On Such a Full Sea (7 page)

But there was no real population to speak of anyway, one of the more stridently confident of us might have said. Those shops were failing!

You should know, he answered, eyebrows rising, that they were failing for a very long time.

We asked what he meant by this, and Uncle Kellen explained that while it was true that the existing city was an impoverished husk of a society, with just enough inhabitants to fill the schools and ride the buses and, indeed, shop in the stores, there
were
schools and buses and small businesses, there was a police force on patrol, with a governmental body overseeing it all (if not terribly well); and that this society, barely clinging to life, was still stubbornly doing so, and might have improved itself if given the opportunity our originals had to retool and create a B-Mor of their own. Where most of them ended up instead were the open counties.

Not all of the native citizens left after the arrival of the originals, Uncle Kellen told us. Living around the old hospital complex was a sizable population who had refused a relocation scheme that would send them out to an abandoned university campus in the western part of the state. An attempt was made to evict them by force, but after dozens of people including children were killed in an apartment building that somehow caught fire during the operation, it was decided to let them remain, though no more public utilities would be provided to them.

The Parkies!
we sneered, which is how they were identified in our history class materials, owing to their subsequent annexation of a large city park. For nearly a generation they were entrenched in their flawed Eden. There was a brief but memorable study unit on the period, with close-up footage of the initial protests and ensuing riots and eventually a sprouted tent city. The Parkies contended that because there were no jobs, and they’d been cut off from city services, that they needed the land for growing food and collecting firewood and drilling water wells, though the historical record shows that by the end of their occupation all the trees were felled and the ponds had become craters of muck and the plots were either misused or neglected and were producing nothing. They’d even tried farming shrimp but had the wrong equipment and token assistance from the authorities, and they only succeeded in fouling their water.

Now it is a typical park again, very popular on fair-weather free-days.

But do you realize how difficult it is to grow fruits and vegetables outside? Uncle Kellen said to us. We forget about how ideally engineered our grow facilities are. No pests or bad weather. Uncontaminated, nutrient-rich media. And all of you now trained from an early age in the techniques of maximized production. It is only natural for you to believe that we have achieved mastery.

And you believe we haven’t, Uncle?

He snorted, snacking on his peanuts, being quiet in the way he often was, not quite responding to our questions, clearly not for lack of views but because he wanted us to formulate our own opinions rather than automatically inscribe ourselves with his, which we would have done, immediately, happily.

That’s not what’s important, he said.

All these years later we’re still not certain what he meant. Perhaps this is why we remember him so well. You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes it is how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain periods of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now.

A couple of free-days afterward, we knocked on his bedroom door on the top floor (row-house attic rooms are always the smallest, and thus go to couples) and Auntie Virginia answered and told us he was away driving, a rare instance for Uncle Kellen on a free-day; sometimes there were shortages or maybe a big occasion when a village required an emergency shipment of goods, and someone had to go. Like most everybody else, Uncle Kellen was a hard worker and devoted to whatever might benefit B-Mor, so it was no surprise that he volunteered. The next time she said he had a chest cold and was napping, which seemed like bad luck, but when on the following free-day we noticed Auntie Virginia making a cup of tea in the kitchen and we bounded upstairs to their door knocking and calling to no answer, despite sounds of movement within, we had to wonder if we had somehow disappointed or offended him. We accused one another of being rude to Uncle, of haughtiness and overfamiliarity, of accidentally kicking him too often in the shins, and would probably have gone on berating ourselves had the directorate not posted a message for certain citizens to report to the central clinic for testing.

A month before, just around the time when Uncle receded, all of us B-Mors had gone in to be evaluated for a certain marker for liver disease, but this time it was only certain people being summoned, the listing of their names by clan flashed on every screen in the settlement, hand and home, facility and mall. Of course, it was casually known who might be
mixed
, but to that point it had never been officially designated. It was a very small percentage, in any case, and we were young and wouldn’t have really cared about such things, but to our surprise there was one person in our extended clan on the list, and it was Auntie Virginia.

She was the last person you’d think was possessed of native blood. She married into our clan, yes, but she was very pale, paler, in fact, than most of us, who tend to be ruddy and darken quickly in the sun. She was on the short side, too, and spoke with a faint New China accent (like many older B-Mors did back then), and Uncle Kellen had known her since their first school days, her parents and siblings all derived from the originals, or at least appearing like they were. So what happened? Maybe the directorate has that information somewhere, the evidentiary gel lines. We shall never know. What we do know is that Uncle Kellen was hardly seen after that, at least for a while. In the mornings he skipped the household’s breakfast and went to the truck transport garage, maybe picking up something to eat on the way. He put in for overnight runs, which by nature were potentially dangerous, having to negotiate so much open counties land. And on free-days both he and Auntie Virginia rarely came down the stairs, and if they did, they scooted out as if they were late for a shift. Where did they go? Maybe to a back booth in a tea parlor, or to a big park, where they could walk about anonymously.

One day our cousins said our uncle and auntie didn’t come down to breakfast or even pass by, and when they were sent upstairs to make sure everything was all right, they found their door unlocked, their night table lamp left on. The tiny, low-ceilinged room was as tidy as always, the corners of the laced bedspread on their double bed tucked in smooth and tight. The only thing different was that their stand-up wardrobe was empty, the shelf cleared of toiletries and other personal items. At the garage they told us that Uncle Kellen had appeared at work that morning with his wife along, a practice that isn’t unheard of on especially long hauls, if not recommended for reasons of safety. But after their first stop they didn’t check in and there were no further pings from their locator. They were gone.

Each day for the next couple of weeks we awaited their return, we children deciding on our own to post a lookout at the end of the block even if we could only do so after school or on free-days (as if they would reappear only when we were ready). While we sat about at the corner benches gaming and watching vids, we traded opinions on why Uncle and Auntie had decided to leave. Sure, at a free-day gathering some members of the clan who drank too much beer maybe uttered some unkind words after Auntie Virginia was listed in that second call-up; maybe she was asked to excuse herself from a cousin’s wedding, not because of her presence per se but the needless commotion it might cause within the other clan; maybe there was something amiss at the mall, where no new policies were instituted but some shops displayed the list of names, bannering it below their daily promotions.

The truth, however, is that when you saw something like the listing, you began to look for it elsewhere, too. And after a while, when you didn’t see it, instead of not noticing or being relieved you might feel oddly unsettled, like something was off in your own belly, a pang of nausea that made you realize you were, in fact, a lot hungrier than you knew, which is why you were impatient with your spouse or friend, which is why you snapped at your child.

Was all this intended, somehow engineered? Again, there were no newly instituted B-Mor rules, restrictions, covenants. Not even the Recommendations of Practice that are periodically general-messaged, such as parking one’s scooter at a forty-five-degree angle to the curb (which are never, in fact,
recommendations
). Nobody was unduly demoted or fired. No one was dispatched. And a similar listing was never again posted.

It was only a relative handful of B-Mors who decided to leave, including Uncle Kellen and Auntie Virginia. After a few more weeks passed and we didn’t hear from them and knew we never would, one of our older cousins packed up his and his wife’s things and, without asking permission, moved upstairs to the vacant attic room. That was all it took. One phase had given way to another, the realm shifting without the least tremor. The new occupants stayed there until they had too many children to live in the tiny room, by which time Uncle Kellen and Auntie Virginia were just another faded memory.

These days we accept the various legacies of our corpus, from the time of the natives and originals right up to now, and live together in harmony as long as we don’t linger too much on those legacies, which we have all agreed to do. We don’t want trouble. Though looking back on it now, there were more tussles and even outright fights at school, when before there had been hardly any; or how certain cliques one had not really noticed in the lunchrooms and playgrounds and food courts seemed suddenly and sharply manifest; or how over the years as we grew up, certain, more mixed clans were more regularly pairing off, which is how someone like Reg can look like he does, the scantest fractions combining in that reversed, serendipitous math.

•   •   •

SO, DID THE SAME
math deliver Reg to be C-free? They tell us every destiny is ordered and yet this one, concerning our Reg and our Fan, seems intent on exhibiting properties as apparent and ungraspable as the smoke from a mystic’s joss stick. Where will the ribboning trail of this pair ultimately lead? How far and high can we rise?

This is the question girding all other questions.

Fan left B-Mor for love, but perhaps not for love alone. About the neighborhoods there is a steadily growing lore about their relationship, sundry anecdotes about the game parlors they frequented and the eateries they liked best and how, when the proprietor wasn’t looking, Reg might puckishly reach over the glass partition at the gelateria and poke a spoon into one of the tubs to get Fan a free taste. There is also talk of their more intimate moments, how they sat on a blanket in the cloistered lovers’ glade of the nearest park along with the other young couples sharing music through their earbuds and, of course, nuzzling and kissing. They were in the first blush of true romance and being sixteen and nineteen you would say it must be so that they were also sneaking off to the mini-inns. But they didn’t, amazing to say, which the mini-inn records show; people who knew them corroborate this, insisting that Fan and Reg were happy to show each other their affections in the park, in the café, on the periphery of busy clan gatherings. There was no way they could be alone together in their respective houses with so many relatives ever present, and thus by all accounts they were chaste.

It certainly seems they were content, and yet at some point the pair consummated their love. This must have been Fan’s initiation, for Reg was a young man who blessedly could not view his present station as anything but highly satisfactory. He was not in essence desirous. It should have been our expectation that Fan was the opposite, if not obviously so. She was the one who arranged their free-day itineraries, she was the packer of the drinks and snacks, she the one directionally leading their scooters, with Reg winged behind her like a potted young palm. And we won’t draw up some image of the two of them entwined the very night before he disappeared to illustrate the fact that Fan departed B-Mor in search of the father of her child.

Aside from the unfortunate souls who came and went daily at Quig’s compound there were forty or so people who were settled there, children included. Most all of them, like Loreen, had first come as patients or else had accompanied patients who died and then, if they could perform some function or service the place required, were allowed to stay on. The still luckier ones—chosen by Quig and Quig alone—could reside in one of the rooms of the winged main house, while the rest lived a few steps down the hill in the complex of shanties that hugged the slope. Over the years these cramped, head-high huts had been erected and added on to exterior wall by exterior wall, and were connected via internal cutouts to form a continuous warren of rooms. You could start from the top and work your way downward through various people’s lairs and end up at the bottom and peer back to see the boxy assemblage of corrugated plastic and plywood and asphalt shingle and tarp, a miniature, junked version of some ancient hillside town in Europe or South America one can search in the archives.

You can imagine this is the sight Fan beheld after Sewey guided her through the huts the first time. It was a couple of weeks since leaving B-Mor and her leg was almost right, the injury in fact probably just a deep bone bruise and no doubt healing faster because of Fan’s superior physical fitness. We sometimes forget that even compared with the most experienced tank divers in the prime of their careers she had a chance to be the finest diver B-Mor had ever known. Kilo for kilo she was stronger than anyone, squat-lifting a record factor of her mass, and as noted, she could hold her breath to that point when it seems certain every cell in your body is going to burst and then in a miracle push past it to the other side, to what must be an altered state of seamless quiet, as if you just broke past the speed of sound. It is a matter of singular will. The very will, we know, that Fan drew upon in the storeroom as she worked her legs in deep bends and stretches at night, often while Sewey jawed on, or when she forced herself to down an extra soy drink or braid of chicken jerky to build up her strength. Or most of all, not flinching and trembling whenever Quig unexpectedly appeared to examine her, his cool, rough fingertips testing her exposed thigh, knowing she was likely safest if he and everyone else in the compound considered her to be still a child, a situation that could not endure long.

It appears her plan was to wait until she was certain her leg was strong enough to set off again on her own. This seems amazing, given what we know, for we have to ask ourselves once more: what was she thinking, when she set out from B-Mor in the first place, and in so headlong a fashion? It is either outrageous fortune or destiny that Quig’s car struck and injured her that first night and thus brought her to a place with shelter and food and that served as a crossroads of sorts in that part of the counties, where people naturally shared word of other settlements, villages, facilities. And although we can debate forever whether cruel fate or good fortune is Fan’s predicating sign, it must be noted that when she left us there was no hope or consciousness of either in her mind, nothing but a furious purpose and the capacity to disregard the usual rational considerations of her own well-being and the chances of reuniting with Reg, which were meager at best. Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too soon delivers him to a precarious ledge, where he can no longer turn back. And while it’s easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn’t this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?

When Fan was able, Sewey took her around the main house and huts, as well as the land around the compound. It was mid-September, still the heart of summer, the foliage of white oak and black cherry and hemlock and countless other species of trees distressed and washed out by the fierceness of the light. The trees were bristling in the dry wind but they were full, crowding all around them, covering the tops of the hills right down the steeply pitched slopes to the banks of the slow-running rivers and streams. From the moment she hiked down the hillside from the huts the first time she was startled by the denseness of the trees, for the school units and evening programs at B-Mor would have you think that the landscape of the open counties was mostly stripped of vegetation and thus devoid of any wildlife save for insects and ground-dwelling rodents, a stretch of dusty nothingness and grubby, wayside slums stitched by the network of major roadways that ran between large grow facilities and the Charter villages. Fan was accustomed to the trees in the parks of B-Mor, every last one of them strategically placed along paved walkways and the hawker-thoroughfares to provide shade, or set in a bower for the sake of privacy, or dotting the banks of an engineered pond where pedi-boaters could wade to shore and secure their crafts to the trunks. Along the straight, lengthy avenues they were planted one for every two row houses, selected for ease of care, the kind that did not throw off too many nuts or pods or sprays of pollen. These were maintained in equal measure by the bordering households and pruned to a specified height and girth.

Of course, there were plenty of sawed-down trunks dotting the hillside of Quig’s compound. The cutting had been done spottily, however, so that the main house and huts were still continuously surrounded by woods, the perimeter of which was patrolled by a platoon of men known as the Boys. They were not boys at all, though a few of them were in their late teens, most being men who had experience or training in security or the military. Like everyone else, each man or a beloved had been treated (probably in a dire moment) by Quig, and by virtue of this and the bonds to their kin and friends who were similarly indebted, they were deeply loyal to him and the general welfare of the compound.

Sewey aspired to join their ranks and complained to Fan about having to do the boring job of passing out tickets rather than scouting the area and warding off bandits and hunting for squirrels and woodchucks while doing so, which he said was as good as he’d ever want, which is what he’d do for the rest of his life. And whenever they caught sight of a couple of the Boys with their rifles slung over their shoulders, he waved wildly at them, and if they waved not-so-wildly back, Sewey would bemoan his plight all over again, and Fan couldn’t help but think how little where you were or the prospects of your circumstances mattered sometimes, for even out here in a place like this a boy’s modest hopes could hold him in thrall.

Fan did her part at first by helping Sewey manage the waiting line of the sick and miserable. She watched how he gave out the numbered tickets and then took them back once they went in to be examined by Quig. Things got confusing with the bidding that often arose, people jumping places in the line and then jumping again, and Fan made it simpler by doing away with the tickets altogether and instituting a separate bidders’ line alongside those taking places as they arrived. Soon enough there was a third line, for people with nothing, or at least nothing to give save themselves. Fan simply intended to help Sewey and wondered if she had done the right thing, for though it soon became clear that the new system was working, with fewer arguments and fights breaking out, the most surprising result was that people were offering more than before, perhaps because they could readily look across at the other lines and see the things others had come bearing. Loreen couldn’t help but be pleased. Quig, whom they rarely saw, didn’t seem to notice, or care if he did.

At the end of the day, Sewey and Fan would head down to the huts, where most of the children and teenagers lived. Sewey shared a bedroom with Loreen in the main house, but he spent as little time there as possible because he said he was too old now to be bunking-up with his mother. So whenever he could, he slept in some section of the huts where he had a friend, and now that Fan was moving around without much difficulty she tagged along with him, though she always hiked back up to the main house to sleep in her cot in the storeroom. She was lucky that it was Sewey who’d befriended her; he treated her like his baby sister, if one smarter than he, and being Loreen’s son, he was humored by everyone with at least a wary kindness, and so Fan was as well.

The people of Quig’s might not have been inclined to treat someone from B-Mor or another facility with any hospitality at all. The Charters were much more exalted settlements but they might as well be constructed up in the clouds; there was no way a counties person could even dream of residing there. But a place like B-Mor, with its safe, clean streets and full employment and the promise of a gentle end, was a theoretically attainable and thus resented possibility to them. One need not even mention its legacy of foreign settlers, which, of course, was expressed in Fan’s face and name, and could only catalyze certain feelings of unfairness and displacement, whether they were justified or not.

Eli, Sewey’s best friend in the huts, had no such feelings, being entranced by Fan from the moment he met her. Like Sewey, he was thirteen, though of more typical size and mental capacity for his age, a strawberry-blond-haired kid with a face so thoroughly mottled with freckles he looked like some aboriginal boy in an old-time nature vid, the skin around his eyes and nose and cheeks inked by the unmitigated open counties sun. No doubt if he lived in a Charter village, where on UV-alert days they project a special scrim into the skies and have public dispensing stations of specially formulated lotions, Eli might have been still unsullied and pink; but out here he went unprotected, and his mother couldn’t always corral him inside on full-sun days or much scare him anymore with the story of what befell his father, from whom he got his coloring. Still, whenever Sewey and Fan appeared at his hut and there were no more tasks or chores to do, Eli pulled on his floppy bucket hat for their forays into the land surrounding the compound. The three of them hiked along the numerous streams and brooks coursing through the small valleys and followed them up to their sources, like one tiny but deep lake that was hidden behind a rise of rock that Sewey and Eli had named Cold Pond, which they said was icy even now. They spent afternoons sitting on an exposed mound of granite that pitched down right into the clear water where you could see tadpoles skittering over the brownish-greenish bottom, the boys throwing rocks at the fish rises or launching a raft of twigs Eli lashed together with weed stems and then throwing rocks at that. Eli sometimes made a separate one for Fan and might festoon it with pretty leaves or wildflowers and nudge it in a different direction and tell Sewey not to aim for it, though soon enough Sewey would forget and do it anyway.

Fan liked that Eli never got mad at his friend, just sort of chuckled to himself as a much older person might when faced with so natural a way, and we can’t help but think she was reminded of her sweet Reg, who never raised his voice in anything but song (he was a lovely karaoke singer, favoring pop ballads), who never complained about always being passed over for promotions, who never pressed her to do anything she was uncomfortable with, matters of love included. Sometimes during breaks they would sneak down to the sublevel nurseries of the grow facility where amid the endless trays of tender sprouts and shallow bins of fry fish and the drip-drip murmur of feed and nutrients they would kiss, Reg bending way down and his big hands cupping the small of her back through the neoprene suiting and staying there, even though nobody else was around, until Fan would tippy-toe or even give a little leap so he’d have to hold her by the bottom. The facility cameras caught such a glimpse of them, and if you viewed similar vids of other couples, you knew things would accelerate and there was nothing else to do but watch, but with Fan and Reg you couldn’t help but keep wondering, for they only kept kissing, and you couldn’t help but think about what it felt like to share a satisfaction so thorough that it compelled one not always to blinded fervor. For isn’t this what any citizen of our difficult world would want if she had her choice, not to tilt ceaselessly or push-push for its own sake but to be quartered by her own best nature, the one most loving and restful and calm?

It was this she found fetching in Eli, though, unlike Reg, he seemed tinged through with what she could only describe as a somberness, his eyes peering out over the water as if waiting for something that would never come, or else had long come and gone. One bright afternoon while sitting on the slab of rock, Eli announced that he was burning up and was going to go in.

What? Sewey said, certain he’d not heard him right. Are you crazy! It’s poison!

Eli replied that it was probably the very water they all drank (if after being boiled), and that the fish and frogs didn’t seem to mind.

But it’s too deep, Eli!

I won’t go far in.

Don’t!

But Eli had already kicked off his flip-flops and pulled his T-shirt over his unruly hair and the glare from his bony shoulders and back momentarily made Fan squint. She was going to warn him, too, as the fall-off was especially steep where he was entering, but he was in before she could say a word, his cargo shorts soaked nearly to the waist with his very first step. He was steadying himself to take another when he lost his footing and in an instant he plunged into the dark but clear water, going in right up past his head, his flowing hair beneath the surface looking like a sea frond inflamed, his arms and hands now stretched stiffly outward as if he were already dead. Sewey slid on his rear to the water’s edge, extending his foot to try to let his friend grab it, but Eli, oddly unbuoyant, was only slipping down farther into the remarkably deep water, and so Fan jumped in after him.