Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

There is always something entrancing about an image on a wall. Perhaps it’s because it’s frameless, threatening to break wider, maybe free. From the youngest to the oldest we know its purpose, which is to inspire and incite and celebrate, maybe question and even criticize, and then, of course, simply to record a version of what has happened, or should have happened, were our world a more genial place. And seeing those splashes of color along with others (or the thought of onlooking others) is totally different from seeing the same images alone, the former sensation, when it is right, akin to sharing a long-harbored secret.

What we have perhaps not considered enough is the maker and why she’s done what she’s done, whether it was some unexplainable artistic urge or else an impetus of conscience, and then, most important, what the making made her think and feel, whether back in an alleyway of B-Mor or deep inside a Charter villa. For did it allow her to feel larger, more connected? Did it settle a self-quarrel? Did it offer her liberty from some private boundary that heretofore she had not understood or even noticed?

Because when we look at the final great work of Six, as well as the broader field-coloring efforts of the others, that ended up completely covering not just the white space of the partly finished wall but the entire blank run of the remaining others, we can conclude whatever it signifies is no more important than that they did it without pause, hardly eating or sleeping or much concurring with one another, caught up as they were in the virulent bloom of a fever. Yes, poor Five had nearly succumbed before their eyes. Yes, both she and Four would be hospitalized for more than a week. Yes, Miss Cathy had fainted from the shock, striking her head on the corner of a night table, her blood blotted all over Mala, who insisted on cradling her while Dr. Upendra stitched up the scary but luckily superficial wound. And yes, Fan had exited the house and climbed into the medical center van with Four and Five and Dr. Upendra, all in full view of Miss Cathy, who didn’t protest or say another word. These moments might have been rendered as always in the flow of connecting panels, with attendant realistic detail and texture, and maybe even in the larger scale of the underwater image of their pushing up Fan to the surface. Or they could have been depicted expressionistically, as was sometimes done before, some exuberant spray of spectral colors or surely, given the mood, a panel microscopically crosshatched in a dread hue.

What Six conceived instead was literally the biggest thing she’d ever done. In fact, it wasn’t a panel at all, but a panorama, the work beginning where she’d left off and stretching not just to the corner but onto the next wall and the next, wrapping the whole way around to where One and Two had begun the mural many years before. In a single immense stroke the project was complete.

And what was this last image? It was at first difficult to tell. Six started penciling the whole thing soon after the medical center van departed, working steadily and purposefully all night. The others even watched her, no one talking under the pall of what had occurred, though each wondering what it was they were seeing. Six was clearly energized by the work, rapidly mounting and dismounting her stepladder and shifting it by herself as she went along the walls; she refused any help. Her motions were unfamiliar to them, as they were accustomed to painstaking rendering, the scribing out of one tiny section at a time. Her hand now swept across the wall in wide arcs, slashes, the furious action of her arm looking like she meant to deface the surface rather than decorate it, the scrape of the pencil raspy and sharp. She labeled the colors to be done as she went, though in fact it was mostly just black, and some grays, and then a few skeins and patches of brighter colors here and there. These were filled in with the especially thick poster markers they already had on the racks but rarely used, the four others coloring while Six directed them from her perch atop the stepladder in the middle of the room. Then she’d come down and join in. By the end, they had gone through a half-dozen additional sets of the markers, their hands and fingers inked, their cheeks smeared by stray smudges and flecks, their lungs so numbed by the sweet vapors of the markers that they felt they were hollowed out, floating with the lightness.

What they made was a portrait. Or a portrait of sorts. Seven said she wished Fan could see it, no doubt assuming it was of her. And maybe it was. It did look like her or, at least, like the curtaining sway of her hair; there was great movement in the work. For what you saw was merely a swath of a much larger image, running the height and length of two and a half walls, a banded glimpse of a girl’s head angled up in quarter profile, such that only the ends of her black hair (flashed by electric glints of violet), a line of cheek, a nub of chin, could be seen. The full portrait, were it apparent, would have been billboard-sized, as tall as the villa itself. And while it surely could have been Fan — Six just shrugged when asked — when you stepped to one corner of the room or another and took it all in, you could also think to see Five’s fullish lips, or the most solid set of Three’s cheek, or some distinctive notation of each of the Girls, and maybe Mala, too. Naturally, Miss Cathy was a presence, if only in the watery rays of sunlight that the girl was craning up to and catching, the blurred streams of them the exact color of her auburn-dyed hair, a shimmering penumbra of the gray-green of her eyes illuminating the field.

That Fan did not see any of this is not so ironic, for all along her journey we’ve observed more of her than she’ll ever know. She moves on, she pushes forward, this her guileless calling, and we have to remind ourselves that it’s perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.

And surely this is how it was that she ended up leaving the villa that day with Dr. Upendra, who had noted to himself, with great surprise, that he had returned to Miss Cathy’s not strictly for her, but at least to close the loop of his piqued regard. For we know he had gone back to the medical center after that first visit to pick up his things — it was long past the end of his shift — but instead of heading home to his condo, he chose to chat and joke with some of the nurses and even began reviewing the past month’s charts, a chore that had to be done but rarely until the last possible moment, and then lingered in the staff lounge over a vending-machine coffee and pastry, something he would normally never do, given his dining standards. As he bit into the gelid, ungiving muffin, there was a certain notion about Fan that kept circling back to him; not that she was fresh or virginal — he had no such coiling for her that way — but rather the sense that he had come upon an arbitrary plant or small tree in a section of counties bush, the specimen mostly ordinary, except that it was in its own unassuming way superbly formed, despite surely not having had much room to be.

It was not exactly that Upendra yearned for such spaciousness, as Fan would soon discover. The issue of his state of being was not stunted or malformed. If anything, he was as highly evolved as any successful young Charter could be, the elements of his existence rigorously tuned, as were those of all his peers, with “best practices” in mind, those ever-optimizing metrics that we in B-Mor know as well as anybody, though ours are, of course, designed ultimately to smooth our unitary workings. Charters, on the contrary, are always striving to be exquisite microcosms, testing and honing and curating every texture and thread of their lives, from what they eat and watch and wear to whom they befriend and make love to, being lifelong and thus expert Connoisseurs of Me.