He listened at his door for life in the building but heard only machinery. He walked around the small flat, closing all the windows, checking the seals. He looked at the vents for the air conditioning. He looked at the mark he had left on the floor by the mirror, the shape of which was nothing human. The air was sour in here, but there was plenty of room. Space for both of them.
He remembered to take his coat.
When he stepped outside, he carried the plastic bag with him. The elevator was waiting at his floor. He rode it down, looking into his blurred reflection, glad to find them looking back. When they reached the ground he walked out to the garbage station. He paused, staring into the bin and then at the small patch of grass that grew from the mud beside it. Nearby, on the other side of a small hedge, an old man was crouched, moving. Adam peered over to see what he was doing. He was digging in the garden, planting or burying something. The man did not seem to notice he was being watched. Maybe he was used to it, or maybe Adam was not quite visible; the light was strange.
He glanced up at the window of his apartment, half-expecting to see himself, but there was no figure in the frame. The cold made his nose smart, his eyes sting; the sky was heavy with clouds that were dark with evening or something worse. It was no longer possible to forget what floated above them, to believe that the sky enclosed. That blue stretch up there, where they could become anyone. So much had been stolen already. He reached into the bin and took the jar out, held it in one hand. He wanted to break the glass in his fist, but he wasn’t strong enough. He dropped it carefully into the recycling instead.
These acts were slow and difficult. His limbs were numb. He put his hands in his pocket to warm them. He had welcomed them now. What more did they want?
‘It was time to get rid of the flowers,’ he said aloud. The air roared in his ears. His voice was torn to rags in the cold.
The old man looked up, startled. One hand reached into the earth between his knees. He was looking for something buried, Adam decided, an animal or insect: something alive that must be brought out and set loose.
‘You remember,’ he said, his breath a whisper.
THE AIRWAYS
What more did I want?
We were like two birds who became lost in our migration, separated from the group: the signals went awry somehow, the land changed beneath us, the air too marked with poison, the map we thought we knew dissolved inside our heads. We were above the clouds, past navigation.
I can never go home again. This could never be a return.
I was strong when I found him. I could enter him like light. I could slow time, I could travel the long constellations of dust between us, feel the patterns shifting as I passed. It has taken a little longer to learn how to stay in this place, how to occupy it as a stranger. To teach him what I’ve come to know. I could have destroyed him. But now we are becoming something new: untethered, unseen. A bright extravagance. A fresh start.
A living body. Shouldn’t that be enough?
He will learn to adjust.
BEIJING
We stood by the canal where the delivery drivers rested in the backs of their cargo bikes, asleep with the parcels. Adam watched the sweet breath in their bodies. How safe they must feel to be able to sleep like this beside the road. He noticed how his vision was returning, but different now: staticky, flickering. He thought that there was something wrong with his eyes, some shard or spark, the presence of dark particles. It looked as though the air was beginning to flake away.
He did not understand what we were seeing. Some toxic transubstantiation, part of him thought. A new level of deadly smog, suspended matter solidified and falling to earth, as grey as ashes. The image was like an old film about the future, a lost promise told in the colourless, grainy texture of the past.
It was more than that. All that had been veiled was dissolving.
I watched with him as the city disintegrated. A car horn sounded behind us, and we stepped forward. The grey static kept appearing. Adam expected to fall through the screen like glass, but he trusted me now. I had taken him so far already. How sweetly his limbs answered to my impulses.
We looked down into the water. The willows dangled their naked branches over it like string. The canal was beginning to freeze over. At the edges, we could see the white film encroaching. The sight of water steadied him; I let him look for his reflection. There were grey fish down there, suspended in a small pool of liquid, living on within their shrinking limits. I was not like them. I could let him go. I reached out a hand to push through the air, which shattered gently.
There was nothing there, nothing beneath what was there. There was nothing to mourn.
Adam saw that this hand was not his hand. Nor was it entirely foreign. We remembered to breathe, even as the air was fragmenting around us. It landed on these numb fingers, settled delicately there like birds landing on a distant shore, their wings worn still by a long journey. It looked like ash until it melted.
It was only a rare fall of snow.
I smiled, and pressed that cold hand to his lips.
I caught his breath.
THE BODY
What became of their bodies, the people that I visited, the skins I pierced or pressed through, the habitats I made? Many forgot me as soon as I was gone, the way they would have forgotten a vanished cramp, a healed scar, their hunger after eating. I was a shudder, a chill, a dizzy spell to them, something they picked up and got over. I was one of those things.
Some felt my presence as a flagging of the spirit, a nagging doubt or a vague exhaustion: they might not have noticed me, or felt the shape of me, but when I left them, they were emptied, daunted by the energy required to move. Some of them remained that way. Uneasy in themselves. They angered quickly or drank too long, unable to fill the space or to bear the company of those they felt were undisturbed.
No body is undisturbed.
There were others who discovered a change months or years later. Over time something grew around the residue I left there, like a pearl around a speck of grit inside an oyster. Growths developed in the places in their bodies that had opened to accommodate me. Marks erupted on their skin. I was clumsy at first. I know I hurt people. I found my way in and out of clusters of cells that were part of the body but hostile to it, that made use of the same kind of space.
I might have gone on, and gone on opening.
There were others in whom my visit opened a route for other travellers, the way a body will trample grass and make a path, carve a desire line into a field or garden. There were those who were always ready to fly open. There were those who were strengthened by it, who loved me, and loved those that came after me.
No, I am not the only guest.
Some changed in smaller ways. They hungered after foods they had been averse to. They turned to lovers and saw their flaws, suddenly disgusted, unable to bear their touch. They turned to what they had hated and saw its loveliness. They took up running, or diving, or driving too fast by night with the windows down and the radio on, trying to get away from themselves. But they never got away. They became like shallow water. They haunted their own bodies. Touch never satisfied again.
Some chose to move, others to stay. They left themselves behind, or tried to. They called these dissatisfactions unhappiness, or seeking purpose, or falling out of love; privately, they wondered if they might have had a stroke. People told them they were hardly recognisable these days.
Some of them felt the loss more keenly, never knowing what it was they missed. The visit, though it was brief, had been intimate. They became lonely, sometimes furiously so. I said I was innocent, but I knew this, I could feel it happening. I took what I needed, I took what I was owed. I possessed and I dispossessed. I did what I had to do to survive. I don’t know if it was right.
Some found that they woke in their bodies and felt new. As if they were alive for the first time. I gave th
em that and more. A moment of pure awareness. A sense of themselves as a perfect form. A cure.
While I am here I want to do everything. I want to buy flowers for the scent alone. To bite into a crisp apple and taste its juice. To walk into the ocean, feel its power hold this body up against gravity. To walk free.
I could take him home. We could look out over the wing and think how solid clouds seem, when they’re only vapour. We could pass through together, land somewhere new. We will never get away, never be alone again.
For now, Beijing holds us in its cold embrace. It accommodates the anomaly, absorbs it into the organism, allows us to live wherever we will not compromise the higher functions. We are visitors, guests. We come face to face in the street, and step to one side, then the other, recognising something in each other. We turn at the sound of a car horn, we feel the subway rumble underfoot. We slip beneath the surface, and the city closes over us like a wound.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The first epigraph is taken from Adrienne Rich’s essay, ‘Notes Towards a Politics of Location’, published in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. The second is from the Tao Te Ching, section 16. English translations for the latter vary considerably; I like Derek Lin’s ‘the self is no more, without danger,’ and A. Charles Muller’s ‘Though you lose the body, you do not die.’
‘To photograph someone is a sublimated murder’ is a line from Susan Sontag, On Photography.
‘Do you recognise me, air?’ is from Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. Stephen Mitchell).
*
I lived in Beijing from 2014–2016; this book began to possess me on the subway. I wrote a rough draft during a residency at Yaddo in 2015, and remain grateful to the Corporation of Yaddo for that gift of time, space and brilliant company. The writing was also supported by a residency at Bundanon in 2017 and by Copyright Agency CREATE funding, some of which enabled me to return to Beijing in 2018. My thanks to both Bundanon Trust and the Copyright Agency.
I’m indebted to the Asialink Foundation for the Arts, which first sent me to Beijing in 2010, to the much-missed Beijing Bookworm for hosting that residency and making me welcome on subsequent visits, and to the staff at the Australian Embassy in China for their support.
I feel enormously fortunate to have worked with Mathilda Imlah, Georgia Douglas, Emma Schwarcz and the team at Picador, whose careful labours on this book have been very much appreciated. Sincere thanks also to generous and attentive first readers, Adolfo Aranjuez and Jinghua Qian, whose comments were invaluable. Any remaining flaws are, of course, my own.
Particular thanks to Hannah May Caspar, for the whole adventure – and for living with me and my ghosts.
About Jennifer Mills
Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels Dyschronia (Picador, 2018), Gone (UQP, 2011) and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight (UQP, 2012). In 2019 Dyschronia was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the Aurealis Awards for science fiction.
Mills’ fiction, essays and criticism have been widely published, including in Best Australian Stories, Best Australian Essays, the Guardian, Lithub, Meanjin, Overland, The Saturday Paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Review of Books and the Washington Post.
Also by Jennifer Mills
Dyschronia
Gone
The Diamond Anchor
The Rest is Weight
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2019
Dyschronia
Jennifer Mills
An electrifying novel about an oracle. A small town. And the end of the world as we know it . . .
One morning, the residents of a small coastal town somewhere in Australia wake to discover the sea has disappeared. One among them has been plagued by troubling visions of this cataclysm for years. Is she a prophet? Does she have a disorder that skews her perception of time? Or is she a gifted and compulsive liar?
Oscillating between the future and the past, Dyschronia is a novel that tantalises and dazzles, as one woman’s prescient nightmares become entangled with her town’s uncertain fate. Blazing with questions of consciousness, trust, and destiny, this is a wildly imaginative and extraordinary novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.
‘A writer of extraordinary range and imagination.’ Cate Kennedy, author of The World Beneath
‘There is a poetry in Mills’s writing that shimmers like desert air – and in her storytelling, in the way she captures the moods of time, there is something mystical. Daring, original and ambitious.’ The Australian
‘Shockingly good.’ The Saturday Paper
Pan Macmillan acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country
throughout Australia and their connections to lands, waters and communities.
We pay our respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all
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First published 2021 in Macmillan Australia by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Jennifer Mills 2021
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All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
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This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations
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