Since they’ve been gone, B-Mor has not been the same place. We have mentioned the murals featuring their portraits, guerrilla-painted under cover of night, with other less prominent notations around the blocks becoming more and more a part of our everyday life. Does it seem that the streets these days are more frequently blemished, at least between the twice-daily sweepings, by the litter of bottle tops and taco wrappers and, amazing to say, gobs of spit (the habit of expectorating long thought eradicated after countless years of education and social reinforcement!), or that the queues at the movie theaters and school sporting events aren’t as orderly as you expect, distinctly more wedge than file, or that even inside the grow facilities, where nothing so much as a few liters of deviation is tolerated in those massive tanks, significant numbers of fry fish have been going missing, presumably to be nurtured in illegal home nurseries.
Just the other week an older fellow and his wife were caught by inspectors of the directorate with a catfish-raising operation set up in their basement; they were visited because of what the inspectors believed was a faulty water meter, and when they were led down to the basement by an unknowing child, they could hardly believe the elaborate thicket of tubs and piping and filters filling the room right up to the ceiling. To spare the rest of their household the old couple took full responsibility, immediately sacrificing themselves, and when asked how they thought they could get away with such a blatant violation, the wife purportedly said, We knew it couldn’t last, but who cares anyway.
Who cares anyway?
This is a startling attitude, one that you might not even hear muttered by some preternaturally indolent, thrice-rejected facilities applicant whose only remaining choices are a janitorial position at the shopping mall and a potentially hazardous job at the wastewater treatment plants. But so baldly voiced, and then by a fish tank alumna, whose pension is modest but certainly adequate and forever secure? This amazes. Enough to make one think ahead to a perhaps inevitable epoch, when the character and disposition of this place might have changed so profoundly as to be untenable. Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?
Reg, of course, was not one to entertain such ideations. It wasn’t in his makeup. What he possessed instead, it is now clear, was much rarer, something that occurs in B-Mor and other cousin settlements maybe only a few times in a generation, if at all.
For Reg, the rumor goes, was C-free.
Yes, it is hard to believe.
Our gangly, bumbling, perennially smiling Reg. Free of the curse! Free of any rogue neoplasms, in either fact or destiny. Naturally, there is a record of every inhabitant’s annual blood panel, which unlike the general physicals have not been suspended, protein, sugar, fat, hormone, vitamin, and numerous other levels collected and tabulated to track and identify trends across the B-Mor population, rather than any individual’s state of health; but always included are tests for known markers of disease. Eventually everyone will express it, the blood panels show this, unless they’re done in by something else, like poor young drowned Joseph or stroke-afflicted Ruby. Our tainted world looms within us, every one.
Most Charters can afford the latest drugs and interventional therapies, such that very few perish directly from a form of the disease; on average they live quite a bit longer than we do, ten or so years. But most will succumb instead to something known as the Crash, a degenerative condition in which the major organs begin to fail, one after another, caused by the accrued ill side effects of the serial therapies, or maybe the therapies themselves (no one really knows, though study has been continuous), until complete shutdown ensues, and there’s nothing left to be done. We suppose that there are a few of us who would, given the means, endure the serial treatments and procedures that Charters now consider a natural part of the experience of life, applied measure after measure, each one increasingly heroic. That what remains of our dwindling resources should be devoted by all rights to you, or you.
The rest of us, however, recognize the advantages of not knowing when one’s day will come. Better to be fine up to the moment a severe fever or backache or rash flares up and lingers, when it’s too late for anything but the quiet room of palliatives, the kind lantern of a picture viewer, and steady visitations from one’s kin and closest friends, whose tears flow not so much in sadness as prideful recognition of your role in the legacy of our cadre. For you have done your job, you have labored and nurtured, you have helped secure the foundations of B-Mor in this fraught civilization without heed to your own dreams, ever modest, unfinished.
And you will never die alone, something that even Charters cannot say, what with how intent they are to outlive one another.
But to pass from mere old age! To drift away in one’s sleep or pull up a chair at the food court with the not-quite-idle thought, I’ll just shut my eyes for a second. What a blessing that must be for one and all. And to think that Reg might have that chance, indeed, makes sense in the way of a karmic embodiment, in that he was an exceedingly ingenuous soul, a true babe of the woods whose striking sandy-hazel eyes cast more broad sheen than sparkle.
In fact, it’s funny that Reg should end up being the one who was so cellularly pure. The lines of his family, the Xi-Jang clan, go back right to the beginning of B-Mor, the Jangs among the originals who landed in the destitute city that very first hour. After the initial period of strife with the handful of remaining inhabitants finally died down, one of the Jang boys fell in love with a girl from one of the holdout native families, surname Willis, and married her, producing several children. There’s no record of further mixing for the Jangs, just an extensive linking during those early years with the Xi clan of Shining Tomorrow Road, but there are inevitable jokes and snickerings about certain undiluted features that show up in every generation of the clan, like Reg’s amazing head of Afro-type hair, which clearly derive from that Willis girl.
How indelible, blood. Which is why, after Reg went missing, the rest of his household was apparently shuttled by special bus to the clinic for a few days of testing and retesting, everyone from the walker-ambling grannies to the swaddled babes scanned and pricked, and closely observed afterward by platoons of purple-jumpsuited Charter researchers seeking to determine whether some clan practice of hygiene or domiciling or even cuisine could somehow explain the perfect anomaly of Reg. They couldn’t, though every so often we will hear that the younger Xi-Jangs have been summoned from whatever facility or mall where they might be and bused to the clinic for ultimately fruitless examinations, going so far as to corral other B-Mor clans whose members are believed to have certain genetic filaments woven through their beings. Word of this quickly spread, presumably to the negative, but now one hears that among those of Fan’s and Reg’s age, in the midst of their prime marrying years, the more “native-looking” young B-Mors have become remarkably popular.
This, needless to say, is an ironic development. It is astounding that one could ever imagine that the dance clubs and tearooms and game parlors would be dotted by young men who visited the ladies’ salons to have their hair teased wildly à la Reg, or that there would be a companion run by both sexes on bronzers at the pharmacy, or that the prevailing style of outerwear would feature something called a hoodie, which some enterprising teen discovered in the vid archives and had his mother design and produced in a counties factory (and sold by the dozen, like cinnamon-sugar malasadas), and which transforms any respectable, demure person into a shifty, slump-shouldered gnome.
There was a time—not as long ago as one would like to think—when people of Reg’s appearance would have been talked about openly, right in their faces, as if they didn’t have eyes or ears. Maybe there would be a young mother and her not-purely-from-the-originals kids strolling through the park, and the mere sight of them might elicit a comment by some busybody auntie to her friend, They can still breathe through such flat little noses! or Even the winter sun makes them darker, or And such an attractive
woman! Such talk didn’t much disrupt the atmosphere of whatever park, or mall, or facility lunchroom, and though not applauded or admired, it was certainly, like some extra measure of mugginess on an otherwise pleasant day, not found to be intolerable.
When we were much younger, and as yet unaware of certain aspects of B-Mor, there was an uncle of ours who lived in one of the clan row houses on the block. His name was Kellen Yip. He and his wife, Virginia, didn’t have a family of their own—they wanted children but were unable to reproduce—and for a while he often played with us on free-day or after his shift in our street contests of tag and soccer. Uncle Kellen was our favorite among those uncles and aunts (really they were second and third older cousins) who treated us fondly enough but saw us mostly as a pack of pesky sweaty-heads to be fed and duly shushed off. He was a slight man, perhaps no more than fifty-five kilos fully dressed, but he was fast and athletic, and to view him now is to realize how adept he was at gearing himself down to our skill level. He could coax the ball from foot to knee to shoulder like it was a circus animal, and if we showed mettle and were aggressive and quick enough, he’d leave the ball vulnerable so we could win it. What a feeling that was! What a surge of elation and pride and maybe, too, an arrogance tinged with that slightest instinctual contempt for the defeated, at least until he mussed our hair and trumpeted our names as we streaked away.
Afterward he would sit on the stoop with us and “talk story” about olden times while Auntie Virginia poured cups of iced tea to go with the boiled peanuts she’d bring out in a white plastic bowl. Through the muted crackling of the dampened shells, he’d describe how things were for the originals, who were, of course, before his time but whom he’d heard about from his great-grandparents. His stories weren’t exactly the ones you studied in school or watched vids of at the historical museum, the oft-documented stuff about how by dint of their collective will and the discipline of their leaders in keeping everyone focused on the job the originals transformed the desperate nothingness about them.
Uncle Kellen was a truck driver who transported fresh B-Mor goods to Charter villages and from those collected any unsold produce plus second-hand clothing and furniture and other discards to sellers out in the counties. He would take a big gulp of his cold drink and wipe his brow with the back of his hand and you could see the droplets of perspiration sparkling in his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, just like one of us but old, and he might begin by asking one of us an ordinary question about B-Mor history such as who was the first original to open a private business, to which we eager-to-please students would shout the answer (Wu Gangshur!), and then what he sold (kitchen and bathroom plumbing supplies!), but then he would remind us that there were, in fact, numerous existing businesses when the originals arrived, businesses run by the smattering of natives who had stayed on, whose deeds and leases to their properties were unilaterally voided and reassigned to the (then nascent) directorate.
But there was no real population to speak of anyway, one of the more stridently confident of us might have said. Those shops were failing!
You should know, he answered, eyebrows rising, that they were failing for a very long time.
We asked what he meant by this, and Uncle Kellen explained that while it was true that the existing city was an impoverished husk of a society, with just enough inhabitants to fill the schools and ride the buses and, indeed, shop in the stores, there were schools and buses and small businesses, there was a police force on patrol, with a governmental body overseeing it all (if not terribly well); and that this society, barely clinging to life, was still stubbornly doing so, and might have improved itself if given the opportunity our originals had to retool and create a B-Mor of their own. Where most of them ended up instead were the open counties.
Not all of the native citizens left after the arrival of the originals, Uncle Kellen told us. Living around the old hospital complex was a sizable population who had refused a relocation scheme that would send them out to an abandoned university campus in the western part of the state. An attempt was made to evict them by force, but after dozens of people including children were killed in an apartment building that somehow caught fire during the operation, it was decided to let them remain, though no more public utilities would be provided to them.
The Parkies! we sneered, which is how they were identified in our history class materials, owing to their subsequent annexation of a large city park. For nearly a generation they were entrenched in their flawed Eden. There was a brief but memorable study unit on the period, with close-up footage of the initial protests and ensuing riots and eventually a sprouted tent city. The Parkies contended that because there were no jobs, and they’d been cut off from city services, that they needed the land for growing food and collecting firewood and drilling water wells, though the historical record shows that by the end of their occupation all the trees were felled and the ponds had become craters of muck and the plots were either misused or neglected and were producing nothing. They’d even tried farming shrimp but had the wrong equipment and token assistance from the authorities, and they only succeeded in fouling their water.
Now it is a typical park again, very popular on fair-weather free-days.
But do you realize how difficult it is to grow fruits and vegetables outside? Uncle Kellen said to us. We forget about how ideally engineered our grow facilities are. No pests or bad weather. Uncontaminated, nutrient-rich media. And all of you now trained from an early age in the techniques of maximized production. It is only natural for you to believe that we have achieved mastery.
And you believe we haven’t, Uncle?
He snorted, snacking on his peanuts, being quiet in the way he often was, not quite responding to our questions, clearly not for lack of views but because he wanted us to formulate our own opinions rather than automatically inscribe ourselves with his, which we would have done, immediately, happily.
That’s not what’s important, he said.
All these years later we’re still not certain what he meant. Perhaps this is why we remember him so well. You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes it is how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain periods of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now.
A couple of free-days afterward, we knocked on his bedroom door on the top floor (row-house attic rooms are always the smallest, and thus go to couples) and Auntie Virginia answered and told us he was away driving, a rare instance for Uncle Kellen on a free-day; sometimes there were shortages or maybe a big occasion when a village required an emergency shipment of goods, and someone had to go. Like most everybody else, Uncle Kellen was a hard worker and devoted to whatever might benefit B-Mor, so it was no surprise that he volunteered. The next time she said he had a chest cold and was napping, which seemed like bad luck, but when on the following free-day we noticed Auntie Virginia making a cup of tea in the kitchen and we bounded upstairs to their door knocking and calling to no answer, despite sounds of movement within, we had to wonder if we had somehow disappointed or offended him. We accused one another of being rude to Uncle, of haughtiness and overfamiliarity, of accidentally kicking him too often in the shins, and would probably have gone on berating ourselves had the directorate not posted a message for certain citizens to report to the central clinic for testing.
A month before, just around the time when Uncle receded, all of us B-Mors had gone in to be evaluated for a certain marker for liver disease, but this time it was only certain people being summoned, the listing of their names by clan flashed on every screen in the settlement, hand and home, facility and mall. Of course, it was casually known who might be mixed, but to that point it had never been officially designated. It was a very small percentage, in any case, and we were young and wouldn’t have really cared about such things, but to our surprise there was one person in our extended clan on
the list, and it was Auntie Virginia.
She was the last person you’d think was possessed of native blood. She married into our clan, yes, but she was very pale, paler, in fact, than most of us, who tend to be ruddy and darken quickly in the sun. She was on the short side, too, and spoke with a faint New China accent (like many older B-Mors did back then), and Uncle Kellen had known her since their first school days, her parents and siblings all derived from the originals, or at least appearing like they were. So what happened? Maybe the directorate has that information somewhere, the evidentiary gel lines. We shall never know. What we do know is that Uncle Kellen was hardly seen after that, at least for a while. In the mornings he skipped the household’s breakfast and went to the truck transport garage, maybe picking up something to eat on the way. He put in for overnight runs, which by nature were potentially dangerous, having to negotiate so much open counties land. And on free-days both he and Auntie Virginia rarely came down the stairs, and if they did, they scooted out as if they were late for a shift. Where did they go? Maybe to a back booth in a tea parlor, or to a big park, where they could walk about anonymously.
On Such a Full Sea: A Novel Page 7
