Air

by Geoff Ryman

  MAE LOOKED OUT OF HER ATTIC WINDOW AND SAW SNOW WAS FALLING.

  Winter is here, she thought with excitement. Winter was dark, enfolding, and safe. She saw her new winter very clearly: long happy hours alone in her old house, with her own glowing screen.

  In the gray morning, snow blew like feathers. It nestled along the top of the stone wall, and on the roof tiles. This was good heavy snow that fell with a gentle hissing sound and mounted up quickly, as if the town were being padded with thick white pillows.

  It had been so long since Mae had been outside. In winter, everyone stayed inside; no one would see her. The snow would be a veil.

  Mae threw a scarf over her head, and wrapped round one of Kwan’s Eloi sheepskins. It sat slightly askew around her shoulders, bulky and still smelling of lanolin.

  Outside on the landing, she snapped on a light. The staircase stayed dark. Kwan called up through the darkness. “There’s a power failure!”

  Mae felt her way down the staircase. The main room had its front door open to let in gray light

  “I’m going out in the snow!” Mae announced. “Come along!”

  Kwan’s answering chuckle was both affectionate and edgy. There had been no sign of the army, but Kwan was still cautious. “I’ll stay here,” said Kwan.

  Mae eased herself down Kwan’s slippery stone steps. The snow was already sealing over the dungheap next to the barn. Mae’s own breath was a sheltering scarf of fog.

  All sounds were muted. On the chilly stones of the courtyard the snow looked like lace, its delicate patterns refrigerated from underneath. Mae pushed the courtyard gate, and for the first time in weeks stepped back out into her village.

  Everything was being tucked into a bed of snow, as if by a mother. The houses and terraces were all outlined in white. From the high hillside came the tuneless clanking of twenty or thirty sheep bells. Someone had left his flock out to pasture too long. Mae smiled. The same happened every year. Was it Old Mr. Pin? Lazy Mr. Mack? Who would sit in a corner of the Teahouse, smoking a hubbly-bubbly and grinning with embarrassment?

  Mae walked up and over the bridge. The invulnerable ducks still paddled in snow-rimmed water. Mae passed the door of Mrs. Doh and her fearsome dog. Mae heard its breath, and the scratching of its giant claws against the other side of the doorway. She caught a gasp of food odors from Mrs. Don’s kitchen window: garlic, bean sauce, rice.

  The next door opened just as Mae was beside it.

  Out came Sunni’s friend, Mrs. Ali. “Oh!” she said startled. Then she saw it was Mae. Her face faltered and then recovered.

  “Hello,” she said. “It snows.”

  This was awkward. Village manners would not allow them to part without talking. Mrs. Ali slammed her door twice with her customary thoroughness. She was bundled up against the chill, tall, skinny, regal and slightly absurd, like a walking telephone pole.

  “It is very beautiful,” said Mae. “It makes me feel like I have come home.”

  Then the old rake did not know what to say, for Mae plainly had lost her home several times over. She was discomforted, but not hostile.

  “Well, we all have fond memories of snow.” Mrs. Ali paused. “I hear your business does well.”

  They both started to walk down the hill together.

  “Yes. We have orders from America for five hundred collars. I don’t know how we will do all the work!”

  That was so far beyond Mrs. Ali’s imagination that she could not be sure she had heard correctly.

  “Successful indeed!” she said, and her smile froze. “That brings in money?”

  “It is a special deal. We have a good relationship with a New York fashion magpie. So we said, join our Circle and wear our collar for only ten dollars each.”

  Yes, thought Mae, that does make five thousand dollars. “So amidst all the terrible things that have happened, there has been some good. The ladies of the Circle share the money. Sunni and I are friends again.” Mae shrugged with her eyebrows, a kind of peace offering. Don’t forget that I have been hurt too.

  They were at the Okans’, the last house on Upper Street. Mrs. Ali paused.

  “I have noticed,” said Mrs. Ali, “that your friends tend to benefit.” She looked back at Mae, and there was something completely unexpected: a rueful humor, as if Mae were one of life’s bitter jokes.

  “Good day,” said Mrs. Ali. “I have no lard, and winter is upon us, and I go to beg some from Sunni.” She turned and began to trudge uphill towards Sunni’s big house.

  There was a rumble, as if from the sky. Mae scowled. Something shifted gears and roared and suddenly, a truck came round the hill and up Upper Street, straight towards her.

  A big green truck with huge devouring tires.

  Army! Mae thought, and it was a though a fist had seized hold of her heart and stopped it pumping. She ducked to the side of the Okans’ house.

  Army, army, army, army, struggled her heart as if to breathe.

  The truck roared past, green canvas over camouflaged sides, lashed down, bolted, huge. Army, army, army roaring up the hill, slowing to shoulder their way over the bridge.

  Towards Kwan’s house.

  Mae ran without thinking. Her feet slipped on the snowy cobbles; the cold reached down like deep roots into her lungs. Please! Please! It was a prayer.

  She had to be there to tell her story, to explain. I am New York Times! I am New York Times! Mae ran out of breath and had to lean forward onto her knees. Fire from her pregnancy shot up her gorge into her mouth. She swallowed, pushed herself upright and struggled on up the hill. Kwan’s gates gaped defenselessly. The courtyard was already full of truck. Mae stumbled into the yard.

  There was a bloodcurdling yell, and the green door of the cab swung open. A bull of a man burst out of it in piebald camouflage. Before Mae could think, he was running towards her, full pelt, male, huge, fast, young, and strong. She managed to skid to a halt, and was about to turn and run.

  He grabbed hold of her.

  And then swung her round and round and round. Her string shoes with their slippery leather soles left the ground. She flew. Kwan’s courtyard became a merry-go-round, spinning around her, and the man was laughing. Mae wanted to be sick.

  He kissed her.

  “Surprise!” he called, as if out of a nightmare. Mae’s feet were helpless as flippers as she fought to find footing.

  She looked up at him. She saw his teeth grinning. “It’s me!” he said.

  The world shifted gears like a truck. Her breath left her, she clutched at her chest, all was confusion.

  “Lung?” she asked. “Lung!” For one further terrible moment she thought her own son had come to arrest her best friend.

  He laughed. “Not expecting me were you?”

  “No,” she said weakly. “What are you doing here?”

  He laughed again. “We are bringing you your knitting machine!” As big as a tree branch, his arm was flung towards the cargo under the canvas.

  “Oh!” she called out, clutching herself in relief. “Oh! Oh!”

  “Your Mr. Oz told me the machine was going, and said, it would be a good chance for me to see you again. Also we have the new TV for you! Did no one tell you?”

  Relief spilled over, sloppily, loosely into other emotions. “Oh Lung!” she said again, and hugged him, held onto him as if he were a new village tree to root things in place. Suddenly it was joyful to see him. Out of confusion, relief, and love her eyes were suddenly full of tears. He chuckled and patted her back. “Meet my colleagues,” he said.

  Two more soldiers lurched out of the cab. One was small and wiry with bad teeth in a cheerful grin. The other looked uncomfortable smiling. He was slim in the hips but fat in the face. Fat and brutal was how he would swell into the future. Both bowed slightly in politeness.

  “This is Private Ozer, and Sergeant Alkanuh,” said Lung. “This is my mother, Mrs. Chung Mae.”

  Mae was shivering with cold and nerves but managed to bow to each of them
. She looked back at her son. The cold was bringing a beautiful pink to her cheeks. The two soldiers were chuckling, the tears and emotion were what they expected from a homecoming. Mae saw Kwan, pale, gray at a window.

  “Kwan!” Mae called. “It is my son Lung. He has bought our knitting machine.” She pushed the tear out of her face and smiled, smiled as wide as she could so that Kwan would see everything was all right.

  “Kwan, come out and see my huge, new son! I mean, machine!”

  They all laughed because it was true.

  Lung was a monster. He had left home as a skinny, spotty seventeen-year-old, off to army college and refusing to admit that he was shy of the future. Army food and training had made him tall and broad and fit. And he was handsome, oh how handsome Lung had become! She stared in wonder at his perfect face, his perfect teeth, his perfect combed jet black hair.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said and hit him, lightly on the arm.

  His colleagues chuckled again.

  “I thought Mr. Oz would tell you,” he said, coyly, charmingly.

  The skinny one spoke. “Lung wanted to surprise you.”

  “He surprised me all right, I thought I would die!” Her eyes betrayed her again, she wept again. “It has been three years since I have seen him!”

  Shaking like fine china on an unsteady shelf, Kwan crept down the stone steps of her house, clutching her coat. Kwan looked as though she had been punched in the belly.

  “Mrs. Wing-ma’am,” said Lung, with a practiced adult politeness that would have been beyond him when he left home. He bowed, and beamed, and enveloped Kwan’s frail hand in his own. “It is so good to see old friends,” he smiled. He held onto Kwan’s hand and said to Mae. “Come, quick, see your beautiful machine.” He escorted them both to the back of the truck and flung back the tarpaulin with one huge gesture.

  The weaving machine like her son was huge, brown and khaki.

  Lung chuckled. “Mrs. Wing-ma’am,” he asked the owner of the barns. “Where do you want it?”

  Mae spoke instead. “Oh not here. I have rented our old house. It needs to go there.”

  Lung’s smile faltered; he did not look at her, but he managed not to look sad, or ashamed.

  The beefy one with the dark chin said, “We better get it there, Lieutenant,” said the Sergeant. “Before the snow settles too badly.”

  “And there’s a power failure,” warned Mae.

  Lung barked with laughter. “Of course! There always is the first snow of winter! Come on, let’s get this in!” He bowed again, quickly to Kwan, and was striding back to the cab on legs as thick as prize hams. “Come on, Mama!”

  “We need to stop at Sunni’s.” said Mae. He pulled her into the cab, and for lack of space sat her on his lap. It was strange to be so supported by your baby.

  “I remember when I used to hold you like this,” she said. He looked like a barrel full of apples, all round, red. She knew she was looking with a mother’s eyes, but there was no doubt. He was so much better looking than the other two. They were invisible next to him, as if you blinded from looking at the sun.

  No wonder a Western girl fell in love with you, Mae thought. They must all fall in love with you. She felt herself fall in love with him, all over again. So this is what my son grew up into. Lieutenant Chung.

  Mae realized that her son was the best looking man she had ever seen. Better looking than a movie star. But he smelled different than those pretty boys, there was nothing wispy about him. This was someone, you could tell, who jumped from airplanes, who built rope bridges across ravines.

  Mae thought of Joe. No wonder he had been so proud, so amazed of what had stepped out from his own loins. No wonder he wanted to talk about nothing else. Lung was the one good thing he had done.

  “We stop here,” Lung told the skinny driver, and the truck whined to a professional halt, not skidding in the snow.

  Sunni greeted Lung graciously, just as if the family Chung had not been shattered by scandal. Her kitchen still smelled of gas and was lit with a gas lamp.

  Mae murmured to her about housing the machine in the old house. Sunni waved a hand, in a grand ladylike way that was also slightly crabby. Mae suddenly saw how she would be when she was old. Saw that Sunni was already getting old, but that somehow, getting old would be good for her.

  “Oh!” Sunni said. “I already told that man of mine, I said we will get nothing else for that old place, it’s only good for giving to tenants and who needs tenants? They are trouble, you have to give them the house for free with the land. Pshaw! Fifteen riels a month.”

  “Twelve,” said Mae.

  “Twelve,” said Sunni. “But only because I want to see to see the machine loaded.”

  Both ladies got to sit on Lung’s lap, one thigh each.

  The snow still fell, shooting past the windscreen as the truck moved through it. The snow looked like shooting stars, as if they traveling through outer space.

  Their old house turned as if to greet them, gray as a ghost.

  “I’ll get the gate,” Mae said, and stepped down from the truck. She lifted up the ground bolts, and wondered why she did not feel more. Snow, power failure, Lung, machine, there was too much going on to feel the pain and the loss of what had happened. That was good.

  As the gate opened amid a spangle of illuminated snow, it was more like a festival.

  The huge green van bounced into the courtyard, just missing taking off the lintel from the gate. All Mr. Ken’s hens were inside out of the cold or surely some of them would have been crushed. The great truck swung around and backed up. Mae saw Mr. Ken’s house, darkened as if deserted.

  Her washing line was folded, her kitchen door was locked, and the stump for chopping wood lay sideways. Mae went to open up the barn.

  The bolts were cold on her hands; the old doors groaned as if in protest at being awakened. The earthen floor had been beaten flat as polished flagstone.

  The floor sloped down, as did the entire courtyard.

  Lung stepped out of the truck, holding what looked like a remote control. Sunni hung back behind him as if afraid. Mae walked out then.

  “We’ve got to put it on something first,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “There are floods,” said Mae.

  MAE FELT AS IF ELASTIC BRACES WERE DRAWING IN AROUND HER HEART AS SHE KNOCKED ON MR. KEN’S DOOR.

  She looked at the old gray wood of the door, and waited unable to breathe, feeling Lung’s eyes on her back. She heard footsteps; the door opened.

  There he was. Mr. Ken. He looked older than she remembered, more rumpled, but then she had seen Hikmet Tunch, and her son Lung, since. His eyes quickened when he first saw her, widened, darted over her face, then looked behind and saw the truck. He tried to straighten his hair; he looked embarrassed, befuddled.

  “Hello, Mae,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  There was no time for yearning, remembrance, or even any sign of what happened. Not with Joe’s son looking on.

  “Hello,” she said with restraint. “I am sorry to bother you like this. But we are putting a new machine in the barn.…”

  “My mother needs to talk to you about this.…”

  Mae cut him off. “It is actually Sunni’s barn and I rent it. You once said that you had no use for the stone drinking troughs. Can I have them?”

  He looked at her with an expression that was impossible to read. You and I meet again and we talk about this?

  “I’m moving back in,” she told him. “I’ve only just decided.”

  Behind her, Sunni said to Lung, “I have the keys. Let’s get the TV inside.”

  Kuei’s hands did a helpless little wave. “Have them if you want. They are very old. What do want them for?”

  It would not be right not to warn him.

  “There will be a flood. Everything will be washed away. I need to have my machine on a platform, to save it.”

  His whole face was wary. “This is Grandmother talking,
” he said. “Every winter, she would always warn us about the flood.”

  “This time it’s true.” All right, don’t believe me, she thought. I have no time to argue. The truck’s engine is running and so is Lung’s. She glanced behind and saw her TV lowered from the back of the van. “May I have the use of the troughs? I can pay you for them, whatever you ask.”

  Mr Ken held up a hand. “Take them, take them.”

  Mae nodded, smiling, hoping her eyes were also able to jam into such snatched time, a form of remembrance.

  “I’ll have them back when the flood does not come,” he said darkly, and shut the door on her.

  Mae blinked, for that had been too sudden. She turned slowly followed her TV as it was huffed and sighed into her old house.

  “Here, here, into its new home!” enthused Sunni, too bright, too glowing. She was covering for Mae. The house was small and dark and smelled of dust. Noodles had stiffened on plates left on the table. Some of Mae’s old dresses still hung from the wall, as if preserved by the cold. Lung glanced down, ashamed.

  “Does it convert to Aircast?” Sunni asked tapping the top of the TV.

  “Oh yes, I expect Sezen will use it to serve Collabo.”

  “Can I rent it?” Sunni asked. Mae hesitated. “I want to serve high fashion. We can split the market.”

  “It has possibilities,” said Mae. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  The two fashion experts nodded, eyes hooded. Then something happened. Listen to us both, they seemed to say, and both burst out laughing at themselves.

  “Captains of industry,” said Lung, but he was smiling.

  THE TRUCK ROARED BACK INTO KWAN’S COURTYARD TO FIND IT FULL OF PREPARATIONS FOR A PARTY.

  A tractor ran its engine and its lights, and Mr. Wing and Mr. Atakoloo were moving tables. Children stuck their head through the gate and turned to run back home. There always was a party with the first snow this year it would be at the Big House.

  The forecourt quickly filled with people. Hot wine was left on braziers that smoked as much as most people’s mouths steamed.

  Men took cups of warm wine and stood on Mr. Wing’s steps. Lung strode into their midst, shaking hands, remembering names. Mae, as his mother, accompanied him.