Will he sense them there, if they disturb him?
The guard exhales, a near sigh controlled. He turns, one hand still tapping. In his twisted step they find a blister where the shoe has pushed its seam against him. His tread is heavier on that side, as though the foot wants to feel the discomfort. Of course the body wants to feel, to know it lives. Understanding this, they burst the blister.
He stumbles, the rhythm broken. Stands still, his eyes cast to the ceiling. Then the tapping stops.
They take charge of him. Feel his withdrawal as they fill the space in him like water. The pain travels through him, from the blister to the brain. One change cascades. Their disruption rattles through his systems, uncontainable chain reactions. A single alteration is much more complicated than they thought, and more dangerous.
He clears his throat. His finger resumes, without asking their permission. The rhythm subtly slowed. They let go.
As they slip from him, a young man passes on the platform, speaking in hushed tones into his phone. For a moment they might have lost the sense of words. But this is a language their body once knew. They recall the feel of it in his mouth, the shape of the muscle in the back of the throat. ‘Wǒ zhīdào, wǒ zhīdào,’ he mutters, defensive. The heat of the machine against his ear, and a woman’s voice. They feel his body respond to a name. His name. The sound of it in her voice, and a flush of warm belonging. Then he steps onto the train and it swings away. Her voice decays, and he changes. His limbs engaged in steadying. A motherless sigh. They slip out with the breath.
The transitions are becoming easier, even if control remains beyond them. They flip through bodies like pages, looking for lines they recognise, that leap of meaning. Each body speaks in its own cadence, with its own accent, in unique patterns of heat and energy and motion, desire and entanglement, attention and aversion and devotion. Each its own playground and prison. A boy asleep in sugar dreams, teenage limbs swinging from handrails; a man with a warm pie in a bag on his lap, the scent of it dancing in his stomach; a woman staring at a crossword, pen in the mouth, the taste of ink. Noise in headphones, and the rush of air from an open window. The flush of being drunk in the afternoon. Sour sweat. A ball under one big arm. Captive muscle bursting, humid breath. The spell of Deaf hands singing to each other. The bodies keep swinging open, and they search through, more deliberate than before. Looking for the open host, the safe harbour. All these people, losing their distinctions. It is a long time since they’ve caught a glimpse of him.
There are only so many people in this city. How long will it take to come into contact with all of them? They must find him again. They want to light out after him, to sink their teeth into his skin. The desire isn’t simple – isn’t fair, perhaps – but it’s undeniable.
And if they find him. If they get to him. What then?
They pause, abruptly nervous. It takes a moment to remember that they have no teeth of their own to sink. It’s this body that’s nervous, then. Her trousers too tight around the hips. They watch her set the feet with care as she steps from the train, no confidence in her balance, a strain to move, but urgent. She crosses the closed platform, rides the escalator into artificial light. Her tongue against the smooth back of one canine. A tunnel, and another escalator, and another tunnel. White tiles. A glimpse of sky through frames: door, carpark. Moving with a stream of others, gathering their panic as she pushes through the crowd. Sudden smell of coffee, bread. She hesitates, and glances behind her. They want to go back to the train. She’s already half turned that way, it isn’t far. They don’t want to hurt her, but she might just move if they try. They force her doors.
She doesn’t listen. They’ve already lost her, lost their concentration.
She keeps a firm grip on her case, stretches one leg, an ache at the back of the knee where they can settle, compensating, in a long nerve. Then they follow the attention in the hand. They feel the sweat against the vinyl of the little book she’s carrying between thumb and palm. She looks down at the cover. Dark blue, coat of arms, a ribbon and a nest of stars. She strides to a screen and pads at it, scans the passport. Sighs and joins a line. Stands behind a couple with two small children, one amok. As the child whines and stretches flat under the barrier she looks up and steps forward, craning her neck to see over the man in front of her.
They’ve lost the trains. But this is a crowded place. There’s still a possibility.
They feel her fear. It’s in the blood pressure, the sweat in her shirt, and the way the body fidgets, leans and shuffles forward, cradling old hurts. The way one shoulder slumps under the weight of a bag. Around her, others, watching. The sounds of voices in the air, reverberations and overlaps, untranslatable noise. Like a mall, too many people. She looks up at signs, boards, numbers, clocks, faces. The heart an animal in the hollow of her throat. She’s making an escape. She moves, slings the bag onto a conveyor belt, waits and walks through a scanner. A guard nods her past and she collects the bag again, turning to change the favour; the shoulder pains her. Announcements, shops, more wide corridors. Then the sky, suddenly available. A horizon through high windows. A cement expanse with planes lined up alongside, and the little trucks that tend them. She looks at a sign; it says Departures.
They panic.
She walks faster. Running out of time.
If they leave, they might never find him. But she won’t stop for them. They slip into the first person coming the other way. Overdressed, hot in the coat. Skinny, hair tickling the neck, an itch in the back unsatisfied. They hesitate beneath a sign and shift their weight: one leg, then the other. Something about this body softens their terror; it’s calm, familiar. They surrender.
The person moves back and forth in the corridor. The hand moves to the coat pocket but it’s empty. They sink into a chair. They can’t leave the airport, can’t even scratch the place that wants to be scratched. It is, they are, too insubstantial. The body leans forward, and they remember a feeling they have had before. A longing to become invisible. To be both touched and safe, in a body and completely free of it. Just air.
It makes them restless.
They rise from the chair, an ache in the thighs from recent exercise. They feel safe in these limbs, in the muscle against the bones: not comfortable but known. They move a hand across the chin.
They close in on the body’s secret language. Any impulse transmitted into action is a nightmare of complexity, the limbs are light-years from the mind. And each body has its own encryptions. But they are learning.
They begin with the eyes. A test of their power. To read the sign: Departures, flight times, destinations. Choices.
The body ignores them, turns to the newsstand and moves along, glancing at the images, picking out magazines, replacing them. They scan the titles printed across galaxies: Gravitation. Exoplanets. Collider. A universe of frustration.
The eyes go dark.
The next thing they know is the scratch of skin on polyester, stockings against shaved legs, ticklish. The weight of breasts, the itch of breast-sweat underneath. A burn on the arm. The fingers reach and press the place. There’s sweetness in the feeling, warm against cold fingertips. She controls her posture, pauses at the newsstand, buys a cold tin of mints, presses her finger to the rim of the lid, the happy rap of a lacquered nail, and as she turns they notice the skinny person at the magazine rack, still standing there. She pauses to watch them for a moment. They are very still. Their ambiguity, perhaps, disturbs her. An urge to reach for them, to check they are breathing.
The skinny person inhales, spins on their feet, and faces her, a magazine held to their chest. She freezes, then smiles. The taste of lipstick. Looks them in the eye. And they look back, undaunted, clear of gaze. A look nothing can faze.
‘You right?’ they ask her.
They feel her pull back, confronted. She looks down at her pointed shoes and, seeing one foot turned slightly in, corrects it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she mutters. Hands brush at her sides.
‘Take a picture, lady.’ High eyebrow, playing with her.
The woman shivers, embarrassed. The figure pushes past her, drops the magazine on the rack, moves down the hall at a stride. Her eyes follow them, the way soon obscured by scaffold and white plasterboards.
She takes a seat, stretches out the slender legs. Clears her throat, touches the burn again, and picks up her phone. Holds it up, turns the camera, looks at herself as though in a mirror. A pretty face, Asian, makeup an immaculate mask. She looks into her own eyes, searching through it. Small movements of the eyes, the nose, the brow. It’s hard to determine the source. They swim up through her; they will make themselves known.
She takes a picture, then lets her face relax. Looks at the picture. Frowns. Deletes it. Opens the mirror-screen again. The image still disturbs her. She can’t look away.
They want to see her face. Are almost present in it.
Then a voice, loud. She grabs the straps of her bag and rises. Hurries forward through the people assembling. Her phone in one fist. They stop her, and she stands in line. To catch her breath, and then her flight.
As she hurries downstairs, she looks up at the plane’s body, sleek and flimsy, clutching her tickets in one hand. Do they see a familiar figure walking down the aerobridge, a shadow through blue glass? The sun’s behind him; he’s gone before she looks away.
BEIJING
The sky was a white jade bowl, turned belly-up over the city. Insects, captured in the concavity, were draining the available air. Adam could still see the pulsating spine of the artist, remained disturbed by the sense of something living under his skin.
He lifted an arm. It felt manageably light, so he let it fall, but it landed with a bang. The sound of a vehicle. He listened to the military-style drill being conducted by a group of security guards at the office building next door. Sound moved at odd angles; the voices were clear, then distant again.
It was early. The security guards only did their drills early. Friday, probably. The air smelled murderous. He had to get away from this apartment, where it was too late, the poison particles had already gained entrance. His chest hurt when he breathed in. He sat up, and the pain dimmed slightly. A cramp, was all. He should not inhale so fast, but his body wanted air. He would have to go outside, there was no point trying to avoid it. The subway. The idea of it was strangely tempting, though it was unlikely that the air was any better underground.
He dressed and pulled a backpack from the wardrobe. He filled a bottle with water, stuffed a jumper into the bag. He made sure he took his phone with him, slipping it into the bag’s front pocket and zipping it up. He would go and find something to do, take pictures, have a story, exist. It would erase the unpleasant feeling he had about leaving early last night. There were no messages, but Manu must have noticed he was gone. He would explain that he wasn’t well. Something he picked up – but the curse had lost its power.
He went to the window, closed it properly. He could not even see the gate of his apartment complex, let alone the corner where the subway station waited. It was possible to live like this, without any sense of distance, suspended in a blurred enclosure. Yes, there was even a certain kindness in its restrictions, its filtered light. But the sky was too heavy. He wanted to crawl out from under its rim. He looked around the apartment for a long time, trying to fix its details in his mind. He had to locate himself in space before he could move. His body did not resist him. The only place he did not look was the mirror.
He did not have a mask with him so kept his breath shallow. Apart from delivery scooters, the footpath was all but deserted; more cars than usual moved sluggishly through the smog. His eyes were burning before he reached the corner. In the distance he could see the outline of a gas plant, a fixture he had always thought of as a building but realised now was also an image. The government was announcing reforms, promising a future in which people could breathe. One day, maybe soon, these smog years would be reassuringly anomalous; people might even be nostalgic for them. Someone’s true Beijing.
He imagined defending China, invoking the dust that had always come from the west, the huge investment in renewables; soon, even gas would be replaced by something cleaner. It was his mother he thought of as listening to this argument, and he remembered that he hadn’t called her. He would do it tomorrow. He would explain that he had been unwell.
He was not sick, not really. Something was changed in his body, he understood that. But it was not an infection, nor quite the old neurosis returning. He felt better than before, somehow. When he ran through the inventory, he felt clean inside, still weak but also electric, reconstructed from the core. He didn’t need to manage any physical anxieties; that space in him had filled with something else.
The ginkgo trees were half bare. When he walked beneath them, he saw their leaves had fallen before they could fully turn, the gold mixed with green and tattered, brownish yellows. The streetsweeper was nowhere to be seen. By the time he reached the subway stop, his throat was hurting and his eyes were moist. He descended the escalator, passed the security guard, a young man who checked the screen with studied seriousness and did not look up. Adam took the stairs at a run, his heart racing as he entered the cool tiled space. He was healthy, he was free, that was all it was. Glad to be alive.
He looked at his phone while he waited. Instead of checking his messages, he opened the photos and scrolled through them. There were not many from the last few weeks. Pictures of food he had taken, out of habit, and not shared. Pictures of people taking pictures of each other among the autumn leaves, back when the sky was national-holiday blue. He scrolled back to the week before that, and before that, to the video, dim in miniature. Now that his finger hovered over it, felt that energy, he understood that she had been angry at him. He saw that there was, from her point of view, an invasion of privacy.
She had looked so furious as she left for Wuhan, her body stiff against his enclosing embrace. The scale of that anger was unfair. She put the phone to her ear as soon as she turned to catch her train, wheeling the suitcase of her belongings, refusing to look at him. Refusing to let him go with her to Beijing West, arguing that it would take hours to go and come back by subway, and anyway she wanted to make an early start. She had a point. But it also seemed like she could not wait to get away.
It isn’t nice, Adam, she had said. That was almost all she had said to him.
The platform crowded with Golden Week travellers, their luggage. He remembered breathing carefully, aware of all those other people’s breath around him, filling the space. Aware of the limited supply of oxygen that everybody shared.
You must respect people’s boundaries, was the other thing.
But he did, he countered now, and it was clear that she had overreacted. It was harmless, really. Innocent. His thumb hovered now over the play button, the image of a window in which she was yet to appear. He had said he would delete it, and he would. But not today.
Someone bumped him, and he realised he was standing in the middle of the station, that a train was leaving to his right and another arriving to his left. Adam went to board it, smiling at strangers who ignored him. He was a good guy. Eliza had said as much a number of times. That was why they took care of him. A good guy. Natasha would understand this in the end.
The subway train was crowded. On a day like this, nobody wanted to travel on the surface. He squeezed himself between people, took hold of an overhead strap, let his eyes drift over the advertisements for real estate, babies. He felt the rumble underfoot as the train gathered speed, the shift in his legs and hands as they adapted to the motion. This was good. He felt spontaneous. He would wait for a signal, an impulse, before he chose a destination. It was a pleasure just to be among people, among strangers.
She should not have been looking through his phone. And anyway, you could hardly make her o
ut. The light in the video a dim blue-grey. Her silence, and his own breath loud behind the camera. The phone felt hot in his hand. He shoved it back into his bag and zipped the pocket. He would not watch it now.
At Beitucheng he changed lines, headed south. The crowds were becoming uncomfortable, and he got off at Guloudajie almost automatically, then considered walking around the neighbourhood. The thought of the street made him pause. It would be crowded, chaotic. He changed his mind. He switched lines again, continued anticlockwise. The stations on the inner circle were older, the platforms less uniform. He glimpsed blue tiles, murals, worn steps. The train was filling and emptying with tourists, shoppers, but there was too much space between them. Gaps appeared and disappeared on the long, blue plastic seats. He did not seem able to move fast enough to secure one for himself, but it didn’t matter. He smiled at a nervous older couple standing near him who might have been from the country or the past. A young woman with them, a more contemporary relative, frowned at him. The elders clutched onto her with their eyes. The old man’s claw hand softened round the pole. Adam could have put his mouth against it, nibbled at the skin. The man shuffled slightly away.
Circling back to the east side of the city, Adam’s breaths came shorter. He was returning to places he already knew, and he wanted novelty. He waited as the train lumbered through the stations, anxious for a signal, unable to choose. What was he waiting for? The train was airless. Desperate for water, he stumbled out at the next station, looked around for a vending machine, saw one, had to exit through the gates to reach it. He fumbled with his Yīkǎtōng and then with a wad of one-kuài notes as he fed the machine. He watched for the bottle to fall, but the display didn’t move. A clunk came from somewhere behind it. There was only a dim reflection in the glass; it must be plastic. Shadows of movement. The emptying of the train that he could hear now, racing away beneath. The vibration came in through the feet and stayed there. His hands were shaking. His skin prickled with a silent alarm. He knew he was not alone.
The Airways Page 17
