Soon work on the mural was moving faster, too, Six having to draw several new scenes a day instead of just one, the girls behind her more focused and engaged, sometimes even nudging one another because of their tighter assembly. In fact, there was a genuine flare-up between Four and Five, who bickered about whose shade of blue marker was most like the color of the blank screens of Mister Leo’s office, this for a scene portraying Fan’s first solo encounter with him. This was the way of the mural; it reflected whatever was happening at the moment, and by reading it from the beginning, Fan could trace the looping arcs of their time and how each girl had come but also whatever was of interest or concern, becoming a more intricate map of their consciousness as it was emended and evolved.
For example, the scenes before Three appeared were generally straightforward and even childlike in their depiction of their lives before they came to the house and then after they began working with Mala, the renderings of chores and games and girlish pastimes shown simply and often sentimentally, happy girls ironing or painting their nails or brushing each other’s hair. Mister Leo was not yet shown as an ominous presence, but once Three appeared on the wall, those “parts” of him showed up, too; the broader mood of the renderings seemed to shift as well, the emotions of the Girls becoming more patent, raw, the backgrounds sharpened by bolder colors and menacing geometrical shapes, and then new images of long-suffering Miss Cathy as their beacon, their savior, respectively delivering them from the prison of Mister Leo’s downstairs world.
Indeed, they didn’t seem to blame Miss Cathy for standing by while her husband took a turn with each of them, and though at first this bothered Fan, she soon understood why: to them Miss Cathy was their wounded and vulnerable big sister, if one distant, stuck in an ugly misery herself, and from some of the mural scenes, it was evident she had been compromised, too, in her youth, by a gaunt-faced man in a business suit, who may have been her father or stepfather. He showed up here and there along the wall, stiffly eating at the dinner table, a murky silhouette in a nighttime doorway.
The primary problem, of course, was that they were locked in. Only Miss Cathy (and Mala), by a mere touch of her fingertips, specifically right index and thumb, could unlock the suite doors. And now her schedule had changed; after awaking in late morning and going through her ablutions, she went downstairs in her housedress and then didn’t return until evening. With Mister Leo incapacitated, you would think that her days would fully extend, open up to catch the best air and light, but the funny thing about a life is how eventually it will adhere to certain routines of mind, those tracks or grooves laid down in special pressure and heat.
She had already lost interest in shopping with Fan, and lunching out, and getting together with her few acquaintances, realizing now that what was most important was that her husband have her company. It was no matter if that company was gentle or sharp, if she spoon-fed him or let Tico do the job, if she shaved his chin with utter care while humming the melody of a favorite song or if she badly nicked him, if she alerted Tico that he had to empty his bowels or simply stood by as his face contorted with the strain while he was slumped in his wheelchair, letting him brew in the stink. She felt the compulsion to be there, to let him always see her face. But she was growing nervous again, too, tight and jumpy for stretches and then rooting for a period beneath an almost discernible cloud, through which you could tell she needed him, too, for no matter how homely or grotesque the bond was unassailable, having been once pure.
The other matter was indeed how fully the others took to Fan, this Lucky One the latest but also the Last, the role of which instantly elevated her along with the quality we all can’t help but recognize and admire: that effortless anchoring of being, that nascent stillness that typically occurs only in nature. They tended to gather around her, slyly jockeying about the marker tower so they could take the one that would have them coloring right beside her, or be at hand with the ladle to add more broth to her bowl. Though they did not change the position of her bed, they took turns sleeping in the bed of Seven (who was the youngest and quite liked moving about each night) to whisper numerous queries about her life and views, and recount their more curious dreams and then gently rouse her in the morning with an especially wide-eyed smile and their customary greeting, a sweetly harmonized croon: “New-day, new-day.” And then one day someone noticed that the group portrait of the eight of them featured not Mister Leo’s face but each of their own. When they asked Six why this was so, she simply told them she was tired of drawing his face. But of course, they all knew that Fan was the difference.
Another sort of person might have thoughtlessly disrupted their corpus, but Fan was careful not to bestow or withhold any special attention. In part, she accomplished this by regularly moving about the room, breaking from the mural work to take a cup of tea or use the toilet, and then linger alongside whoever was busy in the kitchen or bathroom before returning to the wall. There was no stratagem to this, no intention of gaining favor or influence or trying to engineer her own escape by employing them as cover or diversion. Indeed, Fan was growing fearful for what she might leave behind in these hardly grown-up girls, who seemed too fragile as individuals to endure any change or trauma like a sundering of their group. They had been practically orphans to begin with, toss-offs from the counties who were damaged by Mister Leo and then quartered in a literally hobbling protective custody.
Yet it was not simply the limits of the room but also their own order that had formed them, the expressions of which Fan could see played out on the wall. For there was now nothing that could happen to them, no new experiences whatsoever save their routine, and aside from the more plain, commemorative images that appeared whenever a new girl entered their realm, the scenes portrayed in certain detail the fantastical alternative lives of each: picture tales of the broods of children One and Two bore (and even those they sadly had to bury, a pair from a sleeping sickness and one, of all things, by a fall from a tree), or of the dazzling acting career of Four, who starred in an imagined long-running program about women cattle ranchers in Argentina, or the unsung missions of Three, who brought much needed basic dentistry to counties children by opening a string of spotlessly clean free clinics. And if the trajectories of these seven interlacing mangas were variously modest, heroic, unlikely, they were also thoroughly voluble and peculiar and dense enough in their particulars that after hours of study Fan herself began to feel that it all must have transpired. And she supposed that in a manner it had, and with enough vigor that their yearnings were sated.
Naturally, they began pushing for Fan to reveal what “happens” to her. Six was excited to begin drawing it out, the coloring of Fan’s arrival and attendant documentation already completed. They kept clamoring: We want to know where you go! Finally, Fan said she had some ideas but that they were not yet fully formed. This was half true; the distant future indeed was blank, but Fan’s sighting of the near was as concrete as anyone’s, we B-Mors and now others know this well, she was as clear-eyed as the fortune-card readers in our malls purport to be. A self-visualizer, as they say, one who engenders the path on which she’ll tread by dint of her pure focus, her unwavering belief. And so she would have had to describe how she led them out of this room, out of this house, perhaps even through the secured gates of the village altogether; but of course she did not. Who could know how they might react? Who could anticipate the shape of their fascination, its hot gleam or trembling?
She didn’t want to incite anything like a rebellion. She figured any direct push against Miss Cathy would be futile, given their utter acclimation to their lot and devotion to her. Miss Cathy was not their antagonist. There was no antagonist per se, not even Mister Leo, who for them was the most distant star in the most distant galaxy, undying yet irradiant. She had still not revealed that he was a bare fraction of his former self, again afraid of the psychic consequences. Instead, she began to tell them about Reg, of her love for him—hiding her true ag
e, at least from them, seemed no longer necessary—and that he had disappeared, and how she was still, in fact, on her journey to find him.
The information unsettled them, with One almost unable to comprehend the idea that he was not a story boy; she kept asking what happened to him next. Fan responded by asking Six to sketch him out.
You mean right now? Six said.
Only if you want to.
Sure! Six said. She got right to work, starting with a panel of Fan on the road with a ghostly beanpole of a boy floating out on the horizon. The Girls were instantly enamored of his cheery face, his puffy, imperfect Afro.
He’s as cute as a play doll! one of the girls cried.
He is a play doll, but tall!
He looks so kind and sweet!
He is kind and sweet, Fan said, with enough pause in her voice that the Girls magnetically clustered about her, their warm breath slightly tangy from the dried fruits they constantly snacked on.
Tell us more!
Fan did, saying how Reg did not enjoy being alone, and how he would hold her hand through an entire evening program, whether it was scary or not. How he never hesitated to walk right through the middle of a puddle.
He’s perfect! Two said, to which One responded by saying she thought him perfect, too.
What have you learned of his whereabouts? Three asked. Anything?
She shook her head.
No! Nothing?
She shook her head again, causing a pall to shade the Girls’ faces. And with one voice they groaned, keyed in purest sorrow.
Please don’t worry, sisters, Fan said. I will find him.
But how?
Fan said: Bo Liwei.
Who?
She told them more, and they were doubly astounded. A brother? And one who lived in this Charter or one nearby? Three said that if he was a true Charter he might be powerful or have powerful friends, and so could at least learn something of Reg.
It’s what I must hope, Fan said.
Right away Six quickly drew the scenes of Fan approaching Liwei, his face like hers but squarer-jawed, leaner, heartbreak in his eyes. How agonizing! How wistful and ironic! It was almost unbearable to see, even in the faint pencil, Six able to render the moments with so much saturated longing that Fan herself felt something like a shallows in her chest. It was then that the Girls realized what they must do: help Fan. And to help her, they agreed, meant that she must leave them. Four and Five wanted her to be away for just a short while, but then return. One and Two unhelpfully suggested she wait a few months, as they had gotten into their heads that it was already winter. Seven, with surprising astuteness, asked if Fan still had a pair of her own outdoor shoes. Six was mum as usual, already back at the wall, doodling. Finally, Three made a decree: Fan must depart as soon as possible, as there was no more time to waste.
The funny thing about the tale of Fan is that much of what happened to her happened to her. She showed plenty of her own volition, really more than any of us could ever dream up, and yet at the same time her tale demonstrates how those who met her often took it upon themselves to help her, without really any hesitation. Without always a ready self-interest. Every once in a while there are figures who draw such attention, even when they aren’t especially charismatic, or visionary, or subtly, cleverly aggressive in insinuating an agenda into the larger imagination. For some reason, we want to see them succeed. We want them to flourish, even if that flourishing is something we’ll never personally witness. They draw our energies so steadily and thoroughly that only toward the finish of events can we recognize the extent of our exertions, and how those exertions in sum might have taken the form of a movement.
We have noted the sundry demonstrations such as the chattering commentary on the web boards, snide and earnest and critical, if rarely outraged; the strange acting out at the ponds as well as other, more disquieting, expressions, as seen in the plight of sorry Cousin Gordon; or the most recent sign, which is that a notable number of people are shaving their heads, men and women alike, some old and even a few children.
That’s right. Bald heads are popping up here and there at the mall and in the facilities and maybe even at your own morning meal, when daylight enters at such an angle that the reflection off the clean-shorn pate momentarily casts upon the usually dimmed, cheerless room an illumination that seems generated from within, this lustrous fire. You pause at every sighting, that paleness bobbing across the street, or leaned over the rail of the catwalk above the grow beds, and if you’re close enough, you can’t help but take an extra-long look at the particular scalp and try to read the sheen and textures of that most vulnerable-looking skin, for a clue to why this person has done this to himself. Do they have something in common? Are they nubbier than normal or creased in a similar but distinctive way? Do they appear just that bit transparent so that you’re almost believing you can see the workings of their recusant thoughts? And does it seem that the faces of these people are more unyielding than what the rest of us offer to one another, which is not exactly warmth but rather what you expect in the wordless company of an old friend or cousin, that easy nonchalance?
But something is different; they might be sharing a snack with a companion or browsing a rack of dresses and yet what comes through is a hardness, a blocking, this clear sense that they can no longer share. They are suddenly apart from us, as well as from one another, for there appears to be no secret society bonding them. They are lone agents in a nonexistent organization. They are playing a solo. Perhaps because of this, they appear all the more anchored, all the more unitary. But do not automatically think they have become “individualistic” or, in fact, aim to be. It’s not that. Of course, someday soon they’ll grow their hair again, and we’ll have forgotten that it was ever gone. And, in time, so will they.
For now we wait and wonder. We wonder when it will be that we slip away one ordinary evening when everyone else is busy with their programs or games, and find ourselves before the bathroom mirror, turning this way and that, regarding everything and nothing with our minds strangely blank, and work the powered razor or blade. The first pass is horrid, as you would expect, though not for how awful it looks, but for how it feels, the sensation of an animal slowly prying itself from its shell. You shrink with the exposure, the chill of the air. You’re not ready for this. But as you clean up the rest, make it even and smooth, you begin to understand. You understand that the time has come for you to go downstairs in the morning and sit in your customary spot by the far corner of the table and eat without any self-fanfare, and just as you had earlier, let everyone take in the alteration, let yourself become one more notation. For at some point each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.
Is this what the Girls realized when they deemed that Fan must be allowed to go on her destined way? As with everything, they decided this together, although it was surely catalyzed by Six. One morning Six rose many hours before the rest of them and by the mere glow of the nightlights drew and fully colored the picture that she said was “crowding” her mind. Some of them gasped on seeing it, if simply for how large it was; the scene was nearly three times the width and length of the abutting images, the great stamp of it jutting out into the rest of the wall’s blankness like a continent suddenly born from the depths. The run of the panels was forever altered. But immediately they agreed it was her most beautiful work. Its scale had allowed her a freer hand, and although you could not make out any pencil lines, one could almost imagine Six’s movements, the wider arcs and glides of her arm, with the enlarged fields of the figures and shapes not uniformly markered (for that would have looked blotted and primitive) but rather painstakingly flecked with numerous proximal shades of a color, for richness and depth of hue. The scene itself was an underwater realm bristling not with creatures or fish but with a dense forest of marine plants, wispy tendriled corals and bushy anemones and in the center of the panel, broad ribbo
ns of electric aqua-green seaweed flowing wildly upward, seven of the thick shoots transforming into seven faceless girls, with Fan, of normal body, being pushed by their number to the surface and reaching for another pair of hands, which at this point were only loosely sketched.
I wanted to wait for you before finishing Reg’s, Six said to Fan. I wanted to get them right.
Once Fan described them, Six did get them right, all the way down to Reg’s spindly wrists, and the stubby nails of his long fingers, and the tender-fleshed pads at the base of his thumbs, so much so that Fan could almost feel a lifting to go along with the pangs. She was thankful that Six hadn’t rendered the rest of him, the sensitive, gifted girl perhaps understanding that it would be too much for Fan if he loomed there fully on the wall. Indeed, Fan had left her album card with his images back at the Smokes (it had died anyway, with no way to recharge it), though in truth she had probably done so to deny herself too easy a means of viewing him, which would only amplify her longing, something she had plenty of from the beginning. And too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality.
First, they made a formal request of Miss Cathy. This was much more complicated than it might seem, for they had never done such a thing before. Aside from leaving a brief weekly listing of foodstuffs on her night table, and a monthly one for basic toiletries and some nail supplies, they’d never asked her directly for anything, everything else such as paper goods and cleaning supplies being sent up in the dumbwaiter (presumably by Mala). They took their turn out in the little bed and really there was nothing else to ask of Miss Cathy, who was “keeping” them, as this uncommon but growing Charter practice was called. The Girls were lodged in the same way beloved pets were once kept by their owners, who, of course, did not query them as to what they might desire. And while the Girls professed undying devotion to Miss Cathy, none of them relished the idea of having to ask her for so drastic a thing as Fan’s release, which might as well have been like petitioning the Sun not to set this day.
On Such a Full Sea: A Novel Page 22
