The Airways

by Jennifer Mills

  Nothing touches me. The body doesn’t hold. So weak, stiff, all its physics limits. A negative, a mould. I draw away. Aware of some loss of material, of self as shadow, the remnant pattern left in thought. Feel something, the body commands. Feel this. But it’s a phantom, like time is. I go untouched.

  The pattern forms an afterimage. Of harm. Of theft and.

  There is a swarm of anger, a brief blur of pollinating fury. The air expands with it, swirling and spreading. I am this dust burst forth that wants to flame. Nothing contains me; I can’t contain myself.

  I come apart.

  This is not what I was. Not what I wanted. This is a new arrangement, something much more loose and numerous. Particles expand, their bonds weaken. The moment expands with them, it vibrates newly, and the fury, diffuse, lights away.

  Unremembered, unbodied, the I becomes they.

  There’s no pain. Pain’s in the body, a lonely place. It is past harm; the heat of it’s going. Nothing lies down beside it, curls close, enters from behind. They are out here, buzzing over, up, around. Something other. Present. More. A cluster, a slow burst, a release from old compressions. This complicates and simplifies. Breath and not-breath. They are returning (they will return) to the ah the air.

  The end. Rare, perhaps, to be awake enough to witness this. Thought somewhere between as they disperse. Loosen. Everybody might go through it. Body, no. Every whatever-this-is. A remnant of a fading awareness. A vapour, or a mind in shift. What was taken, what passes away.

  Hands come and attend the body. The hands turn it, and lift it away. They go with the body, carried close. Something to which they still might belong.

  It doesn’t appear to miss them.

  BEIJING

  It was a forgetful air; the building seemed to fade behind him. Ahead, bands of gold shone where the sun fought its way through fine-grained smog to reach the asphalt. Beyond the intersection, the road dissolved completely. Though the light brought no warmth, it seemed colder in the shadows of his apartment complex. Adam could have used the down coat that had been stuffed into his suitcase since April, but the series of gates and doors and their various keys and cards made going back for it a chore. He quickened his pace instead, cutting through the cars parked at odd angles in the road’s central lane. He could not help glancing into windows as he passed. A few held sleeping bodies, socked feet up on the dash, men at peace in their stillness while the city swarmed around them. They might have been dead. He peered into a taxi, and the sleeper jerked, snorted. Adam flinched and stepped away.

  He buttoned his jacket to the throat, its mock sheepskin collar stiff with cold and usage. The day would grow warmer, and he only had to walk as far as the subway, which would be stifling anyway. He shoved hands into pockets, crossed into the light.

  The gold wasn’t just filtered sunlight. The ginkgo trees had begun to turn. Soon they would transform, then drop their hoard of treasure on the footpath to be swept away. Their shadows reached into the bank across the road now, lined up to save before the next crash.

  When he walked under the trees, he saw that each leaf was poised between green and yellow, and each curved rim was edged with brown. Some leaves were crinkled, hanging limp. He hadn’t been here long enough to know if this was normal, or part of the damage.

  It would be his second winter in Beijing, his first in this apartment. His own place, a level of adulthood that wouldn’t have been attainable in Sydney, though renting in either city was a sting. When he first arrived and for the year he had been teaching English, he had shared a cramped apartment near Dongzhimen. If he’d stayed he would have been able to walk to work now, at least on days when the air was good, but it had been a shitty flat, poorly ventilated and noisy. The apartment Manu’s disturbingly youthful agent had found for him was further out but in a better neighbourhood, with parks and new malls nearby, even a few foreigner-friendly bars if you knew where to look.

  It was the same air, though. Today it smelled of iron filings, burnt foam, bitter herbs. When the AQI was over three hundred, the subway stop hovered at the edge of the visible. I broke my eyes, Natasha would have said, if she was here with him. He had learned to number each day by the index, to talk of air instead of weather. Right now it was not so bad; buildings were softened by the haze, rather than obscured by it. Polished tiles along one wall shone with a friendly, coppery light. Young men in suits slipped past him. A mother moved upstream, talked into her phone, wheeling her stroller with a free hand, her paper mask around her neck, a reusable shopping bag slung over the pram’s handle. The child was asleep with its mouth open, and no defences.

  A new fruit shop glistened, bright watermelons displayed in the entrance. The hotpot place on the corner was being demolished; chunks of pink concrete spilled onto the footpath. The shoe repair guy who usually parked his cart outside it was nowhere to be seen, but the tiny shop next door clung on, selling cigarettes and snacks from a room the size of a corridor. It wouldn’t last. Apparent fixtures had a way of vanishing. He’d been living here four months and the street had already transformed. He marvelled again at the city’s capacity for quick erasure. He’d read a statistic in one of the foreigner magazines: rents inside the third ring road had doubled in the last two years, would likely double again. It was no wonder everything kept moving outwards.

  From here, he could get to the office in twenty minutes by taking two subway lines, or he could walk further and avoid having to change. Today, as was his habit lately, he opted for the latter. The autumn air was relatively pleasant, and he should enjoy it before winter hit.

  Beijing was easy to chart, its shape already familiar, as if it had been copied from a cross-section of the body. Ring roads encircled the centre, separating layers: bone, muscle, fat, skin. The mysteries appeared up close. Huge roads barricaded by overpasses, hutongs devolving into fenced apartments, walled buildings: past forms persisting despite constant renovation. There were unpredictable barriers where an anonymous institution or a security guard blocked the way, like a clot in the bloodstream. He could get lost repeatedly in a single square block, but at scale its logic was unquestionable. Like a body, the details could remain strange. Adam was pleased with the analogy. He would use it on Manu, who appreciated the metaphorical turn in his thinking; Adam was used to saving up these thoughts for him.

  The office was near the CBD, which wasn’t central at all but peripheral to the city, a shiny outgrowth. Adam had no clue how the tiny company could afford such a valuable space. Family wealth, probably, or informal connections. Manu had been here a decade; he had got in early, knew people, knew how things worked. Certainly the business could not be generating much. Adam had done the vision statement himself, written a list of goals like empower high quality content development teams to deliver bespoke global brand solutions, but most of his work was preparation for other work that was yet to materialise. Manu called it ‘building out from the core’. Adam’s job description was vague; he’d written that too, after joining the team. When outsiders asked, he said he worked in marketing. It wasn’t clear what they were selling, but it was good to move in the glow of encouragement and positivity that Manu and Eliza generated. He supposed he would get a sense of his function over time.

  By the time he reached the subway entrance Adam was beginning to sweat in the faux shearling, his body generating more heat than it needed. He descended the long escalator, checking his phone before he went out of range. The AQI was 183, not bad but enough to make his eyes sting. He wondered about Natasha without urgency. There were no messages from her, or anyone else.

  At the gate he pushed his phone into a pocket, passed his satchel into the scanner. The security guard, a bored, slightly chubby teenager wearing salon eyelashes under her hat, barely glanced at her screen. There were cameras everywhere; she was probably just there for show. He reached for his face and felt the trim against the skin, checking if he’d missed a spot. He heard the whoos
h of a train leaving below, felt the guard’s eyes arrive on him as he retrieved his bag, and did not bother to meet them.

  Natasha had gone home to Wuhan for Golden Week. Three weeks later, she was still there. Her grandmother was ill, but it wasn’t clear if it was serious. Communication had been intermittent. Her not being here was beginning to feel normal, the awkwardness of her leaving slowly worn away by fresh events.

  He continued down, taking the stairs now, weaving through bodies coming up to the exit. The air seemed better underground, but that might just have been because nothing was far enough away to blur. It smelled recycled. On the platform, he lined up obediently in the area indicated by yellow lines and arrows. Stay behind the line, respect the boundary. He had lived in Beijing long enough to follow such rules automatically, and long enough to be irritated by a two-minute wait for a train. Others were assembling along the platform. Young businessmen in shiny nylon suits, cool kids in faux-designer tracksuits, a hipster girl with an Astro Boy backpack, chewing gum. Beyond them, someone in a uniform and paper face mask stood unmoving on a little plinth, watching over this image of order.

  The image dissolved when the train arrived, as everyone abandoned the notion of a line and pressed into the train, obstructing the people getting off. Adam held back to allow a series of young people to squeeze past, people who managed to look simultaneously wealthy and unemployed. Carefully handsome young men, carelessly nerdy boys. Women in groups of two or three, or accompanied by their phones. At the last minute he had to push his way in through the closing doors. He manoeuvred himself into the coveted corner. His thigh pressed against the hip of a young mother in floral-print pants and a yellow t-shirt, a kid strapped to her chest who looked too big to be carried, a trail of snot down its chin. He did not give way. The child stared through him.

  Beijingers were invisibility experts. With luck, with enough of a crowd, he might disappear on the subway. People stared at their screens, reading or playing games or checking their hair and makeup, crafting pockets of privacy for themselves. He listened to the blur of speech but could not understand much: declarations of existence, position, floated bright between lost specifics. The few familiar words were the most obvious, and therefore useless. His ignorance of the language protected him.

  He had started going to classes when he first came but stopped after a couple of months, too exhausted at the end of a day of teaching young children how to greet each other in English to add an hour of his own clumsy learning to the end of it. Their quick uptake embarrassed him. He could point and demand like a child, but who wanted to be a 27-year-old child? For those months he’d been unable to do anything after class but sit numbly in his apartment, watching TV with his equally numb housemate, who was from one of the vowelled states in the middle bit of the US, and who had turned out to be a pretty serious Christian. Adam had felt constantly frustrated. Something held him back, prevented him from living fully, from participating in the city. But he didn’t know if it was language or courage or circumstance. When he stopped going to classes, he felt bad for a while, but slowly the guilt bled out into an understanding. There was no need to live fully here, to attempt to belong. He could never be anything but temporary.

  ‘Just get a Chinese girlfriend,’ Manu had said. ‘You’ll learn in no time.’ Eliza had been standing right beside him, but she was Chinese from Toronto, which was not the same. The two of them moved between languages amphibiously. Manu was one of those people who had grown up across three continents, lived in several global cities, seemed at home anywhere. He had caught the wave early; the wave was his country now. Adam had only met people like this in Beijing, but he guessed that they existed everywhere. The world lay open to them. Their children, when they had some, would select from a platter of citizenships.

  Adam had found Natasha eventually, but her English was better than she had let on, and since their communication was augmented by translation apps, he hadn’t learned much. It had only been three months, including the time she’d been away. He flinched at what the absence implied. It had been a summertime thing, maybe. He struggled to imagine a future, with or without her. The vanishing point was always away in the haze. He was still settling into the job, the flat, the girlfriend, the life that had formed around him as the novelty of the city wore away. He turned to move an elbow that was stiffening, and his forearm rested a moment against a stranger’s back.

  The train was stopping. He tuned in to the robotic female voice only after she switched to English: ‘. . . is a transfer station. Please prepare to get off.’ Bodies pressed past, and his own body knew to roll aside for them automatically. He wasn’t a big guy, maybe a little less fit than he used to be, but he felt huge and translucent, like one of those enormous Japanese jellyfish that were probably taking over the world. Invisibility could never last. His body was indisputable, it must be negotiated. He let himself be shifted along inside the train. A man near him hoicked wet phlegm. He wondered how long it would take for a person to come into contact with every other person in the city, if there was a six-degree-type equation for the likely exchange of microbes, viruses, spores. Someone would have done the modelling, of course, planned a military response. He watched a girl tuck her hair beneath the strap of a face mask, using her screen as a mirror. It would be easy for an epidemic to spread, but Beijing’s immune system would kick in just as quickly. Boundaries would be policed, invaders expelled. The train moved on, the man still coughing. Adam felt drowsy. It was still early. He might work at Starbucks for an hour or so before heading to the office. But his laptop was still on his desk, so he would have to go there first. Anyway, it was better to be at the office early, be working on something when Manu arrived.

  He checked his reflection in the window, and closed his mouth. His face was friendly, round with health. The tan jacket was growing ragged, the fake sheepskin collar balding at the corners. It was wilfully informal, even for his creative workplace, and possibly out of style. He would throw it away at the end of the season, as soon as the down one became necessary. Mere weeks away, those chill winds, the stick-trees and the colourless palette, the brief flickers of snow. He wondered if he’d still be here in spring. It was too far away to think about.

  The train stopped, released a few more passengers. With a little more room, he took out his phone and, although he knew there would be no signal, checked for messages, updates, news. When all the feeds failed to refresh, he opened a mindless game, connecting rows of cute animals that blinked at him before exploding. He had been stuck on the same level for a few days. When he failed to finish in the allocated number of moves, the cartoon animals glared at him, disappointed. He looked up from the screen and peered down the throat of the moving subway.

  There were no doors between carriages. For a moment his vision wavered, his palms felt damp. He could not tell if he was looking ahead or behind him. As the train took a curve, the end point shrank and shifted closer. He gripped a pole, remembered a film he had once seen of a bridge in an earthquake, twisting like paper. Cars spilled off the tarmac, suspension cables whipped free. Was it real footage or an old disaster movie? He could probably find it online. The image persisted, so that for a moment the entire subway seemed to ripple, loosen. He saw it careening off its rails, spinning up against the walls of its tunnel, hurtling past the stations. He reached for a handhold, pressing an arm between bodies that remained remote, and found himself clinging to the centre pole. He moved to avoid inhaling someone’s hair.

  He had been carsick as a child and now, habitually, his eyes sought the most distant still point. But outside there was only darkness, dim concrete whipping past behind a reflected interior. He avoided his own face doubled in the glass, looked along the length of the train. When it straightened, his eyes were drawn to the vanishing point. Metal verticals concertinaed above the heads of the passengers. He thought he saw someone he knew, but he could not place them.

  The hairs on the back of his neck
prickled against his collar.

  He had an impulse to move closer, to see better, but his feet were caught in place. Then the train turned again, and the figure was lost to view.

  As it bent into the long corner, the subway train became a looping creature, a snake that curved around inside the circular line until its head met its tail. Even if he could move from his place, he would never get to the end of it, just be swallowed up and re-digested. How long had he been on board? He turned his head to check the stations indicated above the door, and a muscle in his neck protested. Too many screens. He sought the row of red and green lights. The familiar procedure would reassure him. It was stuffy in the carriage, overheated. Airless, that was all. He had been waiting a long time.

  There were still a few stops to go.

  In the tunnel walls, rectangles of light appeared. Then an image: flashing billboards gave a stiff animation of a whitened face, a zoetrope of cosmetic perfection. Heat in the back of one shoulder. No room to shed the jacket. A woman beside him stood and narrowed her body for exit. A seated man chewed something, open-mouthed. The train was slowing to a station, but it was taking too long to come to a stop. He felt the bodies shifting along beside him, rolling against each other, moving towards doors, pushing through to seats. He wanted to get off, to breathe, but that was ridiculous. Only three stops to go. He looked up over the passengers. The eyes cast down at screens. The preoccupied expressions, bent heads, raised arms. It all began to seem impressionistic, a mosaic of body parts and clothing.

  His eyes fixed on something in the blur: a still point, a fox in shadow. A curve of hair against one cheek. He felt the pull before he found its source. The heat at his back. His heart went quick against his ribs. Sweat chilled one open hand. Before he recognised what he was seeing, his body knew they were there.