Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

Miss Cathy said, It’s my decision, yes?

Assuming you’re their keeper.

I’m their keeper, she answered.

We know, of course, that Miss Cathy deemed the two would remain in place, to which the rest of the girls, shaken as they’d never been before with real confusion and fright, could only assent. It was happier for all of them, especially Miss Cathy, to believe that the sickness would pass. Even Four and Five tried to agree, waving from their beds. It had been most difficult, Miss Cathy now recalled for them, when Three developed an infection from the burst appendix and had to stay at the medical center for a week. With one of them missing, they couldn’t sleep. They couldn’t eat. Even the wall work went badly. Nothing was right.

Mala asked Miss Cathy to reconsider, but the woman literally blocked her ears, no doubt startled to hear such questioning from her helper. It may have been the very first such instance. Mala pleaded some more and Miss Cathy finally shouted, Enough! Mala shrank. Miss Cathy now mentioned to the Girls that she had been planning to bathe and wondered if they wished to be with her afterward, to do their hair and nails. They cooed in happy panic; it was a rare treat to be invited for a beauty session in her suite. Before leaving, they all kissed the sickened girls, Miss Cathy telling Fan to stay and watch over them and call the doctor if necessary.

Upendra, who had been gathering his things, reiterated that it would only be an ambulance returning to transport them to the medical center, as there was nothing more here for any doctor to do. Miss Cathy didn’t respond, though her tight huddling with the Girls reminded one and all that they were in one another’s care, just as they always had been, just as they always would be. They disappeared into her suite. Mala had to go downstairs, so she would let Upendra out. But before he left the Girls’ room, the young doctor took Fan aside, handling her by the elbow, kindly but with grip enough that she could distinctly feel each pad of his fingers pressing on the joint and bone.

You don’t have to stay here if you aren’t hers to keep. You know that, right?

She nodded.

He waited for her say something, perhaps to ask him for help, but she remained silent.

Okay, then, he said, seemingly unsettled by the moment. He was going to say something else but then he simply left. The Girls’ room door was locked shut. Fan must have known, if anyone would, that she wasn’t Miss Cathy’s to “keep.” She wasn’t anyone’s to keep, perhaps not even Reg’s, which is in part why we admired her so. Yet there are times when one must simply endure, as was the case now, with Fan alone watching the two sick dear girls, their color already going to slate.

There is an old B-Mor saying that one hears a lot these days. Or so it would seem. It came over with the originals, surely, and like many of their sayings, notions, traditions, it has remained in currency. It goes like this:

Behold a fire from the opposite shore.

For the originals, it was advice to be taken literally, for back where they came from there were indeed real fires raging (whether by accident or design or negligence), plus constant plumes of lethal smoke from the primitive industrial processes, not to mention the attendant spews of fouled waters, and countless megakilos of buried waste products that eventually poisoned the entire subdistrict. You had best stay back, suggested the sage. Or flee.

Proverbially, of course, it means to indicate that one can rightly look after one’s own, that you are not obligated to address the plight of others. This may strike us as inconsistent with what we think of as the primary ethos of our community, namely, that it is a community, right down to our slippers, in which we shall labor and prosper together, or else tread at our lonely peril.

Sayings are employed for a purpose, reflecting what we want of them and the larger world, as well as the very time of that wanting. Everyone knows a truth can be a falsehood (or vice versa) depending on the context. So, too, with the recent frequency of this “fire.” Are we afraid of what seems to be happening, and so are justifying a retreat into ourselves? Or is it being spread by people secretly working for the directorate, for the same reason? Either way, we have begun to feel the rends in our finely spun society with each outbreak of vandalism and impromptu public protest and then the rash of the newest graffiti, spray- or hand-painted with what must be a widely distributed stencil.

FREE REG

No matter if we agree. And we do agree, as does everyone else we know. Is even the directorate in opposition? But it’s the fact that the sentiment is being duplicated, in most every hue, with both the faint smudge of haste and the meticulous intricacy of design, which unnerves. It’s gone wide. One example that we saw the other day clearly looked as if a small child was barely able to hold up the stencil before messily overspraying it, the part outline of his or her stout little hand floating faintly above the drippy letters. It was practically heartbreaking — and disturbing — to think of that innocent young person wholly caught up in this broad surge of feeling.

But it is a genuine surge, and like all surges that rise up and tide and maybe threaten the bulwarks, it will eventually recede. What it shows of us when it does is difficult to say. We are not accustomed to thinking too far ahead, no doubt because of our longtime security and prosperity. We are engaged in the regular business of our living, as always passing the hours mostly hived in our households, though these days, despite the cooler weather, you see more and more of us outside, just as we would be on especially hot summer nights.

Though now, instead of the children playing their games of tag and hide-and-seek, and the adults arrayed on the stoops fanning themselves and drinking iced tea and smoking, we are milling about on the sidewalk or in the street. The children are actually aware of us, awaiting our next move. Most everyone is standing. Maybe there’s a food hawker, maybe there’s a reader of palms or cards, but even these are behaving with politeness and reserve, just as though they had set up outside a row house holding a viewing, to serve any craving mourners. They’re acting this way because we are murmuring to one another, and not of garish happenings on the evening programs, or of the unusually pronounced bitterness of the bitter melons at market. We are sharing a different kind of report: of ongoing shift reductions at the facilities; of ever-increasing class sizes at the schools; of a spate of postponed overseas retiree tours, with no further word of rescheduling. And along with these and other observations and gripes, which have all been made before (if privately), what’s arising are the exhortations people are giving to one another to bring about change. And whether or not that change is possible does not seem paramount, at least not yet. It’s the very practice of our talk that warms enough, how we face each other and speak.

Maybe Reg could hear us, too, wherever he was. Maybe he peered out the window of a building or vehicle and caught sight of some of the tags, repeated in their sundry, modest fashion, and felt the buoy of our call. Such that he thought about us as we had been compelled by events to think about him, as our being just one, as beset with joy and pain as any single person. Maybe that inspired him to keep on, to endure.

And in the unknowably connected way of things, this somehow bolstered, too, our dauntless Fan. For within an hour of when we left her last, she realized that poor Five could now no longer make a sound and in fact was barely sustaining herself with her breaths; the rises of her chest stalled halfway and then could not get shallow enough. Four appeared to be approaching the same condition. Fan had already banged on the door to Miss Cathy’s suite but there was no answer. She even swung a night table at it to smash the panes but they were thumb-thick unbreakable plastic and the flimsy piece of furniture instantly broke apart at its leg joint. In the small kitchen she searched for something she could use as a lever but all the knives were short, thin-bladed parers. She was wielding one anyway and ready to try when the half-opened hatch of the dumbwaiter caught her eye. No, even our Fan was too big to fit inside. But she had an instant vision: she tore up a cereal box and piled the pieces in a soup bowl, nesting some toilet paper on top for good measure. She found matches — the Girls loved scented candles — and when the flames leaped up, she sent it down, knowing that when it reached bottom it would sound a bell in the main kitchen. She pressed her ear to the metal door and heard the faint ping.