The Airways

by Jennifer Mills

  He looks down at her. She doesn’t burst open, or surge out. They don’t see her swarm and reform as particles, as dust, or some furious light. She just lies there.

  He watches her chest for breath, but nothing moves. He sees what the living see: an uncanny stillness. It frightens him.

  He retreats, the phone hot on his ear, still speaking. Sits in a doorway to wait. Plays with a shoelace. Looks. Thinks whatever he thinks.

  He lets go the shoelace, touches a hand to his wrist, feels its pulse. Still beating. They are lucky to be here, in the sweet of his experience, lucky to persist. After a while there’s a banging on the door below. He leaps up, runs downstairs, skirting her at the feet to let them in. They love the quick in his untrained muscle. The thrum of his voice as he chatters at three green suits without faces. They love the shock in him that bleeds to panic. He follows them up, still talking. Two take her, a third sits with him. He stops talking, starts shaking. Then they pity him.

  They breathe his quick breath, curl into his adrenaline response. They shift with the base of his brain, with the muscle that stretches when his hand reaches up to tug at the oily hair pressed flat beneath a baseball cap. They don’t dare try to move him, ease the shaking. But they can read its meaning.

  Danger here. A fear not of death, but of living.

  Bodies die. Of course they knew this, having done it before. But here’s the thing: it could happen again. Each host, each carrier, might be their last. For all the lessons of this not-quite-immaterial stage, they missed the simplest and most logical. They hadn’t wanted to consider themselves so precarious.

  He’s sobbing now, and cold. In his shiver they remember. The loose awareness of their feet. Mild hunger, cool air, cement, tree et cetera. Just idling nothing thoughts and innocence. Streetlights. And not listening, not paying attention to the body’s vulnerability. Not aware of an alarm. The fist or weapon that connected with the skull, a place above where this boy’s hair is caught. His hand reaches for the neck, now, as they consider it. There was a fault line, a ready-made wound. The memory is paperish. Robbed of its material, it’s just a story. There is no point going over it.

  But there’s something there.

  A key in the pocket. A brief blur.

  For a moment, sensation was everything. Then they burst forth.

  They had a body once before. The feel of someone’s breath on their neck, the scent of it. All those missed signals, and then – what went wrong? Who wanted it to happen? One act, in one place, and a life goes out like a light.

  The young man’s sadness has become their own. They ache for the body that was stolen, an ache inseparable from his.

  His weeping spent, the young man softens; rage won’t catch in him. One warm tear crawls down between the cheek and nose and settles ticklish in the crevice. He stands. He shuffles off a hand. He hesitates in the stairwell, then follows the paramedics out to watch them load her into the ambulance. No hurry in their bodies, now, and in his, only raw things, uncertain, distant. He has stopped shivering, and no-one comforts him. His wrists, bent in against the hipbone, connected soothingly through skin.

  They feel the chemistry in his head adjust, the numb release. They feel for flaws.

  Is that a disconnect? A predisposition? A risk?

  They meant no harm to her. No harm to him.

  They must keep moving. They must reassess everything.

  BEIJING

  Adam wanted to go outside. The light out there was clear; between the buildings that crowded the view from his bedroom window he could make out a patch of bright blue sky, undimmed by smog. He wanted to breathe that air. He rolled onto his back. The ceiling appeared to move, streaked with patterns, but it was just dust shifting on the wet screen of his eyes.

  The air tasted stale, like he had smoked a whole packet of cigarettes the night before, his breath clogged and muddy, the blood moving sluggishly beneath his skin. All these minor pains kept clamouring for his attention. But the fever, if that’s what it had been, seemed to have left him.

  He was not going to work. He thought he had said as much to Manu already. He reached for his phone, which told him it was 10.13 am on Wednesday. He had not slept this late in years, maybe since he was a student. He scrolled through his messages. There it was, he hadn’t dreamed it. He composed another message quickly and sent it, no punctuation, no emojis, no apology: Still sick.

  The three grey dots did not appear, but his chest and throat were sending him a stream of messages. The noise of his body was already overwhelming thought.

  Adam pulled the other pillow across, settled back against it, closed his eyes. He listened to his stomach gurgle, his breath pass in and out. Hunger, thirst, the pressure of the bladder, these daily sensations arrived with a strangely clear pleasure. It was a relief to let it take over. The fresh appreciation of the functioning body after an illness, he supposed. He attempted to recall the inventory of his fridge, his cupboards. There would be nothing decent to eat in the apartment. Crackers, he thought. Probably pickles. He remembered placing a bottle of Pocari Sweat in the fridge some time ago, but wasn’t sure it would still be there. He felt his forehead, wondering if he was still feverish after all.

  He touched his fingertips to the glands in his neck. They were slightly swollen, but it was hard to tell if this was an infection or just a normal response to the air quality. Eliza was still sorting out his medical insurance. He wouldn’t go to the doctor for something so minor, even if he’d known how to describe it.

  This was like no other sickness. It was more like an uncertainty, an unease. It wasn’t completely unfamiliar, or completely unpleasant.

  His stomach lurched, cradling hunger. He turned to look out the window. It was wrong to waste a sky that colour. He lifted an arm, then was uncertain what to do with it and so used it to reach for his phone.

  The screen lit up as he held it. A message from Manu. OK man, no problemo, and the yellow thumbs-up. It was brief, but that could be friendly, rather than distancing. Either way, Adam wasn’t needed. That should be a relief.

  His attention moved outside. One hand against his soft belly.

  He could hear an excavator, the cheery warning of a reversing vehicle, traffic. Mid-morning, and the machinery of the city was at full throttle. He must have slept for ten hours, and before that, maybe twenty-four hours, and he felt he could easily sleep again. But he needed air, the outside, air. The city was calling him to life. People died in their sleep.

  A strange thought. He sat up and bent over the screen. It would unlock something for him, decode a welcome from Beijing’s chaos, it would offer him a way out.

  The VPN was still unresponsive, so he scrolled through the apps that were left to him. He had a vague memory of Natasha, of some grey image buried in his store of photos. When he checked her profile there was nothing important, just the selfie with the friend he had seen yesterday. It was not the best photo of her. She looked too young, or something; pictures of her were always superficial, not capturing the private person she revealed when she thought no-one was looking. Adam liked her face best when she was sleeping.

  There was something he had left unfinished. He had to settle a score, atone for something. He had committed no crime that he could think of. Perhaps it didn’t matter now.

  He scrolled away, checked the AQI. It was only 73. He went back into his settings, tried the VPN again, and waited for it to connect. Then he opened Facebook to see what people were doing back in Australia. He thumbed through a few pictures of his sister’s baby, three or four people having posted different angles from the same scene. It was awful the way children were put under surveillance, he thought. All that attention from birth, it would change how you saw yourself. There was a cake, and he had a terrible thought that it was the kid’s birthday. But no, it was born in January, and anyway Facebook would have told him. He would remember to post it something. Her. Annab
elle. Something Chinese, but nothing she could choke on.

  His Facebook friends were all Australian and their photos were more or less the same. People dressed in summer clothes, drinking at beaches, eating photogenic meals. None of them seemed to be working. The blue skies in the background were default, they were insignificant. It sometimes felt as though by moving to China he had passed behind a screen, ceased to exist for them. It was strange that time went on in that other country without him; a life went on, although he had renounced it. Looking at these images salved his conscience.

  He checked his email. A message from his mother. He felt his eyes glaze over, but he focused and read through it, in case there was some terrible news. She was just checking in, wondering how the new job was going. He didn’t reply straight away. She would only tell him he was fine and it was nothing serious. Later, he could say that work was keeping him busy. She had attached some of the same photos of his sister’s baby he had just seen. She suggested he might call. He pushed his phone away.

  Perhaps he wasn’t really well enough to go outside, but that angled patch of sky seemed to sing to him. He was wasting a good day. He stood up urgently, had to brace himself against the wall and slow the impulse down. He needed water, food, before he could obey it. He wrested off the sheet, dragged on some tracksuit pants and an old Bintang t-shirt from the pile by the bed, stepped into the living room/kitchen, closed a cupboard door so that he could open the fridge, and looked into it. There was a plastic bowl of leftover xiǎomiàn from two days ago that could still be good, if it had been good when he’d bought it from the stall at the station. But that wasn’t two days ago, he realised, it was four. The Pocari bottle stood on the counter, empty. The cupboard he had just closed held an opened packet of ramen that would take too long to cook and there was only soy sauce on the bench to go with it. He wanted an apple or a slice of watermelon, something crisp and healthy and refreshing. He imagined it bursting in his mouth, how good and clean that would feel. For a moment, the hunger dizzied him.

  He found a glass and filled it at the water cooler, which was almost empty. Last time Natasha had arranged a new bottle over the phone. It was too soon to ask her to move in. He liked her company, but the thought of her being here all the time made him uneasy. Sleeping here. He shook his head. Maybe after six months, a year. His stomach shifted unpleasantly. He dropped the bottle into a cardboard box by the door.

  An unpaid bill lay on the floor beside it, but he didn’t bother to retrieve it, didn’t have the energy to try to decode it. This country had a way of eroding your confidence. There were so many things he couldn’t do by himself. He drank the water, refilled the glass and leaned against the window. The water, like the floor, was unpleasantly warm. The apartment was in disarray. He would have to watch himself, cut down on this private slumming. With no-one else here, there had been little incentive to keep the place in order.

  It was possible that she would not forgive him. But how was he supposed to know that he had crossed a line he couldn’t see?

  He leaned his head against the flyscreen and looked out at the road. It was jammed with cars, and every second car was a taxi. The pattern of blocks and horns and intersections seemed carefully choreographed. Someone swept dust from what had been the hotpot place, then a pink ruin. It was now becoming a hole. Men hurled small clusters of cement into a truck bed, the crumbs brought into line by a straw broom. He felt sad for the loss, though he had never eaten there. Sad that it had been so thoroughly erased, that it might never have existed.

  There was a glitch in the delicate ballet of traffic, a sudden eruption of noise. A close miss between an SUV and a mini-van. Both vehicles reversed slightly, and both drove forward again, stopping just before they collided. At last an arm extended from the mini-van window and waved the other driver through. Adam had that sense of the surface closing and settling. A vast order made up of infinite, tiny civilities. The thought was usually reassuring, but now it frightened him. It was all too precarious. There were five million cars in Beijing, according to Manu: too many. The city had introduced a lottery system for new licence plates, but everyone was finding ways around it.

  He wanted to go outside. Conflicting impulses were facing off inside him, and any decisions his mind was trying to form did not seem to reach the muscle. If he was going to describe it, he might say that some central mechanism had come loose, but that wasn’t right; the body did not function like that at all. It was really much too hot in here.

  Adam thought firmly of watermelon. He could just see the edge of the bright new vegetable shop from here. It was getting colder; strawberries might be in season. The urge to taste them filled his mouth. A single, simple desire. The flyscreen on his window and the window itself were covered in muck. He lifted a finger to his forehead and pressed it; his finger came away with a grid of dirt. Turning, he sent a galaxy of dust into the fat parallelogram of light. He opened the screen, leaned on the handle, felt its warmth and the breeze over his fingers. Much cooler outside.

  Bone-tired, this was called. A strange phrase, since the bones were not muscle and could not tire. Also: to know in the bones. People needed to think of skeletons, a sense of solidity, because the body was so fragile. So many small ways it could all go wrong.

  That old unsteadiness, the fear of malfunction, began to fill him up like a water balloon. The body was a series of close calls and narrowly missed catastrophes. He could not remember his father’s face except from photographs. He remembered the shape of grief in his body, his boy’s body with its careful itemisations, the obsession with details he could not quite observe, the expectation of fault. At any moment something could come loose in him. His heart engorged somehow, or swollen. This breath inadequate. He knew that it was autonomic, that he did not have to think about it. But he also knew that if he did not pay attention, remain vigilant, then the breath could pause, the heartbeat hesitate, the thousand other processes that kept his body functional go subtly, horribly wrong.

  He would go outside, he decided.

  He lay down on the couch.

  The system had a tendency to entropy. Something inside him was accelerating the process, drawing on his energy, intercepting his authority. It must be a parasite, something he’d eaten. One of those parasites that could affect cognition. Something he picked up on the subway. He closed his eyes and recounted to himself the parts of the blood that he remembered from high-school biology: the torus shape of red blood, then platelets, plasma. But what was plasma? He was too tired to switch the VPN back on and google it. He tried to visualise a diagram he had once memorised for an exam. There had to be more than four parts, he thought. Stamen, pistil. No. There was so much that he would not be able to identify on a map, let alone under a microscope. He needed someone else to look inside him; the thought was not quite medical. He needed to be seen, watched over. And they were ready. They were already here, waiting patiently in the room with him, their legs stretched out on his stiff grey sofa, with their delicate hands, the fingers tapered like a statue’s, folded into their lap.

  GHOST

  He looks back as the ambulance doors swing shut, the engine humming in his ear. A small crowd stands gazing and gasping, covering their mouths with their hands. He moves on, his heart huge and heavy, his limbs sore. This body like a grandfather clock, with its pendulum of steps. His knees ache. They begin again from ignorance.

  What he wants, turning away, can be guessed from the attention. Peace and quiet, to rest the heat-swelled feet. But these are surface things. What his body wants is deeper in its chaos. It’s what all life wants: more of itself, the sensation of itself. The warmth of blood in veins and arteries, the rich interchanges of oxygen, nutrients, gases and liquids, the sense of energy, the trust in process. These desires are unspoken, but they receive them as language: the language of the body singing to itself, the language of damages, of order and disorder, growth and decay.

  How good it must fee
l to take charge of these instruments. To deliberate, decide and act. To move a muscle. Just to sigh. And then, through the body, to remember.

  The tall man stops to catch his breath. They feel the oxygen flailing towards the fingertips, the struggle for reach. He relaxes one knee and the ache moves into the other. He puts one huge hand over his chest and feels the ribs, tenderly, through wasted muscle. He is everywhere flaws, potential collapses. They must leave him, keep moving. Become what they can in the leaps between.

  He sneezes.

  An elderly woman bends uphill into the wind. A new set of signals, they grasp at the centre, her spine twists inside her like a reed. Not young, not well, but strong enough for now. A young man in a suit brushes past her, knocking her arm; he doesn’t stop. They feel the effort of her eyes lifting to follow his retreat. She mutters after him, but to herself. A fierce gleaming.

  She blinks in the sun, her hurt lighter, and turns to feel the heat against her back. A plastic shopping bag cuts into her arm although it’s nearly empty. Capillaries, crushed under its weight, will leave a mark. Inside the hip, soft bone has mended to another substance, the foreign artefact held in place by living tissue; they feel their way around its shadow. Old repairs, and fellow passengers.

  They can’t stay, not in a body like this, so close to her time. Must go before something trips inside her and she falls. If they could figure out the mechanics of it maybe they could take charge of the transitions, make the shift. But it isn’t quite mechanical. There’s something else in her, besides breath and flesh and weakness. A power that makes them want to stay. This body holds itself together by sheer force. Force of will, of joy in being? This gleam in her, the way her blood has filled with sudden passion, it is dear to them. Now these small fists knock against the thighs, the blood pressure rises; an inkling in the mouth. A fury, and such pleasure in it. She looks up at the powdered sky, the high cloud descending.