Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Watch out for DC.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Missiles,’ I told him. He looked so disappointed that I told him not to worry. ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Probably you fly too fast.’

‘Oh, very fast,’ he beamed. ‘Several millions of miles per hour. And also I fly when everyone else is asleep.’

I wished him well and excused myself and moved on. A Russian woman, a prominent biophysicist, tried to tell me about her theories of the arctic soul. ‘Cold climates,’ she said. ‘The long nights, the temperatures, cause a darkening and deepening of the soul. Korlovsky clearly demonstrates …’

I excused myself again.

‘The parthenogenetic whiptail lizards of the South-west,’ a pale man said.

‘Wulfric of Haselbury,’ a tan girl said. ‘You’ve never heard of him?’

Two biochemists were slandering their brokers, a political economist was proclaiming the perils of not studying Latin, a sculptor was trying to buy an old Dodge from a girl with remarkable legs. I drifted through all of them to the corner where Walter, still crowned with giraffe ears, sat surrounded by his students. The students cast yearning looks at the dancers, at the group watching the physicist who was demonstrating the laws of surface tension by blowing bubbles through a straw into other bubbles, at the thumb-wrestling finals and the limbo contest and the crowd throwing Velcro darts toward a target fastened to a woman’s bottom. But they knew better than to abandon Walter, who was trying to reconstruct a colony from the rubble that I’d left him. He’d told everyone he’d had to abandon the swamp project because of his other commitments. Now everyone wanted to know what those other commitments were.

‘China,’ he kept muttering. ‘I’m arranging this big meeting in China …’

Tyler Robertson danced by just then, his tiara glimmering. ‘Outside, everyone!’ he called. ‘Two minutes to midnight!’

We tumbled out of the house and into the clear, cold night. Tyler pranced along the snowdrift at the edge of our driveway, setting out sparklers. ‘Ten seconds!’ Elena called. Tyler struck a match. ‘Nine, eight, seven, six …’ Tyler lit the sparklers. ‘Five, four, three, two, one! ’

‘ Happy New Year! ’ Tyler shouted. He lit a cherry bomb and threw it over his shoulder. The noise echoed off the windows; the sparklers sent out silvery trails; people clinked glasses and kissed. I was standing by myself, watching the swarming crowd. Walter pecked Page on the cheek. Tyler and Elena mashed themselves together and Tyler’s glasses fell into the snow. The fair-haired man who’d told the hedgehog story slipped his hand down the black-haired woman’s pants, his silver alien antennae entwined with her Carmen Miranda fruits. The students were knotted like pollywogs and the Pakistani I’d met in the hall had his eyes closed and was, presumably, flying above us all. The girl in the green cotton undershirt whirled a string attached to a tuft of burning steel wool, sending sparks flying in all directions, and when I turned a woman I didn’t know smiled at me and asked if I were pregnant.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said.

I smiled with sealed lips and walked inside. Of course I looked pregnant, I looked like a cow, and something snapped inside me after I left her. I slunk out of our white-fenced yard and down the stairs into our basement, and once I was there I wept for my lost child, my lost lives, for the houses that had given me only a stack of money in the bank. I wept, and then I ate, and when Page called my name from the top of the stairs and then turned on the light when she heard the crackle of cellophane, I cowered in my corner like a trapped opossum.

‘Grace?’ she called, already moving down the stairs. ‘Is that you? Walter’s looking for you, he wants to know if the champagne’s down here …’

She came around the corner, past the water heater, muttering something about scientists who couldn’t remember their names, and then her mouth dropped open in shock. She couldn’t see the hamper behind me; I’d blocked it with my body. But she could see all too clearly the refuse heap beneath the soapstone sink. Candy wrappers, empty bottles, torn boxes, open tins, foil and cellophane, fruit skins, jars I’d cleaned out with my fingers and tongue. Page kicked at the pile with the toe of one red shoe.

‘Jesus,’ she said. A stranger’s voice, cool and academic. ‘What are you doing?’

My hand was trapped in an open sack of glazed pecans. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. What do you want?’

‘There’s all that food upstairs,’ she said. ‘All the stuff Tyler brought. Why would you eat here?’

Why indeed. The basement was dark and damp and smelled of mold and spiderwebs. The pecans were stale. I couldn’t explain to Page or to anyone else why I needed to eat alone; for weeks, since I’d blown up again, I’d eaten like a mouse in public. I was huge, grotesque, enormous. I had no right to eat.

I stared at Page, my eyes dull and my hands dirty. From the head of the stairs I heard Walter calling. ‘Page?’ he said. ‘Is she down there?’

I froze. ‘Tell him I’ll bring the champagne up myself,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right there.’

‘She’s here,’ Page called instead. Her voice was puzzled, frightened; I don’t think she meant to be cruel. She probably assumed that Walter already knew what was going on.

But Walter didn’t know. He came down the stairs with Tyler and a student named Larry, all three of them laughing and ready to lug up boxes of liquor in their strong arms. When the three of them came upon me and Page, they stopped quite suddenly. All of them had cornered animals in the woods.

‘Holy shit,’ Tyler said. He moved closer to Page.

I hunched over my bag of glazed pecans and glared at them. Walter reached behind me and lifted the lid of the hamper and then drew a deep breath.

‘Grace,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘Leave me alone.’

I drew back against the hamper, aware that I was acting bizarrely but unable to stop myself. That corner had been my place, the only place I could call my own since I’d sold my other houses, and it was ruined now. My place, my food, my trash. I growled, I couldn’t help it. And when Page squatted down, her face inches from mine and her hand extended, I leaned over and took her hand in my mouth and held it there dumbly, like a dog.

INCENSE BURNER PEAK

There are no straight roads in the world; we must be prepared to follow a road which twists and turns and not try to get things on the cheap.

— Mao

ZILLAH’S VOICE VANISHED with my pneumonia, which left as quickly as it had come: a drenching sweat and a plunge in my temperature, and suddenly the pain in my chest was gone and I could breathe again. I woke, hungry and thirsty and worn, to find the room cool and quiet. The flowers on my bedside table were only flowers. The blinds hung sedately over the windows, and the only sounds in the room came from the other patients. I drew the air into my lungs and slept, twenty-two hours of dreamless rest. Then I woke and ate everything Dr Yu gave me — she was there, as she’d been all along — and I had a bath. Then I slept again, another full day and night, dreaming this time of Dr Yu and her life.