She looks away fast; they can’t guess what she’s seen in him. Heat in her neck, but that’s steam, labour. She moves a hand and it’s a practised gesture, made to be seen. Here there is affection, a regular exchange. She leans on the counter, looks up, grinning. Her whole skin comes aflame.
They’ve already left her, leapt the counter. A skinny girl looming at cakes, her breath hot against the glass. A strapped chest that beats with sugar, the bitter coffee memory in the mouth. Simple wants that overwhelm the moment. Then the next, face pinched, runs her eyes over the same sweet things: suffering, and cruelty, and long past hunger. They could please her, hurt her. It’s the same desire. Sometimes gift, and sometimes trauma.
They are led by the bodies’ longings. A man dragged by a wrist to a darkened room, laughing with every muscle. The rush, the way the heat of it spreads through his body. How close they come to feeling clean then, as the pleasure moves through him like water. How close they come to his mind’s quiet wonder.
There is always some point of contact. Bodies look for abrasions. The heat relaxes the muscle, allows itself to stretch beyond its usual measure. They feed on hunger. On tenderness and steam. It’s something else, something shapeless, their own nascent appetites ascending. The roving eyes. The will to exhale. The ecstatic skin.
They study here. Learn the ways that want hooks on the gaze, becomes an impulse, impulse becomes will, will an act. The friction, the reach for an uneasy peace. They wonder at the permutations, rituals, of an act they thought near universal; they wonder at their disregard for parts. Because each body is its own experience. Each combination unrepeatable. All the flaws are miraculous. Even the dissatisfactions are perfect.
So much affection, so little speech. Just bodies moving, and release. They feel the minds go blank a moment, flooded with fresh chemistry. Each one freed briefly of its weight before returning to pain, or laughter.
Never free for long. Even here, they are a guest. But, oh, overjoyed by the body’s hospitality.
Its forgetting pleasures might have satisfied them, once.
But they do not want to forget.
When they come out into the light again, in a man of early middle age and good fitness, dressed and worn and sore and lighter somehow, stronger, more at ease in himself, they are surprised by how bright the sky is. His eyes hurt, adjusting to it.
There’s a woman walking her dog on the sloped road, down to the park beside the water. Little grey thing. Woman and dog both appear absorbed. He follows her, or so it seems, as far as the lights. He stops a step behind her, and they rest in his pleasant exhaustion, listening to the gentle blip, blip of the crossing. He looks at his shoes, there’s pleasure there too. The eyes relax, the mouth calm. A blend of chemistry.
There is a rumble. Small ferocity. He steps back, peace shattered. The brain has readied itself to run. Something in him, the poised boy, expects this. The savagery that loiters, always, at the rim.
It’s only the little grey dog, growling up at him.
The man steadies his stance, disguises the effort, and lets out a laugh. Not quite convincing. He looks into the eyes of the animal. The little dog shakes with its responsible uncertainty. And they look too. Right into the animal’s brown eyes.
The dog growls, but not at the man. It sees something odd in him. Not just his vigilance. Something out of place.
The dog knows they are there. It cocks its little skull. They feel its fixed eyes as a pleasure in the chest, the legs.
‘Sorry! He never does this!’ The woman yanks the lead. The dog resists, paws caught, gaze firm. They fight the impulse to hide, uncertain if it’s his or theirs. They try to come forward. To make themselves large inside the body. They try to shimmer, to bark back. They don’t know how to answer the gaze of this animal, what it asks them. They only know they want to meet it. They want to be seen.
‘It’s nothing, Pip, leave it.’ The woman holds her fist out, palm down. Something in it. And the animal turns. Its whole body moves as its attention changes. With his nervous eyes they watch the one ear twitch and swivel. The animal snatches the snack, it glances back. They fall through his body like water. They disappear. It’s so easy.
The blip becomes bip-bip-bip.
She turns. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘No, no dramas love,’ the man says. And smiles and, before she walks away, reaches into his pocket for his phone. Unconscious, probably, repeat of the treat. They feel him ease as he senses her relief. A thumb wakes the screen and seeks a name and finds its messages. But then it hesitates over all the little boxes waiting, and answers nothing. The sun comes down the road and hits his eyes, is sweetly blinding. He yawns, a little falsely, just to feel what’s left of pleasure in the skin. The shiver passes from his shoulders. The dog trots away with its companion. The inner shimmering has ceased. They are, he is, exhausted.
He crosses the street as the lights are changing back. Not quite as easy on his feet now. Panic floats beneath the skin as he pushes a glass door into a noisy room. They feel old violence, one elbow lodged in his lower back, but it isn’t really there. His body remembers. He touches the place. Smiles at the barista and stands waiting, foot tapping, for his turn.
They feel his breath slow down, his lips move, counting.
Seen! Only by an animal. But seen!
He’s yawning.
‘Excuse me, sweetheart, can I just –’ The man leans across a woman for the paper and she smiles faintly. The sugar jar tinkles. All his endearments are disarmaments. He softens himself to the world, to that elbow in the back, to the barking stranger. He will sleep soon, and wake alone. They can’t help him. They move on, excited by that brief expansion.
They leap into caffeinated bloodstreams, glad to stay awake. They want it again, that hit of awareness. It seems meaningful. Down to the park, suit by suit, they play. But people don’t really look at each other. They stand apart from each other, eyes on phones. The dogs are only interested in dogs.
They slip into streets. Once or twice they think someone catches a glimpse of their presence in a mirror, or a window, but nothing more. False positives, incomplete images appear and disappear. Screens are everywhere. The city is limp with winter rain, and then concussed by summer. In a wet and overheating tent, they are almost convinced a woman is talking directly to them: ‘Get out of me, get away from me, ya bastard.’ But she’s re-enacting, it’s not the first repeat. Something that the body knows from old. The pressure of these memories hurts. They don’t want to feel what she feels. So many people are like this, carrying around their private violence, their body’s understanding with the world.
They make affinities with objects: a bottle bobbing in a polyp of harbour, a doomed fern clinging to a high damp wall, a half-deflated helium balloon flitting around between apartments in its last performance. The uneaten sandwiches some hands pick from the garbage, the smudge of their fingerless gloves. Anchorless things. These discards have a solidarity about them, a fellowship of persistence.
A woman shops through cornered tears, her bruised mouth chewing. Two broken ribs and a cloak of terror. Unable to breathe in the store with the perfume, she runs out in a panic. She crosses a road, holding herself as if from falling. The pain is insoluble and they dive into it. She pauses in the middle of the road. For a moment they think she wants to die in traffic, are about to jump out, but then a car horn brings her back. She looks into the windscreen, at her distorted face, and there they are.
Go, they tell her, move. Keep going. Get away.
She changes direction, enters a tiled burrow, old neon invitations overhead of Distinction, clock, Tickets, tight cream ceiling, tunnel without end. They digest her panic, the easing of her breath; the rib cage settles. She pauses, passes a card at a silver box, the wedges fall back, her fingers are so tight against the plastic they could break. And she goes down into the cement chamber, its green iron, the scent of
a dark lake beneath. She pauses, looks up to where the water soaks through rock above. Small roots slip through stone. She looks away fast. Arched windows light old photographs of a city that has died and still lies buried here.
A train slides in with its melody. The people in it, compartmentalised but near. So many people at once, so close together. All this energy. Why didn’t they think of it before? She holds her breath as she steps aboard, pushes between them into the feast.
Sweetheart, they wonder. And they push free.
BEIJING
Adam passed the place a couple of times. He had been walking up and down for a while, trying to look like he knew where he was going, taking what he thought were shortcuts, following footsteps into blind alleys, feeling adventurous, then irritated. A dented scooter rattled past him, and he stood watching it veer over the uneven surface where the road was being repaired; asphalt was still being poured in the distance in a fug of steam and beeping. The city always resurfacing, always sealing itself closed.
He watched a black sedan and a cargo trike face off in the lane, the latter with a load of trimmed branches finally reversing to make room. He stepped between two huge trees to avoid the sedan. Then the light of the gallery appeared, spilling out into the dark. A few people were gathered there smoking or staring at their phones, and he moved to join them.
The gallery was well lit and crowded. It was only a stripped shopfront, it didn’t take many people to fill it. There were two characters painted on the window in thick black brushstrokes; he couldn’t recognise either of them. He stepped inside. The air was heavy with the breaths of the crowd and the cigarette smoke that drifted in through the open door behind him. Adam looked around, hoping for snacks. He thought he saw Eliza across the room, caught a glimpse of her hair, but if it was her she was deep in conversation and did not notice him. There didn’t seem to be any food or wine, not that he needed wine. It was hot in the gallery and he felt a little dizzy, but he pressed himself in among the people, brushing against arms and raising a hand to protect his face from a spun ponytail, feeling the bodies move around him, the constellations of encounter and near miss, with unexpected pleasure.
It was a blank, ungentrified hutong, mostly a place where people lived. There were hipster bars and restaurants around the corner, appearing and disappearing faster than they could be discovered by the foreigner magazines Adam had once thought he might write for. This space had just opened; he thought the invitation had said this was their first exhibition. There were still signs the building had not been fully reclaimed from its past. Bits of wire and shelf brackets along one wall, some artfully exposed plumbing that might have been an affectation. He felt in his jeans pocket for his phone, but it seemed he hadn’t brought it with him. He checked his back pocket: his wallet was still there. He had left the phone on the edge of his bed, he thought, but when? He couldn’t remember leaving the apartment. His legs ached, so he must have walked a fair way. He should not have come, was not quite well enough. But there was no need to panic. He decided he would find Manu, say hello, show his face and not stay long.
For lack of a phone, he looked at the art. There was not much on the walls: a few big pieces of paper with red brushstrokes on them, suggesting blood or writing. At the centre of the room was a sort of cage, a flimsy one, its bars not parallel and only loosely joined to a few simple wooden crosspieces; somewhere between a piece of cheap furniture and a packing crate. Inside the cage there was a human figure.
Adam thought it was a statue at first. One of those lifelike forms sculpted from resin or moulded plastic. The hipbones protruded, and the spine was a row of knots. The figure was very thin, long-backed, almost reptilian. He admired the artist’s attention to detail. Then it moved.
Adam squeezed between people. The knots receded down to a narrow waist, and the coccyx protruded above what appeared to be bike shorts. Adam could see a fine shading of hair where the line descended. The figure shifted his weight again, was struggling to hold himself in position. The breath or the heartbeat visible in gentle pulses under skin. Adam wanted to get closer, but a young woman stepped in front of him. She was filming on her phone, mustn’t have seen him. Her coat collar formed a barricade. Despite the heat inside the gallery, everyone still wore their winter clothing. Adam had his shearling jacket and was sweating.
He moved to take it off, and felt something weighing it down. Reaching gratefully for his phone, he touched something soft, and pulled out a half-eaten apple. The flesh was brown, already turning. There was nowhere to dispose of it. He put it back into the pocket. The man in the cage was still now, apart from the breath that moved and sustained him. The performance must be something to do with hunger, Adam thought, looking around. A few people were holding glasses of wine, but he still couldn’t see a bar. He saw Eliza again, managed to catch her eye this time. A faint look of concern crossed her face, but was gone so fast that he doubted it had really been there. He turned back to the art, thinking that he should pay attention, remember this, write a post on Facebook or something. He would have no photos to show for it. He might describe it to Natasha, demonstrate that he was happy, that they might go on as if nothing had happened. Adam tried to watch the body in the crate, but something about the man unsettled him. His eyes would not keep still.
Looking around, Adam saw half-a-dozen white plinths, their tops covered by what looked like mirrors. On closer inspection they were screens laid flat, like in an Apple store. He felt clever to make the association, but it was probably deliberate. He glanced down at the closest of the tablets, which was showing something that might have been digital art or the device’s inbuilt screen saver. He touched it lightly with a finger, and it did not respond. There were headphones attached to the plinths. When he held one to his ear, it sounded like the sea; perhaps it was broken.
‘It’s very conceptual,’ Eliza said, appearing at his elbow. She gave it a light squeeze. Her fingers were sharp through the jacket. ‘The artist is a friend of ours,’ she said, nodding at the young man in the cage. ‘What do you think?’
Natasha would have touched her arm, given her opinion without hesitating. He should not have left his phone at home; he would not be able to explain this without images. The man curled in his cage shifted his weight slightly from foot to foot. Adam felt that this was cheating, that an image should remain still, but he did not say so.
Instead he cleared his throat. ‘Does he do anything else?’
Eliza smiled and told him that the artist had studied to be a filmmaker. ‘But the situation is becoming difficult,’ she said. He wasn’t sure if she meant film or the crate, so he simply nodded. She had misunderstood his question, or he had asked the wrong one.
‘The situation,’ he said.
She looked at him, her face grave. ‘It is getting worse,’ she said.
Adam felt safe now. Everyone always agreed that things were getting worse. It was the one reliable statement that could be made. For foreigners, the true China was always in the past. Whichever China they had arrived in began immediately to be replaced by this other usurping country; the true China lay buried and had to be mourned. Adam hadn’t been here long enough to feel he had any such claim on the place. He always felt as though he had missed something, arrived too late. He expressed these opinions about the loss, the destruction of neighbourhoods, the surveillance and restrictions and shutdowns. But they were the only China he knew.
He wondered if she was going to change the subject now, ask him if he was feeling better. It wasn’t like her to forget a social nicety; perhaps Manu had not passed the news of his illness on. That was a dark thought. He felt his face flush.
‘Have you heard from Natasha?’ he asked, but Eliza stepped aside to kiss someone on the cheek and didn’t answer. When he moved to join her, the other person dissolved into the crowd and she peered after her.
‘Oh! There he is,’ she said, and waved to Manu, who was just visible across
the room and turned at her voice. She moved towards him, taking the scent of flowers with her, a scent that he only began to notice now that it was leaving. What sort of flowers were they? Something slightly heady, slightly nauseating. Adam swallowed. He still had a lump in his throat, maybe not an infection but something that prevented him from swallowing normally. It must be the air. He should not have been out in it so long.
Turning to give the two of them privacy, he caught his reflection in the glass of the gallery. He moved towards it, weaving through the crowd. He thought that he looked different. A little pink. But everyone else was discoloured; the air was grainy, and the lights were cheap fluorescents. The one above him now was flickering. It would probably give him a headache if he stood underneath it too long.
He watched the room’s reflection. A crowd was gathering around the artist, brought in by some signal he had missed. Adam shifted his focus to the street, where the hip Beijing art crowd were extinguishing their cigarettes and coming back inside. Some returned their phones to pockets, while others held them in front of their faces, ready to film. Something was happening. A hush descended in the gallery behind him.
As the artist did whatever he was doing, Adam watched the street. An old man cycled up very slowly in his pyjamas, a fluffy white dog in the basket at the front of his bike. He stopped without dismounting and stared into the window, his face very close to Adam’s. He must have been able to see Adam, who was well lit, but he squinted into the gallery as though there was no-one there.
Adam felt sorry for him. His neighbourhood was filling with rowdy foreigners, late-night bars. The man was at least sixty, probably older. Adam tried to calculate what he might have lived through. He tried to guess which side he might have taken in each of the catastrophes that had befallen his nation, his city, but such events seemed distant, and anyway he could not remember many of the dates. The man’s face was blank and peaceful.
The Airways Page 14
