oats hard-edged and dry, but it had a flavoring, if stale, of maple brown sugar, which made her mouth water and the swallowing easier. Loreen lit a hand-rolled cigarette and stood over Fan as she smoked, her arms crossed over her ample bosom. She wore loose blue jeans and a gray-colored sweatshirt that matched the long, untidy strands of her graying hair. She was heavier than she had appeared the night before, which was undoubtedly surprising to Fan, given the fact that all counties people were supposedly underfed, very thick about the hips and thighs, and with a fleshy face that made her look much younger than she was. Her eyes were a pretty marine blue and she might have been pretty generally but her nose was misshapen and pointed well off center and this lent her a skeptical aspect, as it appeared she was literally looking at you sideways. And then her harsh, threshing voice made her seem preternaturally irritated, angry.

I told him I wasn’t going to feed you. This isn’t some fancy facilities health clinic, you know. It’s not like everyone gets to stay here. I don’t know why he’s letting you.

Fan couldn’t understand what she was talking about but she kept eating anyway, glad now for the food. The nourishment stirred life in her veins and the more she ate the hungrier she got and she finished the oatmeal quickly, scraping out the last gluey streaks until Loreen took the mug from her and went to leave. Fan told her she needed to use the bathroom right away and Loreen said she’d find something Fan could use so she had better not soil the cot, unless she wanted a whipping. The door shut with a bang and was padlocked from the outside, and who could blame Fan for wanting to cry at that moment, being frightened of course by this gratuitous aggression (which is most uncommon in B-Mor) but also now longing for the comfort of her row house, where you were never alone for all the clan occupants.

For if she did not long particularly for her parents or siblings (or cousins or grandparents or aunts and uncles), she missed them in sum, for their constant and interchangeable array. They never much talked to one another at the table, or while watching their programs, or sitting in the yard on their free-days, but that didn’t matter now. Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive. And Fan finally succumbed and cried, fiercely and silently, half ashamed at herself for doing so, half wanting to devolve into a mere cluster of cells, something simple enough that were she to disappear even she might not notice the moment of demise.

After a while, Fan realized Loreen was not returning anytime soon. She desperately had to pee and she scanned the room for any suitable container. On a shelf near the door were some partly used cans of paint and on top of these was a roller tray that she could probably reach, at least if she stood. Fan drew the blanket aside and examined her splinted leg, undoing the bandages within the structure as gingerly as she could, noting how he had wound them so she could redo them herself. Once exposed, her leg looked horrid with a multihued bruise of muddy purples and reds covering most of her left thigh, its shape very much like Australia as it curled about her limb. In school they had briefly studied the origins of the continents, and while Australia wasn’t one of them, the teacher had made a point of likening it to B-Mor, this substantial land that had detached from the rest and become a self-sustaining island, and here it was, tattooed on her leg, this sign of what might as well be a thousand miles away.

She probed the bruise with her fingers, pressing until it hurt, surprised to find that it was not as fragile or tender as she feared. When she twisted her leg, the pain was still searing but she could lift it several inches without too much discomfort. Slowly she swung her legs onto the floor and then bent her good leg and leaned forward and up and onto it, attempting to find her balance. She faltered and had to let herself down on the edge of the cot. She tried twice more before finally being able to stand on her good leg alone. When she tested the other, it was okay, until she tried a normal stance and then it hurt too much; she had to lean on one side of the splint to brace herself, hobbling across the room. She reached as high as she could on the shelf and barely grabbed the roller tray, but it hooked a can of paint, which came down with it as well, nearly landing on her foot. The top popped off and glaring yellow paint — the kind used for marking lines in roads — spewed onto the wood floor. Though it was pointless to be careful now, she crouched as much as she could with a splinted leg, holding the tray beneath her as she pulled her underwear to the side. And in a sweet whoosh she let it all go; it seemed she was relieving herself forever as she stared at the shimmering paint thrown out in the pattern of a seal’s flipper, fully extended, racing through the waters, and all at once she was crying again, in what seemed to her an equally ridiculous deluge. She couldn’t stop either flow, as hard as she tried she couldn’t, even when the padlock chocked and the door swung in to reveal Loreen holding an old green plastic beach pail, her fetching eyes shouting murder. Before Fan could take another breath, Loreen stepped forward and struck her across the cheek with the pail, sending her hard to the floor in a clatter, dismantling the splint and upending the tray and splaying Fan in her own warm, odorous water.

You little bitch! Look at what you’ve done! What a goddamned mess!

Fan, however, could not look, being momentarily blinded by the attack. And when her sight returned, all she could see were the woman’s pudgy, unpainted toes poking out from her rubber sandals, these mini-Loreens traveling pendulously to and fro before they struck, too, in the chest and shoulder and now on her arms, with which she was trying to shield her face. Fan had almost given up, not knowing anymore if she was asleep or awake or dead. But then the blows ceased, and Loreen was down on all fours beside her, and she saw Quig, looming high and wraithlike above them, a long white wand in his hand, its red tip two-pronged. He seemed to have stepped right out of a fantastical movie, like he was one of those warlocks but without a special hat.

I told you, he said softly. Be gentle.

Oh, screw you, Loreen rasped through her teeth. Screw you.

He extended the wand and touched her on the back of the neck. She bucked and stiffened, and then pitched forward, face-first, right in Fan’s puddle.

He said, with calm, Be gentle.