They shift away, impatient. They pitch from body to body and out onto the stairs, rushing forward. They want to bend and touch the concrete, put their head against it like a monk, press down gratefully upon the solid ground until it opens. But the bodies must keep moving on, upright; they’re overground, pushed into a bus, unbalanced. A brief and airless drive. Buildings, doors. A woman collapses behind them, but they barely notice, moving on and through. They shift through travellers quickly. When people are tired, attention’s fragmented, resistance is low. Easy to step in. Harder to move without harm.
Everything flows forward. They glimpse texts in several languages, pass too fast to read. They have a sudden sense of vertigo, of sea legs; sky legs, their hold wavers between worlds. They concentrate their energy, stay with the breath. They are better at this now, hardly raise a heart rate. It should satisfy them, the forward motion, but it doesn’t. Perhaps nothing will.
In front of them a man pants hard at the top of the stairs, struggles with a huge woven plastic bag, red and white checks. They slide into the kid beside him, barked at, unwilling to move – no, not unwilling, just slow to connect. They do what they can with him, gently suggest the correction. The man’s surprised at how easily he answers, and the boy seems happy. He sits on the floor among legs, and the man bends down, catches his collar and sighs into his hair.
They shift through the air, through missed instructions. A body that lengthens like a shadow as it walks to the back of a crowd, looks up to read a sign that flashes languages they know. He mouths one word: Foreigners. Faces, backs of heads. The body shuffles forward, throws them back. Next body behind, looking sideways, back bent. Shuffles forward, throws them. Foreigners. They want to go back and look for Adam. Find another flight, a return. But it’s impossible. Where would they begin? He might be anywhere by now. They are condemned to move among strangers. Blue straps form a labyrinth, the bodies obedient to the flimsy boundaries made by stanchions, rules. Blue signs above the desks, yellow text. Blue uniforms in blue enclosures, caught between.
This chest is tight, compressed: the air fraught in its lungs, the suck of particles that join to particles that mutate and might metastasise. A smoker, or a breather of coal. The pressure of this poison as they approach the border.
But the border is a dream, no more fixed than the blue straps, as porous as this slipway between life and death. He cranes his neck at what’s ahead, sees only doors and glass and passageways. The inside repeats the outside to absurdity. He finds a cigarette and puts it behind his ear, which gives him a taste of the rush that will come with it when he is free. The body moves forward, willing. Its checkpoints are nothing but air and expectation. They are curious, ready.
They take him through.
BEIJING
It was dark when he retraced his path out of the station. The barricade of construction fences seemed to have been rearranged in his absence; only the flow of people gave it logic as a map. He exited through the gate, crossed the paved square, looked up to see a single star hanging miraculously overhead. The air must have cleared, but this thought did not bring the usual sense of reprieve. Adam looked for the familiar symbol, found the stairs and descended to the subway. A peaceful feeling returned as he passed his bag into the security checkpoint, pressed his card against the gate and felt it open for him, re-entering the predictable system. These were checkpoints he knew how to pass, tracks he could easily follow. His body felt calm. He breathed deeply, without struggle, and moved along the platform through the crowd, safe in its embrace.
Thousands had left the station with him, and would now disperse. Many would make their way to other cities, other towns. At times it seemed that Beijing was just a giant transit centre where arrivals and departures intermingled, a central exchange in the vast network of transactions that accumulated as an even vaster growth. He felt his heart beating the blood away, his pulse decaying as it reached the periphery, and rubbed his fingertips against his jeans.
He waited for the train to turn the corner, watched the vanishing point disappear or close in as the verticals slid together. If it resembled an animal, a reptile, the image faded quickly. The system attracted analogy but eluded definition. To find someone in this complexity was a strange miracle, as strange as the evolution of life itself. No wonder they would not let go.
The evening crowds were building, young people heading out for the night, the other passengers observing their energy, which dispersed among exhausted workers, parents coming home late, sleeping children, weary travellers. He stood close behind a young couple; he could smell her perfumed hair. When the couple sat down the girl fell immediately asleep and the boy held her head in his palm. Adam stood over them and watched her trust. He watched the young man gently wake her before they arrived at Yonghegong. When they disembarked he slipped out onto the platform behind them, but the boy turned and saw him and so he followed a group of well-dressed young women to another exit, through the gates and out of the station, watching their heels as they clipped their way up the stairs. Dimly aware of the intention to go home, back to his apartment, he went on climbing. It was as if his body needed to surface for a moment, like a whale.
The corner was thronging, festive. Music nearby, the jeering beat of a pop song that had haunted the summer. Someone passed in a ghoulish costume. He thought again of the funeral fires in the fields, and wondered if there was some traditional holiday he hadn’t heard of. He narrowly missed a bicycle as it rounded a corner, and began to walk faster. Someone in an army greatcoat waved a cup at him, three fingers missing from a hand where they should have poked out from fingerless gloves. He stood fixated for a moment on the empty sockets, then turned to follow the stream of people. His sleeve was tugged, his step spring-loaded. He let himself be led away.
Past the temple entrance, which was closed and guarded. Past the shops that were filled with Buddhist trinkets, battery-operated prayer wheels, everything glittering to itself in the lit windows. A few stores were open late, a few street traders crouched beside their wares. One young woman, her face absorbed in her phone screen, knelt beside a pile of hair accessories. Among them lay large plastic flowers for offerings, though the temple would be closed until morning. The colours were brilliant, more brilliant than life. As he stood looking down at them, a man bumped into him from behind.
‘Sorry,’ Adam muttered in English. He felt the warmth of the man’s coat against him with a rush of pleasure; he wanted to sink into that coat’s embrace. To wake beside him, safe in his body heat, the odour of old labour and cigarettes. When he turned, the man’s face was pale, his skin damp. Adam shook his head. The guy was unwell, he thought. Drunk, or something worse. He stumbled out of the way, folded his arms against his chest.
He pushed past a couple of young women in front of him, middle-class women with soft hair walking slowly, looking at their phones, and when he glanced over at those faces they were pale, too pale, too unmoving, their eyes lit blue by their screens, appearing still as glass. He passed a closed restaurant, an old woman who carried a breathless child who spun to point at him and then recoiled. Her skin ash-grey, the child’s head lolling back. In the hutong beyond them, he glimpsed two men in dirty overalls lifting a sack of body parts into a van where other sacks lay stacked and bleeding. A butcher, a market, it was nothing to do with him. He hurried on. Stepped over drains that stank of old blood. He was drawn to a fire at the corner, a moment’s warmth. Someone burning for the dead in a small metal drum. The government was cracking down on offerings. By the time he reached them, they were tossing a child’s plastic tub of water over the metal, and it hissed out steam. He hurried on.
At the corner there was a van full of police officers, teenagers in uniform, all asleep holding their weapons. But they could not be sleeping, because there was no fog of breath on the van’s windows. He would not stay to see if it appeared. A convenience store glinted from across the road, and Adam made for it, grateful, but the d
oors would not open for him, and the person behind the counter turned away. He shook his head. Beijing refused to resolve into the familiar. People hung from the barrier that saved pedestrians from cars, or vice versa. Their mouths open, their legs rudely slung towards the road like old mops. A woman on a bicycle turned as she passed, her eyes like two peeled lychees, and wove through the pedestrians in front of him. Security guards wheeled bodies out of a hutong by the barrow-load, cheerfully chatting over their heft. One laughed, fell into the wagon, and was wheeled away by the other.
Adam’s hands would not get warm. He had passed through the wrong gate at the station, stepped off at the wrong platform. Please prepare for your arrival, the voice always said, and he had not prepared, was yet to arrive anywhere. He pressed his hands into the armpits of his jacket, feeling the ribs through the soft flesh with a strange pleasure, as though the hands were of a different substance to the rest of his body.
A young woman passed him, short hair like Natasha’s, laughing into her phone. From the back, the white of her skull was visible through the skin. A couple of tourists, Germans maybe, sat against a wall with their mouths open, holding hands. The cameras around their necks were still recording, lit up with images of the pavement. Mounds of boxes had been piled on the street beside them, a cornucopia of undelivered parcels.
Adam was still on the train, and this was nothing but a vivid nightmare.
In front of him a young man had been walking at a steady pace but now stopped and toppled to his side, the phone in his hand clattering away. A woman in a lane didn’t flinch when the phone hit her slipper, merely picked it up and wiped it on her skirt and pocketed it, then slumped back into stillness. Adam stepped over the young man and the old woman and through dogs, cats, not dead but free, that began to chase a scrawny white hen down an alley. He wanted to wake up now. He had seen enough. Two fashionable young men in matching monochrome clutched each other against a bus stop, frozen to the pole. The hen screamed. The smell was earthy. Adam had taken a wrong turn leaving the subway. He had to keep moving, to walk out of here and into the next block, another neighbourhood, where the dead would be fewer. He had to find the street that would lead him back to the surface. There, there was light, he followed it gratefully. But he saw bright LEDs and realised where he was. Guijie. Ghost street. His subconscious was embarrassing. He turned down a hutong, headed into darkness.
He would have to come out the other side eventually. Even this city had limits. But he was walking towards the centre, and the edges were impossibly far away. Ring roads were rippling into existence faster than he could reach them on foot. He would never outrun this place, or leave it.
Through a door he glimpsed four bright shapes of women slumped facedown into their card game. Beneath the car horns, the voices, bells, there was a low silence. He could not understand how they were still breathing. A procession honked at him; he stepped out of the way. These people could not be dead. They did not even seem troubled.
‘Whose funeral is this?’ he asked a man in front, walking with the crowd through the shortcut lane beside the garbage and grease and piles of cardboard left by recycling traders. The person laughed at him and shrugged, uncomprehending. Said something in a thick accent, or in the language of the dead. Adam was annoyed – if it was his dream, he should be able to make everyone speak English – but he followed the crowd anyway. Because it was a dream, he could not leave its pattern. And if it was a dream, it could not reach inside his body, could not hurt him. He felt a bright fever surging, but it wasn’t sickness, not this time. It was powerful, the heat of living. It was what came between.
He was charged with an alertness, a redoubled energy, that did not seem consistent with sleep. He felt it in his head, concentrated around the eyes and in the front of the skull. His mind felt short-circuited, in danger of overheating. The procession descended at the corner and began to follow the canal. Adam took a deep breath, stepped away from the press of bodies, and retreated into a doorway stacked with cinder blocks, grey tiles and broken bicycles, overhung with laundry and some kind of vine, cucumber or pumpkin, that was turning brown and drying.
‘Nǐde.’ He heard a voice behind him. Yours. When he turned, a man was handing a broad-brimmed black felt hat to a slender woman draped in a designer cream coat, impossibly clean. The forked tongue of a ribbon trailed from her hand. She swept past him as though he wasn’t there. Adam followed her, but she was walking very quickly and soon disappeared. There was a vibration in his body that he could not place. He could still feel the grains of sand caught between his toes.
Adam stopped. He sniffed the hot, wet, rotten air that emanated from the drain over which he was standing, and took one more step, into a shaft of golden light.
This was not his dream, but someone else’s. He had slipped by accident into another person’s private sleep. It surprised him how easy it had been to cross the threshold, but now he was caught in their subconscious, submerged in their grief. He must be able to slip out again. He began to look for turnings, portals, half laughing at the idea. All the doors he saw were closed to him, all exits shuttered. He had been dragged down into this. He did not deserve it.
In a moment he would wake on the train with a snort and disembark, hoping he hadn’t cried out or snored or missed his stop. It must be the train’s movement he could feel in his body, the rumbling from somewhere below. Of course, if he was sleeping, he could simply open his eyes. He blinked hard enough to blur the world.
When he looked up, he saw that the shaft of light belonged to a café. Inside, hipsters were drinking wine and coffee. Their mouths were moving, their skins healthy and intact. An orange paper lantern stood on the counter, painted with a cartoon face. Adam turned back to the lane, wanting to find it changed. A child in a Spider-Man costume sailed past him on a scooter, the bendy kind that could split in two. The child’s face was masked but the eyes above the mask were healthy and profoundly serious. He was filled with shame, then fury, at this breach of his condition, the violation of his safety and comfort. He put a hand to the glass and the people on the other side recoiled slightly, shuffled a little in their seats, but did not look at him. It was very bright in there; he couldn’t see his reflection.
No-one had died.
He pressed his head to the glass and rested it there. It was slightly warm from the heating inside, and his breath against it, his own breath that he held and released at will, made a small cloud in the cold night air beside him. In a moment, when he was more certain of that sustenance, he might go in. Get a drink, something warming. Those wine-stained lips. He would follow them back to the surface. But first he would lift his head and his reflection would appear in the glass and he would remember their name. He would remember them.
He breathed. The heart knocked in its hollow. So tired of fighting. A moment more. All he had to do was surrender. He closed his eyes.
The door swung open beside him. ‘Adam?’
WIRE
They take the train, wanting its store of shared breath. They watch for a sign, recognising almost nothing. They left this country two or more transformations ago. It has changed in their absence. They remember fragments: sleeping on long journeys, lights and towns flashing by. They see familiar images. Grey towers crumbling beside the railway line in indistinct light. Rain-green fields turning to concrete flats. Corn spread out in golden paths to dry, a dream of abundance that remains elusive. Nothing touches them.
After the body, what can they know of their life but its details? Memory, experience, all the fragments of attention that hope to accumulate meaning. Their specific instance, so brief. Always this transitory. There are billions like them, arriving and departing. They might choose to stay with any one of them. It would be a kind of death for the other, they suppose, and a kind of life for them – a kind of selfhood.
What would it take to stay? Days, weeks, a lifetime of delicate transferences. It could destroy the host.
To take one life is a crime. A crime for which there can be no restitution.
What if it is only borrowed?
They do not know what justice looks like. But perhaps those terms don’t matter anymore.
He watches the apartments set against the rail line, mesh boxes overlaid with ghostly laundry, repeated like stacked versions of the train. There is an ache in his left hand where a break has set but not healed. He is strong, despite the frailty of age. His eyes won’t look away from the window, and they stop trying, giving themselves over now to the lines that nest outside, now to the smudge of a fingerprint on glass, a little remainder. He listens to the guard in the corridor attending to the openings and closings of doors, a ceremony that is conducted ten thousand times, across ten thousand carriages, as blessed by repetition as a prayer. They loiter in him, hesitant to harm.
The train is pulling into a station. With his eyes they watch the passengers leave and arrive, preoccupied, passive with tiredness and travel. The sound of the platform dulled by the glass. He breathes out and the steam of his breath fogs the window. They might write their name, if they could remember it. His hand doesn’t move.
They look for Adam in the crowd. Habitual now, and hopeless.
The train slides out, and they watch the small city recede: the tall glass shrinking into damp cement flats, then farmhouses, village roofs and fields, moving back in time. Houses where the light of the city has not yet arrived. Only the train’s light searches their rooms, checking in on each of them as they sleep. The machine goes on looking steadily, as if it knows what for. The man inhales. The lungs are weak. He doesn’t suit them.With effort, they lift a hand to the mouth, sniff the nicotine between the fingers, sending signals that reverberate like voices in a cave. The train is shucked to the side by a freight passing, grainers full of coal. Blood in the ears. He’s coughing, struggling against the pressure, sitting up. They get in his lungs and settle them, but it’s hard to stay. In the dark there is no-one else close enough. Tracksuit hoisted to hip-height, tingles in the calves and feet as the blood pours down, a dam collapses. The meat collides with a closed door, then the rail that holds down shade. At the end the urn gleams dimly in the light from the guard’s room. They want to go to her, but he shuffles on before they have a chance.
The Airways Page 20
