Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

But something is different; they might be sharing a snack with a companion or browsing a rack of dresses and yet what comes through is a hardness, a blocking, this clear sense that they can no longer share. They are suddenly apart from us, as well as from one another, for there appears to be no secret society bonding them. They are lone agents in a nonexistent organization. They are playing a solo. Perhaps because of this, they appear all the more anchored, all the more unitary. But do not automatically think they have become “individualistic” or, in fact, aim to be. It’s not that. Of course, someday soon they’ll grow their hair again, and we’ll have forgotten that it was ever gone. And, in time, so will they.

For now we wait and wonder. We wonder when it will be that we slip away one ordinary evening when everyone else is busy with their programs or games, and find ourselves before the bathroom mirror, turning this way and that, regarding everything and nothing with our minds strangely blank, and work the powered razor or blade. The first pass is horrid, as you would expect, though not for how awful it looks, but for how it feels, the sensation of an animal slowly prying itself from its shell. You shrink with the exposure, the chill of the air. You’re not ready for this. But as you clean up the rest, make it even and smooth, you begin to understand. You understand that the time has come for you to go downstairs in the morning and sit in your customary spot by the far corner of the table and eat without any self-fanfare, and just as you had earlier, let everyone take in the alteration, let yourself become one more notation. For at some point each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

Is this what the Girls realized when they deemed that Fan must be allowed to go on her destined way? As with everything, they decided this together, although it was surely catalyzed by Six. One morning Six rose many hours before the rest of them and by the mere glow of the nightlights drew and fully colored the picture that she said was “crowding” her mind. Some of them gasped on seeing it, if simply for how large it was; the scene was nearly three times the width and length of the abutting images, the great stamp of it jutting out into the rest of the wall’s blankness like a continent suddenly born from the depths. The run of the panels was forever altered. But immediately they agreed it was her most beautiful work. Its scale had allowed her a freer hand, and although you could not make out any pencil lines, one could almost imagine Six’s movements, the wider arcs and glides of her arm, with the enlarged fields of the figures and shapes not uniformly markered (for that would have looked blotted and primitive) but rather painstakingly flecked with numerous proximal shades of a color, for richness and depth of hue. The scene itself was an underwater realm bristling not with creatures or fish but with a dense forest of marine plants, wispy tendriled corals and bushy anemones and in the center of the panel, broad ribbons of electric aqua-green seaweed flowing wildly upward, seven of the thick shoots transforming into seven faceless girls, with Fan, of normal body, being pushed by their number to the surface and reaching for another pair of hands, which at this point were only loosely sketched.

I wanted to wait for you before finishing Reg’s, Six said to Fan. I wanted to get them right.

Once Fan described them, Six did get them right, all the way down to Reg’s spindly wrists, and the stubby nails of his long fingers, and the tender-fleshed pads at the base of his thumbs, so much so that Fan could almost feel a lifting to go along with the pangs. She was thankful that Six hadn’t rendered the rest of him, the sensitive, gifted girl perhaps understanding that it would be too much for Fan if he loomed there fully on the wall. Indeed, Fan had left her album card with his images back at the Smokes (it had died anyway, with no way to recharge it), though in truth she had probably done so to deny herself too easy a means of viewing him, which would only amplify her longing, something she had plenty of from the beginning. And too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality.

First, they made a formal request of Miss Cathy. This was much more complicated than it might seem, for they had never done such a thing before. Aside from leaving a brief weekly listing of foodstuffs on her night table, and a monthly one for basic toiletries and some nail supplies, they’d never asked her directly for anything, everything else such as paper goods and cleaning supplies being sent up in the dumbwaiter (presumably by Mala). They took their turn out in the little bed and really there was nothing else to ask of Miss Cathy, who was “keeping” them, as this uncommon but growing Charter practice was called. The Girls were lodged in the same way beloved pets were once kept by their owners, who, of course, did not query them as to what they might desire. And while the Girls professed undying devotion to Miss Cathy, none of them relished the idea of having to ask her for so drastic a thing as Fan’s release, which might as well have been like petitioning the Sun not to set this day.

Still, it was decided that Three should do it, as she was the most outspoken of them, and because it was her turn to sleep out in Miss Cathy’s suite anyway. But when she slipped back inside their room the next morning, she was as upset and shaken as any of them had ever seen her, telling them how instantly cross Miss Cathy had become, and then deeply hurt by the idea that the Girls were even considering that she had anything but their best welfare in mind. Fan was a part of them now forever. In fact, Miss Cathy decided that no one would stay out with her for an entire week, effectively barring all of them. This caused an immediate panic in the group, for she had never done such a thing before, and poor old Two, who was perhaps the most fragile of them, became so anxious that she had to be given nighttime ibuprofen dissolved in some ginger tea to stop her obsessive throat-clearing, which is how her nervousness expressed itself. Miss Cathy had, of course, taken off a week or two when she and Mister Leo went on a rare vacation, but she had never been home without having one of them sleep out.

While they were all comforting Two as she sipped her tea on the circular sofa, Fan told them that they should not concern themselves with her plight and that she would somehow find a way to reunite with Reg. They protested, bemoaning her lot, though finally assented with kindly murmurs and exhortations, hugging her in turn. Of course, their aim of liberating Fan was not in the least diminished. And after years of intimate domiciling, a shared glance among them was enough to cement the understanding that only they would constitute the solution.

The first attempt was mostly exploratory. Six and Seven, perhaps wanting to be daring, intentionally ate some moldy Korean rice cakes they had unearthed in the back of the pantry closet, in the hopes that they’d become ill enough for Miss Cathy to call the medical center for help. An ambulance had come a couple of years before, when Three suffered an attack of appendicitis, with the EMTs waiting outside Miss Cathy’s suite; the doors were briefly unlocked for them then, several girls carrying Three to the gurney in the corridor. But now Six and Seven only got ill enough from the dduk to throw up and suffer a half day’s bout of diarrhea, after which they felt fine. Miss Cathy could not even be alerted.

The second try was more serious. Four and Five, who most often prepared the meals, were making a cold bean salad for a lunch. But when Four opened one of the cans of kidney beans — it was slightly bulged on the bottom, so that it wobbled as she clipped the can opener onto it — a horrific, apocalyptic smell filled the small kitchen. They had to turn on the hood fan, though it did little good; the smell was practically vicious, similar to the awful odor last summer when an animal died in the venting for their room, but ten times as potent, sickly sharp and alive. We can imagine them holding their noses, and looking at each other to see if one of them might be willing to eat it. But it was far too foul. Finally, Four was about to zip up the can in a plastic baggie to throw out when Five suggested that they make a spicy curry out of it for themselves. They got to work, adding a good can of beans to the fry, trebling the dry spices and chilis, until the dish became in fact somewhat edible, being at least intense and fiery. Indeed Five kept saying how they ought to make it this way always, even ladling a second helping on her slice of bread.