Air

by Geoff Ryman

  “I can’t hide from you, Mama. He is there all weekend, every weekend. Sometimes I have to say to him, look, Dad, I am having all the officers over for dinner.”

  Dark, dark, and cold, in this attic room not her own.

  “And the officers, do they find him interesting?”

  “Don’t, Mama. No, they don’t find him interesting. He gets drunk, and tries to talk up what he has done, and pretends to be a businessman.”

  And Tsang, thought Mae, I wonder how you like the overripe peach that people must mistake for your mother.

  “But he also visits your sister Ying.”

  “Yes, yes, he bounces between the two of us. But she is married to an officer too.”

  Mae saw it all: poor Joe, desperate, helplessly in love with his son, yearning only to see Lung and how strong and smart he was, and trying, also desperately, to avoid seeing that he was in his son’s way, his daughter’s way.

  You are not so smart, Lung. You are enough of your father’s son, I saw that somehow tonight. This is as far as you will go, and then you too will start, unaccountably, to fade.

  “You want some advice, son?” Mae moved through the winter silk of the night. She took the hard band of muscle beside his neck and worked it. “The army will not like it that you have a Western wife. They will be disappointed in your father. You know what you should do? Though this pains me, I cannot think only of myself. You should be your wife’s husband, and go back with her to Canada.”

  Lung sighed. “I know.”

  And then, thought Mae, you will not be a spy on all of us.

  18

  audio file from: Mr. Hikmet Tunch

  16 December

  New York Times! How useful. For whom? For me, certainly. Thank you for making such an emotional case against the U.N. The government will also be pleased to be shown in such a good light. And your friend Bugsy. How do you serve her? You bring visitors to her superficial and decadent magpie. Do you really think American ladies—for whom a shift from chiffon pastel to black cotton is big news—are capable of being one with your Circle? Remember, Mae, that 2020 is an election year. Your friend is a Democratic journalist. She is using you and your praise of government subsidy to attack the Republican president. You are not a stupid woman, Mae, so it interests me to find that you allow yourself to be acted upon. Finally, you may be wondering who supplied that interesting code that arrived so happily a few nights ago. You should avoid thanking anyone else for it. So who is watching whom?

  BREAKFAST WAS LATE AND BOISTEROUS AND PROLONGED.

  Lung was still pumped full of love from the night before and didn’t want to go. He joked and kicked his big-booted feet, and accepted one cup of tea after another. He and his men had gone out before anyone was up, and repaired the powerline.

  “We found a frame for the wires just hanging in midair. The wires were holding it up and not the other way around. We just stared!” Lung mimed a village dolt scratching his head. “Then we saw burn marks. Some old farmer had been burning off straw and burned the pole as well!”

  Kwan scraped dishes, her lips drawn. There was a vertical gray line down the middle of her cheeks and her hands suddenly looked thin, frail and veined.

  “I’ll do that,” said Mae. Lung was merry, and oblivious. His cheeks still glowed from freezing morning air. He looked like a polished apple. Kwan sat arms folded, her eyes dim and small.

  Finally Mr. Wing came in, bundled in sheepskin, his eyes measuring like lasers. “It’s started to snow,” he said.

  The little private looked anxious. “We could get snowed in.”

  Lung moved slowly, regretfully. Kwan stood up and delicately shook his hand and could not look him in the face. She was scared.

  The sergeant and the private flew up to their rooms and hopped back down, swinging khaki bags. Mae speeded things along by getting Lung’s bag for him.

  In the courtyard, Lung recovered his poise. Sergeant Albankuh already had the engine running, and Lung had begun to understand that he was not quite at home. He spent time thanking the Wings handsomely for their hospitality, and also—his hand covering Kwan’s—for their kindnesses to his mother.

  Kwan had recovered as well. She replied with exquisite politeness, knowing that he had come to warn her off and, perhaps, to report on her.

  Mae marveled at them all, the maintenance of form and the retention of humanity.

  It is the village that allows us to do this, she thought. We know each other, and we all hope that that knowledge keeps us each in balance, within limits.

  Then Lung turned to Mae and both of them seemed to relent. They collapsed into a hug. For Mae it was like hugging some huge stranger. He kissed her forehead, called her his Clever Little Mama. Then he stepped back from her. He shoved on his army hat, and that was somehow heartbreaking. It was a boy’s gesture, innocent and eternal. All the soldiers throughout history had pushed on some kind of boot or glove just before they left their mothers to die or to come back for ever changed.

  This was the last of her boy. He would swell even bigger, like a great fat boil, and she saw how he would coarsen as he aged until his astounding beauty could not be credited.

  “You remember what I told you,” he said, suddenly serious, pointing a finger at her.

  “You remember what I told you,” she said, equally serious.

  He nodded and hopped into the cab, and nodded to the sergeant to release the brake with—it seemed to Mae—a kind of relief. The truck crept forward, and suddenly Lung’s face was flooded with a grin, wide and white between two cheeks like peaches. It was how both of them wanted him to be remembered.

  Snow clung to Mae’s hair. It seemed to be wrapping the village in lace. Lace was wrapped tightly around things in drawers, to preserve them.

  Mae stood in the courtyard for many minutes listening to the rumble of the truck as the snow fell. She heard each acceleration, braking, or change of gears. The sound trailed away, away, farther into the valley, step by step, deeper and deeper down, away from her.

  Mae turned to Kwan and said, “I’m going, too.”

  Kwan blinked. “What? Why?”

  Mae said, “I’m renting my own house from Sunni. I’ll move my business there. I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

  “You’re not a nuisance,” said Kwan, and took her hand.

  “Then I want to go before I become one.”

  She went up the long staircase to the freezing attic room, and packed her bags again. She redirected her mail to the new TV of her own. She went back down to the kitchen. Kwan was putting together an evening meal from the remains of last night’s feast.

  “You won’t have any food in the house,” explained Kwan. “I thought you might like to have this. We have kindling and shitcakes in the barn. Take some of those, too, to warm the house.”

  “You have been so kind.”

  Kwan looked somber. “We have been through a lot together.”

  “Oh! You could say that ten times and it would still not be enough!”

  “But we came through.”

  “We came through.”

  Kwan hugged her. “You can still stay, you know.”

  Mae touched her arm. “I really do not know what I would have done if my friend Wing Kwan had not been so kind. There would have been nowhere else for me to go. But the time comes, even with family, when one must leave.”

  Kwan nodded.

  So Mae took her one carpetbag, and another bag of food and fuel, and set out across the courtyard. Her slippers scrunched on the snow, and her breath rose up as vaporous as a fading memory. She knew Kwan would be watching from her diwan. Mae held up a hand and waved goodbye without looking back.

  THE WANG HOUSEHOLD WAS THE FIRST DOOR SHE PASSED, ON THE CORNER OF UPPER AND LOWER STREETS.

  It had been her home through most of her childhood. Mae stopped and looked at the doorstep. The single step would always get muddy and she and her older sister did not want anyone to think of them as dirty, so every day for t
en years they had scrubbed it. The water in the plastic bucket was always cold.

  Mae now brushed the snow off the step with her slipper. Here, in this house, Mae had slept in one tiny bedroom with two sisters. Their mother had slept on cushions on the diwan. Her brother and an uncle shared a room. The Iron Aunt kept the main bedchamber for herself. It was a fatherless house full of work and worry.

  Mae realized she felt guilty for neglecting her mother. She felt a sullen resentment that her mother had not been to see her. She felt awkwardness and she felt a kind of twist of triumph. She felt many things she did not like herself feeling.

  Come on Mae, she told herself. She knocked on the front door.

  Her sister-in-law opened it, to a sudden swelling sound from within of a baby wailing. Her sister-in-law’s face drooped and then froze, mouth open.

  “Li-liang, may I come in?” Mae heard herself ringing a sweet little bell voice, which was designed to put rude people in the wrong.

  “Uh … Mae. Hello.” Her sister-in-law was not an independent person. If there was a surprise, she could take no action without Ju-mei. “Ju-mei!” she shouted. “Your sister is here!”

  And still outside in the snow, Mae thought, smiling like a row of tinkling windchimes:

  My family really is as bad as I think they are, she decided.

  The sister-in-law stepped back out of view, leaving the door hanging open and Mae standing outside. Mae heard steps.

  Her brother Ju-mei’s voice was dim. “Why is the door open?”

  Mae was not in a tolerant mood. “Because your wife does not want to invite me in and does not have the courage to slam it in my face,” said Mae.

  “I had my baby to look after!” said Young Mrs. Wang.

  Ju-mei swelled suddenly into the doorway. He needed a shave, his shirt was untucked, and Mae knew: They did not want me to see them as ordinary, scruffy, and so hated answering the door. That is the Wang family way: to be rude in order to preserve good appearances. I am probably the same.

  “I am moving back into my old house,” Mae announced. “I can afford to rent it from my friend Sunni Haseem.”

  Ju-mei snorted. Friend? Haseem? And yet there was doubt. What if they were friends again?

  “My business will move back there as well.” Mae kept smiling. “I am sure you will be pleased that it is doing very well. And since the house has so long been in the family Chung, I was wondering if Old Mr. Chung and my brother-in-law Mr. Chung Siao would not like to occupy it with me.” Mae smiled. “So. You see, I have not come to trouble you. I really wish to speak to the Chung family.”

  “And not your own family,” growled Ju-mei.

  “My own family does not invite me into their house, even when it is snowing. From that, I conclude I am not welcome. I do not wish to intrude.”

  Ju-mei was very angry with her. “Very well,” he said—and closed the door in Mae’s face.

  Mae heard a singsong wailing from behind the wooden door. That, she realized, would be Mama. She had time to wonder if Ju-mei had actually wished to spare Mae a scene with Mama. Mama presented her life as a continuing tragic opera.

  Then the door was flung open, and Mae’s mother, wearing her Quivering Flower face, stood trembling in the doorway. She held her head back with defiant pride.

  “How dare you! How dare you show your face at my doorway!”

  “Mother, you’re being silly,” said Mae.

  “You talk to me! You judge me! When you have behaved as no woman should behave. When you brought shame to me—yes, me. What do you think people are saying about me: ‘There she goes, the woman who cannot control her wild daughter, who brings down respectable life in the village.’ I cannot believe you would do that to me!”

  “I didn’t do it to you, Mother, I did it to myself.”

  “Everything you do, you do to me. When your father was killed…”

  Here we go, sighed Mae.

  You can tell the truth so often that it becomes a lie.

  Mae had not spent a day in her mother’s presence without Mama telling yet again the full story of how their brave father was shot by the Communists, and how she was left alone in the world with three young babies. Then followed the sacrifice, the work, and the endless worry, only to be repaid with desertion and coldness. Then—and this was best of all—how she had never complained, was always silent, had left the past behind her, but now … now, because of Mae’s behavior, was forced to speak of what had been left behind.

  “You! You! You have made me cry, you have made me remember, you have broken my triumph over these terrible memories!”

  “I need to speak to Mr. Chung,” repeated Mae.

  Her mother by now was wracked with sobs, and Ju-mei was holding her, patting her and glowering at Mae.

  “You see-hee-hee!” her mother sobbed. “She cannot admit she was wrong!”

  “I was wrong,” said Mae.

  “You see! She has no remorse!”

  “It was a disruptive thing I did.”

  “She has no feeling. She has not been to see me once! She was staying next door, and she would not deign to see me! She does not care that I am old and sick and alone!”

  Suddenly, Siao in his T-shirt had inserted himself sideways past the Wangs, and his steady face was wrinkled in an embarrassed smile. There was no accusation in the face at all. Mae saw at once: He had absolutely had his fill of the Wangs. She also saw his Karz blue-gray eyes, and his fine dark beard, and his slim workman’s arms. She found herself thinking: He has grown up.

  “Come home?” Mae asked him.

  Siao nodded yes, very slightly. “It would be pleasant to be in my old house,” he said.

  “I am sorry for what happened,” Mae said.

  Siao stayed smiling and calm, while his shoulders equivocated. “It was a terrible thing you did.”

  Mae nodded. Yes.

  Siao turned back to the doorway. “Mr. Wang…” he began. “I must speak to my father.”

  “You cannot go back with that woman after what she has done!” roared Mr. Ju-mei.

  Siao rocked slightly in place. “I am so grateful for what you have done for us, but I am aware that we cannot stay as guests for ever. It is a burden for you. Please, I am very cold, we all are, can we not simply ask Mae to come inside?”

  “Never!” wailed her mother.

  Ju-mei stood up straight. “You heard what my mother said.”

  His wife chipped in: “The baby is freezing.”

  Siao nodded once, politely, and smiling, stepped inside. “Just a moment, Mae, I will not be long,” he said, bowing slightly. He closed the door.

  When he opened it again, he had Old Mr. Chung with him. The old man looked confused now. He had on a filthy quilted jacket, with his box of tools. “Is it a job?” he asked, looking eager.

  Still in his T-shirt, Siao stepped outside with his father into the snow and closed the door after him.

  “Your family has been very generous to us,” he said to Mae. Mae saw his bare arms and took off her coat and put it around Siao’s shoulders.

  They were all cold. Mae spoke quickly: “The house is restored to you as long as I can pay rent. The business is now in the barn. How are you, Old Mr. Chung-sir?”

  “Ready. Ready,” the old man said, stepping in place as if held back by a harness. “They are driving me crazy.”

  “Father, that is rude.”

  Old Mr. Chung looked at Mae. “I know they are your family…”

  Mae heard herself say, “You are my family. Whatever was between me and Joe, I always loved his family.”

  The old man blinked. “We loved you.”

  The door blurted open like an awkward remark. Ju-mei stood glowering at the door. “You keep a poor old man outside!” he accused Mae.

  “Then perhaps you can let us inside,” said Mae.

  Mae won. Reluctantly Ju-mei admitted her. Her mother sat enthroned and avoiding her gaze. Young Mrs. Wang had taken the baby elsewhere. The inside of the house, as al
ways, was as empty and as clean as iceberg. The tiny brazier did nothing to warm it. On the wall was the framed photograph of all of them as children, and another photograph of her father, so familiar that it looked nothing like him.

  Mae’s mother cowered in black trousers and jacket and a long flowered scarf. She looked tiny and frail and unhappy. There is nothing in her to be frightened of, Mae thought. Then she thought: Frightened?

  Siao said, bowing, “We have decided to take Mae’s kind offer.” Something in the way he said it made Mae realize: Siao is head of the family now. Joe’s going has been good for him.

  Ju-mei glowered. “I cannot believe you will accept any help from that woman.”

  “We have taken much already from her family who owed us nothing and were so kind to make space for us in their home,” said Siao. “We are impoverished and through our own efforts have lost everything we inherited. At least this way, there may be some small illusion that we live in our own home.”

  Ju-mei glowered at Mae. “Your sentiments are noble, Siao, and I can only add that I am deeply ashamed that my own sister has left you in such a terrible situation. You have been an ideal guest…”

  Ah, thought Mae, they’ve all been driving each other crazy.

  “… and I feel that as a mark of my respect and affection for you, that I will assist in carrying your cases and goods.”

  He wants to see what is going on, thought Mae.

  And he did. Ju-mei went into the barn and saw the giant weaver with its lights and display, and its speaking voice. His eyes boggled.

  “You make money from this?”

  Mae used her little formula: five hundred collars at ten dollars each.

  Ju-mei looked so forlorn that part of Mae wanted to hug him. He looked like such a disappointed little boy: he pouted and looked sad and yearning, and hung his head. Ju-mei had always thought that if someone had something, they had got it by stealing it from him.

  “Tuh. Who will work for a woman like you?”

  “About half the village,” chuckled Siao, “since it makes them so much money. Your sister has appeared in the New York Times.” He even gave his sister-in-law a little hug about the shoulders.