On Such a Full Sea: A Novel

by Lee, Chang-rae

  What about the new company job? the second woman asked. What about Asimil? Don’t you want to see it through?

  Oliver said of course he did, but that from everyone he’d talked to as they prepared for the sale he understood it would never be how it was, he’d never again have full control of the direction of the lab. He and his researchers would be employees in the end. After a few months, he would find it maddening; in a year, impossible. He would then quit in frustration, leaving the lab and project rudderless.

  So better not to waste a whole year. They already have a plan for Asimil anyway. And I decided I don’t want to treat patients anymore, either.

  But they love you!

  Thank you. I will now entrust them to all of you. Day by day I was a medical doctor but all these years I’ve also been an entrepreneur. I was building a business. That business has significant value now. It exists. So I’m going to begin doing that again.

  Another kind of therapy?

  Probably, but not necessarily. Something in medicine for certain. Maybe devices. But not directly, not bench work. I’m going to be an angel investor, right here from the house. I can leverage an expertise very few people have. So I’m having an office set up. This way I can watch the kids grow. Betty and I can have lunch.

  It sounds wonderful, the vineyard woman said, everyone tinkling their glasses again. Another rush of guests had stepped into the conservatory, including a few of his lab assistants and Betty’s parents, and so Oliver went to meet them, handing the massive bottle to the catering waiters to go around and pour glasses for the other guests. It seemed everyone’s eyes and murmurs were following him, this generous and gracious and even filial genius who’d made good on the promise of his powerful intellect and leveraged it, as he’d said, to this now magnificent scale. Vik told Fan he was going to the bathroom and she nodded, though she noticed that he, too, stopped by and greeted Betty’s parents, who warmly greeted him. She was fine to stay here alone but she wasn’t alone now, as a pudgy young girl with black bangs had latched on to her by the banquet table, saying, You want to play? Her thoroughly exhausted-looking nanny entreated Fan with a desperate smile and Fan naturally said she didn’t mind. The girl was four or five years old and her name was Josey. Josey was very bright and talkative and decided to make up a plate of food for a play dinner party and did so with startling care and maturity, choosing a healthful mix of fresh veggies, plus a second plate teetering with cake slices and cookies.

  They settled at one of the many small bistro tables that had been set up for the party. The nanny sat on a folding chair on the periphery, finally having a chance to eat something herself. Josey demonstrated how to dip the crudités in the whipped dressing she’d dolloped on the plate. She bit half of a carrot stick and gave the rest to Fan, but when Fan only pretended to eat it, Josey scowled and took Fan’s hand that was still holding the jagged rest and pushed it up toward her mouth. Fan could have resisted, easily reclaimed her hand, yet there was something about the fierce set of the girl’s chin and the pinch of her tiny dampish grip, a focus and determination that was so pure and elemental (and that undoubtedly had not yet been thwarted in her life) that Fan thought it best the moment be played all the way through.

  Once they had eaten enough veggies, Josey pronounced they could have dessert, and it was now that the young girl seemed to forget they were sharing, as well as maybe forgetting everything else around her, clutching the big chocolate chip cookie in one hand while forking pieces of carrot cake into her mouth with the other, and then even dipping the crisp cookie into the creamy icing and having it that way, the combination pleasing her immensely. In fact, she was eating a bit too avidly, in Fan’s view, when the girl stood up and tried to cough. She shivered and dropped her fork, and without a thought, Fan rapped her squarely on the back once, quite hard, which caused the girl to yelp and shook the piece of cookie forward onto her tongue. She kept chewing it even as she wailed from the surprise blow and the frightened faces of Oliver and Betty’s parents, who had already rushed over.

  Daddy! she sobbed, Oliver taking her into his arms. He thanked Fan for her confident action, as he’d noticed them together just before Josey got in trouble. One would think Josey’s grandparents would be busy offering her comfort and assurance, too, but instead the wispy, lamb-faced, stylishly dressed pair had turned a radish hue and were flaying the terrified nanny, who had bounded over still holding, the misfortunate thing, her piled-high buffet plate. She tried to explain but they weren’t hearing any of it, calling her lazy and incompetent and stupid for not sticking by Josey at all times, until Fan finally said she was to blame for asking to spend time with their granddaughter.

  I should not have let her eat so fast, she said, which to her mind was certainly true.

  Who in the world are you? said the grandmother.

  She’s Fan! Josey cried, unlatching herself from Oliver and taking Fan’s hand. And it’s not her fault!

  It’s not anyone’s fault, honey, Oliver said to her, though the flash of his icy regard for the nanny seemed to wither the woman instantly. He told her that she could go home for the day. Dr. Oliver, please, I will stay, the helper meekly said, patting Josey on the back, but before anyone could say another word, the grandparents had already summoned a brace of other helpers to lead the helper away, all of them whoop-cooing the shunned one like she was a strange, just-alighted bird.

  I’m going to play with Fan! announced Josey. Oliver, craning about the crowded party and the various guests signaling him with their wineglasses, asked Fan if she would stay with her for a while. Josey immediately led her upstairs to her bedroom, a pink-and-white paradise of frilly-gowned dolls and sleepy polar bears and herds of unicorns, her canopied and skirted bed made to look like an icing-dotted pink princess cake, wall-to-wall fluffy sheepskins carpeting the floor. They played some vid games and next with the dolls and animals and then a pretend, with Josey as the nanny and Fan as Josey, in which nothing unusual happened, just Josey combing Fan’s hair and rattling away idly in remarkable detail about the troubles of her adult son, Raymundo, who evidently drank and gambled away most of his meager counties earnings, as did all of his friends. No worlds made for us, little girl. At one point Josey stopped brushing and tapped Fan on the shoulder and whispered: I have to do a stinky. Fan took this to mean what it did, Josey leading her through a short hallway of closets to the connected bathroom and having her stand sentinel while she sat on the toilet. This always takes forever, Josey said theatrically, rolling her eyes, and then picked up one of the handscreens from a bin of toys beside her to start a game.

  Fan heard some muted voices—the bathroom was Jack-n-Jill, shared on the other side by an as yet unoccupied child’s bedroom—and as Josey became engrossed in her game, Fan drifted toward the sounds, realizing she was hearing Betty and Vik. They were trying to keep their voices down but they were arguing. They were arguing about messages, and no longer sending messages, about the sweet gone past and the harsh press of the present, about the time being wrong and then never wrong, which even Vik, clearly the more wounded and angry party, didn’t sound convinced of. But he kept on beseeching Betty. She was now rich beyond imagining, yes, he could never offer her such heights, but at least they weren’t bloodless and joyless together, and cast to conduct their lives ever the same, merely with nicer things, the same-same-same. You’ll take a global every month but you’ll never go for pie! He was not sounding very rational now. Then it was silent for a moment, like they were embracing, even kissing, and then all there was to be heard was some shuffling of feet and Vik’s groan of Oh, come on, before the sounds of a door slowly opening, and closing.

  When she and Josey finally returned downstairs, the determined girl at last successful in her business, people were gathered in the main hall around the collection of gifts they’d brought and deposited there, Betty and her helpers presiding.

  There you are, sweetie! We’re going to open
the house presents now. Didn’t you want to help?

  Josey squealed and threw herself into the pile. She shred away the wrapping papers like a ravenous big cat, precariously showcasing each gift over her head—a custom-forged chef’s knife, a crystal wine decanter—and then handing it to a helper, who would put it away safely and catalogue it for Betty. There were thirty or forty presents, all so luxuriously wrapped and fancifully ribboned, the strappings slowing Josey down enough that another helper was tasked to snip them unobtrusively so when she touched them, they fell away like loose straw. Still it was going to be a lengthy process, everyone fully indulging the giving and the delight of the child.

  Fan looked for Vik but he wasn’t there. Was he still up in the bedroom, slumped in a chair, disabled by heartbreak? Or was he alone in the conservatory, trying to stunt his grief with drink? Suddenly she felt herself lost. After Betty left him, Fan had tried to listen for his movements, she had nearly gone into the other room to console him. But like too many of us would, she determined he was better left undisturbed than be forced to commune with her. No matter, solace; the problem of sympathy is that it requires two. Despite having followed her many travails, whenever we put ourselves in Fan’s place, we can’t help but feel unsettled. It’s not because of the many palpable dangers, or the strings of awful suffering she had to witness, the homeliest aspects of our citizenry. Instead the feeling can come from something as unpitched as this: standing among a roomful of strangers in a house far away.

  After a few more unwrappings, Josey discovered there was a very big present that had been hidden by the stacks of others, covered in sparkly white paper with a huge sky-blue bow. It was nearly the size of an outdoor AC unit. Though it wasn’t labeled, Fan knew it was Vik’s gift. Josey brazenly shoved a few smaller presents aside and paused a moment before it, as if taking its measure. The helper unclipped the bow and then Josey clawed a corner and ripped at the paper, dragging it across the front. There was a cardboard hood over it and together Betty and the helper lifted it up and off.

  It was an aquarium. Someone said plug it in, and someone did. Its lights flicked on and everyone clapped. It was a popular new kind, called the Full Sea, one that was already filled with water and completely sealed. There was a gravelly seafloor and a mass of gnarly coral and sea plants that looked like threaded sugar and ribbons of dark green silk, which swayed with an invisible, gentle current. There was a remote that came with it, and someone pressed it and out of the gaps in the coral came tropical fish. They looked so alive and real someone gasped—all household creatures having been banned—but these were artificial, if perfect, spotted catfish and striped angelfish and red discus fish and iridescent barbs, their fins fluttering, their mouths working, their bodies flashing away whenever someone tapped at the glass.

  It was then Fan strode quickly from the main hall to the front door, coming out on the landing. When she got there, she saw Vik’s coupe, already backed out and just now spinning away. She waved for him to stop. She didn’t want to be left. She shouted, running down the steps and across the front grass. But he was gone.

  And it was now that she saw Oliver had watched him drive away, too. He had been standing in the driveway on the other side of the catering vans. He approached her slowly, his face somehow somber and sated all at once.

  And in a voice that shook her, he said, I know who you are, Fan.

  She didn’t answer, or couldn’t, sure that she’d now come to the end of a line.

  You’re my sister.

  Our sister Fan.

  Brother Reg.

  Sisters Claire and Ji, brothers Darren, Sho, Tien; we will say it like that now, wherever we are, to those beyond our households, beyond our clans, unafraid of what might happen if the bosom address is spurned. Flag us if you must. What can they do? Detain us all? Have most of B-Mor disappear? It’s a matter of numbers, yes, but there is an altered thrum in the air. Too many of us are together now. When we’re at the theater, even for a wildly popular film, not a single seat free, the murmur before the lights dim is often word of the latest gatherings around the settlement, demonstrations that are no longer just spontaneous (like the littering of ponds), or stray (tags on walls), these keen if mostly isolated bursts of feeling. Talk has it there was a meeting at the big children’s park in West B-Mor, openly planned and announced, and at the appointed hour, instead of the wary, measured trickle that might have come before, a few elders sent out with toddlers in tow to test the directorate’s response; they say the grounds were filled nearly all at once, adults with infants strapped to their chests sitting on the swings, the abler-bodied climbing into the rope structure of the forts, the organizers standing on facilities palettes stacked three high so that everyone could see them, passing the bullhorn to one another to speak about the recent raising of the qualifying score of B-Mor children for promotion to a Charter, ours now having to test in their top 1.25 percent instead of the 2 percent before, which seemed already unfair. This is not about the price of fish anymore. Regular people, including people who were even childless, asked to be helped up onto the palettes, to speak of our most talented children and our bittersweet willingness to part with them, and did so without attempting to mask their faces. In fact, someone with high access leaked a security vid of the rally, the face ID predictably focusing on the organizers first and their deputies next and then systematically sectioning the crowd, but the drone’s zoom-and-pan kept moving too slowly and then too fast, perhaps not programmed for such large and dense and shifting numbers, and in the end the vid was rendered unviewable, jittery and useless, until it zoomed out to capture the entire massing. It turns out we are one, if not ever how we expected.

  And it cannot matter that outwardly nothing has yet changed. Maybe we don’t even expect things to. Maybe we know that next year it will be deemed that 0.75 percent is the allowed fraction. We may not soon be heeded, but at least we can feel the long-held rumbles, now open-throated, our lungs warmed and aching with this special use that we know may be poignant only to us. There was so little of this voicing before, and now that there is much more, we see it takes as many forms as there are people, though some don’t easily align. There are instances of overexuberance, when someone is so stimulated by this unfettered exhibition that he loses all perspective and control. Take the case of one B-Mor fellow, who, after receiving what he felt was poor care at the health clinic, set up a camera in the staff restroom and took vids of the nurses and PAs, posting them for all, and going further by captioning each with the names and house addresses of these supposedly rotten individuals, who are of course our brethren. While we well know that our clinics are not the finest centers, and that the staffs can often seem indifferent to their charges, there is no excusing this fellow for trying to expose and humiliate them, something we have all darkly considered (not by using surreptitious vids, of course) but would never dream of enacting. And yet this B-Mor did, taking on the mantle of witness, prosecutor, judge, and jury, and executing in an instant the full bore of his malice that was unleashed, in great part, by this new and wide enthrallment.

  The feeling he was free.

  We will bear his blight, and others, trying to understand them as what naturally attends any plenitude, the rise of certain kinds of pests. But what gives us pause is what also may be happening to the rest of us, who have not gone to any extremes and never will and yet are differently engaged, not ultimately self-celebrating and self-aggrandizing like our health center muckraker but oriented in a way we haven’t quite been before. Are our thoughts angling as much toward ourselves as to our household or clan? Have we become as primary as the collective rest? Such indication may be in what we have begun to hear and see of the concern for Reg. B-Mor remains focused and worried about his whereabouts and welfare; there are growing calls for official information; there was even a lie-in at one of the main intersections of the settlement, in which a thoroughly organized group of younger people spelled out his name o
n the asphalt with their bodies, causing a jam that took some hours to undo, an inconvenience for sure but one we abided.

  There are other Reg notations that don’t at first blush appear out of the ordinary. Newer tags, hand done, that only slightly revise what we’ve seen before, such as:

  FREE ME, REG.

  I MISS REG.

  And amazingly, REG ME, which must have inspired the now popular eponymous song, whose lyrics, quirkily charming as they may be, are remarkable mostly in how much they reveal the fascination the singer has with herself. She goes on and on, and by song’s end, we can’t help but think only of her sitting at the mall café, her tea getting cold, waiting for a boy who might never come. We end up losing Reg all the more. Hey, that’s the point, some say, though it doesn’t feel in the least convincing on that score. And although the majority of us are still fixed on Reg’s happy images about the walls and streets, on the shapely simplicity of his name, on the hope that he will return to us unchanged and whole, it seems some of us have already skipped a few beats forward with no wearing effects at all.

  What stands besides is that there has been nothing of Reg. Nothing at all, if you don’t count the wild rumors, which have him simultaneously manning a handscreen accessories kiosk in D-Troy, and gravely injured while attempting to escape from wherever the directorate was detaining him, and currently living among us after being cosmetically and mentally altered, which set off a brief period in which younger men of his build and height were regularly corralled by people absolutely sure it was he. Perhaps you find yourself trailing a gangly figure at the park, the kid jogging with a friend, a ball cap on his head, tufts of curly hair poking out the sides. You actually run alongside for fifty meters or so, eavesdropping on their breathy dialogue in the hope of gleaning some telltale remark or tendency that can’t be surgically erased—the way the bridge of his nose lightly twitches as he laughs, how he makes a tiny throaty rumbling urr if you startle him when he’s on his ladder—and while there is no definitive display, you can’t help but see him locked away behind that boy’s pale face and greenish yellow-flecked eyes, and reach for his pointy elbow. The boy sees this and swerves, sneering as though he’s seen a diseased cur, and then he and his friend bolt down a diverging path, giddily cracking up as if they know they just barely got away.