The Airways

by Jennifer Mills

  Not infinite. Not perfect, either. The crowd, sated, is becoming thin.

  BEIJING

  He was grateful for the heat of her body. For her small weight depressing the bed beside him. He felt her breath at his neck, the cool pressure of her knee in the back of his thigh. But the will to turn towards her, to reach out, was not quite strong enough to move him.

  Adam woke in the dark apartment, his body slick with sweat. He wiped at his damp chest, pushed the cheap synthetic blanket down to his feet. He was still wearing his long-sleeved shirt. His neck was sore where the shirt had twisted, the constraint of it pushing his shoulders out of alignment. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth, part acid and part decay. He had somehow wrested off his pants, or almost; they were still tangled around one ankle.

  He reached a hand across the mattress. No-one there.

  He freed his leg, tried to rise, farted hot air, lurched towards the bathroom. Pain reached up into him from behind, gripped his skull from the neck and wrenched it. The walls rotated wildly. He held the doorframe, thought of earthquakes. When he made it to the toilet, he retched over the bowl but failed to produce anything more than spit and bile. The spinning in his head was familiar, the feeling of still being drunk from the night before.

  He sat back on his haunches. The floor was not moving. He didn’t think he had been drinking. He remembered leaving the office. He remembered fish suspended in a grey canal. An insect slicing Beijing’s reflection in two. He thought he remembered returning to the apartment, swiping his card at the door to his building, waiting for the elevator, but this routine was so automatic that he couldn’t be certain the memory was yesterday’s. He wasn’t drunk, but he might be feverish. Picked something up on the subway. The line repeated in his searing head. He could not remember who had said it. He raised himself slowly to a standing position, avoiding the mirror, and leaned his head out the bathroom door. The combined living room/kitchen was as he had left it, the front door closed. There was his laptop bag on the table. No-one else was here. Natasha had gone away. There was no-one to tell him if he was really ill. No-one to look after him. His face let go a moment, but he gathered himself. Rest, he decided, and sank to his knees.

  The floor was dusty, always dusty with the particles that came inside and fell and settled there. He should have let Manu arrange an āyí. The air in the apartment had thickened somehow, turned against him. He moved on all fours back to the bed, pushed himself onto it, then lay on his side. The landlord’s mattress was hard through the layer of memory foam; he could feel it pressing against his bones. No-one stood in the corner of his room, watching over from the half-dark. With an effort, he turned onto his belly.

  For a time he drifted between waking and dreaming. People came and went: his mother, Manu, indistinct others. Several times he heard someone calling at the door. He thought he woke at some point to blue sky outside, high trees. He might have dreamed it.

  When he woke again, it was night. He guessed Tuesday. The facts of head, throat, stomach all made claims on his attention, and he listened to their arguments for a while, but did little apart from shift position. His stomach was tight, but he did not feel hungry. After a while he remembered how thirsty he was, and let that take precedence. All these complaints. Despite the body’s urgency, he stayed still as long as he could, without turning a light on. The dark in the city was never quite dark and he could easily see the features of the room. With the air the way it had been, the days were never quite light either. It was hard to tell what time it was outside. Evening, or morning. The room strangely warm, the air as stifling as the subway.

  The subway. He had left something there, something important.

  He found his phone under one thigh, stuck to his skin with sweat. He dragged it up to his face, saw that it was late, almost midnight, Tuesday. A column of notifications waited on his screen. The most recent one was from Manu, and he opened it quickly, but it was only a group thing. So were most of the messages. He scrolled back through the replies – Sounds great! and thumbs-up emojis – to the beginning: an invite to drinks after work Wednesday at one of the brew bars that had sprung up near their office. Maybe a bit of hump day KTV if we’re all up for it! The cheery exclamation marks, the awful yellow smile. He swiped it away, put his phone down, got up to go to the kitchen. The floor underfoot was warm. He stepped around the shearling jacket on the floor beside the bed, dimly annoyed by its presence.

  Somewhere down the hall a neighbour was hacking up phlegm. The poor guy had been sick for weeks. A chronic chest infection afflicted half the city, though Natasha had told him only foreigners got the notorious Beijing Cough. The neighbour was probably a heavy smoker, but who could blame him? At a certain point a pack a day made no difference.

  Adam felt the building shift subtly with the people in it, breathing their unsteady, damaged breaths. Each afloat in their solitary sleep, the apartments stacked one above another like cells. He felt the heat of those bodies seeping into the walls, forming the building’s bloodstream. His own apartment was on the fourth floor. They rented the unlucky ones to foreigners. There were twelve floors on top of him; he could feel their weight. He went to the small window, pushed it open. When he looked outside, no-one was in the grounds or in the street beyond the gate. The world could have ended, the city been abandoned, the people received some warning he had missed.

  The building would stand here. Even empty, it would go on living.

  Adam remembered he was thirsty.

  He found a sports drink in his fridge. The cold liquid numbed his throat for a moment, then stretched out in his stomach. He would go back to bed. He would not go to work tomorrow. It might be too late to text Manu. He veered towards the bathroom, emerging minutes later slightly more grateful to be alone, though he had to check the rooms again to make sure of it. He could not remember being this ill since he was a child. It was a violation of his adult self somehow, an insult to coherence.

  Fluids. Drink plenty of fluids. He filled a glass with water from the cooler, gulped a mouthful. Before going back to bed he turned and checked the bathroom again. As empty as he had left it a moment ago. When he clicked off the light, the mirror reflected a band of residual brightness that soon faded. Just a passing car, he thought, though its angle confused him. He closed the door and went to the bedroom window to check. There was no-one standing in the street below. A taxi crawled past, then a black SUV. The world went on, and no-one seemed panicked. Beijing was calm at night, a city that liked its sleep.

  The jacket on the floor was just a shadow now; its shape should not disturb him, but it did. A memory flickered, peripheral. He pushed the jacket against the wall with one foot. The plastic cover on the bedside table glistened wetly. He almost left a lamp on, but even as a child he had not been afraid of the dark. Dark was his protection. He slid the glass carefully beneath the lamp and climbed into bed, cradling his phone.

  The screen hurt his eyes, even at the lowest brightness. But he followed the impulse to check in, to anchor himself in the updates, to locate himself in the world.

  He could not get the VPN to work, so was limited to WeChat. There were a couple of messages from World of English; he hadn’t taken himself off the group. A fun run on the Great Wall, a charity clothes swap. He flicked them away. Then a photo from Natasha, not a personal message, just another update on her Moments page. A blurred close-up of her and another young woman, slightly less pretty. Their faces were pushed together, distorted by the angle, or by some beautifying app. Natasha looked younger in the photograph, her smile broad. A pink heart had been pasted across her chest. It was hard to tell from the fragment of background in one corner where they were. Indoors, in electric light, too bright to be a club. Their cheeks together, skin on skin. The other girl seemed vaguely familiar, but there was no caption. No-one had liked the photo or commented on it. He couldn’t remember Natasha mentioning friends, though of course she must have had some
. She didn’t talk much about Wuhan, her university days, anything before she had come to Beijing two years ago to work. The past didn’t interest either of them much. He’d thought this was respectful, mature, but now he wished he’d asked. Her ability to slip away into another life, a happier one, seemed to speak to something flippant in her.

  He was awake now, awake and annoyed that these messages were doing the opposite of what they were supposed to do. He wanted to be the first to comment, but didn’t know what to say. He could not quite get his thoughts in order.

  He decided to reply to Manu’s invitation. To him personally, not the group. Soz for today. Just woke up. He added the sickness emoji, the yellow face with its white mask.

  There was no immediate answer.

  Was the mask too much? Or not enough? He couldn’t tell. It might just mean the air was bad. But Manu would understand the context.

  He could feel it inside him. Between the inhale and the exhale, between the ribs and the spine. A virus, maybe, though it felt nothing like any virus he had had before. It was making him weak. He tried stretching his arms up to relieve the shoulders, but something fundamental in his body started shaking, so he let them fall.

  He typed: Will try to make it tomoz.

  He regretted it as soon as he sent it. It sounded much too lively. He knew already that he would still be unwell in the morning, and he didn’t even like KTV. When the light grey dots appeared to show that Manu was replying, his stomach knotted. He hoped he had not woken him. He watched the dots, wide awake, wondering what was taking so long. Then he saw he had written male and tomox. His thumb moved towards the offending words, but it was too late to fix them. Having autocorrect turned off was usually a point of pride, and he was unsteadied by the unexpected error. At least this way he sounded sicker. He let his thumb relax.

  The grey dots vanished, and no reply appeared.

  Adam stared, but nothing happened. He looked at the photo of Natasha and her friend for a while, then switched off the screen.

  He closed his eyes. The virus, infection, whatever it was, was moving around inside him, waiting for him to fall asleep. Picked something up on the subway. A tangled image of the underground, that heat, all those other microbes swimming in its thickly crowded air; the train spinning out of control in its loop. He turned onto his back and tried to think about something else. But he struggled to find focus.

  He thought about insects. Mosquitos, fleets of them, the way it had been in Sydney in the heat. Summer days when the song of cicadas deafened all else. Huge roaches flying through the house, and beetles trapped in carpet. Here there were so few insects. Once or twice a tiny cockroach, an ant, would appear in his kitchen, and he would spray it.

  Too much thinking was keeping him up.

  He opened his eyes and reached for his phone.

  I am in bed very sick, he typed. He added then removed an exclamation mark. He found the sickness emoji again and added that, then removed it. His thumb hovered over the sad face. Then he deleted the entire message without sending it. He knew that there was something else that he was supposed to say to her. The video was buried in his photos, he would have to scroll back to find it, it was as good as deleted. She should not have known about it in the first place, she shouldn’t have been looking through his phone, she had no right to talk to him about boundaries. Let her get in touch first. She would ask how he was, and be sorry she hadn’t asked sooner.

  He wondered if Manu had gone back to sleep, or if he was lying awake too. Eliza beside him, both of them sitting up with their laptops open, working late. He liked thinking of the two of them tucked into fine quality linen, side by side with their reading glasses on, in undisturbed domestic peace.

  He did not remember when he first noticed Natasha. She was working in admin at World of English; he must have met her in orientation. He’d met Manu at the staff Christmas party, and made the mistake of asking him if he was new. ‘I’m consulting,’ he had said. Not quite haughty, but Adam had felt the need to apologise. Then Eliza had appeared, made everyone comfortable again. Adam had formed a quick attachment to both of them. He had drunk too much and lost them somewhere. Later, he found Manu’s card in his jacket pocket, added him on WeChat, watched his life on display: the boat trip in Guilin, the luxury weekends up at the Wall in boutique organic farm hotels. They had a beautiful apartment, photogenic house plants. A grey and white rescue cat named Totoro. They had good bones, beautiful friends. He had seen them around the school a few more times, then at another staff drinks, where he’d sat across from them at a long table. It was Eliza who had been talking to the short-haired, cheerful Chinese girl who did something in the office and, when she got up to use the bathroom, leaned over to Adam and said, ‘Natasha’s cool, isn’t she? You know she has a master’s in linguistics?’ He had noticed her before that. At work she was eminently professional, nearly severe, but would burst into peals of laughter unexpectedly. Her style was tomboyish; the laugh was powerful rather than cute. So it was a surprise to find her phone persona sweeter. He almost liked texting her better than talking. In person –

  With a start he remembered the sensation before waking, the feel of her there in the bed beside him. He shivered, and threw out an arm. It landed on cool sheets, as he knew it would. He moved it around the empty bed anyway, then turned onto his side.

  He could not shake the sense that someone was with him. He could almost speak to them. So close, and he could not see them.

  When he closed his eyes, he felt the roll of the subway in his body, the vibration coming up from below. He pulled the blanket to his chin. He would sweat this thing out of him.

  STEAM

  It’s not empty, even after the shutters go down. There are cleaners, security, garbage removal, deliveries, a drunk man almost sleeping across an arrangement of soft vinyl seats. They find themselves in his stolen satisfaction, awake when he is woken by the young cops with kind voices and acned skin. The cops move the man on; they go with him, still hungry.

  There’s a next morning, a fresh rush, and a next, and nights and work between. A woman sweats in the steam of a dishwasher, pain in her left breast over the heart that beats too heavily. Her muscled arms push the trolley, lifting plates and trays and stacking them. Some injury in the breast, no, the rib, an old violence. She worries at it when she smokes, her tongue working back to a gap in her teeth. They circle through the glands and fluids, wanting to stay long enough to know her, to learn how she’s held together, how she’s kept herself alive. Her eyes struggle but she carries on working. Fighting the body’s demands for rest, vengeance, rest.

  They move on, repeating sequences. Patterns take the place of sense. Hunger has its own logic. For some bodies, the appetite is everything. Then indigestion, tiredness, sugar high, sugar low, letting go. They are all the same, and each one is its own universe. There’s a lot to learn about bodies, about what they want and how they might be satisfied.

  They have no way of keeping time. They are young, then a baby, then elderly, now young again. A child, still loose in her skin, wriggling. Each transport is a set of urgent present tenses. They don’t know how long they stay down there.

  They watch as singlets and print dresses are covered in jackets, then coats. Bodies damp with rain from the surface, or all soft with sweat and smelling of sunscreen. They taste the city’s whims, watch as fixtures shift, doughnuts replaced by juice, and juice by sushi. A flare of frozen yoghurt chills the throat, followed by sour saliva; a bowl of pho heats the face with steam; interludes of labour when the lights change, the walls move, the shoulders ache from painting.

  All bodies want. Their attention follows hunger, curious. It has something to do with power. From inside, eating is a kind of violence. There’s such exchange between substances, such a festive destruction and recombination, that it’s felt as a loss of being: each swallow drawing solids into the intestine, pushing nutrients through its walls,
the acids in the stomach mingling with fluids, gas, separating fat and pushing it around in the blood so that it greases the walls of arteries. They are present for all kinds of waste; they grow to love the pleasure in it, to fear the pain. They are swept along, afloat on process. There’s so much to digest.

  They persist. They think they are getting stronger, but they’re still so far from whole. Their own wants are dislocated, disembodied. They long for a saturated moment, the intensity of fully being. They need to figure out the mechanics, how these impulses work, not just how to read the body but how to stay with it, direct it. They will be digested in the city’s systems, destroyed, reorganised, fragmented, erased, unless they can learn to control it.

  Muscle. Ripe bitter taste of adrenaline. A clear intention. Find and cleave to the message before it goes. Look for the source. Nose points ahead, strides long, no hesitation. Up the escalator, two at a time. A static charge gets left on the skin, the tickle of the polyester jacket against a rash concealed by a sleeve. He scratches through the fabric, something wet and pulsing. An itch in the scalp, too deep to reach with the fingernails. He tries. In the blood, some unknown sickness. They dwell there, uncomfortable in this hot pulse, this unfamiliar fever. He pushes past the line for coffee, past the teenager handing out fliers, ignoring his proffered hand and disappointed eyes. He rises into the light.

  He steps into sweet air and sunshine. It should feel good, the sun on skin. But there is too much space and not enough hum. He recoils, turns and stalks around a corner, hands jittery. Chews his lip. Need is in him, and need is almost living.

  This is dark, a long experience of keening. Not hunger; something else. This kind of want engulfs the body, drags all the attention with it. The skin is sweating, the stomach past communication. The eyes roam, hunting something.