On Such a Full Sea: A Novel

by Lee, Chang-rae

  Whenever we tell the story of Fan, details are apt to change. You don’t mean to alter anything; in fact, your intention is the very opposite, you want nothing more than to be an echo of the previous speaker, who, you decide, did a perfectly super job. And try as you might to match the very tone of the telling, the bellow of certain episodes and the half-breathed whisper of others, isn’t it the truth that, despite your fealty to the story, a moment will arise that compels a freelancing, perhaps even rebellious, urge?

  Of course, those moments will vary depending on who you are. Like everyone else, we have a sensitivity to particular incidents, which can strike a nerve. For example, when we hear about Miss Cathy’s girls surrounding Fan, we’re as startled as anyone else, the same hard knot instantly twisting in our chests as in yours; and yet we can’t help but add a little of our own special imprint, a tiny re-marking here, a slight miscoloration there, and sometimes even more than that if the feeling is intense enough.

  For what comes to us when we picture Fan’s last circumstance is not solely worry or fright or repulsion but also a fascination with this unlikely gathering, which, we are quite sure now, did not alarm Fan as much as one might assume. And why not? The Girls were only nice to her. She was certainly in shock when they appeared and quickly conveyed her back into their room behind the curtain, helping her change out of her regular clothing into a nightshirt exactly matching theirs, even squeezing toothpaste onto a new toothbrush and placing it in her hand. They brushed her hair and washed her feet and lightly misted her with a fruity, candy-sweet perfume. She would sleep in the bed next to Miss Cathy’s bed for several nights before moving in with them, after which they would resume their nightly schedule of taking a turn to sleep in the bed outside.

  Apparently Miss Cathy could not sleep if sleeping alone in her room, and when she didn’t rest well enough, the following day was often very difficult because of the pall of her mood, which perhaps prompted the Girls to bring Fan right back out to Miss Cathy, who was already in her own bed, eyeshade on. Fan realized how chilly it was in the room—the AC constantly pushed icy air down from the vents—and she turned off the lamp and slipped beneath the tightly tucked sheet and blanket of the tiny bed. She found she had to lie on her side and bring up her knees a little to keep her feet from overhanging the edge, which she would have done anyway to keep from shivering, as the cotton nightshirt was thin and the sheeting was starchy and cold. Miss Cathy had a fluffy duvet covering her and Fan wondered if she was supposed to freeze and thus be compelled to climb up into the big bed. In fact, for nearly all of the night the woman did not stir, which Fan knew because she could not fall asleep herself, given the frigid temperature and the high beam of her own vigilance. What perverse episode lay ahead for her now? How might she have to defend herself? And how would she ever manage to escape, which she needed to do soon? She was at last thinking about Mala as she finally did relent and lose consciousness, wondering if the woman had been wholly false in her kindness and feeling, acting out yet another round of temporary friendship that would reside as a set of glimmers in her bedside viewer, to be accessed when it appealed.

  Miss Cathy did, however, wake Fan up in the night. A light tug on her shoulder roused her and she instinctively curled up at the sight of the woman above; the bedroom was faintly lit by moonlight and the expression on Miss Cathy’s face was of a ghoul, lifeless but hungering, her eyes half lidded, her mouth slackly ajar. But all the woman did was nudge Fan off, and the moment she cleared the bed and stood up, Miss Cathy took her place. The woman even expropriated Fan’s meager blanket and wrapped herself in it as she curled into a tight ball, which was the only way she could fit, this sonorous mound of a whorl. Fan did not quite know what to do. After a while, she climbed up into the huge, high bed and got under the heavy duvet, which was still warm and dampish from Miss Cathy, the downy pillow laced with the powdery, floral scent of her facial cream; and she must have fallen asleep within a minute, for the next time she stirred it was morning and Miss Cathy was gone from the little bed and the Girls were enveloping her with their excited warbles and trills and their many petting hands, conveying her straight back into their lair.

  They sat with her on a circular sofa in the middle of the very large, airy room and introduced themselves by number, One through Seven. Fan could keep them straight for it was the order of both their coming to the house and their ages, One being the eldest and so on down the line, although their identically altered eyes made it harder at first. Fan had heard of girls and boys doing this long, long ago to make themselves look like their favorite anime characters but had never seen it done. Apparently early on One and Two had asked Miss Cathy if they could have their eyes done and then each successive girl wanted it as well soon after her arrival. Their bizarrely large eyes made them look deeply attentive, like some puppy or doe who craves only your company and succor. But there was also a welling of wistfulness in those big brown discs, as if they were all quietly longing for someone or something, that they would always be searching.

  As for their names, they’d had their original ones before, but once there were three of them, it seemed best to shrug off the markers of the near and distant past, and start anew, this world of a room peopled only by themselves and, of course, anchored by Miss Cathy, who rarely came inside but always received one of them nightly. And what happened with Fan, said Five, was exactly how it went each night, Miss Cathy arising at some point to switch places, something about the temperature and smell of a girl’s just-vacated bed helping Miss Cathy to go back to sleep after she awoke from her nightly bad dream.

  The Girls didn’t seem to know what had happened to Mister Leo, and Fan did not say anything, perhaps concerned that such news would be too disruptive, or simply because of her characteristic reticence. What is clear is that she joined their grouping without resistance, the only worry being that they would assume she’d want to have her own eyes done, too. But none mentioned it. They seemed simply pleased to have a new addition, a brand-new sister, and Fan let herself be appended on their line when they asked if she would be their most propitious number Eight.

  Of course, there was an eighth bed already made up for her, the last along the wall. All the beds were made up exactly like the one next to Miss Cathy’s, with a white sheet and thin flannel blanket, and they were the same shrunken size. At the foot of each was a small white plastic set of drawers on black plastic wheels, just enough storage for perhaps underclothes and socks, some toiletries, maybe a few pieces of jewelry, and an extra nightshirt. It could have been like a barracks but the huge square room was bright and fresh smelling, despite having no windows or even a skylight. This now explained the massing above the garages, which was covered in ivy and looked like the broad tower of a granary and which Fan had assumed housed a personal gymnasium or some such thing. The space was well lighted by numerous can fixtures set in the double-height vaulted ceiling, as well as by the lamps on the night tables beside each bed. The carpeting was wall-to-wall and white, though more like the white of an animal, vaguely richer in tone, and in fact, Fan would learn that it was made of many sheep hides all stitched together, practically a small herd. She’d never seen a live sheep, so she didn’t know that they could look like this. The carpet was wonderfully plush on the feet, which was good, as they only went barefoot. The four expansive walls were white, too, except that approximately one and a half of the panels had been painted from ceiling to floor.

  It was this Fan kept glancing at, for there was something strange about it, and the Girls tittered with glee as they vied to show it to her. It was their work, Three said—she was broad shouldered and had sparkling teeth and was obviously the most strident of them—and this was how they spent most of their waking hours. From the center of the room you couldn’t make out any particular images or shapes; in fact, the walls appeared to Fan as a murk of brown-blue, with random crosshatchings and blotches of brighter tones, which seemed the oddest and slowest way to paint
a wall, if it truly took up most of their day. There were several stepladders at the edge of the painted section and Fan drifted toward those, but Three insisted that she should start at the “beginning,” at one of the corners near the curtained French doors.

  The nature of their work became apparent as Fan drew closer. It was miraculous, in a way. We have mentioned the “guerrilla” images of Fan and Reg that have popped up on the walls of B-Mor in the last couple of months, billboard-sized portraits of the pair that are mostly simple and crudely executed, and then another kind you see more and more of late, abstracted or surreal images of such things as a pair of weeping lovers’ hands, or the widened maw of a pond carp, or a floral burst that in a certain light looks like an immense suppurating sore, all of which, we have begun to feel, are now an expected feature of a B-Mor stroll. They are eventually whitewashed or papered over, and if the individual expressions won’t permanently linger in our minds, the ready regeneration of them does, this irrepressible urge.

  But an urge was trebled in the handiwork of the Girls. The work covered every square centimeter of the nearly four-meter-high wall. It was not paint that they used but colored magic markers, of which Miss Cathy had provided thousands, in every possible hue and a half-dozen widths, and that filled three rolling towers organized by gradations in the spectrum. Fan had to get up fairly close to make out what was depicted, which was basically the story of their lives, separately and together. The mural was begun when there were two of them, and so naturally the initial images, drawn in the style of anime, showed One and Two in their much younger days, the very first scene being a pair of nightshirted girls crouched down in the corner of a room with markers in hand, dabbing at the wall, the skin of the bottoms of their feet crinkled as they knelt, the picture they were working on being the very picture of their kneeling selves but in the appropriate minuscule dimension. The size of this and the rest of the scenes was small, no wider than the span between a young girl’s shoulders, and half as high, though in comparison with the great panels of wall, it was tiny, a mere footprint in a field, as if they understood before they started that this would be their enduring task.

  How they did it was this: One and Two (and now Six as well) would sketch out in faint pencil specific moments from their lives, for example, how they were separated from or lost their original families, how they came to Seneca to work in this house, how with each new arrival, the girl who worked with Mala was then sent up to Miss Cathy’s suite to live with the rest, the scenes rendered from bottom to top in a narrow column and then shifting to run down before they went up again and so on. The scenes were not separated by borders or other framing but rather magically melded into one another, via all sides, a detail of background or figuration of one threading into the fabric of the next so that the whole appeared to be roiling in a continuous, visceral flow.

  The quality of rendering was impressive, as polished as in any of the anime movies regularly playing in the B-Mor mall, the figures and objects and backgrounds not simply in the right proportion and perspective but rich of presence and sentiment. The scenes with Mister Leo were moodier, of course, but no less finely executed. The noteworthy detail about his panels was that he never appeared whole but rather as an insinuation or part; in one scene, for example, of one of the girls ironing napkins in the kitchen, a line of wine goblets on the shelf behind her kept watch, their bellies twinkling with his eyes. Or another, showing Three vacuuming the seat of a stuffed chair whose arms looked just like his, right down to the stout pink fingers. Or just Mister Leo’s mouth, five-o’clock-shadowed, saying HERE through his heavy, almost womanly lips. And the few that showed his face were in the motif of a group portrait, their number growing with each arrival, nightshirted and barefoot and so skillfully captured you could distinguish them from one another simply by their posture, except that each girl possessed not her own face but Mister Leo’s impassive, once handsome visage, now repeated in a line.

  They had her pose for the newest version. The latest columns were still marked out in pencil, and while the others, laddered high and low, colored in the scenes behind her, Six sketched Fan into their group. The girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, wore thick spectacles and had a faint shading of dark hair on her upper lip, but there was no concealing how pretty she was, her especially dark, glistening eyes and high, sharp cheeks, and how talented she was, her hand moving over the blank white space with speed and assurance, like a tiny champion skater, the other girls almost instantly appearing in their present sizes and shapes. Fan, after being appraised by a brief but locked-in glance, swiftly came into being with the exact splayed angle of her feet and her petite hands and the curt bob of her hair. For the moment Six left their faces blank, working instead on the background, the detail as ornate and filigreed as the sheeting of the Girls’ nightshirts was plain, and as it came to life, Fan could see that it was an underwater garden, wildly overgrown, of entwined sea plants and fabulous creatures such as tusked fish and many-headed eels and fat man-o’-wars whose insides contained miniature worlds of the same, though the sheer density of the images made the scene appear more like a design than a place.

  After a while, Fan asked Six why she had decided on this to draw.

  I’m not sure, Six said, her tone unlike the others’, not nearly as high-pitched or girly. I looked at you and just thought of the sea.

  Have you ever seen it?

  Only on programs, she said. Have you?

  No.

  The others had, of course, been listening and began to pipe in about how they had been or not been to the sea, whether they liked to swim or were afraid of the water, or what kind of fish they would be if they had to live as fish, all of them instantly agreeing they would be manta rays, winging their way through the water in a silent squadron. Six assented but didn’t say anything, continuing her drawing while the others went on about what they had discussed earlier or the day before, all while coloring, which Fan had now joined them in. She was handed just one marker, and whenever her color was needed, she filled in a space or the hatch of a shading, the chatter around her echoing in the large room like in the aviary of the one zoo in B-Mor, which had no large creatures but lots of birds and reptiles, the sound oddly both distant and cacophonous, so that Fan later realized how her ears ached with the ringing.

  And she realized that they had not left this room since their respective arrivals in this suite, not even once, the glow of their skin just that of an eggshell, but on its inside, a limpid, silken white. It was why Mala would sometimes receive an extra order of foodstuffs from the delivery van and put it away herself in one of the pantries of the house kitchen. The groceries were sent up to the Girls via a dumbwaiter that opened up into their small but functional galley kitchen near the bathroom, where they prepared their own simple meals. The bathroom was outfitted with two basins and two toilets and two shower stalls, plus a closet with a washer and dryer, though all that needed to be laundered were the bed linens and towels and nightshirts. For exercise they practiced a special mix of tai chi and yoga that Miss Cathy had read about in a magazine and instituted into their day, though they all suffered to varying degrees from sore joints and fragile bones and periodic bouts of an intense dragging weariness that Fan would later learn were all caused by lack of sunlight. In fact, they were definitely stooped in their posture, slope-shouldered and none very tall, which made them look even more like blood sisters than they already did. Fan herself felt fine, maybe extra-fine because of the pregnancy, her joints seemingly more flexible as she led the exercises. Her skin was certainly more supple, her hair more luminous, her chest seeming to have become fuller, though in a way only she could notice and feel. And she was beginning to yearn for the water again, to stretch her arms, motor forth with her powerful kick, but not in the confines of a tank.

  Fan would have expected that one or two of the Girls would have long rebelled at spending a life in a room, would have begged, say, the dentist, to help t
hem steal away, but the funny thing about this existence is that once firmly settled we occupy it with less guard than we know. We watch ourselves routinely brushing our teeth, or coloring the wall, or blowing off the burn from a steaming yarn of soup noodles, and for every moment there is a companion moment that elides onto it, a secret span that deepens the original’s stamp. We feel ever obliged by everyday charges and tasks. They conscript us more and more. We find world enough in a frame. Until at last we take our places at the wheel, or wall, or line, having somewhere forgotten that we can look up.

  At first Fan went right along with the rub of the days. A week passed, then two. The Girls had been especially pleased that she asked Miss Cathy if she could move to their room a full day early, spending only two nights out in the main bedroom. She responded to being called Eight right away, but the truth was that each Girl had already begun calling her Fan. Three and Four always seemed to be sitting next to her at meals. Seven followed her around. Six loved the shape of her eyes, saying they were like the daintiest pea pods, and even drew a special panel of them alone, floating above a field of waving girls’ hands. And aside from her own wall coloring, with which she was very careful and slow, knowing herself not to be naturally skilled, Fan helped out as much as she could with the few chores they allowed her, such as the sweeping and dusting, and then in assisting Four, who led the daily period of exercise.

  Fan was strong and limber, practically in world-class condition compared with their chronically achy and weak array, instantly able to do what they considered to be the most difficult poses, and soon enough Four asked Fan if she would lead the session. Fan got them to try simpler, if more strenuous, exercises like push-ups and sit-ups and deep knee bends, and although it was tough at first (especially for the older ones) and a couple of them even half fainted, they grew accustomed to the burn in their arms and thighs, and to the dew of sweat dampening their brows and the cloth between their shoulder blades, and soon they were counting out the increasing number of reps they could do in an urging, tweeting chorus. They grew stronger for certain but the greatest change was in their level of energy, they seemed to be quicker in rising from bed, or stepping in and out of the shower, or even while taking their meals with their newly piqued appetites, when the play of their chopsticks over the platters seemed more vigorous and pitched.