Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘Your house,’ Quentin continued. ‘That extra room over your garage — Walter says Katherine might as well stay there, she’ll be perfectly comfortable.’

My old room, the place where I’d first holed up when I returned to Massachusetts. The sloping walls, the neat bed, the desk in front of the window; I wondered how my life would have gone if I’d stuck to that room, treated it as shelter and nothing more. I couldn’t imagine Katherine there.

Katherine was very pink by then, but Walter stood his ground. ‘We want to do some work together,’ he said, and then he took a swipe at me — intended? unconscious? — while I was trying to picture them dissecting fish together in a trailer by the lake. ‘Since I can’t finish the project at the swamp,’ he continued. ‘I was telling Katherine what happened there, how things fell apart right in the middle of our work, and she said I ought to put the research team back together and go to the Quabbin instead. It’s a great idea — I don’t know why I didn’t see it. A better model, more refined than the first one, a follow-up study looking at the changes over the last ten years … we got so excited planning it that Katherine volunteered to help.’

Something clicked into place in my brain, the way a jigsaw puzzle piece which has always appeared to belong to a mountain suddenly reveals itself as part of a cloud. Everything is related to everything else , Zillah said; Walter’s first law of ecology.

‘Isn’t that nice,’ Quentin said. ‘That she’s willing to help?’

‘She has a huge grant,’ Walter said. ‘We can use the Quabbin data for a comparative study with her work in Sheffield.’

An old man in a blue coat passed by, carrying a duffle bag and smoking a long pipe. He wore a small white cap and walked as if he’d come from the sea or was heading back to it. Two boys in miniature green army outfits watched me and giggled when I caught them at it. Someone had carved dragons over all the walls and pillars; someone else had pruned the trees for decades into gnarled and amazing shapes, so there was something to look at in every direction. Out on the lake three small boats floated, no bigger from this distance than the rafts James Li had floated on the garden pond.

‘I was thinking we could stay here,’ I said to Walter quietly. I already knew what he’d say, but I wanted the words out in the open. ‘You could teach at one of the universities, and I could tutor people in English, and we could live in one of the dormitories.’

‘ Here? ’ Walter said. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘I hate it here,’ he told me. ‘I mean, it’s interesting for a few weeks, but all I want right now is home.’

‘Hot water,’ Quentin said helpfully. ‘Air-conditioning. Decent restaurants.’

‘That’s right,’ Walter said. ‘And I’m not ashamed to admit it.’

‘I love it here,’ I said.

Katherine laughed nervously and Walter made a disgusted face.

‘You think you do,’ he said. ‘Because you don’t understand it. You don’t see one real thing that’s going on here. All you see are your fantasies.’

That was Walter; full missionary position. I shrugged and rose and headed down the long smooth path, leaving him and the others behind as I tried to imagine China the way Walter did, as it might be. Just a big dirty country. Just a lot of people. Snarled up, unworkable; not a romance, not a story, not a myth. Maybe Walter was right and all I saw here were my dreams. Above me the glazed tiles of the Temple of the Sea of Wisdom glittered in the sun. I made a palace of dreams , Dr Yu had said to me. What I wish for. What I want. What I hope. Everyone had one; maybe everyone had two, the way we had two ears, two eyes, two lungs, two hands, a pair of kidneys, and a pair of feet. One palace for the past and one for the dreams to come. I felt the way I once had in Massachusetts — as if my skin had grown suddenly permeable, as if the world were leaking in.

Walter saw a sea of things too broken to fix and I saw, below me, hundreds of people near the edge of the lake, enjoying the sun and the gentle breeze and dreaming their own dreams. I leaned against a carved stone lion and emptied my mind. Listen , Zillah said. You can hear if you try.

My boy has red cheeks and fat arms.

Four babies sit at my feet.

In a field green with new wheat, two rocks sit.

From our houseboat, floating down the river, we hear tigers call.

If only that man would move his arm.

If only I had a new bike.

He lifts his hand, which is creased along the back, and he takes my chin in his warm fingers.

That woman by the water there, beneath her clothes her skin may be like ivory.

Suppose I had just two young pigs.

I walk into the office and I am firm, I am perfectly clear, I do not apologize.

In the old garden, the stones shot straight from the earth.

The trees might talk.

I opened my eyes. Maybe I’d heard the people below me; maybe I’d only guessed. Somewhere my mother dreamed of being rich, not understanding that no amount of money would ever fix her life. My father dreamed of small rare stamps, a face printed upside down or a boat with its sails reversed. My brother dreamed that his children might be wholly unlike him and that his wife had turned into a model. My mother-in-law dreamed of her son and my father-in-law dreamed of peas. James Li floated rafts on a puddle and dreamed of his lost love. Rocky dreamed of shopping malls and unrationed pork, his father dreamed he could live his life again, and Dr Yu dreamed that her sister and parents were still alive, that her students had not been lost, that her lab gleamed with new equipment … for a minute, just a minute, I heard her voice in the hospital, telling me the story of her life.

I walked down to the marble pleasure boat the Dowager Empress had bought with the money meant for the Imperial Navy, and as I did I saw the first house I’d bought with Uncle Owen’s money. Which was the more useless purchase? Zillah said. Which more cruel?

I couldn’t answer her. The Dowager Empress had had an answer for the people who criticized her purchase: she told them she had used the money for shipbuilding, and she invited them to visit her boat. I had never asked Walter to visit my first house. He’d come twice, uninvited, only to stand silently in the lacquer-red dining room, and only now did I wonder what he’d thought. Perhaps he’d looked at my careful arrangements of screens, chairs, and porcelains, and had seen, not a woman combining and recombining objects into a pleasing pattern, but a woman getting ready to leave.

In the distance I saw Walter standing near his bench, waving his left arm at me in broad, slow strokes. Years ago, in Fargo, he’d once waved across space like that to me. He and his father had gone for a walk and were returning across the rutted fields; from the window above the kitchen sink I’d seen them emerge from the trees and move our way. The wind caught at their jackets and puffed their sleeves. Walter had turned toward Ray and then Ray had taken a little twisting step and sunk to his knees, as if he wanted to demonstrate to Walter some property of the soil. Walter had turned toward the window where I stood and had thrown his left arm up in the air, moving it slowly back and forth.

I had waved back, and then Walter had cupped his right hand around his mouth and shouted something. I’d thrown open the window. ‘What?’ I’d called. I couldn’t understand him. ‘What?’

His left arm beat at the air: up, down, up. ‘Geese!’ he’d cried. And when I’d raised my eyes to the sky above him, I’d seen an enormous flock of geese in the air, winging their way south.