On Such a Full Sea: A Novel

by Lee, Chang-rae

  And while self-sacrifice is a hallmark of life here in B-Mor, one of our original and most cherished mores, is there anyone who does not flinch whenever he or she hears of yet another act such as Ruby’s, which seem to grow more numerous each quarter, each year? In the old days, with our first generations, people would relieve their households all the time, but those were mostly the very old, ultrastubborn, salty pioneers who were too proud to become any kind of burden, their gestures as much prods to the community as discharges of their respective families.

  Yet one looks around, and not just at the more flagrant cases. Visits to the health clinics were once unlimited, a yearly exam for every citizen an option as well, and in this way Charter people had very little on us, save that most of them go to private offices and see the same physicians each time. Our clinics are staffed by Charter doctors (if the youngest ones, often fresh out of residency), who rotate through monthly, but the nurses and physician’s assistants are constant and are B-Mor residents, and it’s these people who tender the real care. You could stop in and get your thumb stitched up (a regular occurrence for our indomitable fish filleters); you could pick up a bottle of pills for impotence or anxiety; you could get a quick session of chiropractic or acupunctural therapy, and for the most part people availed themselves of these things without abusing the privilege. In fact, we often reminded ourselves of our fortunate circumstance with the saying “Save some noodles for tomorrow’s lunch.”

  Now there are so many new rules that make it all very complicated. The doors are still open twenty-four/seven but for life-threatening emergencies only; the rest of us with broken fingers or kidney stones have to wait it out until the next morning, an emergency-care doctor making the final determination. And when you do check in at the clinic, everything that has happened to you and that you’ve ever been prescribed or treated with pops up on the screen like always, but now some lines flash when a certain frequency is exceeded, and if you want that particular prescription or treatment, you’ll have to pay a fee beyond the usual token fee to receive it, an additional cost that is sometimes not so small.

  When did this change? you ask, though of course nobody at the desk knows. It did change, and now is, these “reforms” from this point forward in force, and the result is that you may forgo that diagnostic X-ray, you might take only every other blood pressure pill if that’s tolerable, you will decide to amble another season on that arthritic hip in the hopes that it will somehow, someday, kindly warm. Really, every person we know has had to make such compromises, most not leading to horrific consequences, but the truth is you can’t help but wonder where this will lead, what new reforms will be instituted next year, or in ten, and to what extent the quality of life in B-Mor might someday come to resemble the conditions outside.

  They say that with the economy stuck so long in the doldrums, even the Charter villages have had to institute certain cost-cutting measures, like no more free full-body scans each quarter for everyone over age thirty, though some of our more cynical citizens contend this is simply what the directorate and the Charters want us to believe. Even if this is true, what of it? How can it matter what goes on inside those gates? You might as well worry about the life cycle of the nearest star. A twinkling in the heavens, rightful but brief. We must remind ourselves of what the reality is within those lovely confines, that along with the neatly paved streets and the spotless schools and the fancy shops offering uncontaminated goods from all over the globe comes the fact that very little is guaranteed for a Charter person, if anything at all, and that one must continually work and invest and have enough money to sustain a Charter lifestyle or else leave.

  This is, in fact, what had befallen certain open counties people. For it is known that a surprising number of them are former Charters. One might ask, Hey, why don’t they just come to the gates of a place like B-Mor? But it’s not as simple as that, and in practical terms, impossible. They can’t quite enter a B-Mor–like settlement because those are oversubscribed already, the row houses or residence halls occupied right up to the rooftops, our children assigned two to a desk at school. Plus, what could any newcomer among us possibly do to make a living? The jobs in the grow facilities and water and power plants are always filled and backed by apprentice attendants, who have been training since youth to step into the positions the moment they come open. The smattering of privately run businesses, like the one the Rivera-Dengs own, have been under family control for generations, and their leaseholds are rarely relinquished.

  It’s ironic that ex-Charters should have to fall so far so quickly, that there’s no middle realm for them and their kin, pushed out as they are into the counties with little practical know-how or clue as to how to get by. It’s the reason why so few do get by, at least for very long, in particular those with solely Charter-specific skills, such as real estate speculators, or brokers of insurance or stocks, or the writer/creators of evening programs, one of whom was a compulsive gambler who squandered his considerable fortune. Needless to say, he did not last.

  So when our dear Fan came to after the assault by Loreen, lying again in the cot with the splint redone, she couldn’t help but wonder about Quig. Like any of us, she knew the possibilities. Could he in fact be a former Charter nurse, or maybe even a doctor? Though as they say in the Charter villages, that would be quite an “outcome.” Doctors are among the most important and prestigious people around, especially for Charters, and thus often quite wealthy, too.

  The messes were gone, her arms and legs and torso sponged mostly clean, the floor cleared except for a faint scrim of yellow paint. Loreen was of course gone, too, and though a panic that the mad woman might soon return sparked through Fan, she had a naturally reciprocal welling of what must be gratitude for Quig’s having halted the beating. She was surely wary of him, but the fact remained that he had already rescued her twice.

  For the rest of the day Fan kept as still as she could. She tried to quell her hunger and thirst the same way she’d pushed back the need to breathe when she was underwater in the tanks, with the force of pure will, but applying it now like a balm to the jabs in her belly, the dry spots in her throat. She wanted not to need anything, at least as long as she could bear it. She couldn’t stand up, so she could not look out the little window set high in the wall, but she listened to numerous vehicles and people who came and went through the compound all day. One of the voices was Loreen’s, bossy and annoyed, rudely ordering people about; yet no one seemed to contest her. There were other voices and she listened for Quig’s; but none were his.

  It was toward the end of the afternoon that someone approached the door, which immediately made Fan brace and sit up. When it opened, it was neither Loreen nor Quig but rather a pale, curly-haired boy of about thirteen or so, wearing a soiled T-shirt and dungarees and decrepit sneakers, and sipping from a drink box of strawberry-flavored soy milk. He had another drink box in his free hand and he offered it to Fan. She poked the straw through the foil hole and they drank without speaking. Fan surely couldn’t help but recall the breaks at the grow facility when she and Reg would buy a cup of tamarind juice from the refreshments cart and maybe slip away for a quick hug or even a peck or two before getting back to work. She drank the soy milk slowly in a long, steady draw. It was brackish and artificially flavored but still tasted as good as anything she could imagine. All the while the boy stared at her without a hint of self-consciousness. His sleepy, slightly up-angled eyes, like a goat’s, were the color of seawater beneath an overcast sky, and just as blank and murky.

  Finally he said, You really from B-Mor?

  Fan nodded. It hadn’t occurred to her until that moment that she hadn’t uttered more than a few words since walking out from the gates. She had not meant to keep such a silence but here she was with a sensation of stitchedness upon her mouth and there was no reason to try to break it until she had to.

  They say it’s nice there. Someday I’m going to see it.

&n
bsp; She finished her drink and held it out, shaking it.

  You want another?

  She nodded again.

  He skipped away and quickly returned, this time with two drink boxes in each hand. This easy bounty surprised her and made her worry for them both, in case he’d done wrong to retrieve them. But she drank two more anyway, one right after the other, while he asked her numerous questions about B-Mor that oddly enough could all be answered with a simple shake or nod of the head, which was perhaps an apt reflection of the workings of his mind but also his instinct telling him that that’s all he would get out of her. He asked, Did all the children go to school? Did everyone end up working in the “factories”? Did they ever run out of things to eat? Were the streets and parks as neat and clean as they say? Did people really live to old age? Yes, yes, no, yes, sort of; and then she gave replies to a score of other queries both childish and knowing. He was excited to talk to her and had turned over the large white toilet bucket that had been left for Fan as his own seat and would have gone on querying her indefinitely had Loreen’s voice not sawed through the air.

  Sewey!

  The boy rose slowly to his feet. I give out the numbers, he grumbled.

  Sewey! You still in there?

  Okay, Ma! he yelled.

  Okay nothing! Get your ass out here! Now!

  I’ll bring more drinks later, he said, a dull grin marking his face. Then he left her alone, locking her in once again.

  • • •

  FOR THE FEW DAYS Fan lived on flavored soy milk and graham crackers and peanut brittle and the odd piece of chicken jerky, Sewey was her sole sustained contact with the world. The injury was more minor than Quig had surmised, for her leg was only moderately painful and already seemed to be healing. She kept this fact to herself, an instinct for discretion overriding any fears she had for what might befall her, good leg or no. Quig came briefly to examine her leg and the splint, but he appeared both times in the middle of the night, his mini-flashlight rousing her from sleep, her heart bounding in a fitful dash; and before she could form any words, he’d have retightened the cord and checked the splint bindings and extinguished the light and left, depositing her back in her dreams. And what were those dreams? They were tableaus of the unknown, naturally, visions of anxiety and miserable solitude, the kind you might have when you are a child and clenched by high fever, when you see your loved ones from the bottom of a salt pit and they are as far off as the moon, when your arms are too heavy to lift, much less wave, and your voice has no carry. Fan’s dreams were all this but shot through as well with what surely were figments of a self-doubt characterized in her mind by the silhouette of our row houses set against a blood-orange haze of sky, the line of the roofs deviating by certain centimeters as they spanned the endless street, the segments discernibly shifting but never quite broken.

  During those first visits from Sewey, Fan learned about life in the compound. She hardly had to ask any questions; Sewey was a born talker, the kind of talker you meet and have to nod at frequently and right off think about how to slip away from, but of course, Fan was going nowhere and Sewey had the companion he’d always longed for and no adults or older kids around to tell him to shut up. Fan was not just the quiet type but someone with a bountiful store of patience who didn’t mind following the endless branches of his thoughts as they reached skyward and backward and around the corner, toward whatever sun he alone felt the warmth of and could see. He brought another old bucket for a seat (she using hers to relieve herself, which he happily emptied and hosed out at day’s end), while she ate or drank or mostly just lay there and listened to Sewey talk while playing with something he called a yo-yo, a translucent orange plastic disc with a string wound about its split middle that he made go up and down, up and down, and sometimes would let spin in place, magically suspended a few centimeters above the floor, before flicking it back up.

  And he told her more or less this: that they were in Quig’s place, and had been for as long as he could remember. Sewey was born here, in fact: Loreen was indeed his mother. She had come to give birth to him and was lucky she had because he needed to be cut out of her to be born and Quig was the only person in the Smokes and within a two-day’s drive around who could do it, at least without killing the mother most of the time. Loreen had then stayed on, at first to work off the debt she owed Quig, eventually becoming his main assistant and scheduler. It was the most important job at Quig’s because of the dozens of people who showed up every day with injuries from bad accidents like severe cuts and burns and broken bones, not even mentioning the pains from the C-illnesses that pretty much afflicted every adult. Each arrival was an emergency—it had to be, to burn fuel for the winding trek into these hills—and each arrival knew to bring money or gold or jewelry or else some special offer of barter or services. Loreen’s job was to assign an order to them determined by injury but mostly by what they could offer to move up a few spots or even to the head of the line. Naturally there were constant renegotiations: if someone came and got a place ahead of you, you could offer something more, or else different. It was your decision, and then Loreen’s, and of course, ultimately Quig’s, Sewey tasked as the messenger whenever the batteries for the two-ways went out, conveying word of a young man with two fingers crushed and near amputated offering twenty dollars to cut them off cleanly, or a lady with a festering rash covering half her back who will give him a gold wedding band, or an older man with a terrible pain in his side who will leave his pretty daughter for three days in exchange for surgery, four if the “doctor” could also pull a bad tooth, and every once in a while a younger person might be left there, indefinitely, as payment; it went like this all day and every day, Sewey describing it with a much younger child’s innocent delight, the terribly sick and injured queued up beneath the ferocious sun or pelting rain to have Quig take a look and say if he could fix them. Most times he could, which is why so many people were journeying to the Smokes, word of his skills having spread across the region over the last fifteen or so years after Quig had left the big Charter village down south where he once lived.

  Apparently, Quig had not been a physician in his village, but rather a veterinarian with a large, successful practice. With a few partners, he owned an animal hospital and operated a small fleet of house-call vans, the business thriving until that infamous year of the bird and swine flu epidemics that hit in rapid succession and crossed the species barrier to infect and kill dozens of Charters in a village out west. In the ensuing panic across the Charter Association every last home-raised fowl and toy swine was destroyed and soon after all the dogs and even the cats and ornamental birds, with a permanent ban on all nonmarine pets instituted, and soon thereafter even on pet fish, just to be safe. His profession was gone overnight. He and his wife eventually lost their condo to the bank and were living month to month in a trades- and services-people’s dormitory when they were caught in a sting selling animal tranquilizers at a health club. They were arrested, swiftly tried and convicted, their sentence immediate banishment; Quig and his wife had a young daughter and the three of them had to leave behind whatever they couldn’t fit into their car, the very same that Fan rode in the back of that first drenching night. Apparently, his wife and daughter did not last long.

  They got dead like right away, Sewey told her now. And adding as if quoting: How it always goes.

  Fan asked him what happened, but he shook his head.

  Momma won’t say. And she told me to never ask him and to never bring it up. So we shouldn’t.

  They were quiet for a minute, Sewey unfurling his yo-yo up and down, getting it to hover, skitter across the floor, snap back.

  Momma says we got a good thing here, even if B-Mors or Charters would never believe it. Is that why you came out here? To see if it was as awful as people say?

  Fan didn’t answer. While it didn’t matter because the rhetorical was Sewey’s optimal mode, as he got his wind and
proceeded to ramble about how sometimes people died before they could be seen by Quig, literally collapsing while waiting, and how if they had come alone it was Sewey’s job to go through their clothes for anything of value before summoning certain of Quig’s men to haul the body away, it strikes us that Fan must have posed his question to herself again. It couldn’t have been just Reg she had gone to search out. She had no real leads as to where he might be, or if he was even alive. So why would any sane person leave our cloister for such uncertainties? He was the impetus, yes, the veritable without which, but not the whole story. One person or thing can never comprise that, no matter how much one is cherished, no matter how much one is loved. A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.

  So let us keep our attention on the small. Which means, for the moment, that we should consider Reg with special focus. To be sure, Reg was unaware of himself as anything but a keeper of Building Six vegetable beds F-8 through F-24, a fourth-generation member of the Xi-Jang household, and the first and only boyfriend of Fan.

  Let’s not forget he meant the world to her, and even if that speaks more to the limited extent of her experience than his personal qualities, we ought to remind ourselves of how fetching a young man he was in sum. Very tall, as noted, around 180 centimeters not counting the fluffy pad of his hair, which made him seem at least six or seven centimeters taller. We have, of course, described his amazing skin, its hue and hand. He was by nature filial to his household, bringing home whenever he could hard candies for the younger ones and sticky rice cakes for his elders, and then without exception (after maybe playing with Joseph et al.) taking out Fan on their free-days, most often spending the entire afternoon in the subterranean mall shopping for stickers and costume jewelry and other trinkets and splitting a lychee smoothie and basket of spicy-sweet fried chicken wings with her. He always treated for the movies or games or photo-booth images of themselves that each carried in an old-fashioned hand-sized folding album, one of our favorite shots showing Reg having to tilt far down to sip his straw from their shared drink, Fan craning up for hers, their smooth cheeks drawn in. Both are looking at the camera with a mirthful conspiracy in their eyes that is part of the animated moment but also suggests how wonderfully unadulterated their romance was, as yet free of the grit of life that accumulates, inexorably, no matter what you do to screen it out. Call it first love, puppy love, but in this case Fan and Reg didn’t just rush away on their free-day to the pillowed compartment of a mini-inn like so many of our youth (and not-youth) now do and on the roaring pyre of their lust self-immolate. Fan and Reg were as keen on each other as any, let us say that. The difference lies in their easeful lingering, in their letting the time simply pass, thereby unbinding themselves from the false insistence of the hours. They were not the only couple, of course, to do this, but it was plainly heartening to see good young people, out in public, enjoying in quiet thrall the company of the other while welcoming the rest of us to draw upon their contentment, the gleam of which broadcasts wider than one can ever believe, which warms from within.