by Rachel Heng
There was one problem, though, Lea thought as they began the walk to the marina.
“No wind,” Kaito said, as if reading her mind. “Guess we’ll have to paddle.”
She laughed. “Or swim and push.”
The boat would have an engine, of course. The sails were just for show. Jiang didn’t actually know how to sail, and Lea doubted any of his mistresses did either.
Her father was in high spirits. He’d brought a large, embarrassing ladies’ sun hat and insisted on wearing it on the walk there. “The UV rays! The killer UV rays!” he stage-whispered in mock horror, pretending to shield Lea under his hat too. She pushed him away, laughing. Though it was still cold enough that she was wearing her coat, the heat of the sun felt good on her exposed hands and neck.
He pointed at the beach, where a placard was driven into the sand.
“Every winter, a hundred people or so gather here, on this beach. They call themselves the Polar Bear Club,” he said, eyes crinkling. “Can you guess why?”
“No,” she said. “No way.”
“Yup. Water temperature in the fifties. So cold it burns. Come to think of it, it’s probably not far off from that today.”
Lea shuddered. “Why would anyone do that to themselves?”
He shrugged.
The walk to the marina was a straightforward one, straight down the boardwalk for an hour or so. But halfway there, Kaito veered off the boardwalk.
“Where are you going? That’s not the right way,” Lea called after him.
He smiled and waved her over. “I just want to stop somewhere first,” he said. “Come, you’ll see.”
So she followed him off the path, into the empty streets. The buildings were wooden, squat and whitewashed, their windows dirty, gardens crowded with hairy overgrown plants. Where were they going? They walked first through one street, then the next, then turned off into a small side road.
Suddenly they were in a narrow alley lined with shops and crowded with people. It was a makeshift market of some kind. The sellers had their wares laid out on large white sheets—“In case the police come, makes it easier for them to grab and run,” Kaito explained—and they shouted at people going by. They were selling junk, at least it seemed so to Lea. Old household appliances, pieces of cameras, what looked like a canoe paddle. But then her gaze landed on a sheet with stacks of compact discs neatly lined up, their faces dusty but still glinting in the sun, and she understood what kind of market it was. Lea was tempted to stop and rifle through the discs, to see what music they had, if they had anything she could add to her collection, but her father was already way ahead of her. So she hurried along.
“It’s very busy,” her father said. “Why don’t you wait here?” He pointed to an empty spot by the wall. Lea nodded.
Her father continued pushing his way through the browsers, finally stopping at a stall crowded with plastic models—tiny planes, cars, dolls with wide blue eyes and small red lips. He was talking to the seller, a stocky, large man who couldn’t stop staring at Kaito’s floppy sun hat. The seller nodded and squatted down. Lea could no longer see him. Then he stood up again, and handed something to Kaito. Kaito examined whatever the man had given him carefully, turning it over in his hands, and then smiled. He paid the man and began pushing his way through the crowd, back to Lea.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“What did you get?” Lea said, looking down at his hand. Whatever he’d bought was wrapped in brown paper.
“Not here,” he said. “Later, on the boat.”
Lea nodded. They made their way out of the crowded street and back to the boardwalk. The empty space was a relief after the scrum of the alleyway.
“Why does no one ever come out here? It’s so beautiful, and so quiet.”
Her father shrugged. “Had you ever come here before?”
She knew what he meant by before—before he brought her here, but also before everything else. Before the Club, before Anja, before Ambrose. Before him.
“No,” Lea said. “I hadn’t.”
She would tell him once they were on the boat, she thought. She would find the right moment, not now, not when they were walking side by side, distracted, with a destination in mind. No, better on the boat, once the engine was running and they were out on the big gray sea, nothing and no one around them.
* * *
The boat was smaller than she had imagined. The way Jiang had boasted about it, she’d imagined a luxury yacht, with multiple cabins, decks, coolers. But it was a humble sailboat with an inside space that could only fit one person. Most of the boat was open, and it had low sides. They would truly feel like they were on the water.
“Key,” her father said. He was already standing in the boat. She handed it to him mutely, then took his outstretched hand and stepped into its rocking hull.
She perched on a small bench at the back of the boat while her father started the engine. It burst into life with a loud roar.
Lea felt strangely unsettled, despite the glorious day and the comfort of being with her father. At first she thought it was nerves—completely understandable, given the magnitude of her decision. But then she realized, as she watched her father guide the boat out of its lot in the marina, turning the steering wheel with a deft lightness that made her ache for her childhood, that it wasn’t even that. What it was, was the feeling of someone else being in charge. Of relinquishing control automatically, of trusting someone else. Lea was not used to that at all.
Once they were away from the dock, Kaito revved the engine playfully.
“Shall we?” he shouted, twisting his head around to look at her.
He’d taken his coat off and was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans underneath. With the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, his long uncut hair whipping in the wind, he almost looked like a young man again. At the helm of the boat he stood with his back straight, chin up, hands resting comfortably on the steering wheel. From the back, when she couldn’t see the folds of skin in his neck and face, Lea could almost imagine she was ten years old. For a moment, she believed that Samuel was with them too, sitting at her side, just outside her peripheral vision.
But when she turned, there was nothing but water. Slow, undulating, and opaque. They were some distance from the crashing shore now. The waves were smooth and unbroken, their progress quiet, regular.
“What are you looking at?” her father said. He turned the engine off and made his way to the back of the boat.
It was quiet now, the space and the silence filling her mind, her heart.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, before the words left her. “I’ve been thinking we could—go. Somewhere away from here. Any of the places you’ve been, all those years you were away. I want to see it all too.”
He stared at her. She saw that he didn’t understand.
“Asia, or Europe, even. We could go there. Away.”
“You know that’s not possible,” her father said. “The border sanctions. You’d never be able to come back, at least not to your life as it is now.”
She was silent. Was that what she wanted? Around them, the world swayed, back and forth, back and forth, rocked by the invisible pull of the moon.
“Even when I left. When I left here. I never went beyond the borders,” he said. “I traveled around the country, but always within it. Never far from a clinic.”
“So don’t you want to see what’s outside of it? Outside of here?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you understand what you’re suggesting, Lea. You’d have to give everything up. Live among sub-100s. Sure, other countries have started their own life extension programs, but you wouldn’t be eligible for them. Besides, they’re way behind; you wouldn’t be able to get the maintenance you need. You’d have ten, maybe twenty years, tops.”
“Like you,” she said, looking him in the eye. “We could spend those ten, twenty years together.”
Her father stared at her for a long while. She held
his gaze, feeling the resolve within her solidifying. She wanted to go, yes, but that didn’t stop her from tasting the sweet bitterness of self-sacrifice. A small voice inside her crying: See? See what you made me do?
Perhaps this was why they did it, the Ambroses of the world. To hold their chins up in defiance. Grand gestures driven by a petty smallness.
No, but that wasn’t fair. She remembered Ambrose, remembered the fire burning in his eyes, the conviction in his voice when he no longer stuttered.
“I want to,” she said, softening her tone. “Something’s changed, ever since—ever since you came back. The Observation List, WeCovery, the Club. Todd. Dwight.”
She paused, struggling for the right words. “I guess I just—I just don’t believe in it anymore. I don’t know if I ever did.”
Lea saw that he didn’t understand. She went on.
“Try as I might, I’ll always be that girl who broke Dwight Rose’s face, who shattered his kneecaps, who—” She stopped, took a deep breath. “Who tried to turn off his life support. I’ll always want to break things.”
Finally her father dropped his gaze. He laced his fingers together, examined the half moons in his fingernails.
“I don’t belong here,” she said. “I never have.”
When he looked up at her, she thought he would protest, tell her that she didn’t know what she was saying, ask her to reconsider carefully. Say that it was absurd and he couldn’t possibly condone her plan.
“Oh, Lea,” he said. “It breaks my heart to hear you say that. If I had known—if I had known, I would have—I don’t know, done something. I don’t know what, maybe take you away, go someplace else. But your mother was so sure. That this was right. The right thing to do, the right way to live. And perhaps it was. Perhaps it would have been worse if we had left, who knows? I couldn’t leave, either, after all, despite all my talk, all my principles. In spite of myself. Stayed in the country, hiding like a dog, clinging to what little life I had left.”
“It’s not too late,” Lea said. “We could still leave. Start a new life together, away from here.”
“No,” he said in a strange voice. “It’s not. We could.”
“How many years do you have left?” she asked eagerly.
He paused. “One,” he said. “Maybe less.”
Her heart squeezed. Suddenly the calm, gelatinous beauty of the ocean surrounding them felt unbearably cruel. Seagulls swooped and soared overhead, their shrill cries seeming to mock the tiny sailboat buoyed by the waves, where Lea sat across from the only person left in the world whom she loved. One year, maybe less. She thought of all the decades she would live without him once that precious year was up, the interminable tomorrows stretching forward into the cold, empty future. But then she thought of the eighty-eight years that they had wasted.
“Still,” she said as evenly as she could. “One year, that’s enough to go to lots of places. Shanghai. Melbourne. Paris. Maybe Sweden. I’ve heard a lot about it from Anja. It sounds beautiful.”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Sweden. Beautiful countryside, I’ve heard. We could go hiking. The Road of Kings, that’s what it’s called. Endless light in the summer, when the sun sets for only an hour a day.”
“Right,” she said, more hopefully, though the words One, maybe less echoed at the back of her mind. “Hiking. I’ve never been hiking before. Because it’s meant to be hard on the ligaments, or at least that’s what the advisories say. I guess it won’t matter anymore, what the advisories say.” She laughed, experimentally.
“Shanghai too,” he said, his face lighting up now. “I’ve always wanted to see it.”
“And on the way there, maybe Tokyo,” she said. “That’s where your grandparents were from, isn’t it? My great-grandparents?”
“It is,” he said. “And if you could have heard them, you’d never forget it either. They were always complaining about New York. The air was too dry, the food portions too large, the people too loud and impolite. Tokyo, now Tokyo was different. City of light. The beacon of civilization,” he said wryly.
“Well then, we’ll just have to see it!” Lea smiled, triumphant.
“We will,” he said. “We will.”
They fell silent. The boat rocked gently and overhead, a seagull squalled.
“I got you something,” her father said. He stood up and fetched something from the front of the boat. It was the package she’d seen him holding in the market earlier.
“Oh! Thank you. But it’s your birthday, not mine,” Lea said, taking the package from him. She felt it. It was small and intricately formed; she thought she felt a tail, legs, a long neck. “Oh no, you didn’t!” She ripped the paper open.
“For all the birthdays I missed,” he said, smiling at her.
It was a plesiosaur, a sea dinosaur. Had roamed the seas in the Mesozoic Era, before whatever it was, meteor or ice age, killed them all. Twenty-five feet long, they said. The size of two full-length cars, they were the giants of the sea, like small whales. Like whales, though, they were gentle creatures, speculated to have only eaten sea plants and small fish.
She pressed the dinosaur into her lap. Her eyes felt hot, and she bit her lip to keep the tears away.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No, thank you.” Her father’s voice was tired all of a sudden. One year, maybe less.
She thought of Anja’s mother, lying in that cold, damp room, her body clicking and whirring long after her soul was gone.
It hit her then that her father was truly dying. That by coming back, by getting involved with the Club, he wasn’t trying to die; he was going to die anyway. She saw now, finally, what he was really looking for.
* * *
They stayed out on the boat for the rest of the afternoon. When the sky began to turn purple, Lea’s father asked if they should start heading back. She nodded slowly, reluctantly.
They fell silent as he turned the boat around. Lea realized she was still holding the dinosaur, gripping it so hard that her hands came away embossed with the pattern of its scales. She set it down gently, so that it was standing on the bench next to her. Give me strength, she thought to herself.
Strength for what? Lea turned her face into the wind, and thought of the way her father had held Samuel’s hands at the very end. Thought of the way her mother had looked at her for the last time, drinking in the image of her face, before closing her eyes forever.
The sun was a low orange ball on the horizon, coloring the pale pebbles on the shore a blazing red. As they drew closer to the shore, Lea saw that the city skyline, gleaming in the distance, was aflame too. A city of light.
Kaito docked the boat. He got out first, then helped her over its side. Lea hadn’t noticed the rocking of the waves, but now as she stepped onto solid ground, the world began to sway.
He handed her the key.
“Thank you,” he said, patting the boat’s white hull. He turned to Lea. “And thank you. For a wonderful day. It was perfect.”
“We’re not going to Tokyo,” Lea said in a low voice, “are we?”
Her father looked at her. She saw him struggling for the words to say.
“It’s okay,” she said. She gripped the dinosaur in her right hand, by the tail. “I should have known.”
“I didn’t want to let you down again,” he said.
Lea swallowed. She looked at her feet.
“Do you have the pill?” she asked.
She knew he did. Manuel had told her a week ago that their latest shipment had been fully distributed. That everyone who wanted one had one.
Kaito nodded. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his wallet. The leather was worn and soft, so she could see the faint outline of something small making the opposite of a dent in the otherwise flat black square.
He slid the T-pill out and held it in the palm of his hand. It was oval-shaped and creamy in color, flecked with tiny brown dots. Nestled in Kaito’s callused hand, it looked like th
e abandoned egg of a tiny bird.
Her father studied the pill in his hand. “I’ve had it a long time now. I’ve been waiting.”
“For what?” Lea asked.
But even as the words left her mouth, she knew. Her lower lip began to tremble. To still it, she thought of Anja’s mother, and Ambrose, and Samuel. She squeezed the plastic dinosaur toy in her hand.
He didn’t answer, but held her gaze. Lea studied the lines of his face. In them she saw again every expression he had ever made—every smile and frown and sigh—saw how they jostled for room on the canvas of his skin, how they’d etched their fleeting existence into his flesh, how they filled it up, made their mark, carved and pulled and twisted until there was no space left. She saw how full he was of the world he had seen, how sated, how tired. Saw, at last, that it wasn’t anything to do with her. Had never been anything to do with her. He’d made his choices, and she would make hers.
The steady roar of the waves crashing on the beach filled the pause. “You’ve been waiting for me,” Lea said. Her voice was strong now, and filled with kindness.
* * *
They walked back along the boardwalk slowly. They didn’t talk about the pill that Kaito had swallowed while standing there on the dock, as the boats rocked gently around them. Instead, her father told her a story. He told her about his childhood, the creaky wooden stairs in his grandparents’ narrow house, the balls of rice with flakes of fish in them that only his grandmother knew how to make, the time his father made him kneel on chopsticks outside the front door because he had been caught lying.
He told her about growing up always looking for a way out, finding that way out in her mother, Uju, who was ambitious and loud and strong, and everything he was not. About how it was heaven at first, before. He didn’t say before what, but she knew it was before Samuel, and before her, before the world forced them to pick sides: trad meals or Nutripaks, jazz or Muzak, life-loving or antisanct. He told her about how it fell apart slowly, the pieces of their lives slipping away.
He told her about leaving. About how he’d never admitted, not even to Uju, that it was Lea who set off the alarms at the hospital. He told her it was the excuse he had been looking for that whole time, that he had been planning an escape for years but could never bear to finally leave. He told her about how it was disappointing, that the life he lived away from them was only filled with more of the same. He told her about realizing one day, after seeing a picture of Uju with someone else, that his family had moved on. He told her about the loneliness, the desperation. But also the moments of pure, untainted joy, the gratitude for the simple fact of the strength in his limbs as he took a walk outside on a clear blue day. A day not unlike today, he told her.
