On Such A Full Sea

7

Aside from the unfortunate souls who came and went daily at Quig’s compound there were forty or so people who were settled there, children included. Most all of them, like Loreen, had first come as patients or else had accompanied patients who died and then, if they could perform some function or service the place required, were allowed to stay on. The still luckier ones — chosen by Quig and Quig alone — could reside in one of the rooms of the winged main house, while the rest lived a few steps down the hill in the complex of shanties that hugged the slope. Over the years these cramped, head-high huts had been erected and added on to exterior wall by exterior wall, and were connected via internal cutouts to form a continuous warren of rooms. You could start from the top and work your way downward through various people’s lairs and end up at the bottom and peer back to see the boxy assemblage of corrugated plastic and plywood and asphalt shingle and tarp, a miniature, junked version of some ancient hillside town in Europe or South America one can search in the archives.

You can imagine this is the sight Fan beheld after Sewey guided her through the huts the first time. It was a couple of weeks since leaving B-Mor and her leg was almost right, the injury in fact probably just a deep bone bruise and no doubt healing faster because of Fan’s superior physical fitness. We sometimes forget that even compared with the most experienced tank divers in the prime of their careers she had a chance to be the finest diver B-Mor had ever known. Kilo for kilo she was stronger than anyone, squat-lifting a record factor of her mass, and as noted, she could hold her breath to that point when it seems certain every cell in your body is going to burst and then in a miracle push past it to the other side, to what must be an altered state of seamless quiet, as if you just broke past the speed of sound. It is a matter of singular will. The very will, we know, that Fan drew upon in the storeroom as she worked her legs in deep bends and stretches at night, often while Sewey jawed on, or when she forced herself to down an extra soy drink or braid of chicken jerky to build up her strength. Or most of all, not flinching and trembling whenever Quig unexpectedly appeared to examine her, his cool, rough fingertips testing her exposed thigh, knowing she was likely safest if he and everyone else in the compound considered her to be still a child, a situation that could not endure long.

It appears her plan was to wait until she was certain her leg was strong enough to set off again on her own. This seems amazing, given what we know, for we have to ask ourselves once more: what was she thinking, when she set out from B-Mor in the first place, and in so headlong a fashion? It is either outrageous fortune or destiny that Quig’s car struck and injured her that first night and thus brought her to a place with shelter and food and that served as a crossroads of sorts in that part of the counties, where people naturally shared word of other settlements, villages, facilities. And although we can debate forever whether cruel fate or good fortune is Fan’s predicating sign, it must be noted that when she left us there was no hope or consciousness of either in her mind, nothing but a furious purpose and the capacity to disregard the usual rational considerations of her own well-being and the chances of reuniting with Reg, which were meager at best. Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too soon delivers him to a precarious ledge, where he can no longer turn back. And while it’s easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn’t this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?

When Fan was able, Sewey took her around the main house and huts, as well as the land around the compound. It was mid-September, still the heart of summer, the foliage of white oak and black cherry and hemlock and countless other species of trees distressed and washed out by the fierceness of the light. The trees were bristling in the dry wind but they were full, crowding all around them, covering the tops of the hills right down the steeply pitched slopes to the banks of the slow-running rivers and streams. From the moment she hiked down the hillside from the huts the first time she was startled by the denseness of the trees, for the school units and evening programs at B-Mor would have you think that the landscape of the open counties was mostly stripped of vegetation and thus devoid of any wildlife save for insects and ground-dwelling rodents, a stretch of dusty nothingness and grubby, wayside slums stitched by the network of major roadways that ran between large grow facilities and the Charter villages. Fan was accustomed to the trees in the parks of B-Mor, every last one of them strategically placed along paved walkways and the hawker-thoroughfares to provide shade, or set in a bower for the sake of privacy, or dotting the banks of an engineered pond where pedi-boaters could wade to shore and secure their crafts to the trunks. Along the straight, lengthy avenues they were planted one for every two row houses, selected for ease of care, the kind that did not throw off too many nuts or pods or sprays of pollen. These were maintained in equal measure by the bordering households and pruned to a specified height and girth.

Of course, there were plenty of sawed-down trunks dotting the hillside of Quig’s compound. The cutting had been done spottily, however, so that the main house and huts were still continuously surrounded by woods, the perimeter of which was patrolled by a platoon of men known as the Boys. They were not boys at all, though a few of them were in their late teens, most being men who had experience or training in security or the military. Like everyone else, each man or a beloved had been treated (probably in a dire moment) by Quig, and by virtue of this and the bonds to their kin and friends who were similarly indebted, they were deeply loyal to him and the general welfare of the compound.

Sewey aspired to join their ranks and complained to Fan about having to do the boring job of passing out tickets rather than scouting the area and warding off bandits and hunting for squirrels and woodchucks while doing so, which he said was as good as he’d ever want, which is what he’d do for the rest of his life. And whenever they caught sight of a couple of the Boys with their rifles slung over their shoulders, he waved wildly at them, and if they waved not-so-wildly back, Sewey would bemoan his plight all over again, and Fan couldn’t help but think how little where you were or the prospects of your circumstances mattered sometimes, for even out here in a place like this a boy’s modest hopes could hold him in thrall.

Fan did her part at first by helping Sewey manage the waiting line of the sick and miserable. She watched how he gave out the numbered tickets and then took them back once they went in to be examined by Quig. Things got confusing with the bidding that often arose, people jumping places in the line and then jumping again, and Fan made it simpler by doing away with the tickets altogether and instituting a separate bidders’ line alongside those taking places as they arrived. Soon enough there was a third line, for people with nothing, or at least nothing to give save themselves. Fan simply intended to help Sewey and wondered if she had done the right thing, for though it soon became clear that the new system was working, with fewer arguments and fights breaking out, the most surprising result was that people were offering more than before, perhaps because they could readily look across at the other lines and see the things others had come bearing. Loreen couldn’t help but be pleased. Quig, whom they rarely saw, didn’t seem to notice, or care if he did.

At the end of the day, Sewey and Fan would head down to the huts, where most of the children and teenagers lived. Sewey shared a bedroom with Loreen in the main house, but he spent as little time there as possible because he said he was too old now to be bunking-up with his mother. So whenever he could, he slept in some section of the huts where he had a friend, and now that Fan was moving around without much difficulty she tagged along with him, though she always hiked back up to the main house to sleep in her cot in the storeroom. She was lucky that it was Sewey who’d befriended her; he treated her like his baby sister, if one smarter than he, and being Loreen’s son, he was humored by everyone with at least a wary kindness, and so Fan was as well.

The people of Quig’s might not have been inclined to treat someone from B-Mor or another facility with any hospitality at all. The Charters were much more exalted settlements but they might as well be constructed up in the clouds; there was no way a counties person could even dream of residing there. But a place like B-Mor, with its safe, clean streets and full employment and the promise of a gentle end, was a theoretically attainable and thus resented possibility to them. One need not even mention its legacy of foreign settlers, which, of course, was expressed in Fan’s face and name, and could only catalyze certain feelings of unfairness and displacement, whether they were justified or not.

Eli, Sewey’s best friend in the huts, had no such feelings, being entranced by Fan from the moment he met her. Like Sewey, he was thirteen, though of more typical size and mental capacity for his age, a strawberry-blond-haired kid with a face so thoroughly mottled with freckles he looked like some aboriginal boy in an old-time nature vid, the skin around his eyes and nose and cheeks inked by the unmitigated open counties sun. No doubt if he lived in a Charter village, where on UV-alert days they project a special scrim into the skies and have public dispensing stations of specially formulated lotions, Eli might have been still unsullied and pink; but out here he went unprotected, and his mother couldn’t always corral him inside on full-sun days or much scare him anymore with the story of what befell his father, from whom he got his coloring. Still, whenever Sewey and Fan appeared at his hut and there were no more tasks or chores to do, Eli pulled on his floppy bucket hat for their forays into the land surrounding the compound. The three of them hiked along the numerous streams and brooks coursing through the small valleys and followed them up to their sources, like one tiny but deep lake that was hidden behind a rise of rock that Sewey and Eli had named Cold Pond, which they said was icy even now. They spent afternoons sitting on an exposed mound of granite that pitched down right into the clear water where you could see tadpoles skittering over the brownish-greenish bottom, the boys throwing rocks at the fish rises or launching a raft of twigs Eli lashed together with weed stems and then throwing rocks at that. Eli sometimes made a separate one for Fan and might festoon it with pretty leaves or wildflowers and nudge it in a different direction and tell Sewey not to aim for it, though soon enough Sewey would forget and do it anyway.

Fan liked that Eli never got mad at his friend, just sort of chuckled to himself as a much older person might when faced with so natural a way, and we can’t help but think she was reminded of her sweet Reg, who never raised his voice in anything but song (he was a lovely karaoke singer, favoring pop ballads), who never complained about always being passed over for promotions, who never pressed her to do anything she was uncomfortable with, matters of love included. Sometimes during breaks they would sneak down to the sublevel nurseries of the grow facility where amid the endless trays of tender sprouts and shallow bins of fry fish and the drip-drip murmur of feed and nutrients they would kiss, Reg bending way down and his big hands cupping the small of her back through the neoprene suiting and staying there, even though nobody else was around, until Fan would tippy-toe or even give a little leap so he’d have to hold her by the bottom. The facility cameras caught such a glimpse of them, and if you viewed similar vids of other couples, you knew things would accelerate and there was nothing else to do but watch, but with Fan and Reg you couldn’t help but keep wondering, for they only kept kissing, and you couldn’t help but think about what it felt like to share a satisfaction so thorough that it compelled one not always to blinded fervor. For isn’t this what any citizen of our difficult world would want if she had her choice, not to tilt ceaselessly or push-push for its own sake but to be quartered by her own best nature, the one most loving and restful and calm?

It was this she found fetching in Eli, though, unlike Reg, he seemed tinged through with what she could only describe as a somberness, his eyes peering out over the water as if waiting for something that would never come, or else had long come and gone. One bright afternoon while sitting on the slab of rock, Eli announced that he was burning up and was going to go in.

What? Sewey said, certain he’d not heard him right. Are you crazy! It’s poison!

Eli replied that it was probably the very water they all drank (if after being boiled), and that the fish and frogs didn’t seem to mind.

But it’s too deep, Eli!

I won’t go far in.

Don’t!

But Eli had already kicked off his flip-flops and pulled his T-shirt over his unruly hair and the glare from his bony shoulders and back momentarily made Fan squint. She was going to warn him, too, as the fall-off was especially steep where he was entering, but he was in before she could say a word, his cargo shorts soaked nearly to the waist with his very first step. He was steadying himself to take another when he lost his footing and in an instant he plunged into the dark but clear water, going in right up past his head, his flowing hair beneath the surface looking like a sea frond inflamed, his arms and hands now stretched stiffly outward as if he were already dead. Sewey slid on his rear to the water’s edge, extending his foot to try to let his friend grab it, but Eli, oddly unbuoyant, was only slipping down farther into the remarkably deep water, and so Fan jumped in after him.

The water was cold; the shock of it nearly forced her mouth open, her heart sprinting, the chill flowing past her feet as though it were being fed by an underground river spewing forth from just beneath the slab of the rock. Of course, she hadn’t been in any water since leaving B-Mor, and without her suit or mask, a spark of panic momentarily froze her, and when she opened her eyes, all she could see was Sewey’s block of a foot thrashing uselessly just beneath the surface and then, at what seemed too far below her to believe, the waxen glowing of Eli’s hair. She hauled herself up for a full breath and snapped herself downward and right away she was with him. His eyes were closed and his lips were shut tight and she thought he must be caught on something, not to rise. But his arms and feet were free, and he was not yet at the bottom, and when she hooked him by his torso and kicked, it was not as easy as she expected, given his frame, which was slightly larger than her own. But now he was suddenly grabbing her around the neck, clawing at her ears, her hair; he was desperate to breathe. She fought him off and tugged at him and kicked upward with all her might when she felt a heaviness in his buttoned pockets. They were full of stones, which he must have collected during the hike. And although he’d gone limp, Fan had to undo the buttons and strip out the stones before she could swim him up to the surface, where Sewey easily lifted him out in one swift pull.

Eli lay shell-pale on the rock, the band of freckles on his face all the darker for having the color wholly washed out of him. From emergencies at the tanks, Fan knew what to do; she began pumping on his chest and blowing into his mouth, while Sewey craned wide-eyed above her. She worked back and forth pumping and blowing, and she was not willing to give up maybe ever when he finally bucked and coughed, then coughed again, water spilling from his mouth. Then he leaned over and vomited. After he gathered himself, he wiped his eyes and pulled on his T-shirt and his sun hat, and the three of them sat beside the still-again water, drying off, each wondering in silence what exactly had happened.

They never mentioned this to anyone. It seemed to them all nobody’s business. Although Fan did wonder. It seemed to her Eli’s family’s circumstance appeared no worse or better than anyone else’s in the compound; the hut he shared with his mother and younger brother and sister was like the rest of them, drafty and damp and rickety, a narrow door the only barrier to the elements, the lone window a hinged piece of cut plywood, the beds jammed tightly in one corner so that they all slept together, as was typical in the huts. In the other corner was set a small woodstove welded together out of sundry metal panels with an aluminum duct running up through the roof. Because it was summer, it was used now only for cooking the evening meal, which meant sometimes frying up eggs, or game if someone shot or trapped any, but mostly it was heating stuff right in the cans. Each hut had a stove and now they took turns starting the fires with those in the adjoining huts, and so people would drift in and out to warm up their dinners and often enough everyone would share what they had, a potluck of diced carrots and mackerel and kidney beans, and if someone was feeling extra-generous, maybe a tin of beef chili or chicken stew would get opened. Sewey was welcomed because he always brought something special from the house such as dried fruit rolls or energy bars, a share of which he gave to Fan to offer. You had to contribute something, even if it was totally unpalatable, like the can of teriyaki-flavored beetle grubs someone had slipped onto the stove the last time and didn’t own up to until people tried it and actually didn’t mind the flavor, which was sort of shrimpy and sweet. That evening it was Fan and Sewey and Eli’s family along with two others, both made up of a mother and her children. Of the residents of the huts a majority seemed to be fatherless, or manless, a fact that seemed natural enough to Fan; though the households of B-Mor had plenty of men, there were always more females by head count because of the nature of the facilities work, not just in the tanks but in the nurseries, where smaller, nimbler hands could plant seedlings and prune and weed more efficiently. Reg had originally started in the jobs mostly held by men, whose tasks were physically demanding, having to handle large soil bags and drums of nutrients, but he wasn’t very strong for his size and he’d shown a genuine interest in gardening, not to mention having the advantage of his wide wingspan.

Fan took meager portions from the cans, waiting for the others to coax her to take more. They were sitting on folding chairs outside Eli’s hut in the still, pine-fragrant air of the late-dying evening light with their plastic picnic bowls and spoons, and ate while sharing stories of the day and of the various comings and goings of the compound residents and patients but mostly laughing and joking in a manner that Fan realized she didn’t much see any longer back in B-Mor. These people didn’t have the same ingrained knowledge of one another as did those in her household or, of course, that insoluble bond of blood, but what they did seem to share, despite or maybe because of the prevailing trial of their circumstance, was a kind of sharp appreciation of one another, their talk never quite easy or clement, and sometimes bordering on being cruel; after eating, they would usually play word games because there was little else to do once it got dark and the kids and moms would go round with something they called Roadkill, a memory word game that started at A and went through the alphabet, with the first person saying something you might find at the side of a counties road, such as antelope or auto, with the next repeating that and then offering his or her own word, bones, the following person restating both the previous and then offering crow, and so on, until someone either couldn’t remember the string of words or come up with a new one, when the kids and even moms would lob abuse at the loser, especially if his word was particularly silly or desperate, like igloo, which would prompt a game within a game: a rushing litany of idiot, inane, ignoramus, et cetera. But they were always kind to Sewey, whispering suggestive clues or letting Eli recall a series of words for him when he faltered, exempting him from the mocking if he couldn’t think of anything at the end.

Fan didn’t play because she was new, and because of that, they weren’t sure how she should be treated, but the truth was that she wasn’t accustomed to such activities nor did she have much of a vocabulary, despite the fact that she went through the full seven years of formal B-Mor schooling while they had merely their mothers and one another to learn from; there was no signal out here (or if there was, it was too costly to buy a code), and thus they didn’t have any games or shows or vids or messaging, and the only thing they could do was read the few dozen old books that were loaded on a couple of antique handscreens the kids passed around. Fan followed the game and played along inside her head, trying to generate her own word every turn, though she had some trouble; she was plenty smart but there was little occasion for her mind to be challenged at the facility or at home, where her aunts and uncles and parents and cousins would sit cheek by jowl for the meal but never really talk or if they did, they would just comment on whatever was transpiring on the programs they were all plugged in to, lamenting and bellowing about the show characters as if they were the friends and family and lovers in greatest question.

And maybe they were; for whatever was in question when the originals landed long ago is by now for us a set of curiosities, like the crank on an ancient automobile, or the virtual keys on a computer screen, the inconvenient or tiresome having been steadily engineered away. We labor hard for certain but the work is rote and our tomorrows are mostly settled and the way we love one another is cast by the form of our excellent contiguity, a rigorous closeness that only rarely oversteps its bounds.

Fan could see that these women and children she now sat amid were the lucky ones. Like Loreen, both of the women had come to Quig’s in dire need, Eli’s mother originally arriving with a man who died, and immediately she found herself in a circumstance that presented numerous reasons to try to stay on — a regular supply of food, decent shelter, protection from marauders and opportunistic counties authorities — and only a single one to leave. All the reasons, of course, had their ultimate basis in Quig himself — this was his domain, indeed perhaps as far as the eye could see — and Eli’s mother and Loreen and every other person who made his or her way here had to decide how much they were willing to cede in return for such succor. The men would work in policing/security, or procurement and trading of supplies, or in the maintenance of the compound, and the women were responsible for everything else, the daily pilgrimage of patients and the organization of inventories, the “cooking” and the cleaning, the raising of the kids, and if they were manless, and sometimes even if they were not, making a periodic nighttime visit to Quig.

This last fact sounds most unsavory, as well it should; there is nothing laudable about it. And yet it must be noted that no decree came from Quig. He was not the sort of man, it turned out, to force himself on anyone, which he could have easily done. Nor was there any punishment for not making a visitation. The practice arose on its own, and from the women themselves, a schedule drawn up each month by Loreen. It is not certain that he even liked the practice, for often enough one of the women would go up to the main house on her appointed night and come right back again. According to Sewey, Loreen had not been with him that way for many years, though she would still sometimes harangue him to take her into his suite, if only to remind him of her willingness. If there was anyone who was allowed to stay whenever she went up to the main house, it was Eli’s mother, Penelope, who was tall and slender, bone pale like her son though not as freckled, and then quite young. She didn’t look like a counties person, her prettiness not yet worn away. But it seemed it was her whole person that he favored, for she always had to take along one of the handscreens with her, apparently so they could discuss whatever book in its memory they were reading together, and then it wasn’t every time that she would spend the night.

On those that she did, Sewey and Fan stayed over with Eli and his siblings. The three boys would sleep in one bed, with Fan in Penelope’s bed with the little girl, though all of them were pretty much jumbled together. We can only imagine how it must have been for our Fan, to be in such close quarters with children who could bathe only infrequently, if ever, their innate creaturely sweetness masked by layers of dried sweat and grime, nibs of soured grease clinging to the corners of their mouths. She must have become quickly accustomed to that sharp stink, and nestled down as she did without concern for the rampant bedbugs and lice to lie together like dogs in a den, with air just enough to breathe. The little girl, Star, clung fast to her all night, a slick of her drool settling in the well of Fan’s throat, but Fan didn’t mind or even move; in fact, she went half limp, inviting the girl to embrace her even more. And surprisingly, Fan was not thinking of the child growing inside her, for though she well knew that it existed, it was still purely a figment for her, a vague promise of something that made her think of Reg instead of some specklike being, an image of her lover rendered with a blunted glow, like a portrait done in memorial mode. Fan was not sentimental, we can say that now for certain, her blood running the same temperature as the cool waters of the tanks, and yet here she was encased in the humid nest of these shallow-breathing children with their limbs and hair splayed messily about her, and wishing simply that Reg was with them, his endless arms bundling them all tight. She did not, in fact, miss the people of her household, even though they were her beloved, this including her mother and father, who were perfectly fine parents but no more nor less dear to her than her aunts and uncles, her nieces and nephews and in-laws, for in essence everybody was like a cousin, which is the way we wish it, and so cast it, which is how we are certain B-Mor functions best.

She realized that if she did miss anything it was the household itself, the narrow, high-ceilinged rooms whose air was layered with the aromas of stale cooking oil and the earthy gas of the trooped footwear lined up inside the front door, the tall windows onto the opposing row houses more like mirrors than clear panes, the treads of the steep stairwells worn down in the middle by generations of bare and slippered feet. There were people moving about at all hours, snacking or showering or watching programs, and from the rooms of the younger couples, one could sometimes hear the murmurings and cries of passion, reports of B-Mor maybe everlasting, and it was this unitary vitality that was the girding of her feeling, its tireless, self-tuning motor.

Yet here at Quig’s, she was finding herself becoming strangely and particularly attached, of course, to Sewey but also, for example, to little Star, who was slightly walleyed and talked in a stiff, robotic voice but who was magical with figures (she could correctly figure non-whole square roots almost instantly), and to Eli, who in his sleep scolded himself in the voice (presumably) of his deceased father, chiding himself for not being, oddly, more fleet of foot (Damnit, son, just run!), and to the other children who stopped by, their grubby mouths of chipped and misdirected teeth grinning madly for nothing other than the arrival of a just-bartered, unopened plastic sleeve of tennis balls, peering at them wide-eyed like they were gigantic furry candies. She was even warming to Loreen, who had accepted the idea that Fan was here to stay, at least as long as Quig was concerned, and had stopped being harsh to her for some consecutive days now, even allowing her to manage the patients’ line by herself when Sewey was laid up for two days with an especially bad fever. And Fan found herself slipping out and trailing Penelope whenever she gathered her things to go up and spend her appointed night in the main house, watching her as she entered Quig’s wing and appeared inside with the handscreen glowing and ready, his long shadow flicking across her face. Was her expression one of well-masked dread? Of hard-feigned interest? Or was it, in fact, a reflection of Fan’s own feeling, this unlikely welling of what she couldn’t help but admit was gratitude, surely measured, but tinged warm all the same?