Turbulence

by David Szalay

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’re a wonderful writer.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Marion said, and to Wendy’s surprise, she soggily embraced her. ‘Oh!’ Wendy said. ‘Wow!’ Marion, in fact, was very emotional suddenly. With tears in her eyes, she simply nodded at the older woman, Jackie, who taught her work to students in Hong Kong, and then turned and hurried away down the supermarket aisle.

  6

  SEA – HKG

  SHE WOKE TO the dim stillness of the cabin. This had already happened several times, and each time what she had experienced was less like sleep than like an odd discontinuity in her presence in the world. She woke to the dim stillness of the cabin. Stillness, not silence. There was the sound of the engines – an unvarying sound like a large waterfall somewhere nearby – that muffled all other sounds so that it seemed as if she had stuffing in her ears. It was night and the main lights were switched off. Stretched out on her nearly flat bed, she was able to see, from where her head was, her neighbour’s screen. He was watching a film. The silent pictures troubled her – some people shouting at each other – and she shut her eyes again, and thought of the two weeks she had just spent in Seattle with her daughter Wendy and her family. They had left her tired, those two weeks, even though they hadn’t particularly done much. There had been some little outings – to the Japanese Garden, to the top of the Space Needle. There had been frequent visits to shopping malls and supermarkets. There had been time with the kids, picking them up from school and preparing meals. In Seattle, she had found herself able to forget the situation she was flying back to.

  Last autumn she had had a health scare. It had turned out to be a false alarm. Still, it had frightened her. Even when the doctor told her she had nothing to worry about she was obviously shaken and, since it was the end of his working day, he had offered to take her for a drink. ‘You look like you could use one,’ he had said. They went to the Conrad Hotel, which was near his surgery. It was pleasant enough. She didn’t expect to hear from him again. Then the following week he had invited her to an exhibition of Buddhist sculpture – the subject of this exhibition had been mentioned over their drink, and they seemed to have a shared enthusiasm for it. That was when she first knew that something was happening, the way her heart quickened when she saw that SMS. She told herself that she was a sixty-year-old married woman, that it was absurd for her to feel that kind of excitement over an invitation to an art exhibition, issued in the form of a text message with a link to the exhibition website. The fact was, it felt unmistakeably like a date, something neither of them acknowledged when it took place – which it did, after she had spent some days going through the motions of wondering whether to accept the invitation. After that they met a few more times – they went to see films and exhibitions, and then had lunch or a drink.

  When she told her husband that she was in love with someone else, he stared at her as if he was literally unable to believe what she had just said.

  ‘Who?’ he finally asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘Neither do I,’ she said.

  They sat there for a long time in silence. They had been married for nearly forty years and nothing like this had ever happened. There was a feeling, apart from anything else, that it was late in the day for this sort of thing. There was also a feeling of desolation.

  ‘I had to tell you,’ she said. ‘We’ve never hidden things from each other.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  There was another long desolate silence.

  He said, ‘So … so you love him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, without hesitation.

  ‘What happens now?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said again. Though that wasn’t true – she knew that she wanted the doctor, who was the only thing she thought about from the moment she woke up in the morning until the moment she finally fell asleep at night.

  Her husband sighed.

  Strangely, their life went on outwardly as normal for a while after that, though with a kind of silence at the heart of it.

  She opened her eyes – the localised lights and silhouettes of the Delta First cabin, the shapes of the seats, or pods they were more like, with their semi-private, semi-enclosed spaces. She adjusted her position. Her neighbour’s screen was still showing the same film. Her own showed a map of their progress – they were eight hours into the flight, and far out over an ocean of unimaginable size. On the map the plane was marked by a plane-shaped symbol that would be, if it were to scale, about a thousand kilometres long. In fact it was hard to understand quite what an insignificant speck this aeroplane was, in terms of the size of the ocean it was flying over, in terms of the quantity of emptiness which surrounded it on all sides.

  In February the doctor had tried to persuade her to spend a night or two away with him. He had suggested Hainan Island, he said he knew some nice places near the sea. That they would sleep together there wasn’t explicitly the idea – they had still hardly touched each other – though they both understood that was probably what would happen. He was more than ten years younger than her and unmarried. When she told him that she was in love with him he had, after a short pause, taken her hand. She had let him take it. Her hand felt hot and damp in his. That was when he first suggested the trip to Hainan. She had said she would think about it.

  While she was wondering whether to go to Hainan Island with the doctor, her husband said to her one day, ‘You have to decide what you want.’

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked him.

  ‘I want you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to Hainan Island next weekend,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and his eyes filled with tears.

  His quiet acceptance of the situation was mature and fully acknowledged her autonomy as an individual, and she despised him for it.

  She didn’t know what he should have done.

  Nothing, she thought, would have prevented her from going to Hainan Island at that point – it seemed more important than anything else in her life, and worth whatever price life might exact for it.

  They went one weekend in early March.

  The hotel was near the sea – the windows of their suite looked onto the ocean. They walked along the sand, the huge surf battering blindly away at the shore.

  On the very southern tip of the island, on some wave-lashed rocks, they found a rough brown stone on which was inscribed, in two Chinese characters – The end of the civilised world.

  The day she got back from Hainan, that Sunday evening, her husband said, again, ‘You have to decide what you want.’

  She had just stepped into the flat, straight from the airport, the Hainan Airlines luggage tag still on her suitcase. He was sitting there in his pyjamas. He didn’t look well. He had lost weight, and had stopped shaving every day. And he hadn’t been sleeping well – they still slept next to each other, everything was still outwardly the same.

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  She had a shower and then told him that she was planning to visit their daughter in Seattle for two weeks. When she came back, she said, she would have made a decision.

  The map on her screen showed that the plane was flying south now, over the far eastern peninsulas of Russia, towards Japan. In less than five hours it would land in Hong Kong.

  It wasn’t so much a matter of deciding between her husband and the doctor. It was a matter of deciding whether the fact that she had fallen overwhelmingly in love with the doctor somehow in itself annulled her marriage. Once, when they were much younger, she had loved her husband in something like the way she loved the doctor now. She hadn’t thought she would ever love anyone else like that. And now there was the doctor. And it seemed obvious that just as she had stopped loving her husband like that, she would in time stop loving the doctor in that way too. That was the diff
erence – she knew that now. She wouldn’t love the doctor in this way forever, so she shouldn’t do anything predicated on the idea that she would. And she didn’t intend to. Was that maturity? Was it wisdom? Whatever it was, the question insisted on an answer – did the fact that she had fallen in love with the doctor somehow in itself annul her marriage? Did it make it somehow untrue? She did not want to live with something untrue.

  Her flight from Seattle landed just after eight in the morning. She took a taxi to the flat, which was in the Mid-Levels, not far from the University where she worked. Her husband was at home. She had not doubted that he would be. When she arrived, he was sitting at the kitchen table in his white squash kit – he had just returned from his weekly session at the club and still smelled faintly of the sweat he had expended. He was eating fruit salad. She took off her jacket and sat down at the table with him. There were pleasantries, and then some small-talk about how things had been in the States, about Wendy and the kids – they hadn’t spoken on the phone even once while she was there. When they had dealt with all that, he stood up to make some more coffee and she said, ‘I don’t want to live with something which isn’t true.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, sitting down again.

  ‘I mean that I don’t want to live a life which isn’t true. Where we’re just going through the motions.’

  ‘I don’t either,’ he said.

  He looked nice, in his whites. She found herself looking at him as if he was a stranger, someone she didn’t know, and was seeing for the first time. And in a sense he had become a stranger to her over the past ten weeks. This shift in perspective took her slightly by surprise, the way he seemed positively attractive now, as a sort of stranger in his sweaty shirt, with his lean muscles, and his intelligent eyes, which were trained on her, trying to perceive what it was that she intended or hoped for from this talk. Which in fact was still not entirely obvious to her, though his sudden sexiness – which seemed to have something to do with the fact that he was now this semi-stranger with whom things might develop in any number of ways, which after all was what the situation truly was, and always had been – was starting to move things in a particular direction. He felt this and took her hand. She let him do that, as she had let the doctor do it that afternoon when she told him she loved him. As it had that afternoon, her hand felt hot and damp. And as the doctor had that afternoon, he leaned towards her and kissed her mouth, and she let him do that as well. She put her hands on his skin, inside his shirt, and then he was pulling her underwear down to her knees, and there on the kitchen table that morning they tried again to make something true.

  7

  HKG – SGN

  THAT FRIDAY DR ABIR BANNERJEE left his surgery early and went to the airport. The weekend of golf with his brother Abhijit was something they did every year, usually somewhere inexpensive in South East Asia. This time it was Vietnam. From Hong Kong, it was not a long flight – not much more than two hours – and it was only mid-afternoon when he landed in the city he still thought of as Saigon. He sat in the back of the taxi looking out at the noisy, energetic poverty of modern Vietnam. His driver, a talkative fellow though without much English, tried to engage him in conversation but Abir’s monosyllabic answers eventually discouraged him, and they passed the remainder of the journey in silence. For part of that time Abir’s thoughts were taken up with someone he knew, a woman he had been seeing. She was married and she had decided, in the end, to stay with her husband. When she had told him that, the previous day, over a drink at the Conrad Hotel, he had tried to be philosophical. That was life. He approved of her decision in principle, and he was thankful for what they had had together. For an hour afterwards he had walked the streets, trying to work out how he felt. There was a sort of numbness that made it hard to say. When he wasn’t thinking about her, he was mostly thinking about the money his brother owed him – earlier in the year he had lent Abhijit five lakh rupees and he was supposed to have paid it back by now.

  The taxi arrived at the Song Be Golf Resort.

  It looked, Abir thought, like an upscale Florida shopping mall.

  It had been Abhijit’s idea to spend a weekend here.

  Abhijit himself didn’t arrive until later. It was nearly ten o’clock when he thumped on Abir’s door. ‘It’s me,’ he shouted. ‘Are you asleep or what?’ Abir had in fact been thinking of turning in. He was lying on his bed trying to focus on the latest issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He put his tablet down, opened the door, and said, ‘No, I’m not asleep. Hello, Abhijit.’

  They hugged.

  Abhijit smelled of a mixture of sweat and smoke and stale aftershave.

  ‘Drink?’ he suggested. ‘Come on – drink! Let’s have a drink. Just one. We can’t not have a drink.’

  Abir let himself be persuaded. He put on his shoes, and they went down to the bar, which was an open-sided area at one end of the lobby level, a sort of veranda, with wicker furniture under turning fans.

  ‘There is no fucking direct flight from India to Ho Chi Minh can you believe it?’ Abhijit said, agitating the ice in his Wild Turkey and Coke.

  ‘There is from Hong Kong,’ Abir said.

  ‘Yes of course there is from Hong Kong!’ Abhijit shouted, enjoying himself. ‘You can fly fucking anywhere from Hong Kong!’ Derisively he threw out the names of some obscure destinations. ‘Almaty. Port Moresby. Brisbane. Budapest.’

  ‘Seattle,’ Abir added.

  ‘Seattle?’

  ‘Yes, I know someone, she flew in from Seattle a few days ago.’

  ‘One of your walking corpses?’ Abhijit asked with a jolly laugh.

  ‘No,’ Abir said. ‘Not a patient.’

  ‘Lucky her.’ Abhijit slurped from his drink.

  ‘Actually she was a patient,’ Abir said. ‘It was a false alarm.’ He was aware of a desire to talk more about her. ‘You came via … where then? Bangkok?’ he asked instead, though he wasn’t actually interested in the details of Abhijit’s itinerary.

  Abhijit nodded. ‘Sure, yes, Bangkok,’ he said. ‘Thai Airways. They’re okay.’ He slurped again from his drink, and padded sweat from his forehead with a napkin – the night was humid. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

  Abir shook his head.

  They talked, for a while, about other possible connections – KL, Yangon – and Abir agreed, dispassionately, that the lack of direct flight destinations from India’s major airports was a national disgrace.

  ‘The fact is,’ Abhijit said, ‘as in so many other areas, we’re twenty years behind the Chinese. And you live among them, you traitor!’

  ‘Hong Kong isn’t China.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to say that there,’ Abhijit pointed out.

  ‘Well, you can say anything in India,’ Abir said. ‘There is that, on the plus side.’

  Abhijit frowned. ‘I’m not sure if that’s true any more actually.’ He tended his damp forehead. ‘What did you fly, then?’ he asked. ‘Cathay?’

  ‘No, VietJet,’ Abir said.

  Abhijit seemed amazed. ‘VietJet? The cheapo outfit? Why?’

  Abir shrugged. ‘It’s not a long flight.’

  There was a silence, and he wondered if this was the moment when Abhijit would bring up the subject of the loan.

  Instead Abhijit signalled to an ancient-looking Vietnamese man in a white jacket that he wanted to sign for the drinks.

  ‘I’ll get these,’ he said, and Abir wondered if he expected to be thanked. It did irritate him that Abhijit was making a show of paying for the drinks, was taking the social advantage of that, while at the same time owing him money, and showing no sign so far of being willing or able to pay it back, or even of mentioning it.

  ‘I’ll get these,’ Abhijit said again, as the waiter approached, as if Abir might not have heard him the first time.

  Abir just nodded and looked away.

  ‘So, what time are we up tomorrow?’ Abhijit asked, signing with a flourish, snapping the little padded f
older shut, and handing it back to the waiter. ‘What time are we on the tee?’

  Abir did not sleep well. Abhijit’s failure to mention the loan needled him for much of the night. He had had a dream in which he was in some vague hotel setting – on an island somewhere – with the woman he had been seeing. Her physical presence had seemed very palpable in the dream, the slightly damp feel of her skin. When he woke up, in the total darkness of the Vietnamese night, he had been surprised for a moment that she wasn’t there. After that he hadn’t been able to sleep again for a long time. It was then that he started to think about the money Abhijit owed him. He spent what seemed like hours lying there in the dark, trying to find a form of words with which to approach the subject himself in the morning, if Abhijit did not. He drowsily imagined whole exchanges, some of which ended with Abhijit tearfully apologising, others with one of them storming out, or even with physical violence. What he did not do was decide on an actual form of words, though he did decide, lying there in the dimness of dawn, that the subject would have to be tackled. Since they were kids, Abhijit’s ability to get away with things had infuriated him. He would not let him get away with not even mentioning this loan.

  In the morning, however, he ate his fruit salad in silence while Abhijit talked about this and that, about Bitcoin and what fortunes were available there.

  ‘Hasn’t it lost, like, half its value in the last few months?’ Abir objected.

  Abhijit insisted that was a positive sign. He was thinking about making an investment himself, he said as they walked to the first tee.

  Abir lost the toss, and stepped up to the tee with his one wood – an undistinguished specimen he had been using since he first took up the sport at Stanford med school.

  He tried to empty his mind. He was still thinking about the loan and it distracted him. It stopped him being fully present in the moment.

  Aware that he had lost focus, he stood back from the tee, shut his eyes for a few seconds, and then stepped up to it again.