Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

When she and Josey finally returned downstairs, the determined girl at last successful in her business, people were gathered in the main hall around the collection of gifts they’d brought and deposited there, Betty and her helpers presiding.

There you are, sweetie! We’re going to open the house presents now. Didn’t you want to help?

Josey squealed and threw herself into the pile. She shred away the wrapping papers like a ravenous big cat, precariously showcasing each gift over her head — a custom-forged chef’s knife, a crystal wine decanter — and then handing it to a helper, who would put it away safely and catalogue it for Betty. There were thirty or forty presents, all so luxuriously wrapped and fancifully ribboned, the strappings slowing Josey down enough that another helper was tasked to snip them unobtrusively so when she touched them, they fell away like loose straw. Still it was going to be a lengthy process, everyone fully indulging the giving and the delight of the child.

Fan looked for Vik but he wasn’t there. Was he still up in the bedroom, slumped in a chair, disabled by heartbreak? Or was he alone in the conservatory, trying to stunt his grief with drink? Suddenly she felt herself lost. After Betty left him, Fan had tried to listen for his movements, she had nearly gone into the other room to console him. But like too many of us would, she determined he was better left undisturbed than be forced to commune with her. No matter, solace; the problem of sympathy is that it requires two. Despite having followed her many travails, whenever we put ourselves in Fan’s place, we can’t help but feel unsettled. It’s not because of the many palpable dangers, or the strings of awful suffering she had to witness, the homeliest aspects of our citizenry. Instead the feeling can come from something as unpitched as this: standing among a roomful of strangers in a house far away.

After a few more unwrappings, Josey discovered there was a very big present that had been hidden by the stacks of others, covered in sparkly white paper with a huge sky-blue bow. It was nearly the size of an outdoor AC unit. Though it wasn’t labeled, Fan knew it was Vik’s gift. Josey brazenly shoved a few smaller presents aside and paused a moment before it, as if taking its measure. The helper unclipped the bow and then Josey clawed a corner and ripped at the paper, dragging it across the front. There was a cardboard hood over it and together Betty and the helper lifted it up and off.

It was an aquarium. Someone said plug it in, and someone did. Its lights flicked on and everyone clapped. It was a popular new kind, called the Full Sea, one that was already filled with water and completely sealed. There was a gravelly seafloor and a mass of gnarly coral and sea plants that looked like threaded sugar and ribbons of dark green silk, which swayed with an invisible, gentle current. There was a remote that came with it, and someone pressed it and out of the gaps in the coral came tropical fish. They looked so alive and real someone gasped — all household creatures having been banned — but these were artificial, if perfect, spotted catfish and striped angelfish and red discus fish and iridescent barbs, their fins fluttering, their mouths working, their bodies flashing away whenever someone tapped at the glass.

It was then Fan strode quickly from the main hall to the front door, coming out on the landing. When she got there, she saw Vik’s coupe, already backed out and just now spinning away. She waved for him to stop. She didn’t want to be left. She shouted, running down the steps and across the front grass. But he was gone.

And it was now that she saw Oliver had watched him drive away, too. He had been standing in the driveway on the other side of the catering vans. He approached her slowly, his face somehow somber and sated all at once.

And in a voice that shook her, he said, I know who you are, Fan.

She didn’t answer, or couldn’t, sure that she’d now come to the end of a line.

You’re my sister.

Our sister Fan.

Brother Reg.

Sisters Claire and Ji, brothers Darren, Sho, Tien; we will say it like that now, wherever we are, to those beyond our households, beyond our clans, unafraid of what might happen if the bosom address is spurned. Flag us if you must. What can they do? Detain us all? Have most of B-Mor disappear? It’s a matter of numbers, yes, but there is an altered thrum in the air. Too many of us are together now. When we’re at the theater, even for a wildly popular film, not a single seat free, the murmur before the lights dim is often word of the latest gatherings around the settlement, demonstrations that are no longer just spontaneous (like the littering of ponds), or stray (tags on walls), these keen if mostly isolated bursts of feeling. Talk has it there was a meeting at the big children’s park in West B-Mor, openly planned and announced, and at the appointed hour, instead of the wary, measured trickle that might have come before, a few elders sent out with toddlers in tow to test the directorate’s response; they say the grounds were filled nearly all at once, adults with infants strapped to their chests sitting on the swings, the abler-bodied climbing into the rope structure of the forts, the organizers standing on facilities palettes stacked three high so that everyone could see them, passing the bullhorn to one another to speak about the recent raising of the qualifying score of B-Mor children for promotion to a Charter, ours now having to test in their top 1.25 percent instead of the 2 percent before, which seemed already unfair. This is not about the price of fish anymore. Regular people, including people who were even childless, asked to be helped up onto the palettes, to speak of our most talented children and our bittersweet willingness to part with them, and did so without attempting to mask their faces. In fact, someone with high access leaked a security vid of the rally, the face ID predictably focusing on the organizers first and their deputies next and then systematically sectioning the crowd, but the drone’s zoom-and-pan kept moving too slowly and then too fast, perhaps not programmed for such large and dense and shifting numbers, and in the end the vid was rendered unviewable, jittery and useless, until it zoomed out to capture the entire massing. It turns out we are one, if not ever how we expected.

And it cannot matter that outwardly nothing has yet changed. Maybe we don’t even expect things to. Maybe we know that next year it will be deemed that 0.75 percent is the allowed fraction. We may not soon be heeded, but at least we can feel the long-held rumbles, now open-throated, our lungs warmed and aching with this special use that we know may be poignant only to us. There was so little of this voicing before, and now that there is much more, we see it takes as many forms as there are people, though some don’t easily align. There are instances of overexuberance, when someone is so stimulated by this unfettered exhibition that he loses all perspective and control. Take the case of one B-Mor fellow, who, after receiving what he felt was poor care at the health clinic, set up a camera in the staff restroom and took vids of the nurses and PAs, posting them for all, and going further by captioning each with the names and house addresses of these supposedly rotten individuals, who are of course our brethren. While we well know that our clinics are not the finest centers, and that the staffs can often seem indifferent to their charges, there is no excusing this fellow for trying to expose and humiliate them, something we have all darkly considered (not by using surreptitious vids, of course) but would never dream of enacting. And yet this B-Mor did, taking on the mantle of witness, prosecutor, judge, and jury, and executing in an instant the full bore of his malice that was unleashed, in great part, by this new and wide enthrallment.