Famous Men Who Never Lived

by K. Chess

  “To see what?”

  Outside the automatic doors, the snow hadn’t paused. It blanketed the expanse of concrete once again. It had swallowed up their footprints. Together, they stepped out into the white.

  “A reversal of fortune,” Hel said.

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: CARLOS OLIVEIRA, AGE 73, MANHATTAN

  I don’t want to talk about me. I want to tell you about a man named Jin Fan-Wen.

  It’s easier to think of him as two men who lived different lives. Two people: Dr. Jin and Mr. Jin. Both are dead. As a specialist in the sociology of scientific knowledge, I knew Dr. Jin by reputation. Mr. Jin, who lived and died in this world, is a person with whom I’ve become acquainted only recently. But he is the one I want to tell you about. About his fate, as it unfolded here.

  Nineteen hundred and nine is the generally accepted year now, the year of the first divergences. Jin Fan-Wen was born safely just Before, in 1908, to a middle-class family in the Chinese city of Xiangshan on the western bank of the Pearl River. His well-educated parents—a laboratory technician and a shorthand instructor at a secretarial school—expected their only son to excel. Young Fan-Wen received high marks, showing special promise in the sciences. A sober-natured child, he was known to spend his leisure time not in games or sport but with a pencil and pad. I’ve had the opportunity to examine a few of his schoolboy drawings—made in 1918 and 1919 and saved by a sentimental mother—intricate thatches of abstract line. (No doubt his counterpart also liked to draw, in the other world. No doubt he tended toward variations of the same themes.) I find the sketches mesmerizingly creative, though I am not one to judge their artistic merit.

  But by any standard, Fan-Wen was bright and obedient. He studied his lessons. All who knew him felt secure in predicting for him a brilliant career.

  The fortunes of the boy who would one day become Mr. Jin changed drastically in the spring of his eighteenth year. Ineffable forces delayed the split between Communists and Nationalists, and the White Famine that ravaged my China never emerged; thus, in 1926, the political and social situation in his country remained sufficiently stable for young Jin Fan-Wen’s parents to decide to send him to the newly founded National Central University, rather than shipping him abroad to be educated as they would do in my own world. In the city of Nanking, where he was to sit the examination, the streetcar in which young Fan-Wen traveled collided with a stuffed-bun cart, which had become stuck on the tracks while the vendor who owned it attempted to push it to a better spot in the shade of the buildings on the avenue. Fan-Wen and other uninjured parties helped to pull the dead and dying from the wrecked car. By the time he reached the university, arriving on foot with a torn shirt and blood beneath his fingernails, the examinations were already underway. His excuses were not accepted.

  My informant in all these particulars is Mr. Jin’s adult daughter, Jin Bingbing, who heard the story of this fateful day many times at her father’s knee. Why would such an intimate encounter with others’ mortality put a young man with talent and inclination off medicine as a course of study? Why was Jin Fan-Wen not able to take the examinations on another day or the following year? Jin Bingbing, with whom I communicate by email through a translator, does not seem able to answer these questions. When I heard his story, I wondered if perhaps he stopped to help those injured streetcar passengers precisely because he wished to escape the fate that, his whole life long, seemed to have been prearranged for him.

  Catastrophe. The sweep of a butterfly’s wing. I wonder what I would have done if it hadn’t been for that booby-trapped house in San Antonio my unit was assigned to patrol. There are things a man is expected to do with his hands. After the incisions healed and they finally released me from the hospital, I would get drunk. Little blue bottles. It was a test of my dexterity, getting them open. Holding the bottle still between my knees and gripping with one re-formed arm and then the other, and then the reward. I would feel the liquor burn down my esophagus. Drunk was the only state in which I felt able to attempt the exercises set for me by my therapists. Drawing lines, as the young Fan-Wen had once done, only in my case, I pinned the pencil between two extremities that had, until the procedure, been the bones of my forearm. The alcohol that fogged my brain estranged me from the grief, the horror that I normally felt until, at last, all I saw was a problem to solve.

  What can I do with these broken tools? Asking this question turned me into a scientist.

  But I told you that I didn’t want to talk about myself. You have tricked me!

  Mr. Jin would never be a doctor. He did not attend university, not in Nanking (soon to be renamed Nanjing) or anywhere else. Instead, he took up the trade of mending appliances, apprenticing in the workroom of a small repair shop in the suburbs built up in the alluvial plains around Xiangshan, soon to become re-Romanized as Zhongshan. When the appliance shop became collectivized, he hung on. Though he came from an undesirable class background, he kept his head down and survived the Cultural Revolution. All day, he wired broken lamps and rewelded hot plates that no longer heated. Sometimes, when the case was hopeless, he advised customers where they might buy a replacement. He married a rather quarrelsome woman and when she died young, of an ovarian cancer, he got married again—more felicitously—to Jin Bingbing’s mother. He was an active parent; Ms. Jin remembers him helping her with calligraphy in their one-room apartment.

  And at night, he diagrammed elaborate circuits. The switches and coils, the resistors and capacitors: all drawn confidently in ink. Mr. Jin died as a very old man. He was weak and bald as a baby and utterly without material or intellectual legacy, unsung and unrecognized. But he died at home. His granddaughter cried at his bedside.

  Fated by identical genes, Dr. Jin also survived to an advanced age. Just a decade after finishing his studies, he grew famous for his pioneering study of lipoprotein levels among the Chinese immigrant population in Oceania and the correlation of these levels with heart disease. He was among the first to emphasize the role of diet in promoting cardiovascular health. As an epidemiologist, he could take indirect credit for saving thousands of lives. He passed from life on a modern sofa of Indonesian design in an elegant Sydney penthouse. Many admired him; he possessed honorary degrees from institutions all over the world. Still, Dr. Jin was a lifelong bachelor. It would be days before the cleaning lady discovered the body.

  There could be a third world where this man was an engineer. A fourth where he became an art teacher. The possibilities stretch into eternity, for all of us. It is dizzying.

  I used the word fate just now. I may have said it more than once. We humans tend to see whatever befalls us as our fate. We perceive good things and bad things alike as happening just the way they are meant to. To teach us lessons, maybe. To make us into the women and men we ought to become. If one lives to be old—as I have—it’s terrifying to imagine the infinite slew of choices made over the course of a lifetime. Different events. Different luck.

  A politician makes a speech. A virus fails to mutate. A homemade bomb goes off. A traffic accident happens in China. Who is to say what constitutes our happiness? How can we predict? I would not take my hands back now, though I certainly would have at any time in the decade after I lost them.

  So I can understand this: whether her passage through Dr. Mornay’s Gate was purposeful or accidental, Teresa Klay made the best of things. She got used to secrecy and to her own singularity. Then when the life she’d pulled together was challenged, she reacted violently, trying to erase all evidence of the world she came from. Ree viewed the possibility of renewed interest in the world that UDPs like herself came from, the potential for sustained inquiry into the nature of the divergence, as threats.

  I look upon the whole thing as a mistaken response. Like the faulty reaction of an immune system that attacks the very tissues of the body.

  Nineteen hundred and nine is the year of the first divergences. Helen Nash has finally shown this to all the experts’ satisfaction, though neither she nor anyo
ne else can say why the multiverse should have split the way it did, or whether Sleight’s death was, in fact, the catalyst for all that followed, or what caused that death. No doubt, as observers from both known worlds continue to scrutinize the brief part of the twentieth century that we all share, an earlier divergence will be found. For now, Hel’s museum takes up both floors of the restored cottage, and it is called Divergence Memorial House. It runs on charitable donations furnished by the curious and the sentimental, including myself. And at my request, Mr. Jin’s story appears there, alongside that of Dr. Jin.

  No. My father did not believe in fate, Jin Bingbing wrote to me, when I asked this question of her. But those words traveled back and forth across kilometers of land and ocean, deciphered for me by one of my young Chinese students who helps with my correspondence. Like me, this student is a sociologist; he has no training in the art of translation. Who knows whether the rendering from Cantonese to English was done skillfully. The question remains: What is fate?

  Another gleaning from one of Ms. Jin’s emails. Less equivocal, less open to interpretation. For the rest of his life, my father never went to Nanjing again.

  What is fate? What are its qualities? What is its nature? I think of myself as I was, years ago, giving up on my new weaker grip and biting the cap of a bottle in my teeth. I think of Teresa Klay, her little wave at the security camera.

  I like to imagine a world where that footage exists. I picture a flat-screen hung just inside the door of the new museum. Ree—there one moment and gone the next. Good-bye.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I owe heartfelt thanks to a long list of people.

  To Stacia Decker, my agent, for having my back and fielding a million questions. To Tony Perez, my editor, who understood the story I wanted to tell and guided its refinement. To Jakob Vala, for creating a beautiful design and to Anne Horowitz and Meg Storey, for a keen copyedit and a precise proofread. To Arielle Datz, Alana Csaposs, Sabrina Wise and everyone at Tin House Books and at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

  To Pinckney Benedict, who told me that this idea could be a book. To other fine teachers: Scott Blackwood, Edward Brunner, Dean Crawford, Beth Lordan, Julie Rose and Paul Russell. To the W. K. Rose Fellowship Committee for a vote of confidence on which I couldn’t put a price.

  To all my New York City roommates, coworkers and back-in-the-day lovers. Also, to the underappreciated city of Carbondale, Illinois and the friends who kept me going during the gestation of this book, including Emily Rose Cole, Talib Fletter and family, Me-Chelle Hall, Maria Romasco Moore, Natalie Nash, Sandra Sidi, Brandon Timm, Honna Veerkamp, and Kate Worzala. And to Ms. Patty Norris, whose warm welcome convinced me to come there in the first place.

  To Mary Kate Varnau for providing a valuable example of professionalism as well as hospitality at all hours and good conversation. To Toni Judnitch, whose comeradship continually delights and improves me, even at long distance. To the many fellow writers from whose work and comments I have learned.

  To my longtime ride-or-die companions, Lindsay MacCallum, Phillip Wilson-Camhi and especially Sabina-Elease Utley. Here's to another fifteen years.

  To Libby Westie and Joel Brattin, dear parents and voracious readers. To my brother, John Brattin, who is good at sharing. To the rest of my large and loving family.

  And to my strong and fascinating wife, Shaylla Chess—partner, confidante and inspiration. I dream with you.

  PHOTO © BRADLEE SWINTON WESTIE

  K CHESS is the author of short stories honored by the Nelson Algren Literary Award and the Pushcart Prize. She was a W. K. Rose Fellow, earned an MFA from Southern Illinois University, and currently teaches at GrubStreet. She lives with her wife in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Copyright © 2019 K Chess

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Chess, K, author.

  Title: Famous men who never lived / by K Chess.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon :

  Tin House Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018041655 | ISBN 9781947793248 (hardcover) |

  ISBN 978-1-947793-25-5 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction)

  Classification: LCC PS3603.H4855 F36 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041655

  First U.S. Edition 2019

  Interior design by Jakob Vala

  www.tinhouse.com