On Such a Full Sea: A Novel

by Lee, Chang-rae

  Where are you from?

  The counties.

  She’s from the Smokes, ma’am, Mala said.

  Where’s that?

  I don’t know, ma’am.

  You must know, Miss Cathy asked Fan.

  She shook her head because she didn’t know, not really, and whatever else she could add did not seem worthwhile.

  Miss Cathy was now staring at her, examining, it seemed, every hair on her head, the shape and color of her eyes, the texture of her skin.

  She touched Fan’s face. And then she turned away. She said to Mala, Should I go back up or are you serving now?

  I think Mister Leo will be ready for dinner soon, ma’am.

  Well, then, let’s do so.

  In the dining room they served themselves except for Miss Cathy, whose plate Mala filled with small samples of the dishes. She sat at one end of the table, Mister Leo at the other, with Quig and Loreen to either side of him and Fan closest to Miss Cathy. Mala went back into the kitchen. Everyone ate quite heartily, save for Miss Cathy, who took an exploratory bite of each dish and then no more. She just drank her wine, though not with any gusto. She didn’t say much, either, even when her husband tried to bring her into the conversation by saying how she had selected much of the art to buy at auction, as she was a talented painter herself. He didn’t seem to mind when she showed no interest in engaging with him, and he simply went on to other topics, among which were the misguided new policies of the directorate, who were stifling free enterprise with a host of new taxes, and the worrisome trend of Charter youth, who despite all their advantages and test prep were scoring lower and lower, in raw terms, on the yearly Exams.

  No one seems to care because the results come out in percentiles! he said. But I’ve looked back at the historical numbers and performance is declining at every grade level. I will assure you the tests are not getting harder. In fact they’re getting easier, is what I am told. So we must conclude that Charter children are not as bright as they used to be. Or else they are feeling less pressure to do well, being disincentivized by the wealth of their parents. Either way, it’s an ominous sign. We’re losing what makes a Charter a Charter, which is the tireless drive for excellence. The compulsion to build and to own. Meanwhile, the number of outsiders testing into our ranks is ever rising. They aren’t in decline. This alarms some people, but I’m not so against it, actually, if it means we’re getting top-notch young minds.

  You believe in new blood, Miss Cathy mumbled.

  Yes I do, he replied, not acknowledging her weary tone. No truly intelligent person can be a bigot. We welcome all as long as they have drive and a capacity for hard work. He briefly glanced at Fan and then took Quig by the shoulder. Of course, talent and skill count for a lot. I never told you the whole story, Cathy, but were it not for this good man I’d be a cripple, if not a corpse rotting on the side of a counties road. We need people like him. I keep trying to tell him we could arrange for a review of his case, a reinstatement hearing, but he wants no part of it. Do you, my good man?

  Quig said he did not.

  No, you don’t. It’s my one criticism. You are stubborn. I hope not fatally. But nonetheless we’re going to help you out. The drill has been scheduled to be trucked down to you. And about the geno-chemo for Loreen’s son. I’m happy to tell you it was just sent over this morning by a friend I have on the pharmacorp board. It’s right in my office.

  Loreen thanked him profusely, reaching out to clasp his hand, though her touch seemed to disagree with him and he leaned back in his chair, interlocking his fingers behind his head.

  And what do we receive in return? The joy and satisfaction of knowing we’ve done some good. And I have my leg! My dear wife has me! And Mala, Mala, please come out here, Mala gets a new young helper to train and to be her companion. I’m afraid we’re not the best company, are we my dear?

  Oh, Mister Leo, Mala said, that’s not true.

  Tell the truth! Mister Leo teased her.

  I am, Mala insisted.

  No, you’re not, Miss Cathy pronounced, to which Mala didn’t respond. She stood there awkwardly for a moment before asking if she might clear people’s dishes. Fan rose to help and Miss Cathy told her to sit, that she was a guest tonight and Mala would take care of it. Isn’t that right, Mala?

  Yes, ma’am, of course. She is a guest.

  She wants to help, Mister Leo said.

  A guest is a guest, Miss Cathy said, with an unusual amount of feeling. Then she winced, pressing a hand to her chest. Whatever struck seemed to pass but she took a blue pill anyway from a tiny silver case, set atop one of her rings.

  Are you all right, my love?

  Did you hear what I said?

  Yes, we did, my love.

  No one spoke for a while. Loreen was staring at her as if she was crazy while both Quig and Fan had just begun to fathom the steep troughs of this woman’s sadness.

  Mister Leo finally said: I think you’re tired, my dear.

  I just woke up, she replied. But you’re right, Leo, I am tired. And so tiring, too, for your guests. Excuse me. I am going to bed.

  And with that, she left.

  Mister Leo did not appear in the least perturbed, asking Mala to serve dessert. While she did, he went over the usage of the special drilling equipment with Quig; it would be a two-day loan, but if it went a third because of difficult ground conditions, there would be a cost, as it was being taken off a big job up in Ontario. Quig said he wished to pay for the first two days as well but Mister Leo wouldn’t hear of it, just wanting to set out the deal, though it was obviously not a matter of money to him. Rather he was the owner, he was the builder, and the price of his engagement in any agreement or sphere was the primacy of his executive privilege. Quig did not protest, and whether it was more to save the charges or his rapidly expanding dislike of this man whose life he saved was not clear. All we know is that he was still avoiding eye contact with Fan, who surely must have been making some calculations herself. She had come to value and maybe even adore her entrenchment in the dank but cozy Smokes but it was never a solution and now with circumstance conveying her here she had to determine whether to try this strange household or somehow split off again on her own.

  And so in her forthright fashion, Fan said to Mister Leo: Do you know of someone in this village named Bo Liwei?

  Who? Mister Leo said, between sips of his coffee.

  Bo Liwei. He is now thirty-two years old. He is the second son of Bo Qianfan and Xi Shihong. He tested out of B-Mor Facility 2A twenty years ago. He is my brother.

  Show me his picture.

  Fan didn’t have one; in fact, her household never had one, following the B-Mor practice of consigning everything about the promoted to the status of lore. In fact, there were no uploaded pictures of him, either, only that sharp etch of his name with the others on the big monument in the park.

  He was accepted at Seneca?

  Fan said, Seneca Hamlet.

  Seneca Hamlet? I haven’t heard that in a while. I think it was one of the villages that was dissolved, or maybe absorbed, at least fifteen years ago now. There used to be five or six very small villages in the vicinity of the lake but not all of them could make it work. They combined with us, we were the most established, and Seneca became Seneca as it is today. But a lot of those villagers went elsewhere.

  So have you heard of him?

  No, he said, with a surety that suggested he could not possibly know of such a person, despite his earlier comments. You’ve not heard of him, have you, Mala?

  Mala said she hadn’t and began somewhat hastily clearing the dessert dishes. She dropped one and it shattered and this time Fan helped her. Mala’s thumb was bleeding quite badly and Fan said she should see to her wound. Mala excused herself and Quig and Loreen and even Mister Leo started helping Fan pick up the shards from the floor and then bring th
e rest of the dishware into the kitchen. By the time Mala returned, everything had been brought in and Loreen was washing and Quig drying, Fan loading the dishwasher. Mister Leo was trying to put away some of the glasses and bowls but in fact didn’t know where they went. He handed the stemware to Mala and asked Fan if she would come with him for a moment.

  As they walked to the other end of the house, he cupped her shoulder and then the back of her neck, and she tensed at the weight of his cool, strong grip. He was the same height as Quig but he seemed to loom much higher as he opened the door to his darkened office, only the dance of the numerous screensavers murkily lighting the room, which now looked like the waters of her awful dream. He touched a wall panel as they passed and the lighting turned on to a gentle level of brightness. He had her sit in his large leather chair while he retrieved some items from the credenza behind the desk; the first thing was a glass-encased set of small vials, the geno-chemo for Sewey.

  I thought you could give this to Loreen, he said, kneeling so that he was at her height. She said you and her son were good friends.

  Fan said they were.

  Is he your boyfriend?

  She shook her head.

  It’s not as though you’ll never see these people again. Someday, if you still wanted, you might have the means. But you’ll decide then.

  Fan nodded.

  And this is for you.

  It was a pretty little box of red lacquered wood, its lid inlaid in faux pearl with the figure of a delicate, reposing crane.

  Go ahead, open it.

  She suddenly didn’t want to, but he insisted. It was a silver locket on a silver chain. He had her open the locket and inside there was a diamond, small but dazzling and cut in a perfectly faceted oval.

  It’s a real one, he said. Antique, not manufactured as most all diamonds are these days. It’s worth quite a sum. Probably more than you can imagine. It’s all yours, Fan. But don’t put it on now. Let this be our secret, yes? Why don’t you wear it only at night, when you go to bed. All right? How nice that would be. Will you be a good, sweet girl and do that?

  Our Fan, we can well imagine, could not sleep that night. After returning with Mister Leo from the office and giving the therapy to Loreen, she went right up to her room. The necklace was in her pocket and she dropped it on the night table, not wanting it touching her. The others had been wondering where she and Mister Leo had gone, but once she presented the vials Loreen was overjoyed, hugging her and Quig and even Mister Leo, despite his visibly stiffening at her embrace. Quig was squarely looking at her now but Fan wouldn’t acknowledge him, afraid she might betray her dread. She must get away but not before Loreen and Quig were back at the Smokes and Sewey’s medicine was secured and after the well-drilling was done. She would have to endure for that long at least. But there was no lock on her bedroom door or on the door of her bathroom, and she wondered whether Mala would let her stay in her room after tomorrow, when Quig and Loreen departed. Although when she pictured the girls on Mala’s viewer, a streak of panic flashed through her; was she imagining it, or had some of them been adorned with an inordinately fancy piece of jewelry, a stud earring or gold ring or pearl necklace? And through all these years, with all those girls, had Mala been a knowing bystander, or abettor, or worse?

  She kept the bed lamps on and read from Penelope’s handscreen. She was going to stay up all night, fighting it. Yet at some point in the scant moments before dawn she must have fallen dead asleep. For the lamps around her were turned off, the veil of the night drawn down over her. And we can barely recount what was about to happen next, for how awful it could have been, for when she gasped from the touch on the cap of her knee, and the horrid murmuring blandishments, she half cried out. There was the stricture of Mister Leo’s hand. She did have time to deeply breathe. She was passing out. He was fully heavy on her and now she wished to be gone, but before anything else could happen, he was sliding away. And the voice she heard was not his but Miss Cathy’s, telling her husband to get off the bed.

  Why, in the life of a community, does a certain happening or person become the stuff of lore? You would probably say great accomplishment is the reason, such as when one of our B-Mor children triumphed in an event for the first time ever in the biannual regional track meet (in the four-thousand-meter event), this against a field of intensively coached, superprimed Charters. We will note the historical significance of the achievement, basking in the reflected glory, for naturally we would like to think how it is emblematic of the best qualities of our kind, even if we ourselves can hardly summon the effort to jog half a block in pursuit of a candy wrapper skittering away on a sudden gust of wind.

  It’s our common character on display, which is why we invest so much of ourselves—often totally beyond reason—in particular figures and performers, both fictive and of flesh. And when that display is unsettling or notorious, we can collectively wring our hands and wail and then try to assuage the disquiet in our hearts by more coolly interrogating its antecedents, the conditions and causes of its expression, and debate about how we might curb a future recurrence, none of this cynically posed but subtly servicing the final hopeful notion that This Is Not We.

  Yet sometimes, as in the instance of our dear Fan, the talk lingers. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have much actual footage of her, unlike that of the long-distance runner, or even of Joseph niftily curling a shot into the goal. There’s no more to see on our handscreens after that first surveillance vid of her exit, nothing at all, and so the secondary rumor and conjecture continues to root and grow. We reshape the story even when we believe we are simply repeating it. Our telling becomes an irrepressible vine whose hold becomes stronger than the originating stock and sometimes even topples it, replacing it altogether.

  And while we shall resume our trailing of what happened to Fan et al. after Miss Cathy’s intervention, we feel the need to return at least briefly to B-Mor, where rumors had spread about imminent cutbacks in the production facilities because of the oversupply of fish and now produce and then even some outlandish scenarios about the eventual shutdown and closure of B-Mor itself. For after the price of fish dropped precipitously, so, too, did the prices on our succulent vegetables, the markets of our neighborhoods for a time selling produce by the crate, the obvious explanation being that Charter suspicion of our products had widened, branding even those perfectly sheened and plump tomatoes that Reg and his coworkers would pick to be somehow perilous to their health.

  As with what occurred with the falling price of fish, our first impulse was to buy as much as we could of normally very expensive Charter-bound fresh peas and cucumbers and sweet corn, most everyone freezing and salting and canning whatever their households couldn’t consume, so much so that the price of pickling jars tripled and then quadrupled before the containers of new jars finally got trucked in. By that time, the supply of ripened, ready produce had more or less equilibrated, our facilities adjusting accordingly to the lowered Charter demand, and the unfortunate B-Mor fellow who remortgaged his clan’s row house to bring in the jars was ruined, as the price suddenly dropped below what they used to cost.

  In fact, we just heard of his body being discovered blocking one of the intakes of a pond in West B-Mor; he’d come up from the bottom, having drowned himself by tying dozens of jars filled with gravel to his wrists and ankles. Apparently the pond fish had pecked enough at his body to release him from the twine, and not just where he was anchored, which precluded any traditional viewing of the body at his funeral. There were whispers that his clan had done him in, in retribution for being saddled with a now enormous, multigenerational debt. There was also a spate of ironic, off-color comments on the boards and in the neighborhoods, about how the fish were developing their own taste for “B-Mor prime,” for the truth of the matter is that there has been a noticeable rise in the number of people choosing to do away with themselves, and then selecting the park ponds for the site of t
heir demise. Firearms are banned in B-Mor, and the only widely available lethal weapon is a kitchen knife, which is no easy instrument when contemplating suicide. Most people have neither CO-producing vehicles nor garages, there are few accessible, assuredly high-enough places from which to jump, pills are strictly regulated and meagerly dispensed, and so the waters beckon the hopeless and desperate (plus the fact that very few of us can swim). In the commentary there were jests about the tenderness of the cheeks of Jar Man versus those of Popped Rice Cake Lady (who rashly sold her successful kiosk and invested in opening a fancy health-smoothie shop), or the likely gamey flavor of another fellow who was known to spend whole mornings eating slices of blood sausage dipped in pepper salt while he wagered on New China cockfights streaming live on his handscreen.

  We know of others who, perhaps shaken by the soured spirit of our community, have also chosen the nether path. There are no official directorate numbers—never would such things be published—but it seems that everybody has heard of someone from the block or the neighboring clan who has chosen to depart. Maybe they would have done so anyway, maybe their own demons were inevitably going to consume them, but we have to wonder why there have been so many in such a relatively brief period, and what this might suggest about the relationship between the public realm and private lives in our settlement.

  Some have proposed that we need to do more in encouraging individual interests and pursuits, even if they don’t appear terribly useful or practical, to bolster and deepen those inner reserves that “make” a person into who she is, and how, by extension, she identifies and values herself. Other, more conservative, voices balk at this, countering that we need, in fact, to strengthen the bonds of the commune, so that to end one’s own life would be tantamount to a grievous assault on us all. Still others have begun to take a nihilistic approach, posting their skeptical thoughts and going on about the futility of doing much of anything in the face of what they clearly view as a pointless way of life. All these and other opinions smack of some truth, and if they ultimately fail to convince, it’s probably because they can never quite acknowledge the other aspects and sides. But if we calm ourselves and open our eyes and step back far enough, we have to admit that our society, if not fundamentally unwell, has been profoundly wounded.