On Such a Full Sea: A Novel

by Lee, Chang-rae

  It’s quarter to eight, Loreen was saying, looming above Fan as she lay in bed. It’s time for dinner. Loreen said to get dressed right away. She looked mostly recovered, her face no longer so terribly pale like soap, and having washed and combed her hair and put on a beaded necklace, she looked almost glamorous, even with the shapeless, smocklike dress she was wearing. As Fan changed in the immense walk-in closet (into clothes Penelope had given her for the trip, a simple blouse and long skirt borrowed from another family), Loreen reminded her how important this meeting was, for Mister Leo was going to give them the geno-chemo Sewey needed, as well as the drilling equipment for the compound. When Fan stepped out, Loreen had her sit beside her on the bed, so she could brush Fan’s hair. Loreen took her time, running the brush gently through her short locks and pinning up one side and the other and then both, finally pulling all the pins and brushing her hair out again.

  You know now why you’re here, right? Loreen finally said. I know you do. You’re not a dumb girl.

  Fan nodded and said she did.

  You’re going to be that woman’s helper. She’ll show you how to take care of the house. You’ll train under her and then someday take over when she retires. And you can live here the whole time, probably right in this room. But I will tell you this. These people don’t have their own children. It’s just the two of them. So who knows, if they really take to you, maybe someday all this will be yours. Can you imagine that?

  Fan said she couldn’t, but that she understood. She knew she wasn’t going to live at the Smokes forever, so this was the best way, helping get the equipment for the new well, and especially Sewey his medicine. The one sad thing was that she would never see him or Eli or the others again.

  Loreen pressed her hand between hers and, with what Fan could sense was genuine gratitude, said she would let them all know how she felt. That was when Quig knocked on the door and poked his head in to say they should go downstairs. Like Loreen, he looked chipper after washing up, like his usual self again, if much more nicely groomed, the one difference now being that he wasn’t really looking at her, seemingly unable to meet her eyes.

  In the airy living room Mister Leo greeted Quig like he was an old childhood friend, taking both his hands for a hearty shake and addressing him by his full surname, Quigley. Quig reintroduced him to Loreen, whom he smiled at but clearly didn’t remember, and then to Fan. Mister Leo bent down with his hands extended and said, What a darling girl.

  Loreen nudged her and she went to Mister Leo, who was perhaps ten or fifteen years older than Quig, though he looked just as young if not younger, being well fed but still impressively fit. Fan, like any of us B-Mors, would not have ever encountered such a person; the directorate people we might come across in the facilities or observing us in the malls were Charters, yes, but they were often technical types, engineers and accountants who seemed always tightly wound and focused, unlike this Mister Leo, who exuded a pure easeful sense of confidence and command and ever rightful ownership. He was very handsome as well and could have been spliced right into a spot for a supercar or luxury clothier, with his strong chin and full head of salt-and-pepper hair and startling cobalt eyes that matched the face of his bulbous platinum-cased diver’s watch. He was dressed in a silken black mock turtleneck and pressed black jeans with an alligator belt and he wore sleek tasseled black loafers made of a leather whose texture even from a distance looked to be extra-buttery and soft, which it was. He clasped Fan’s cheek and she braced at the surprisingly rough nubs of his fingertips on her jaw, exerting the subtlest pressure. Then he let her go. Mala brought out a tray of glasses of Champagne, and one with mango juice for Fan, and they followed Mister Leo as he showed them the artworks around the room, an abundant collection of sculptures and paintings and objets d’art. He walked with a limp—the leg Quig had saved—but not in the least pathetically, his gait more like it was lingering intentionally than it was skipping a measure. The art was pleasing enough to Fan, who didn’t know the first thing about what she was seeing; obviously Loreen didn’t much care. Quig, however, was quietly amazed, his eyes widening at certain pieces, as if he’d seen them before only in museum catalogs. Mister Leo was talking about a painting of the Italian countryside circa 1890s, highlighting its use of heavier brushstrokes and purer colors, when Fan glimpsed Mala walking off with the empty tray down the other end of a hall. She slipped away when they had moved on to a tabletop sculpture of a very skinny, very elongated figure and found Mala in the kitchen, working at one of two stainless-steel-topped islands.

  The woman was alone in the immense, brightly lighted space, which felt to Fan more like a testing laboratory than a place to prepare anything edible. A steady draw on the air made it cool and dry and odorless. When Mala saw her, she smiled and motioned for Fan to come forward. Why don’t you help me? she suggested. She was making various canapés and gave Fan the cookie press to cut out the last few rounds of cheese and smoked meats and toasts. They assembled the components on the toasts as well as on slices of cucumber, and once they filled the appetizer tray, Mala asked Fan to bring it out to the others.

  Mister Leo was delighted at the sight, giving her an approving clap-clap, and saying that if she would rather keep Mala company than look at boring art she should. Fan nodded. When she returned to the kitchen, Mala was on to getting one of the dinner courses ready, a salad of tomatoes and fennel and fresh mint. Fan must have paused, for the produce surely originated from a place just like B-Mor, if not B-Mor itself, and if she wasn’t recalling how Reg would test the ripeness of the fruits with his long, skinny fingers and in his joking drawl announce Yup or Nope or Maybe, how could she not think about the members of her household and their tireless labors in the facilities? She missed them and had even cried once early on at the Smokes after spooning out dinner from yet another blackened can, her heart heavy for the clinging odor of fry oil in their cramped row-house kitchen, but the truth was that she missed her own work of diving in the tanks just as much, if not more; it was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean gaining “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology; in the water she felt fine-tuned, most thoroughly alive, for she could gauge the hardness and pH and trace salinity simply by how it played between her fingers, how it tingled her cheek; she could tell by how the fish were schooling whether they were hungry or stressed or content. And if all of us thought of our work more like this, wouldn’t we be better off? Although certain wider questions can needle if you let them: How did this ecology come to be? Is it the one we wish to endure?

  Mala was surprisingly talkative as she readied the other dishes for dinner, going over unprompted how she had prepared each one with careful attention to healthfulness. It was all very fresh and vibrant and delectable looking, but afterward Fan had to say that none of it was half as tasty as she expected it to be, though she couldn’t exactly say why. It was seasoned enough and not unusually bitter or sweet, but there was something fundamentally sterile about it, as if the food had not been touched by human hands. Mala, of course, was touching it, and now so was Fan, having been enlisted to chop some herbs to sprinkle on the pasta, and ladle a dollop of sauce on the chicken pieces. Mala seemed to know that she was originally from a facility and didn’t ask about it or why she was with Quig and Loreen, only inquiring whether it was still the case that facility couples were encouraged to have at least four children and received special bonuses for having more, which Fan informed her was no longer so, given the gradually declining need for workers since the worldwide recession began, now quite a number of years ago. In fact, new couples were taxed on the third child and thereafter to offset the costs of health care and schooling and training. This seemed to intrigue Mala, and Fan wondered if she had been born in a production settlement, too. She was an Asian of some kind but her skin was quite dark
and her hair wiry and thick and she didn’t look like she was of New Chinese blood. There were some facilities that had experimented with bringing in groups from places like Vietnam and Indonesia and the Philippines but that didn’t continue, often because there was trouble integrating them with our clans, both in the neighborhoods and on the facilities floors. They were eventually forced out, and there was a period of much strife and even violence and some bloodshed, worse than what happened between the natives and originals way back when, but soon enough it was done. Yet Fan still couldn’t help but feel an affinity for this woman, maybe it was the one-piece uniform so much like what Reg and his workmates wore; or her simple, unassuming expression; or that she chewed on a strip of dried ginger, just like Fan’s grandaunt used to do, her breath always spiced and aromatic. Mala also had these wonderfully petite hands like Fan’s, much smaller than it seemed they ought to be given her otherwise normal size, though looking very sturdy as well, like they could manage whatever task or operation that might be necessary.

  While they arranged the food on separate platters—this was an informal dinner and so would be served as a buffet—Fan asked if she lived in the house all the time. It was an odd question to pose, but something about Mala seemed hidden to Fan, and she couldn’t help but ask. Mala told her that she lived here at the house twenty days in a row and on the twenty-first she spent the day and night away. The next morning she returned for another twenty before going away for a full day again. That was the schedule for the last seventeen years.

  Where do you go?

  Outside.

  To the open counties?

  Mala nodded. She was carefully layering the fruit and berries on the cheesecake and did not stop until she was finished.

  You’re going to ask where I stay.

  Yes, Fan said.

  I will tell you. It’s nothing not to tell. I stay with my family. With my husband and my children.

  They must miss you.

  We’re accustomed to the schedule.

  And apparently, Mala went on to describe, to the money, too. She had no need of any funds when she was working, and what she was paid went very far in the counties, enough that her daughters and her son could attend a tutoring center four days a week and her husband could have a dependable car to drive them there. Naturally, he didn’t have his own job, as he had to take care of and safeguard the children and the house. He was a good man. There was a rough period of adjustment but they made it through. Only once was the house not cleaned and vacuumed and the meals prepared for her day at home, when he was already drunk when she arrived in the morning and asked what happened, and he shouted, You’re not the king! She did not argue with him and went about picking up the toys on the floor and gathering the laundry and washing the dishes when he knelt before her at the kitchen sink and with tears in his eyes begged her for forgiveness. He was so lonely it made him crazy. She told him he was a man and should act that way, and that as long as he was faithful in his heart nothing else mattered. After that he was fine. And her children were fine, too, although she worried that they spent too much time on the handscreens she’d bought them last Lunar New Year, rather than studying. But the truth was where would that studying lead them, especially her son? Because of her work, her daughters, now sixteen and thirteen, would at least have sizable dowries they could offer to suitor families. But her son was eleven years old and disliked his tutors and shirked his studies, and she had little hope he’d do well enough on any tests to have a chance at one of the few corporation jobs. What would he have to do? Could he sell enough of something to make a living in the counties or else with mixed fortune marry someone like her?

  They made up a fresh tray of drinks and brought it to the gallery, and Mala then gave Fan a quick tour of the rest of the house. They started from the kitchen and went upstairs to where Fan and Quig and Loreen were staying and then to the other guest bedrooms, which were also richly decorated and outfitted, but they didn’t venture inside the rooms at the other end of the house, as they were the master suites, one for Mister Leo and another for Miss Cathy. On the main level there was a vid room and gym room full of exercise machines and there was Mister Leo’s huge office full of screens that connected him to his mining operations all over the world, plus the commodity exchanges where the metals and rare earths were traded. There was a glass sunroom where Mister Leo and sometimes Miss Cathy had breakfast, which looked out onto the swimming pool and gardens and the rest of the spacious if not immense property. In the finished basement there was a wine room and a massage and sauna room and a very small pool that was meant for swimming when it was too cold outside, a continuous current flowing from one end. Perhaps Mister Leo would even let her use it. They toured the three-car garage, which seemed just as scrubbed as the kitchen and did not smell of fuel or oil, the vehicles sparkling under the bright lighting.

  Finally Mala showed Fan her own suite next to the kitchen and laundry room, which, in fact, was quite nice, if downright spartan in decoration and furnishings when compared with the rest of the house, a bedroom and sitting area with a desk and a full bathroom, all finished in standard white paint and tile. There was nothing on the walls in the way of decoration except a few printed photographs of Mala’s family above her bed. Her husband was Caucasian and her children were exceptionally attractive in the way mixed offspring often are, enough so that it was hard to see how they were derived from their very ordinary-looking parents. There was a viewer on her desk and Fan checked with Mala before tapping the screen. It lighted up with more pictures of her kids, separately and together, and then of her husband standing in front of their house, a tidy-looking cottage painted yellow with white shutters and a dark asphalt roof. His expression was cheerful enough but not quite fixed of feeling, his gaze tentative and faraway. There were many other shots, most of them, Fan could see, obviously taken on her free-day, everyone dutifully assembling in various family combinations at whatever locale they’d decided to visit, a mini-golf or bowling center or an outdoor eatery at a lakeside beach, with Mala pressed in close among her loved ones but maybe with too much hopeful lean. Or maybe not.

  There was a thumbnail of an unfamiliar girl, and when Mala excused herself to use the toilet, Fan tried to bring it up. But a passcode was required and Fan was not going to bother but then idly keyed in 2-0-2-0, the days Mala worked. Nothing. Then she tried 2-1-2-1, and amazingly, this brought it up.

  It was a girl, Asian, too, around eleven or twelve years of age. But the difference now was that the pictures were taken here at the house, out back in the gardens, or in the kitchen, or downstairs by the little pool. None had Mala in them, just the girl. There were albums of other girls, too, seven in all, again in and about the house and property, each captured solo. They were smiling and not, engaging the camera and not, the backgrounds showing every season and various times of day, nothing common about the portraits except that the girls were all around the same age and of some kind of Asian blood. She noticed something funny about one picture, not the girl so much as the shrubs behind her, which were tiny. She could hear a toilet flush and the faucet running, and she touched one last image and it was of the same girl and Mala, the picture clearly snapped by Mala herself as she extended her hand. They were happy, even giddy, like a joyous mother and daughter, but what Fan was startled by most was how young Mala was, the image clearly many years old.

  When she came out, there was an unmistakable tension in the air and Mala looked straight at the viewer, which Fan had just shut down. Mala asked if she liked the pictures. Fan said she did. If she liked, she could look at them again after dinner, but it was time to get back to the kitchen and clear a few things before the meal. Of course, she could rejoin the others. Fan said she would keep helping, which she did, taking the platters out to the buffet table so that Mala could clean up the island. Fan then loaded the dishwasher with the cooking utensils and heavy mixing bowls, Mala commenting on how capable she was for such
a little girl.

  And very strong. How old are you?

  Fan had the strange urge to tell her the truth but in the last moment caught herself and said, What do you think? and that she should guess. Mala took Fan’s hands in hers and gazed into her face, squeezing her palms with enough increasing force that Fan began to wish she’d just said some age to the woman. She was going to shout out. But then Mala let go, for the lady of the house, Miss Cathy, appeared in the kitchen. Immediately Mala retrieved a carafe of water from the refrigerator and poured out a small glass for her, which Miss Cathy drank down with some pills she had in her hand. Her eyes were sleepy and bloodshot. She had not yet seemed to have noticed Fan. She was wearing a striped-print caftan and was tall and full figured, and you could see that she was once probably a very beautiful and commanding woman, with her fine cheekbones and regal, straight nose; but she was definitely only half a figure now, and sickly looking, her reddish hair going uncolored for some time, as the roots were prominently gray; her forehead was broken out in the center with a rash of tiny pimples, the skin of her hands and forearms papery-dry and flaking.

  Are those people of Leo’s here yet?

  Yes, ma’am, Mala said. They’ve been here for a few hours. This is Fan, who came with them. Fan, this is Miss Cathy.

  Miss Cathy turned to Fan and looked at her as blankly as she might a statuette in the gallery, one that had been there a very long time.

  Does she speak English?

  Yes, ma’am, Mala told her.

  That’s good. She looked glumly at Fan and said, Do you think you’ll like it here?

  I don’t know yet, Fan simply answered.

  Her matter-of-fact tone piqued the woman’s attention, as she was obviously expecting a different reply.