The Dragonfly Sea

by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

  She rose from her knees. She said, “I lost the sea.” She retrieved the box from within her rucksack. The broken vessels clanged. “Will you fix these? They are smashed. I brought them back for fixing.” She carried the box to his table.

  He drew the clay out. She watched as he slowed down the wheel, his hands still pushing, pulling, kneading. Entranced, she slipped into stillness, the better to see his hands create. He worked, and some of the congestion in her heart dissolved. “Will you fix it?” Meaning the vessels, meaning her core, meaning Muhidin, meaning the world. He reread the sorrowing worn by her body, the bent head, the sadness and hunched shoulders.

  He stopped his work to take her hands.

  The half-made vessel dissolved.

  Touch.

  She curved her hand around his.

  Time died.

  She cleared her throat. “You are here now?”

  “Yes.”

  “The ship?”

  “She was killed.”

  Ayaana closed her eyes. The MV Qingrui: another phantom in the landscape of losses. She had stopped asking, “Why?”

  His new Zao Wou-Ki, it was mostly sky-blue. Violent blue, red, and black brushstroke signals, like colored scars on a page of light. There was a word she would have used if she had known it: “palimpsest.” Dusk, and the shine of an ever-new, unfolding glimmer, revealing new skin on a now old soul.

  * * *

  —

  Rain pattered. A stirring on the roof. Sparrows roosting on eaves. Ayaana turned from Lai Jin and flowed out the door to witness their presence.

  She said, “Forgiveness birds.” Then she wiped her face with the backs of her hands. Tears. Rain. It soaked her clothes and skin. The purging water trickling into a place of the heart. Lai Jin knew when to meet her at the door with a thin red towel. A hot shower was already running. He led her to it. His beige robe lay folded on a wooden bench for her to use.

  * * *

  —

  Later, supported by soup, they would talk until the dawn. Mostly, they would remember Zao Wou-Ki and smile about plastic ducks and frogs still floating on ceaseless seas. Ayaana would tell him about being the Descendant, and how she had needed to escape it: “I sought the sea.” Stillness. “Then the sea left me.” They would reach for the silence that sat between words. They moved into it. They shifted to sit close to each other. Bodies touched. The fluttering of roosting sparrows. They both looked in that direction.

  Forgiveness birds.

  He imagined she alluded to the Great Sparrow Campaign disaster that still haunted the psyche of the nation, which she would have heard about by now. He imagined she was observing that the sparrows, despite the horror visited upon them, had returned. Forgiveness birds. That was what Lai Jin would call them from now on.

  “My father,” Ayaana said, “Muhidin, he went to the ocean. He has not returned.” Eyes met, entangled. She whispered, “We are waiting for him.” Her gaze searched his for his knowing. Gaze to gaze. Within his eyes, the image and likeness of her tears. It was what, today, she needed to see. That was why she flung her arms around his neck, and he lifted her to himself, and she grieved into his body, and he knew enough of life to know when listening was the only word.

  * * *

  —

  Nightfall. For the first time in Ayaana’s Chinese sojourn, she saw Teacher Ruolan’s Tou Mou, the empress star that never set. How much she had longed for the darkness of real night, away from the confusion of commerce’s neon and sky-clouding smog. In the depth of that night, as Lai Jin slept, Ayaana heard, as if from within, an oud played by a chimerical soul on the fringes of a street that was a crossroads between worlds, between wars. She soared out of bed to reach for a large window out of which to look. A woman wearing a man’s shirt while scanning strange skies for a song. She was still crying.

  * * *

  —

  She wanted to tell him that she had lost the strength to try to keep negotiating existence in Mandarin. She wanted to explain to him that her dreams were inundated by a torrent of languages. She was drowning. Silence. There were no words for what she wanted to say.

  * * *

  —

  The next afternoon, they sat together on a bench, which Lai Jin had crafted beneath an overhang next to an ancient willow tree. It was positioned so that, when they squinted a certain way, they might imagine the sun over Hangzhou Bay, beyond a curtain of smog that ventured to obscure vision. Sometimes, cirrus clouds. Tendrils like calligraphy etched into the sky. The water flickered with copper highlights. Four plump ducks waddled close by. They belonged to nobody. They had turned up one morning, murmured Lai Jin. They must have got lost along the way. They had arrived exhausted and had not thought to leave.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  He spoke to her of events. The accusations, a damning voyage-report. A prison sentence. He imagined she might balk at that; she did not. He told her his ship had been put on trial and murdered by fire.

  As Ayaana turned to stare at the browning sky, he said, “I did drown the containers with the slaughtered animals.”

  She said, “Good.” And then she smiled. “Good.” And her hands were on either side of his face and her eyes were aglow and he was elated, for she had kissed him and said again, “Good.”

  Late dusk; birds were going home. Rustle of leaves, lolloping wind. As she watched the earth, something reminded Ayaana that life was passage, nothing lingered. She shut her eyes and clutched Lai Jin’s hands. The silence between them absorbed extraneous words. Somewhere in the lighthouse, a clock chimed. Ayaana remembered: “You found the watch.”

  “Yes.”

  “You came to Xiamen?”

  He dipped his head.

  The temperatures outside plummeted, and they shivered.

  Lai Jin had gone to Xiamen to tell her something about Delaksha and Nioreg. No, he had needed to content himself with a glimpse of…not her, but the idea of alternative spaces. No, he was a man. He had gone to Xiamen to see a woman. No. Return to silence.

  Ayaana said, “Now you work with earth.”

  Lai Jin stooped to stroke the loam. He smiled as he remembered. “First, after prison, I tried to cook—I burned the food. Tried trade. Bought things in Hong Kong, sold them in Myanmar. Credit, credit, credit. Nobody returned with my money.” His look was desolate. “I returned to my beginnings.” Ayaana stirred next to him. “To fire.”

  Ayaana absorbed his words as a prayer.

  She asked, “This is your home?”

  Lai Jin looked around him. “It was broken.” A distant murmur. They listened to the receding sea, pieces of breeze. Ni shi shei? the ocean was still crying. As before, neither of them replied.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana rested her head against Lai Jin’s right shoulder. Her words were caught in her throat. “That watch. The ping…has gone from it.” Fresh tears settled beneath her jaw. Muhidin, she remembered. She was wearing Lai Jin’s waterproof jacket, the one that had once sheltered her. She leaned in to him, with ease. He watched her. Her fingers were on his arms. The seduction of the deep—its bewildering layers reflected the colors of longing, the memory of a shimmering blue wick that set the sea on fire, and with it two bodies. His eyes were on hers; fingers traced her mouth, fluttering. Her fingers reached up to search his face. Flowing. And then he gathered her to himself. Her face was pressed into his chest, but she had borrowed enough air from the surface not to mind. There, in the middle point between top and bottom, she connected to a heart. And the demons of her present life vanished. She descended; she descended in the bubble of their silence. Cocooned stillness. The temptation to linger. She stroked him.

  His hands bruised her arms. “This time…” he warned, “this time…”

  “What?” she whispered. She faced him.

  “What?” he ask
ed.

  Unveiled—everything was there to be read.

  Lai Jin’s gaze darkened.

  She said, “I went to Shanghai to see Zao Wou-Ki.”

  Lai Jin nodded.

  She rested her head against his neck.

  His arms enfolded her.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, throwing herself into activity, Ayaana used up all Lai Jin’s spices to make a rudimentary chicken biriyani. She also watched Lai Jin fire the clay. His hands, focus, stillness. She knew his body: its feel and taste and touch. She knew the feel of outward scars. And then—a tug in her soul. Stirring outside wind. A chime. The truth: transience. He caught her watching him. Embarrassed, she equivocated. She told Lai Jin of something she saw on a Shanghai street corner. “Someone had carved a Buddha out of a blood-streaked elephant’s tusk.” She then looked over her shoulder, as if expecting something awful to appear.

  What are you running from? Lai Jin wondered. But he would not test fate; whatever this was had brought her to him. He listened as she told him that she was waiting for Muhidin to return. She clutched her stomach. Home. Of late, it had become an ephemeral place she inhabited, which refused to guarantee its endurance. She did not speak of Pate’s expectations for her, or the one thing she was beginning to sense she could no longer do: stay in China. She was not Chinese. “What if there is no home?” she asked, her breath caught in her throat. She looked at him as if he had been privy to the sequence of her thoughts.

  * * *

  —

  Later, Ayaana ate her portion of the biriyani in a small wooden bowl with chopsticks. She lifted the chopsticks. Lai Jin laughed at her ease with them. She cast him a wry look. He looked down at the rice on his plate, frowning as if he might speak. Her friend Delaksha, he remembered. He needed to say something.

  Ayaana said, “I’m like your ducks.”

  He laughed instead.

  * * *

  —

  A view of the night: no curtains, no veils, and sometimes the wind found a way in through the holes in the window. She was wearing one of Lai Jin’s large white workman’s shirts. His futon was small. She was to his left. He settled on his side. She turned to him after five minutes of dense silence. She touched his mouth, the burned side of his face. He blinked. He touched her face as if it were made of clay fragments.

  Ayaana told him, “I saw a man in Turkey. I think he was a lost prophet.”

  Lai Jin stroked her eyelids, wiping away tears, drawing them on her face as if his finger were a paintbrush. Her warm body, warm breasts, warm thighs. Warm voice.

  “I met another who evaporated. All he left behind was an old brown shoe. There was blood on the shoe.” She painted the air. “The shoe itself disappeared.” Tears reached her jaw. He wiped them away.

  “Does anyone in the world find exactly what they need, ship leader?” Her voice petered out.

  Lai Jin recoiled. “We hope to every day.”

  Silence.

  She accused Lai Jin: “Even you abandoned the sea.”

  He heard the break in her voice. He shook his head. Fingers on her skin. He had so many questions for her. He wanted to know about the fissures in her gaze.

  Her hand was on his belly, his on her breast.

  She asked, “Po Fu?”

  He mulled that over before choosing words. “A name for exile.” A light smile. He turned to her. Ayaana saw his soul shimmer, as if it still lived in the sea.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana inched closer and closer to Lai Jin until she was melded to his arms, which tightened around her. Touch. She was drifting to sleep, breath by breath. He stroked her body, reviving memory. The storm, their storm. Its colors. She was here. Ayaana slept long and deep, right into the middle of the following day. When she opened her eyes, a thick smokelike fog shrouded the area, its lighthouse, and its few inhabitants. Desolate weather. Ayaana was cocooned.

  * * *

  —

  She lay beneath him, guiding his erect penis into her softness. Enclosing him. Another beginning. In. Timelessness. They were its sole occupants. Thrusting, thrumming, and starting again. And, again, both dissolving into fire. And currents of dreams and salty dampness and need.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Ayaana scrambled to the top of a rock to try to get the phone signal that she would use to inform a university administrator that she had gone away to a quiet place. She had gone to a shrine close to the sea.

  “Houyi!” the woman screamed. “This is most dishonorable. You come back immediately…”

  Ayaana switched off her phone. And tossed it in the air—catching it before it fell.

  * * *

  —

  “There are no secrets in China,” he told her.

  * * *

  —

  She was bartering with existence, trading ghosts: Pate for Muhidin.

  * * *

  —

  Ayaana and Lai Jin walked all the way to a sea that had fled its old shore. A three-kilometer walk before the water glistened like a silver table in front of them. They looked out of place. They endured the gaze of the few others, the unstated questions. They oozed silence as they walked the bleak shoreline, listening to water. He stooped to pick up sea glass: white, green, blue. She copied him. Lifted up to the light a red one smoothed by the whole weight of the sea. Only later, after the sun dipped into the water, did Ayaana find the portal at the water’s edge from which she could call out to Muhidin in a high cry that split winds and forced them into listening-waiting, as Lai Jin watched over her, and the sea asked, Ni shi shei?

  * * *

  —

  They were a strange pair, sitting as they did, blurred by a darkness that had sewn them into a shoreline as they looked over a night sea. Lai Jin watched the waters for a message. And, with dark light, Lai Jin saw how he would repair Ayaana’s broken vessels. He knew he would use gold paint for the darker vessel, and copper for the light.

  * * *

  —

  Throwing clay at night. In a soft, soft voice made of single words and long pauses, she asked him why the world was the way it was. He told her that he could not say, but that he had settled for the basics: soil, clay, water, fire, and silence. Touch, too. He told her that touch was necessary. The next day, he untied the carton in which she had placed the broken clay vessels. He picked out the pieces one by one. She watched his face. He tested the broken edges with his finger. He blew on others. He transferred all the pieces to a separate rectangular tray, then retreated to a cupboard and returned with the tools and equipment he might need to make sense of the fragments and bring them back to wholeness. She watched his face, his body. At last, he lifted his head to look back at her. He smiled. She breathed.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, she woke up before dawn to run to the sea and walked into the cold, cold waves until they reached her waist—the extent of her tolerance of the icy water. There she prayed to the God that had ebbed from her life as she crossed from Pate to Xiamen. She informed both God and sea that Muhidin was her heart, her spirit, her breath. She told God and the sea that they owed her his life. She gave them a deadline. The tide was coming in. Driftwood buffeted her body. She brought it back to shore and into the lighthouse.

  * * *

  She took to sitting between his legs. Leaning in to him, turning her face so his warm breath could touch her skin: the building up of body tension and desire, of strained longing, skin to skin, and craving wholeness. He was creating a vessel over her shoulder, dipping his mouth into skin. She tilted her head so he could taste the part of her neck beneath her ear. Silent days. Few words.

  * * *

  —

  Lai Jin waited for her footfalls; he anticipated the sense of urgency with which she threw herself into the day, and, more
recently, into his arms. Fate. He had been contemplating his relationship with fate. “Haiyan.” He tested the name, feeling its power, as if it were destiny. She was here.

  * * *

  —

  She saw her life’s otherness as if she were a detached spectator. What would have happened, she wondered, if she had not received that dry pink petal from the Chinese visitor’s hands on Pate?

  * * *

  —

  Clear lacquer. Gold leaf. He started with the tear-shaped vessel.

  Her voice cracked. “You can make it whole?”

  Lai Jin answered, “I will try.”

  “It will be scarred.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not the same as before.”

  “It is other and more.”

  “But not as before.”

  “No.”

  He applied a thin brush with lacquer to a piece of ceramic. The round palette containing the clear lacquer balanced on his left thumb. His delicate touch, delicate gestures. She sat cross-legged, watching. She imagined that the sea was flowing in now.

  * * *