On Such a Full Sea: A Novel

by Lee, Chang-rae

  You need look no further than when you’re at the underground mall, as a glance across the main food hall will confirm. For you can’t help but notice the awful marks on some of the faces, the bruises and scratches and sometimes outright swellings and suppurations, most often on women and children and even on a few of the men.

  Just the other day we saw a young woman working at a dumpling counter who, we are sure, could not see through one of her eyes, for how badly swollen it was. It looked like a mashed jelly doughnut. If she’d not had to work, no doubt she would have stayed in her house that day or the whole week, but there she was, in her smart pink and gray uniform and white gloves, and her otherwise wholesome, pretty face, and then there was this monstrous marring that made you want to cry and get furious at once, and somehow, even more monstrously, also direct your feelings at her. Why was she just standing there, why was she still folding the dainty pockets of filling and dusting them with flour as she set them aside, when what we really wanted to see her do was smash each one flat?

  The odd thing, the funny thing, is that there has been very little chatter about any of this, when, of course, if there was the simplest outbreak of lice going around, there’d be a wild cry of concern from our citizenry, along with a round of alerts and recommendations from the authorities. And while the posts go on and on about the fluctuating food prices, or the latest schedule of mandatory furloughs for certain facility workers, or (as ever) how the evening programs are once again cycling repeats, will there be—disregarding some very crude adolescent jokes about people needing to use more makeup—a single serious voice on the matter? Will there be one honest, substantive remark about what is happening?

  Which we find not just in the vicinity of the food hall, or way down the block, or in a slightly down-in-the-mouth section of West B-Mor, but perhaps close enough to be right here in our household.

  For during the past month, have we not periodically seen some dark purple markings and blotches on the skinny arms of one of our elders, Cousin Gordon? Did he not come to breakfast with a fat lip a couple of weeks ago? Or gingerly drink from his mug of tea the other day with two crooked, swollen fingers? These days he doesn’t say more than a few words at once, but back when he was still strong and spry, Gordon was a bit of a trickster, never too serious, a bright, talkative fellow who liked to tell tall stories to anyone who would listen but especially to us younger ones, though always purely for entertainment. We remember how he had pretty much convinced us that we were descended from Old China royals because of the rounded shape of our earlobes, or how the harbor waters of B-Mor were once as clean and fresh as our facility fish tanks and bristling with millions of sweet-fleshed blue crab.

  The adults all seemed to like Gordon, too, and one never heard anything negative about his presence or contributions at work, and his wife and children seemed to adore him, though it has come to be that in our large and intimately integrated households the significance of who is whose has diminished over time, such that we’re all a kind of cousin, even across generations, direct blood having no deeper feeling for one another than for the rest of us.

  This is all to say that Gordon was pretty much like anyone else in the household, simply going about his days from the morning meal to the facility to lounging around with the rest during the evening programs, the rhythms kind and unsurprising. And even when he began to decline a couple of years ago—he was not extremely old, not yet sixty—nothing much changed in the way people treated him. Sure, he seemed to age very quickly, all his hair thinning out and going white and the flesh on his face and neck drawing off. And at first it was amusing how he began to mix up people’s names and confuse opposites like stop and go, cold and hot, but he’d quickly correct himself and make a joke, and you could put it down to his being a bit tired after his shift. Or maybe it was somewhat enervating to have to walk with him around the underground mall, as his normal stride shortened and he began to take these mincing little steps, as if he were checking the firmness of the ground, clearly being afraid of losing his balance. Or when later on he would not speak until spoken to, and then when engaged, offer no more than a standard response or truncated phrase, it was a bit disheartening, and perhaps a few times his son or wife or one of us might mildly chide his silence and passivity, our frustration borne clearly from our simple wish for him to get back to his usual ways.

  There were no brain scans or tests ordered for Gordon at the clinic, for in B-Mor aging is aging and there’s nothing to be done about it, even when people are stricken well before their time. That’s fine, we know the score. And we know, too, that because of the composition and character of our households those in need will be clothed and fed, washed and groomed, and generally upheld as deserving of our ministrations. Yes, times have changed and demonstrations of filial attention have no doubt diminished in frequency and quality, but it’s still practiced, still genuinely unconditional, being ingrained into our basic strands. But after Charter demand for our goods suddenly dropped, and the entire community fell into a state of anxiety, we seemed to see less of Gordon around the household, and then when we did, we began to notice the first of those telltale signs.

  We recall getting up to fetch a drink in the middle of the night and hearing the water running in the far hall bathroom. No matter how often we remind them, the younger children will often neglect to jiggle the flush handle and turn off the light, and when we went to fix it, we saw instead through the ajar door that Gordon was at the basin, the faucet running, pulling on one of his front teeth with his fingers. His expression was not one of distress or pain but instead a kind of dulled regard, his eyes staring at the fellow in the mirror as though his were a familiar but meaningless face, a random person he’d seen before at the park. There was an ugly color to his lip and some bloody spittle trickling down his fingers, and with an off-key grunt, he tugged and the tooth came free, root and all. We would have said something then, asked him if he was all right, but he saw he was being watched and shut the door.

  At the morning meal he was there as usual beside his wife eating a cob of leftover corn and although it was glaring that one of his canines was missing and his lip was bulged, no one mentioned it. He worked slowly through the cob, if favoring one side of his mouth, and when everyone was done and idly chatting and picking at their gums with toothpicks, Gordon did the same but remained ensnared in the silence that was steadily webbing his mind.

  About a week later, in the late afternoon, we found him in the backyard of the row house. He was sitting on his rear in the grass; apparently he’d fallen. He was lightly bucking himself forward, then waiting, then bucking again, as if that might somehow help him up, and the thought occurred that he had momentarily forgotten how to go about getting back on his feet. He wasn’t in the least frantic or distressed. And for a few long seconds we let him keep trying, despite the fact that he would obviously not succeed, and not because we thought he would eventually figure out a better way. He was stuck in a rut of wrong thinking, or no thinking, whatever you wish to call it, and was never going to break out.

  We lifted him up—he was as light as a child—and brushed the dirt off his cotton trousers, which hung loosely about his hips. With a stammer, he thanked us, patting us on the cheek like we were children, when we noticed that the back of his hand showed a pattern of perfectly round burns, as if a lit cigarette had been pressed against it. The wounds were smooth and reddish and just now beginning to heal.

  What happened here, venerable cousin? we said, clutching his narrow wrist.

  What? he mumbled, suddenly very confused. He thought we were asking about his having been on the ground.

  We nodded to his hand.

  He pulled it back. For a second his eyes flashed. And then they were distant, his mouth pinching up, his face flushed with bitter shame. He huffed and bit his lower lip, suppressing a cry. He didn’t say anything else and he seemed stuck in place so we pointed him toward the house, watching
as he shuffled inside in his poky, inching way.

  Who could do this? Could it be his seemingly too-contented wife, or the son who was always too quiet, or another cousin, whom we saw coming up with Gordon from the basement the other day for no apparent reason? And for goodness sakes, why? Good Cousin Gordon had never been mean or cruel to any of us. He did not owe money. He had not crossed or let anyone down. By every measure, he was harmless, a complete innocent, a fellow who should rightly live out his waning days free of untoward attention or circumstance; and yet here he was, ill equipped to defend himself or even to understand what was going on, his mind likely growing ever more bewildered by the assaults, retracting into its muddied depths. And what disturbs one most is the idea that in a densely inhabited household, one in which he had resided nearly all his life with a sense of sanctuary and succor, he now felt utterly alone.

  Perhaps the rest of us, too, are experiencing a similar feeling. Do we not pause the slightest bit as we pass one another in the hall or on the stairs, checking each other’s eyes? Do we not scuttle a bit more quickly into our beds at night? Do we not brace ourselves and listen, when the house is silent, for the squelched bleat of an old man’s cry? We wait and wait but somehow it never comes.

  Then tomorrow, or some other day, in a moment that catches us by surprise, the poor fellow will limp down the front stoop in his shower slippers, his big toe gnarly and black from being smashed. And a startling thing happens, on having to see this kind of thing once again. We get a quickening in the gut, a vestigial node glows hot behind the eyes. And though we betray nothing, we’re suddenly enraged, our fury hurtling and bounding but no longer for the person or persons responsible, or even for ourselves, but finally, at the pitiable fellow himself. We can understand better now: how when your hand on his neck means to comfort, when it hopes to assure, its grip only kind, can another impetus breathlessly arise, a strangely related volition that craves witness of the most wretched of sights, the just-crushed spirit.

  We are the sinister and the virtuous and most everything in between, and we know too well that in their visitations the fates appear to pay us scant attention. One might ask our good Cousin Gordon how he thinks of his current affairs. Or in a certain frame of mind, perhaps Quig would offer some thoughts on the wayward procession of his life. Or if we were put on the spot to take a philosophical stand, we might well decide to no longer demur and full-throatedly say, We do welcome our turn.

  That it may never come only prepares us more.

  And things can change. We don’t fret so much, despite what is occurring. Instead of anxiety we have discovered, in the face of alarm, a burgeoning hope. Hope that if our livelihood dwindles we will learn to do something else. That we can remake another place. That we have one another and always will. And in certain rare moments, we think, we feel as free as Fan.

  This may sound strange, given where we last left her, barely delivered from the most vile of clutches. But she was free, wasn’t she, and maybe well before she left us? For we must now realize how even in the confines of the tanks, Fan had begun to understand the true measure of her world.

  Of her control, however, there is a different story. That night in Mister Leo’s house she was terrified, as anyone would be, and we shudder to consider not just what would have happened right then but on subsequent nights, and for a lengthy, miserable epoch. We would like to think that we or our loved ones or especially Fan would have somehow repelled the assault and immediately ended any further terror; but then certain cruelties have a way of engendering compliance, which only feeds the hideousness, the sequence cycling on. Poor Gordon knows this, as no doubt did the girls on Mala’s viewer, and the reality is that Fan might have had to know it, too, for the rest of her days.

  Instead it was Mister Leo who was trapped in a dark equation, slackly sitting in the sunroom most all of the day as Mala brought him food and drink and, when necessary, called over Tico, the new home nursing aide. Tico was there to lift him up from his wheelchair and onto the toilet basin, or to hold him up so that Mala could change his pajama bottoms. At supper Tico rolled him into the dining room, where Miss Cathy was already eating. She was still fragile but the incident sparked something in her now, a new savor or hunger piqued each time she looked across the table at her husband slumped before his bowl of blended food, waiting with a blank face for Mala to come and spoon it in. Sometimes Miss Cathy rose and helped him herself, took the spoon and gently nudged it in between his resistant lips, patiently waiting for his tongue to remind him what to do, her hand prickly with the memory of how she struck him, just once, at the base of his skull, with the head end of a stone statuette, the bulbous nude on display in the hall. It must have left no mark. After they followed the ambulance to the Charter health center and waited around, the doctor woefully informed her that Mister Leo had suffered a massive stroke, which they’d treated just in time to save his life. He woke up like this in the health center bed, wholly palsied and mute. He could no longer write or read or do his minerals trading, but of course, they had enough money to live several lifetimes, even Charter ones. Now, Miss Cathy missed him and also didn’t. When he gagged on the spoon, she awoke from her uneasy reverie, but try as she might she didn’t relieve him right away, keeping it there and maybe pushing it in just until he made a funny sound she never heard before he was stricken, this wan, alto squeak.

  Fan would be a witness to these dispositions, but not Quig and Loreen; they left soon after coming back from taking Mister Leo to the hospital, Loreen anxious to bring Sewey his treatment. Quig and Loreen bid Fan good-bye, and she bid them well, and they drove off in the old car after a quick embrace. No one seemed to be much bothered by what had befallen Mister Leo, or even to wish to comment on it. Miss Cathy honored the deal her husband had with them, promising to send the drill, as well as giving Loreen a second, equally necessary set of vials her husband had been holding back (in case they’d balked at leaving Fan). She handed them a wad of money, too, for the purchase of another geno-chemo round, if they so needed.

  But all this was in trade: she wanted Fan to stay. She wouldn’t say why and Loreen said fine but Quig told them, with a finality that seemed to shock Loreen for what he was willing to give up, that it should be up to Fan. He hadn’t said a word since the commotion on the other side of the wall roused him and drew him to Fan’s bedroom, where Miss Cathy was standing over a seizure-gripped Mister Leo, whose fit was causing him to bite his tongue. It looked as if he was eating a slick piece of ham. Fan had pressed herself back against the headboard, wrapped up in the bedsheet. She had a superficial scratch on her cheek but otherwise she was unsullied. Mister Leo was bleeding all over himself and the carpeting, and the blood had begun to choke him, as he was lying on his back. Quig simply stared down at him, seething with weariness and disgust at the scene but perhaps as much at himself as for the foaming mess of a man at his feet. For was this not yet another instance of his wrong-pathed life? Was it not a variant of the same ill-made picture? He had not much countenanced this girl but it turned out from the first moment on the road she had somehow latched on. Or the other way around. But Miss Cathy was panicking and imploring him to do something. Quig finally turned him on his side, and when the man momentarily rested between fits, Quig stuffed the corner of a pillow between his teeth, if too forcefully jamming the material back between the molars. Mister Leo reflexively bit down and caught him, but rather than automatically try to escape, Quig let himself get gnashed for a long breath, the sharp pain from the man’s teeth digging into his finger bones so searingly pure it was nearly self-erasing.

  And what of our Fan? The more we follow the turns of her journey, the more we realize that she is not quite the champion we would normally sing; she is not the heroine who wields the great sword; she is not the bearer of wisdom and light; she does not head the growing column, leading a new march. She is one of the ranks, this perfectly ordinary, exquisitely tiny person in whom we will reside, via both
living and dreaming.

  We know, of course, that Fan decided to stay. There was no talk of how long, but after a week, it soon became apparent to Fan that Miss Cathy was not conceiving of an end.

  In fact, it was quite pleasant at first, just as one might expect life to be if you were the only child of a Charter family. Miss Cathy decided that it would be best if Fan stayed at home to be schooled rather than take the huge leap into the hyperdriven Charter system, but instead of junky handscreens loaded with ancient storybooks to wade through, Fan was visited by private tutors in math and writing code and finance and design and everything else that was useful to know. Brought in as well were athletic coaches, who looked immediately crestfallen on seeing her size but were soon impressed by how strong she was, and swift, and nimble with her feet and hands. Though when a swimming coach arrived, she decided it was best not to show what she could do and Fan said she was afraid of the water. She was seven weeks on and didn’t yet look pregnant, just perhaps like she was gaining some weight with the regular, wholesome Charter meals. She was certainly hungry, feeling this new volume steadily opening up below her, this canyon she could eternally fill. So she ate as she pleased. Miss Cathy was tickled at this, as if her perceptions of this deprived lone waif were being duly confirmed.

  Each afternoon they went out to town, where they would have lunch at one of the many sushi bars or brick-oven pizza places, then visit the galleries and confectionaries and shops filled with trinkets for the home and garden, and then end up at Miss Cathy’s regular salon and spa, where they took skin treatments and exotic massages of the feet and hands and face and neck. Miss Cathy was having her hair regularly colored again and had her stylist give Fan a cut in the current popular Charter style, a messier, slightly teased version of her bob. Although Fan didn’t mind it, on certain nights she’d brush it out and straighten it, and Miss Cathy would bemoan the job the stylist did and have them go right back again. But perhaps Miss Cathy’s favorite activity was to go to the children’s clothing boutiques, where the thrilled salespeople would crowd around Fan and dress her in a dozen outfits or more, shoes included, little party dresses and pantsuits and loungewear just like Miss Cathy’s and then take half of them home to model in front of Mister Leo in his wheelchair, his eyes straining with some dire message or emotion no one could begin to decipher.