On Such a Full Sea (29 page)

This is why we’re asking you to stay here with us, Betty said. You know what it’s like to live in this way. I never knew, nor did my parents and siblings, and Liwei—she paused and he smiled gently at her—he’s all but forgotten. You can be our guide, Fan, you can show us what to do when we’re not sure or doing things all wrong.

Now Oliver said, And we’ll do everything we can to find out what’s happening with your friend. I have colleagues all over, likely some with connections to the board of the directorate for B-Mor, if not on the board themselves. I’ll bet someone is. Regardless, we’ll get the information. And if it’s something we can file a formal petition on, we will. Obviously I’ll have more standing now, and so I have to expect that whatever can happen will happen.

And once we find him, Betty added, he can come live here, too, and be a part of the family, part of, what do you call it, the household?

She winked. Though best for a while in his own room, right?

Fan nodded, to this and the rest of what they were saying, not exactly because it was all pleasant and good (even if it was) but because the manner in which they spoke, with such confidence and reason and the heat of just enough ardor, made it impossible to view them and their desires as anything but highly agreeable, this being a Charter trait in general but one that Oliver and Betty had refined to a spell of enchantment. Indeed, Fan couldn’t help but picture her Reg clopping down the stairs in the morning, sleep still sanding his eyes, delighting in the arrangement of fresh fruits and baked goods (just like what was put out this morning, none of it repurposed from yesterday), or using his height to allow Josey to decorate the street trees for Lunar New Year, or just riding scooters together again, feeling free enough to fly away. For none of us can resist such hopeful flashes, which are, in the end, what lights our way through this ever-dimming world.

Sometimes of late, we get scared. it’s surprising when it happens, because it’s often at a moment when our feeling should be the opposite of fear or panicked worry, a moment, for example, such as the other afternoon, when many of us were having a free-day, plenty of folks enjoying the temperate weather and sitting beneath a peerless clear sky in our rear plots or on the stoops, the children engaging one another in their street games with sweaty-headed abandon, scooting and dashing between the various food-hawker carts that seemingly materialize in precise accordance with our as yet unregistered hankerings. And just when we have a treat in hand, this most humble savor that nevertheless speaks so aptly to our clement realm, we wonder why it is that we now pause and loll the morsel on our tongues until it’s common mush, why there’s a shivering in the belly, which should otherwise be ever ready, avid.

It’s irrational, for sure, maybe even mad, but as our recent hopes for B-Mor have evolved, everything else has begun to seem precarious. Suddenly all the sturdy engineering and constructing, from the originals to now, feels as though it’s been resting upon an insufficient base, the same way a thoroughly elaborate and convincing dream can hinge upon an entirely impossible premise, which, once examined, exposes the rest as a mirage. The pilings are dust, the slab a matrix of silken spiderwebbing, and the very place we reside, our narrow row houses that have stood stalwartly wall-to-wall through a checkered history of caring and neglect, are but cells in a chimera, some bloodless being in whose myth we have believed too deeply and too long.

What we have left is our assembly, and therein lies the unexpected trepidation. We have lashed ourselves together, we are cheek by jowl but now in an entirely different way, yet we can’t help but murmur the question that is surfacing in all our eyes: so who are we now? Yes, we are figuring out our conduct—the demonstrations, the speeches, the murals, even the improvisational work slowdowns by the more daring teams—but none of that retrofits or instructs us on how to think about what we believe in and why. For what are we aiming for, in the end? To be more like Charters? To have built, each of us, some private fortress impenetrable to everyone save a few cousin achievers? We allow that it’s simple instinct to wish to be secured against all manner of riot, whether natural or human, and to strive however long—and sometimes ruthlessly—to make that so. We’re not the kind to decry such pursuits and the fruits that might come of them, even when they are so luscious and rarefied that they become the cardinal imperative, the first and last passion. We won’t fret when someone perches upon his lofty black rock; he can look down without having to endure any harsh caws from us.

At the same time, however, it chills us to think that despite how much we care about one another, and trust that we always will, some fundamental shift is under way. The more we modify longstanding assumptions and practices of B-Mor, the more we can’t help but worry that rather than evolving our corpus we’re in fact undermining it, just as some unrelenting C-illness would rewrite the normal patterns with an adverse instruction set of its own. These days you can even hear the refrain of a certain wild sentiment, basically summarized to this: that someday we’ll have out-Chartered the Charters, that they’ll be bunched about in the cool shadows of our walls, queuing all around to get through our main gate. As much as we’d like to see it—can you imagine?—we pause with what it would mean for us, what price we would have exacted from one another, to become so special and dear.

Perhaps we have already seen a form of this inversion, in what Fan would next encounter with Oliver and Betty. For it was amazing to us, and to Fan, what two focused, otherwise unencumbered Charter people could make happen for themselves so quickly and well. Yes, they were smart, yes, they were talented, yes, they now had such means as to simply require leveling their gaze at a desired “outcome” and deeming it be so, but the thing about Oliver and Betty was how unceasing they were in their formulation and management of the new master plan, applying themselves as though putting on a full-court press, covering every angle and lane, though theirs was more like an offensive pressure, relentlessly pushing as if they were trying to overcome a huge deficit, despite how far they were already ahead.

From a command center in a fully outfitted and climate-controlled trailer they rented from a commercial construction firm and had parked in front of the house, they (along with several bright new assistants) directed the numerous projects and subprojects, each of which required permitting and zoning variances and the vetting and hiring of contractors and their constant coordination to make it run and develop without not just undue delay but really any delay at all, so successful they were (with both incentives and their charms) in getting the excavators and carpenters and plumbers and electricians to take full ownership over what they were doing, as if it were their very own massive twinned house where they would live long and with fulfillment until a gentle good death.

Within two days of Fan’s residing there, the Cheungs had already purchased the property next door and had its house razed, the owners so thrilled with the price that they only bothered to take their clothes and most cherished personal items, leaving the furniture and rugs and plates and everything else to be demolished and scooped up into the dumpsters that were backed in and out through an entire day and night, the
deep-deep-deep
seeming to disturb the neighbors more than the crashing of the debris so that Oliver had the loaders dismantle their horns. Their own brand-new house was dismantled within the week as well, the shell left standing but almost nothing else, although their furnishings and artwork were moved to storage as Betty had spent the last year choosing them. They could have easily waited and resided there while the other was being built, but it was decided that the houses should be constructed and renovated together for sake of consistency and efficiency and to satisfy Oliver and Betty’s desire to begin the Next Stage as soon as possible.

So other trailers were trucked in and situated on the far side of the sister property to house the family and the helpers and Fan, quarters that Fan assumed the Cheungs would find barely acceptable but that turned out to be as luxuriously appointed as their home and, in fact, at an even higher standard (they’d built and furnished the house pre-deal, after all): the trailers, Betty told her, were meant for housing evening-program stars when they were shooting in remote locations, and were made by the same company who built the planes that flew the upper-atmosphere globals, the interiors of the double-wide trailers lined in natural marbles and leathers and rich silks and hardwoods. There was a kitchen trailer for the cooks so the family would be assured of having its meals and snacks and beverages prepared exactly as Betty wanted them sourced and prepared, plus an exercise and virtual-activity trailer where Fan and Josey always spent time right before dinner. Though the trailers were much smaller than the family was used to and the first few days were difficult (the twins seemingly crying nonstop, Josey crabby and nervous, Oliver and Betty suddenly so busy and stressed that they began to snap at each other and everyone else, though not at Fan), they soon began to appreciate these less exalted proportions, where there wasn’t so much space around them; they felt like they were finally living inside, even safer and more secure, especially with the volumes of noise and dust and all the other probably C-accelerating chemicals and particulates stirred up by the construction. And maybe because the trailers were made just like the globals, they were upper-atmosphere quiet and pressurized with purified ionized air.

Fan tracked the progress of the project perhaps as closely as anyone, what with the children not really caring and the helpers out of sorts with the changes in routines and Betty and Oliver neck deep in every detail, watching the stages of the work from the foundation pours to the framing in what seemed to be a time-lapse vid, the new building going up literally overnight (there were so many tradesmen bolting and joining the metal alloy studs that they jostled one another for room), and then sheathed like the original house while the complex innards of both structures were fashioned and fed in, all the labors and change orders and supply drop-offs and debris pickups going on simultaneously like an orchestra tuning up, but under Oliver and Betty’s guidance not making any of that daft, unhinged music, instead sounding out a somehow harmonic, not unbeautiful tone. It was almost magical to behold, and although Fan still harbored many-sided reservations about her brother and his wife, she was like any of us would be, which was awed not just by the inexorable progression of this Genesis-scale undertaking but by their unshakable belief that they were the very people who should bring it off. In B-Mor such self-faith, such a singular audacity, would have been dismissed or mocked, not only because we so value humility or consensus but because most everything we want has already been placed within our reach.

We must say that Fan was heartened by their striving, their devotion, and felt closer to them and their children and the helpers for it. She was our good Fan after all, she wanted to believe in their ultimate decency, to be a generous sister and auntie, and couldn’t help but also think that a small fraction of their efforts and concentrations applied on her behalf would eventually lead to her reuniting with Reg. This was actually being planned for by Betty, who already had her architects draw in a new extension to the original house that contained a full set of suites, with a dedicated entrance, and that was labeled in the plans as
BAY FAN/REG
. There was much more space in the extension than just for two, which was surely just Betty anticipating, rationally thinking things through; they did not know the way Fan was, nor did she want them to know. She was wary as she had always been that such a disclosure could only compromise her, though with Betty and Oliver, who seemed so pleased and appreciative of her presence, she was beginning to imagine a disclosure of her state, naturally wondering, too, if in telling them they would want to help her even more.

With Oliver—whom she could not quite bring herself yet to address as Liwei, as Betty did, as even he was now introducing himself—she was spending more time than anyone, including Betty, who was now camped at the center of the armies of salespeople who came to the command trailer bearing samples of their lighting and plumbing fixtures and bolts of fabrics and carpeting and wallpaper. She had to figure out the countless combinations of such items and the resulting design scenarios, altering course depending on what was available and when and in what quantities, luckily cost not being a factor. Meanwhile Oliver was overseeing the construction and the shuttling in of manpower and machinery, as well as donning a hard hat for part of each day and nailing or soldering something (though this, he admitted, was a noticeable drag on the schedule). He was exceedingly busy, but was also taking some time each day for himself, something Betty was encouraging him to do now that he wasn’t going to work anymore. She proposed that he rekindle his past interests, which he took seriously and with enthusiasm, swimming and taking out his old violin—he played for the family on their first night in the trailers—but as he confessed to her during a break when he and Fan took a light jog around the neighborhood and down to the main square, he wasn’t sure if those had been truly his interests at all.

He recounted to Fan that once assigned to a Charter foster family, a childless older couple (whom he had not been in contact with for a long time), he’d continued with the violin lessons and swim team he’d been doing in B-Mor, plus started
a genetics club at the secondary school (where he met Vik, eventually convincing him to start swimming competitively because of his wingspan) and was involved with a social-service group that gave free math tutoring on the weekends to the children who lived in the service people’s dorms.

I certainly found them engaging and enjoyable, Oliver told her. He took a sip from his iced coffee (which was all he drank besides a little wine in the evenings). But can I say that those were the things I really wanted to do? I started on the violin and swimming so early that that was never a question, and because I was good at both, there was no thought that they weren’t the right activities. The other things I chose because there again I was very good at them and wouldn’t waste my time or anyone else’s, plus they fit in with my vita for medical studies. So does something you’re excellent at and that people admire you for and that does some good for all make for an “interest”?

Fan said she didn’t see why not.

It certainly can, he replied. But all that doesn’t confirm that it really is. Maybe it should mean you can’t love it, because what if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted, and then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit. But that you still come back for more. You’re good at free diving, right? That must be why they put you in the tanks. But did you always like it, even before it was clear that that’s what you should do? Was it something you loved? Or were there other things that you were doing that you might have enjoyed even more?