FLICKER
Long dark, lighting out. Sensations dissipate. The burst slows to a mist. The shudders of a vehicle. Dark brick. Cold steel.
Dark brick. Brief exile. A rattling wheel.
They flicker.
BEIJING
The cold fell through him, entered with the breath. His knees, thighs, lungs were weakened, opened. A tightness in the throat came loose. Adam swallowed, leaned against a weight at his shoulder. He tried to remember how to get air. But the air was in him already; it was too late, too swift. The earth trembled beneath his feet, it rose into his limbs. Not earth, something other. Focus. From the dark, his vision returned.
He could see his feet. The train. His cheeks were hot, his mouth dry. The air was warm and his dumb synthetic jacket was stifling. The mind had snagged on something, some old memory or fear. A turn, a dizzy spell. Something airborne. He inhaled, and the illusion dissolved: a dissociative moment, a trick of perception.
A woman beside him tugged the sleeve of her yellow cardigan over one thin wrist.
If anyone had noticed, they did not show it. When he found his reflection, it looked ordinary; maybe his skin was a little flushed. His face shuddered in the glass then resolved, but it was only motion. He lifted a foot, shifted an arm. All functioning, all fine. His face stared blankly back at him, then turned away.
He fumbled for his phone, drew it from a pocket. It had switched itself off. He tried to turn it back on, pushing the button with his thumb, but it did not respond. A brand new machine, the best in the world; he’d had to line up for it in Sanlitun, and now it wouldn’t wake up. It was a dead black rectangle, an expensive nothing. He pushed it back into his pocket.
It was a mistake, a false positive. The mind was always inexact, it filled in blanks, and at such a distance it was impossible to recognise anyone. Now that he considered it, it was obvious. He remembered how it had been with his father. Seeing the back of his head in the supermarket, on the street. The mind invited patterns, ready to make the leap of recognition. It was the reason he sometimes thought he could hear his name in the Chinese voices around him. He reached over his shoulder to press the place where it was hurt, and felt only tingling. The heat was fading from it. The train slowed, straightened, and he breathed. Lifted his head.
He found the face again, but the person who looked back was unfamiliar: tall, Chinese, early twenties, the gaze neutral and undirected over the distant heads. The eyes like unshelled almonds, not unfriendly, but unknown to him. Dark hair, swept over. He could not see their mouth.
His throat constricted. Like a thread he meant to swallow, a string that caught at the back of the tongue, it drew him forward. He began to move. He breathed the common air in quick gulps. Grasped at poles that slipped clean beneath his hand, swung at plastic handholds, missed. He pushed through bodies, shuffling, separating, but could not get far. Rude in the crush of people, he was suddenly visible. Looks were shot at him, shoulders turned. He heard ‘lǎowài’,‘Měiguórén’. A suck through teeth. An ‘ài’ as he stepped on a toe, though boots protected it. He gave up, reached through coats for a pole. And now he couldn’t see them at all.
The train slid into the station.
There was a rolling crush as it unloaded and reloaded passengers. Adam had to turn and grasp the pole to avoid being swept out with the crowd. After the carriage refilled, he looked out over heads and between raised arms again, searching the place, finding nothing.
He waited for the doors to close, for the train to move on, for what seemed like a long time.
He turned at a murmur. Businessmen and students were leaning out of the doors. Their eyes were fixed on something outside. A girl whispered words to herself. He turned, saw a small crowd gathered on the platform ahead. Two security guards pushing through. As the guards approached the place, the crowd began to loosen and disperse. He guessed that someone had collapsed, or was being arrested, at the centre. It was too far away for him to see. Abruptly, the doors began to slide closed, forcing those leaning in or out to choose a side. And then they were moving.
By the time his carriage passed, nothing remained of the incident. People stood gazing blankly at the departing train. Order had reassembled itself, closed efficiently over the wound.
GRAVITY
Long dark. Little pricks of light appear and go. Like fireworks, but very slow. Like fireworks becoming smoke. What light the smoke holds, after.
A series. A bridge. Joints, edges. The small span from steel to hand. Hum in the articulated knuckle. Chill at the tip. The vertiginous notion of the rest of a hand and a body held behind. The press of that gravity on this meat. The way the skin stretches over it, a tender wrapper. The delicate pulse of capillaries, nerves. A clot, a maze. Press of weight through gaps of atoms. Slow time. Press of a moment. The refuge of flesh.
The finger traces plastic, taps the cold steel underneath, the connection unbroken. Close to the body. They still feel its gravity. But this is not the body. This is not their hand.
Cold earth. The hand moves away. They rise like spores, disperse like spores. Disconnected from the body, in the air. Like dust motes hanging in a cube of light.
Another body breathes them. In its elseness, numb-limbed, they get a glimpse of warm being, thick-blooded, humming. They kindle, and wink out.
Then another.
At once, too many at once: hunger somewhere and pain elsewhere and feeling. A hurt in the soles of some feet and the chemical prickle in an eye and pain, everywhere pain. The finger calluses at plastic, grips at zip. The pain of others. And where becomes whose whose are they in or not are they this isn’t right the wrist a tight band a watch they don’t know it the sleeve tight on the skin white they don’t know it the turn towards a form on a bench there lift the cover just slight wrist creaks touches the eyelash of the body they can see. The face. Cold sleep. Cold fury.
They want their body back.
BEIJING
He could see the blinking light and recognise if not read the characters, but Adam waited for his stop to be announced in English before moving. ‘The door on the left side will open,’ said the calm voice. With a gentle shove he was ready to be discharged, returned to the world above.
‘Xià, xià,’ he muttered, having learned then forgotten a politer way to say he wanted out. The man behind him pushed him gently away like a curtain, and he moved in the wake, breathing greedily. He might have been underground for days.
He had to pause to check the sign for his exit. Finding it, he joined the crowd. As he stepped onto the escalator, he felt a tremor, an excitement he could not quite place. The fine hairs lifted on his neck. It was like static. He thought of dodgy wiring below, some fault in the machinery, but shook the thought away. When the escalator turfed him out at the gates, he passed through without incident and up into the street.
On the surface he stopped. In the soles of his feet he felt that charge vibrating upward. A rumble that entered from beneath. His chest went tight a moment, then it let go. It was the train passing below the road, nothing more.
The day was already a little warmer, but no lighter. Too warm now for the other coat he’d wisely left at home. He stood for a moment, inhaling air that would not satisfy. Someone bumped his elbow and he remembered to keep moving. Street smells darted through him: cigarette smoke, frying eggs, a stinky drain, cosmetic solvents. A cloud of warm vapours piped up through a brightly painted concrete mushroom at the corner, a relic of some more whimsical time. The city went on beneath the footpath. Not the body, only a skin, a layer that had grown across some other Beijing. The levels below persisted, occupied by other forms. He walked to the corner, shaking these trespasser thoughts to the surface, trying to let them float away.
He looked up at the glass towers that loomed around him, the scaffold and cranes, and a blast of a horn drew him back to himself. He glanced into the tinted windows of an Audi, and it blasted its horn aga
in. It wasn’t him, his feet were on the pedestrian island. A young couple in matching aqua hoodies were weaving through the stopped traffic with a pram. He crossed the road after them, paused to let a high-vis streetsweeper cycle past, her hair tied in a bun, her wicker broom poking from the metal trailer. The Audi driver honked again behind him.
There were moments he had a sense of the city’s scale, was awed by the negotiations it took, the way that every tiny decision had to work. A million near misses like this somehow added to an orderly system, complex but logical. Things had their places, that was the only way it could function. Things had to stay where they belonged.
Gratefully, he stepped onto the footpath.
He did not belong. He had nothing owing. And yet the system had left room for him, an introduced species, to thrive. He peered into the window of the Starbucks, where a series of eyes were lit up blue by screens. The glass felt cool against his forehead. The face before him was distorted, disproportioned, pink, but he recognised it without trouble.
He knew who it was he had seen on the subway. It was as though the knowledge had been floating in this small patch of air, waiting for him to inhale it. But it made no sense. It could not have been them. He had not thought of them in over a year. He refused to think of them now.
He breathed out. The glass misted. The illusion of order dissolved.
SMOKE
They can’t go back. Cold. Still. This curious persistence.
A remnant? A slow leaving. What floats away from what was living. A theft. Or something owing.
An escape.
It’s cold in the room, the skins of the bodies prick with it. They are glimpses, thisnesses, entrances and exits in various attendants. A tug at a white sleeve, a nose sniffing. Multiples, in air, in breath. In limbs, in bone, in marrow. The warmth of the mouth behind its mask. The dimpling in these skins, in this room chilled for the dead. The ache of tired feet and strained necks. The low buzz of a craving. They know where the body, their body, lies, know without effort. They see it sometimes, laid out on its slanted steel. Its skull has been sawn open, its eyes are closed. An expression of uninterrupted sleep. It’s hard to pity it. It’s only a body, laid out stone cold. They can no more go back into that house than smoke can enter charcoal and make a tree grow.
So it’s in other hands, these hands, other skin, other itches, aches, eyes that they approach it. They want to stay near it, keep vigil. But these hands, these itches, want things too. To carve. To sample.
In this joint, a wrist, the heel of the hand bent back against the bone, against some cooler surface. It wants to stretch. Tendons in a row like piano strings, reaching through to tug the keys of fingers. Blood from somewhere, in and weaving, through and out. The traffic of its tiny appointments, its minuscule deliveries. The pace of its pulse. The feel inside the vessel, wrapped by muscle by nerve by skin, that artery so close to the surface, where the skin’s enclosed by a ring of not-life: a poly-cotton blend that itches, just there. Detail scales up to perfect order. The hand that comes to push it back is not their hand.
They like this, here: the warmth of the wrist. The tick of hairs resisting. The blood encircling a small cut, carrying oxygen, collagen. They like the repair work, the body’s business. The sensory intelligence that patterns through these tunnels, through all that inner muscle, moving resources, feeding and eliminating. The nowness of it.
Aware in these hands. Aware that time persists, and of their trespass.
What are they becoming?
Is this a theft? Or something owing?
BEIJING
Adam swiped his card at the door of the building, went to the elevator. In its mirrors he saw his hands were shaking. He turned his back and hit the button, then pushed the hands into his pockets. He didn’t know why they were shaking. He remembered the streetsweeper, the sight of his reflection in the window of Starbucks, the feel of cold glass on his forehead. But he couldn’t recall walking from the corner to the building, whether he had smiled at the security guard at the gate as he passed or attempted a greeting. There was an ache in his calves, a weight in his stomach. The emergency stop button at his elbow was an inviting cherry colour. He leaned a shoulder against the mirror, kept his gaze on the scrubbed steel doors. The elevator settled to an ordinary halt at his floor and stood patiently open.
The lungs would not empty completely. He steadied his breathing.
There was nothing wrong with him. It was an ordinary Monday. He took his phone out of his pocket, woke it up. The battery icon was full and green. There were no fresh messages.
It was dark in the office. No-one else was in, but the space had a feeling of recent occupation. He listened, sniffed the air, suspected a scent, but it hovered just below identification. He stood inside the entrance, near where the leaf-like logo, humility-small, marked the wall. There was no reception desk, just the open space with its workstations facing each other, the kitchen along one wall at the back, Manu’s glassed-off space, the bathroom door. His hands were still now, his fingers cold. He slipped the phone into his coat pocket and crossed the room. It was all just as it had been on Friday evening, when he had left his laptop in the office and gone out to a bar with Manu and Eliza and a group of their friends. He passed his desk, relieved that the laptop was still sitting there, its sleep light pulsing faintly.
The bathroom was dim. Murky daylight entered through one high window. The air made things look older than they were, like an Instagram filter. It aged him too, he saw with a glance. He ran his hands under warm water until the chilled feeling went away. His eyes avoided the mirror. When he reached for the dryer, he felt a pain in his shoulder, a tight feeling across the chest like a spark. He ignored it, turned without activating the sensor, wiped his wet hands on his jacket, and went to his desk.
He didn’t touch the lights; he liked the place better like this. With the lights on, it felt too self-conscious, even (he had to admit) a little pretentious. The interior was like a warehouse, with its high ceiling and exposed ducts, but it was all an illusion: the building was new, had been designed for offices and retrofitted in a post-industrial style to give it a startup vibe.
Manu didn’t use words like startup or entrepreneur. He preferred team and family. He had half-a-dozen people like Adam working for him: two Americans, a soft-spoken New Zealander, a short Irish guy and a lanky Argentine who was supposed to be leaving for Japan next month. Adam’s Chinese was the second worst of them, but his English was the best. When Eliza finished a translation, it was him that she approached with her copy for a final correction. It usually didn’t need much, but he always changed her wording anyway. After that first year of ‘hello’, ‘how are you’, and ‘my name is’, it was a relief to work on expressions with nuance and perfectibility.
He reached for his laptop, hesitated. There was really no reason to leave the building. The coffee here was better than at Starbucks; they had it delivered from the specialty place. But the new machine, which must have cost a fortune, intimidated him. Adam decided that he didn’t need coffee. He wasn’t alert, exactly, just reluctant to settle. There was nothing to be anxious about. The office was fine, a warm atmosphere; he liked to be here, even if it slowed him down. He worked from home a couple of days a week, and on those days he was usually done by eleven. In the office everything took six times as long because they reflected on outcomes and talked each other through processes and had whole afternoons off for team-building activities: video game tournaments or languid three-on-three basketball in the park. Every couple of weeks Manu would sit down with each of them to see how things were going. These were unscheduled sessions: he would appear behind a chair, lay a hand on a shoulder, ask: ‘Got time for a little reflection?’ Reflection was a core value, it was on the list. This was the first job Adam had had where he didn’t have to fill out time sheets, get a certificate if he was ill. Manu was a natural leader, not bossy but kind: a guy who surrounded himself w
ith men who were not as strong or happy as he was, and helped them to be stronger, happier. They were all loyal to him. He could have been a therapist, was a good listener, knew to ask open-ended questions. He kept telling Adam he was a godsend. Adam tried to believe the work was easy because he was good at it.
He glanced down at the phone resting in his palm, and plugged it into the charger. There were no notifications. Still nothing from Natasha. He checked her WeChat profile, and saw that she had posted a photo. The photo had been taken in a restaurant, a banquet room, and she was with her family. Her mother’s face almost the twin of her own, not much older, but with curled hair; her father’s lips stained with wine (studium and punctum, a useless part of his mind recited). On the table before them, the remains of a steamed fish lay pooled in sauce on a platter. They seemed happy, if a little stiff. The grandmother, the only one seated, did not look sick or even that old. He studied Natasha’s smile, the liveliest of them. Like her laugh, it seemed too much, almost inappropriate; it overwhelmed the face. No trace of her anger. She was wearing a high-collared dress that looked strange on her. He’d never seen her in anything but jeans and t-shirts in Beijing. She looked glad to be there, despite the costume.
He was still getting used to her face, so different in images. But everybody changed around their families. He might never have to meet them.
He thought he would leave a comment, but could not think of one except to ask when she was coming back, which seemed needy after the long silence. His thumb hovered over the little heart, but he didn’t like the photo in case he thought of a comment later; better to avoid the shame of reacting twice. With thumb and index finger, he zoomed in until the father’s wine-stained lips were looming. Feminine, almost. A genetic match for Natasha’s, maybe even softer. He saw her on the subway platform, mouth tight with anger. When he looked up from his screen, his vision was fuzzy, thoughts scattered. He sank into his ergonomic chair, still unsettled by the sense that there was someone else in the room. Someone must be working elsewhere in the building, he decided. He could hear the hum of air coming in through the filters. Maybe that was enough to generate an illusion of life.
The Airways Page 3