Someone coughed behind him, and he turned. An unfamiliar face was watching, close. Adam took a step back, and her eyes dropped to the purse in her hands. A stranger waiting for the machine, that was all.
He took his water, followed a small crowd up the stairs, past a woman begging with a little portable radio, her disabled son stretched on a sheet of cardboard beside her, then dozens of cops, their faces stiff and eyes too young behind their visors, guarding the way. Fences all around, some kind of square. He had been here before. He had not escaped the familiar routes, nor left the paths allowed him. But here was the railway station, with its disagreeing clocks. It led almost everywhere.
He needed ID to buy a ticket. He looked into his bag, saw the water he had half-drunk from the machine, and beside it another bottle of water that he had brought with him and forgotten. Beneath it, he saw the soft, rounded corner of his passport. He could not remember taking it from the drawer.
This energy in his body, this life of his, felt alien and vivid. He wanted to drink, dance, go swimming. He didn’t even like dancing. He looked up at the station entrance. It seemed to be barricaded. Every route was a detour, the exits and entrances cordoned off behind solid blue construction fencing. But he couldn’t see anything being built. Maybe it was a security upgrade; there, they must be installing new gates, because the row of entrances available seemed pitifully small, and there were thick crowds pressed against them, no pretence at queues. Adam had the sense of a swirling mass of bodies pushing forward, and wanted to join them. He fought the urge, followed an exit sign, turned at a fence and was lost. He reached for his phone. The correct time seemed important. He forgot the numbers as soon as he read them.
It was early, that was all that mattered. He could go anywhere.
He found the ticket counters, scanned the unfamiliar names on the board above them. He watched the Pinyin change to characters, hoping to see something he recognised. Someone near him shouted a name he thought he knew. Photos of Manu and Eliza on a weekend away there. A seaside place in summer, the sand packed with umbrellas. He remembered it clearly. The board remained baffling. At last a young security guard approached and ushered him towards one of the counters, the last in the row. He went to the window, waited in line, shifting his weight from foot to foot. When it was his turn the woman squinted at him and spoke in English and he understood that this was why he had been sent to her.
‘Bay, die, her?’ He fumbled the name of the place and the woman repeated it back to him, talking as if to a child. He nodded gratefully, returned the name to her in better shape. She asked something else and, before he could answer, said impatiently, ‘Next train,’ not inflecting it as a question, checking her screen. He might as well not have been there at all. An inflatable man, an empty costume, a ghost.
‘Nine forty-seven,’ she said. ‘One ticket,’ holding up a finger as if to silence him. And when he stared instead of speaking she pursed her lips and looked away. He felt his face flush as he fumbled for meaning.
‘Passport,’ she said. He slid it into the space below the glass, along with money. She attended to her machine, then sent the passport back to him with the ticket and change. He examined his ticket, a blue rectangle the size of a credit card, a few neat rows of text. He was grateful to be able to read the name, confirm it. He rested a hand on the cold countertop and saw that she was glaring at him.
‘That way,’ she said, and pointed. Her eyes had already left him for the next in line.
Adam went out and joined the crowd that was filtering through the gates. He allowed himself to be pushed forward between steel railings. Up close, the impression of a mass resolved into individual human beings, each moving in his or her own style; by the time he reached the doors the queue seemed orderly and well spaced, the only reasonable formation. He let himself be scanned by the machine and then by the security guards, both men, one tall and young, the other older. The old man scrutinised Adam with weary eyes then said something to his colleague; they both laughed as they waved him past.
He dragged his bag from the conveyor and slung it over his shoulder, felt a sudden longing for Natasha, who would have understood the joke, been able to translate for him, who might have turned and given the man a piece of her mind, or charmed him with a smile before any of it had had a chance to happen. Would she do any of those things? Such imagined scenes were becoming more numerous than his memories. He tried to conjure her face, but could only see the photograph, blurred close and strangely ecstatic. Her skin against the skin of that other girl.
He let the image slide away. The noise in the hall was low but continuous, a hum of announcements and meetings, sales and farewells. He allowed himself to be swept up in the crowd, to take pleasure in the feeling of participating in something at scale. He had adapted to China, but the pride he usually felt at this thought evaporated quickly, and as the crowd encouraged him onward, he felt increasingly at sea. This was not adaptation, it was surrender.
There was pleasure in it, anyway. He showed his ticket to a young woman in uniform to confirm that he had the right room. She made a descending gesture with a hand, indicating that he should wait, but there was a line of people at the gate, so he joined it. When a couple of white tourists in their sixties ambled by, rolling giant suitcases, he looked away. He watched families organise the food and drinks for their trains, wishing that he had prepared for a longer journey. But there was satisfaction in thinking of the coast that waited, of passing out from beneath the white bowl’s enclosure, of the clear blue sky that he had seen in the photographs. Of getting away.
The jostling was anticlimactic: the train sat waiting, and there were fewer people boarding than he expected. He found his seat, an aisle. The man in the window seat beside his was already asleep in his shiny grey-blue suit. His face was round and his mouth slightly open. He did not snore but snuffled gently. His eyelashes were long and pretty and they fluttered like wings, the eyes resettling behind them. He must be dreaming, his body responding to an unseen world. Adam could have leaned his head against the man’s soft chest and listened to the dream’s work in his body. The temptation was both thrilling and tainted. He let it dissolve and sat down, aware of the tension in his shoulders, the beating of his heart, the neat hard borders of his skin inside his clothing, the pressure of the seat against his back.
The train was only half full. After the ticket inspector had passed through, he moved across the aisle to an empty seat. He stretched his legs beneath the seat in front of him, and gazed out the window.
They moved slowly until they reached the outskirts of Beijing and made a sudden lurch between concrete barriers and the backs of buildings. Adam felt the train’s movements in his hips. A vast stone gate loomed through the interior light’s reflection. Beijing evaporated more quickly than he had expected. Before long the window showed repetitions of cornfields and concrete, glimpses of roads, all fading in the smog. The world was borderless. He tried to take a video with his phone, wanting to capture the absence of a horizon, but the image was nothing like what he saw. The screen showed a blank glare in which objects floated helplessly. It would mean nothing if he posted it. He should save his battery.
He set the phone to flight mode and put it away. He watched the speed climb on the LED display above the doors ahead. Somewhere between 149 and 152, he felt the embrace of weightlessness, as though leaving his body behind, the heavy cloak of flesh discarded. The illusion was pleasant, then distressing. Of course the body travelled with him, was him, inescapable. He touched his thigh, felt the pressure of his hand through the fabric. Like a stranger’s touch, it was, chilled and exquisite. Something about the train, the blank window, the repetition of the view, made his thoughts seem foreign to him. As if movement was all it took to protect him.
He closed his eyes and saw Natasha’s face. In a moment, she was sitting with him. He felt her hand in his. But it wasn’t right; the fingers were long and slender and co
ld. When he opened his eyes there was no-one beside him, just a damp sensation in his palm. He scratched at it distractedly.
It was still there when the train reached the outskirts of Beidaihe, and so was the sky. There was no sliding out from under this white atmosphere. The edges remained lost to sight. From the slowing train he watched features loom into this blurred field of vision and disappear. He could see pointed roofs, the architecture referencing a distantly imagined Europe. He could not see the water. He had assumed the railway station would be at the seaside, but realised now that this had been a mistake. This place looked uninviting. He was slow to disembark and took the stairs instead of the escalator. The cavernous station had already emptied by the time he crossed it. It was designed for scale, for crowds that hadn’t materialised. He passed a row of ticket desks in the wall, the men and women watching him from behind their squares of window, their screens. People stared at him from a row of waiting-room chairs. He could not escape their eyes, was moving through something thicker than air. He was tired. He hadn’t eaten, had not meant to come all this way. He struggled to untangle the muddle of his intentions. There was too much interference.
When he left the station, he was surprised by the cold; he had not realised the building was heated. The wind cut through the seams of his jacket. Maybe it would clear the air. He looked up, tried to judge whether the whiteness overhead was cloud or smog, but it was too uniform to tell. Everything seemed desaturated, over-exposed. He crossed a paved expanse, looking for directions to the water. His body longed to be immersed in the ocean, to be lifted up and carried away. How little it weighed.
FLIGHT
Compartments click closed above his head. They feel his restlessness as bodies brush past him. He blinks at rounded windows, battles with the belt. Arranges his phone, headphones, magazine, jacket. Muscles shift on one side of the face, then the other. Something in the mouth. The air dry and whining. He leans a forearm on the armrest, and an elbow jabs against it. There’s no room.
Doors are being locked, bodies settled.
They move along the row, searching the passengers. They know they won’t find him. It wasn’t Adam crossing behind blue glass, but a stranger. They were caught up in that woman’s urgency. And now they are caught in this machine.
The travellers don’t like it either. Everyone’s uncomfortable in their skin, some degree of unease at their confinement. Makes it easy to move and hard to settle. They stop as one woman, annoyed, turns to glare at something jiggling at her back. They feel the muscle at the side of the eye contract as she squints at a child behind her. They watch the child’s frown form, its expression fragment into terror. The parent beside her places a restraining hand. The body, a set of springs, turns again: they feel the release of muscle as the woman’s face goes soft. Something in the blood that slows the heart rate, calms the breath. Medication, or practice. They let the eyes blink and close.
The kid starts crying.
She loosens the seatbelt around her stomach. Clears her throat.
Carefully, they help her to look out the window. Trying not to push too hard, create too much resistance. Interferences like this are dangerous. They still can’t predict the consequences. She complies, moving the eyes, then the head and shoulders, shifting forward to catch the angle. The plane is rolling along the runway now. Around her, people close screens, swipe phones, settle. The child behind her sniffs and whines. The plane gathers speed, they feel its weight lift below her. They have no idea what this will do to them.
The earth releases its hold.
In a moment, they are flying. The roofs below pattern out into a dark green undulation: watercourses, forests, fields. The ocean to one side, vast and welcoming, and edgeless where its roots enter the land. A little furrow forms on her face, and her eyes fall closed.
The hum of the machine encloses them. Excitement rises, subsides. Up high, they are freshly aware of the body’s vulnerabilities. The thin air pushes out the cells and membranes, slowly inflates her in her skin, and they are afraid. Not of losing Adam, or finding him. Afraid they might dissolve completely, slip and fall to pieces, shatter at last into infinite fragments. Anything could happen in the air.
When the plane reaches the clouds it bounces once, twice. Her stomach drops; she grips the armrest, palms cold. They feel the weight of cloud-resistance, the shudders as the plane passes through. Then she looks out again. This blue.
A memory of an empty world, of anything solid left behind. Momentum, as if the body’s load, its terrible ballast, had let go. They were still a child, flying alone, leaving a land behind that shrank to islands. The stewards stumbled over their sweethearts and peanuts. They passed through the boundary, and saw from the other side how little substance it had. How porous these surfaces that had once seemed like walls. Leaving was a reprieve, a fairytale escape, a banishment. Just for a few months, then a year, then the rest of high school. They hadn’t understood it as migration. It was meant to be impermanent. There was always supposed to be a return, a home to return to.
The body was the only homeland. And that’s long gone.
Behind them, the child wriggles. They feel the woman’s body growing heavy, nearing sleep, and with that rest looms the threat of grief; they slip away. The child’s wide awake. The way her body vibrates, breath small and high as a violin against the chest, she might never sleep again. They want her vigilance. The parents make a barricade on either side, safe, but there are sore places she can’t help scratching. Staring into the dark below seats, across the mother’s calves, where something lies concealed that fascinates. She knocks her feet against the rim of the chair, one then the other. They settle in the thoughtless act repeated. Think themselves into it without planning to. Just let the feet coincide until the two limbs beat together. ‘Yī, èr, sān, sì.’ They look with her, see her reflection against the growing dark. Her little round face grows patient, obedient. Then at once she stops and holds both legs stiff against the vinyl, every muscle tense. A hand shoots out to hit the woman beside her, the mother whose body she sometimes commands.
‘Mama,’ the oldest word, warm in her mouth. But it’s not strong enough. Terror tenses in her. Legs out, she grips the armrests, too wide for her small hands. She doesn’t take her eyes off her reflection.
The mother doesn’t wake. They try to move the eyes, and she fights them. The legs collapse, pain at the knee. The insect itch overcomes her. She’s strong; they can’t hold on much longer.
The steward coming down the aisle stops one row ahead. Tries to wake the woman in front, but she won’t stir.
Is she hurt? Have they hurt her? Fear’s in the body, they remember. Then let it be the child’s fear.
The little girl closes her eyes, shuts them in. Her tongue pushes behind her teeth. A wobbling one, and a little gap. Her attention where it aches. She uses pain to connect with herself. They want her to sleep, want to leave her in peace. But they don’t have enough control. They rush into the man behind her, who wakes with a snort. Heart rate rising, lungs like syrup. A little echo of her, at first, but it subsides.
Grateful, they taste the staleness in his mouth. He blinks and reaches for headphones, tracing the cord from the tablet to his chest. The lights overhead go dark. His breath is short and painful. The other passengers begin to cough. This heart’s not getting enough blood. In his weakness they become afraid again. What is to stop them from falling, from floating, lifeless, back to earth? Nothing but air.
Air, and the remains of a dissipating fury.
He drifts into the tune, the heart rate softens. They imagine they might soften too, descend like a feather, something lighter. Weightless, loose up here above the cloud’s false floor. Become rain. Enter oceans. Let go of the energy required to cohere. The scale of the planet frightens them, the spread of the unknown. They are afraid of letting go, of falling to pieces. Out there, grief will adhere to them, weigh them down, scatter them
like ashes. Maybe they’re supposed to let it.
Yet memory comes, and holds them together.
The music encloses him, and they want to let him rest. But they need these eyes. There’s a blinking light out there, emerging from the depth of white. He squints at it, and his throat catches fire. There’s no fire out there. It’s only the wing’s edge cutting through the dark.
His hand reaches up to grasp his neck below the ear. Cold fingers rise to the back of the skull. Strange. He seems to be feeling for a wound, though there’s nothing there.
BEIDAIHE
There were no buses in sight, but a few taxis waited in a shaded area by the station. The first driver was fast asleep so he made eye contact with the second, a middle-aged man who sat up warily.
‘Shātān,’ Adam said, and waited. He was surprised that he remembered the word. The driver’s brow furrowed deeply, then he muttered something Adam didn’t understand, nodded resignedly, and gestured with his hand. The hand held a cigarette, and ash flew from it in all directions. As Adam climbed into the back, he felt the ash touch his cheek, a faint kiss of hot snow.
The taxi turned out of its run by the station and into a wide new road, moving unhurriedly. The driver’s eyes appeared in the rear-view mirror, soft, brown, curious.
‘Měiguórén,’ he guessed, his voice husky with smoke.
The Airways Page 18