Chang-Rae Lee - On Such A Full Sea

She told him there was nothing she found more enjoyable.

You’re lucky, Fan. But what will you do now? There’s no work like that here.

I’ll find something else, she said. You can still play the violin so well.

I like that I can, he said, not in the least bragging. But if I never played it again, I wouldn’t even think about it. I hadn’t, for years, until the other night, when I was actually playing. Do you find that strange?

This indeed puzzled Fan, as he had played so very beautifully, making a kind of music she had not encountered on any evening program or even at the underground mall during the New Year celebrations, when B-Mor’s best musicians would perform swingy, upbeat pieces, the instrument seeming to become creaturely the moment Oliver tucked it under his chin, it seemingly animated by its own wants and voice. She had never felt such pure, lovely, sad sound.

Each day they would jog together like this, and each day Oliver would ask something about B-Mor, what things were like in the facilities and at the mall, what people in the clan were up to, though not inquiring too deeply into any particular person. If there was a theme to his queries about an uncle or cousin or one of their parents, it was about how they had gotten on over the years, how they’d aged physically and which C-illnesses they’d suffered and how they managed the early mandatory retirement and what they did with their free-days. When Fan asked what he remembered of the older people doing around the row houses and stoops, he said smoking and drinking tea and gossiping and eating snacks and watching the programs and farting and belching, to which Fan said, Yes, that’s what they still do, to which he shook his head and laughed, though with a quizzical expression that made Fan think he believed she was trying to tell him something else.

In fact, he responded to much of what she said in this way, with a half-incredulous grin that quickly compressed into a tiny pout of wonder, just as if a monk had uttered a particularly imponderable koan for him to unravel. But he continued to ask all about B-Mor, never anything serious or weighty like school or facilities issues or the directorate, but about what kinds of eateries there were in the mall these days, or the kinds of street games the children were playing, or facts he didn’t get to know because he left too early to be interested in, for example, how the retirees going on a lifetime global were chosen, or what music and vids and games teenagers liked best, and where they went to meet for dates, and whether it still mattered which clan you were from, or which neighborhood, for someone to like you in that way. He was trying to get a feel again for what basic life in B-Mor was like, the day to day to day, which Fan thought he would certainly find dull and common but that he seemed to get more curious about as they spoke, wanting the most insignificant details that Fan herself could hardly recall (if she ever noticed them), like the colors of the sash and uniform of the salesgirls at the department store (crème and mocha), and the price of a mochi (hardly changed), and if the great aunties still used those long-bristled Stone Age hand brooms that the counties peddlers brought in to sell to sweep the walk in front of the houses (yes). In fact, their light jogs, which had eased to walks, became a shared act of cataloguing the many patterns and textures of B-Mor life, a modest cloth indeed, but one that Oliver kept wanting to examine and handle and measure against his newly aroused memories.

For in recent years, and as the promise of his research solidified, he had been thinking more and more of his time in B-Mor with a deepening glow of nostalgia, though one surely too warm and bright and that he was skeptical of, being trained as a scientist. He told Fan how after he was Chartered, as it was known here, he had truly not thought of B-Mor at all, not because he wanted to forget it, but because after all the celebrations and commemorations and absolute good-byes — there were no see-you-laters, no au revoirs — the feeling he had was that he was embarking on his own private global, out past any atmosphere, and leaving behind a world at which he could not gaze back, as it had already been erased. Everyone knows how hard it is for any Charter kid to do well, but he was a newcomer with surprisingly indifferent foster parents who were more interested in keeping than raising him, and so he realized that there was just himself, that he was the only person who would educate this unfledged boy.

In the first overwhelming and chaotic weeks of his new life at school and swim practice he’d come home and, after a mostly silent meal, retreat to his room and stand before the mirror in his dressing room full of new clothes and berate himself for the various mistakes and idiocies he’d committed and revealed that day. He hated the new name he’d been given and he channeled his fury at this pathetic Oliver, calling him out for his failings, starting with his vocabulary, which he’d prided himself on in B-Mor but was shockingly lacking here. He even misused the words he had, no teacher in B-Mor ever correcting him, confusing paramount with tantamount, egress and aegis, his teacher holding forth upon their etymologies for the class, to his utter humiliation. He was excellent at math but found he was a half year behind his new classmates, most of whom were not gifted at all, and he stayed up all night for a week to teach himself the units he was missing, soon enough leaping past them, though he never let on. And while in the pool he was nearly as fast as the others, he realized how much harder he was working because of his faulty technique and mechanics, his teammates languidly pulling themselves through the water with butter-smooth strokes while he brutally chopped at it, as his coach said, like a madman having a fit.

But he learned. He could not help but learn, as vigilant as he was for any sliver of instruction or advice. And this is what Oliver revealed to Fan he was best at, his truest gift: he was instantly able to determine who possessed expertise or useful knowledge, and then glean from them whatever he could, even if they were against him, which most everyone was at the beginning, his classmates and teammates and coaches and even his violin teacher, who had never worked with a Chartered student before. The only one who had been immediately welcoming to him was a very quiet but self-collected Vikram Upendra, who noted an error in a second-order partial differential equation Oliver had written out for the class, mentioning it to Oliver only afterward to make fun of their conceited instructor, who believed himself a rare genius who should have been designing propulsion systems or proprietary trading platforms.

Oliver admired Vik’s mind, for sure, but mostly for how unruffled he was, how he let everything come to him and then made it fit into his own idiosyncratic measure. This could never be Oliver’s way, but hanging out with Vik helped him understand the value of not always pushing and striving at full tilt, that there were situations best handled by patience or throttling back or maybe — and this had never occurred to him — by doing nothing at all. The funny thing was that there was a worrisome period in which his research seemed to have stalled, until one day he asked himself what Vik might do and proceeded to halve his large staff so they could concentrate their efforts on simpler approaches to the problem. Soon thereafter there was a breakthrough, and whether it was mere coincidence didn’t matter, because in Oliver’s own mind, Vik had a credit in his success.

It’s why I could do nothing to him the day of the party, he confessed to Fan. They had stopped as usual at the coffee bar, Oliver having his iced Americano, Fan a tangerine juice.