The Airways

by Jennifer Mills

  ‘It’s getting harder to do business now. All the crackdowns. The atmosphere is shifting.’ Manu was doing something with his hands under the table.

  Adam looked up. Looked him in the eye. ‘I’ve been thinking of a change, actually,’ he said, with unexpected confidence. ‘I’ve been thinking of going home.’ He was startled to hear the words come out of his mouth. He had not thought anything of the sort, and was surprised by how empty the word was of feeling, even meaning. Of course he could not go back. All that was gone now, erased to make way.

  ‘That’s great,’ said Manu, and shot a look of relief at Eliza.

  Adam was fine. Perhaps later he would feel disappointed, but right now there was only relief; it was good to sever connections with people. All this was simply happening on the surface, and beneath it he was becoming someone new. He thought of the canal, the fish that lay together in its water, looking up through a reflected city at the dull sky. He felt good. Maybe he had passed through to some other, weightless side.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Eliza, drawing him back.

  Manu was grinning. ‘I knew you’d be cool,’ he said. Eliza looked pleasantly contrite. Adam had the disloyal thought that he might decide to dislike these people, if he could muster the energy. He wasn’t sure that they would actually notice.

  Too late, a waiter appeared, a man who could be no more than twenty with a slightly panicked expression. Eliza spoke to him in Chinese and his face relaxed. He placed a coffee on the table in front of Adam, and backed away.

  He did not remember ordering anything. Manu must have done it for him. Yes, his princely face was poised in that eager way he had, ready to receive Adam’s gratitude. He reached for the glass. It was iced cold brew, which Adam had tried to enjoy in front of him before. The coffee was bitter, but excellent, and he drank it as slowly as he could, allowing the silence to take hold between them. Nobody was trying to make conversation. Eliza was doing something on her phone. He had been fired in the most polite and charming fashion possible, and now they wanted him to leave. The thick dark liquid of shame poured over Adam’s head and spilled to the floor. He put the drink down.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of you,’ Manu said. ‘Come along tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Adam said. He could not think what day it was today, or what he had agreed to. The last invitation he remembered clearly was the gallery. He saw again the naked back of a man in a cage, the pulse beneath the skin. There was a message waiting, if he could decode it.

  ‘The industry showcase. I sent you the link. The day itself will be boring, but you should come to the networking thing after.’ He named a venue, some new bar in Sanlitun that Adam thought he’d read about on one of the expat blogs.

  ‘It’s at five,’ Manu said, ‘I’ll send you the invite again – oh, you lost your phone.’ He was looking at Adam with a strange expectancy. Adam patted his pocket and smiled dimly, still not wanting to appear incompetent in front of Manu, who was being so kind.

  ‘Not lost. Dead,’ he said. The distinction was important.

  Manu looked confused. Their eyes met over the table. Adam saw that the warmth in his friend’s eyes was still there, but it had packed itself down somehow, boxed and ready to be shipped. Adam wanted to climb into the box and seal it over him. The moment went on until he thought he should speak, but could think of nothing to say that would help. He wished he hadn’t mentioned going home.

  ‘I guess I could email it to you?’

  Manu pursed his lips. Adam thought he saw his eyes drift sideways, but it might have been his own vision blurring. They had that close couples’ habit of conferring privately with glances. It didn’t mean there was anything wrong with him, but he felt that he was being judged.

  ‘That would be great,’ he said.

  ‘A lot of people will be there. We’ll totally hook you up with something.’ Manu smiled, not unsympathetically, and reached across to pat Adam on the upper arm. ‘Are you sure you’re okay, man? You’re not still sick? There’s something nasty going around, I heard.’

  ‘I feel great,’ said Adam.

  He felt bloodless. Cleansed.

  ‘Okay, but listen, the air in the office is still not fixed, so take a break anyway. I mean. It’s a really good time to not come in.’ His teeth flashed in the downlights.

  ‘Okay,’ said Adam. ‘I can do that.’

  ‘Cool, cool. Take care of yourself, bro,’ he said, beginning to stand. ‘Don’t come tomorrow unless you’re feeling a hundred per cent. A hundred and ten per cent. You have to be ready to put yourself out there.’

  ‘Of course,’ Adam said.

  ‘We’ll make sure you’re taken care of,’ he said.

  He saw the man’s hand move instinctively to Eliza’s leg. One of her hands responded, curled against it. The other still thumbed its screen. She was holding herself very stiffly, he thought, but perhaps it was the pregnancy. His knees were so close to hers, he could have reached his own hand across to join theirs. Manu had such beautiful hands, veined with strength but still delicate. It was his own he wasn’t sure of. There was a tingling in his left hand, and as he looked at it the veins on the back seemed to be trembling. These hands were damaged, he thought, though there was no pain in them. They wanted something from him that he could not provide or even name. The knowledge thundered somewhere below him like a subway train, then disappeared, leaving a dim impression of a hollow beneath the surface.

  Manu was not getting up to go, just making it clear he should leave. He stood up in a hurry, backed away from them. ‘Actually I do feel a bit off still,’ he said, hoping it would stop them from following him to the door. He took a step back. ‘I shouldn’t really be out,’ he muttered. ‘Not in this air,’ he added, and covered his mouth theatrically with one hand.

  There was no warm paw on the shoulder, no pressure to stay. Manu didn’t move to accompany Adam to the door, or herd him from the café. Eliza remained seated, rummaging in her bag for something. When he turned, she was clutching a tiny spray bottle. She gave him a small, stiff wave.

  It was cold in the street, much colder than it had been an hour ago, and the air was clear. The mild wind had come from the north-west, blown the smog away, and brought a wave of winter in behind it. Adam smelled something delicious and raised his face to see a lone sweet-potato seller, dressed in an army greatcoat and scarf, his cargo bike rigged with a converted oil-drum stove. The season had changed.

  Adam inhaled deeply; it smelled like a sugar refinery. He was too jumpy to be hungry, too bothered to speak. The cold brew had made his mouth feel stale, his hands a little shaky. He wanted the warmth in his hand, but not enough to do something about it. The man watched Adam with something like suspicion, but returned his smile generously. Adam, unable to release himself, walked backwards until he had to look away.

  He was free. He would go home, shave, shower, change, drag out the winter coat, get his shit together. Clean the apartment, organise himself. Call Natasha, tell her he was sorry, he had never meant to cross a line. It was not too late to return to the life he had been living. These days could be a distant memory, something embarrassing that had happened to him as a child, something he didn’t have to mention. He began to walk home along the lane and under the ring road. Partygoers in fancy dress were heading in the opposite direction. That life seemed brittle, flimsy. When he crossed over the canal, he paused a moment to look down. The water was murky. He could not see his reflection at first, but then the image resolved, and there he was: a silhouette against the lit sky of the city above. Ice gathered white at the water’s edge. The willows were losing their leaves. There were no fish. He changed his mind about walking.

  He returned to the subway entrance he favoured, hidden away behind a wall. In the light of a convenience store, he saw a couple of drunk foreigners rummaging through their bags, a worn-out woman studying her reflection in her pho
ne, one hand arranging her hair, a group of young men jostling wholesomely. No-one he knew. He descended the stairs, careful not to make any unexpected movements, the body clumsy. It was a short trip back to his apartment, only one change of line. Fifteen minutes, twenty. It was such an ordinary thing to do. But going down felt like a commitment, the choice of a much more permanent path. The train pulled in just as he reached the platform, an invitation he was glad to accept.

  TURN

  ‘Nǚshìmen, xiānshēngmen.’ They try to fix his attention on the recorded message, just audible through the murmurs of waking passengers, but there’s competition. A complaining child, an answering parent, the crackle of plastic. ‘Qǐng zhùyì ānquán,’ they hear, before it switches to English: ‘Dear passengers. We are now arriving at Beijing –’ They send a charge through him. Startled, he scrambles up, making for the end of the carriage. He presses past a woman with a huge rolling suitcase, a man pulling striped bags from the luggage rack. They push his face towards the glass. Outside the light is dim and white, the world slowing as it shutters past. The smooth train barely registers the change in speed, but they feel it in his body, heavier now, and in the atmosphere as everyone on board makes the required rearrangements, each attending to a private story. The rail lines split and separate and multiply. The chambers of his heart work steadily, the breath comes short. The man puts a hand to his stomach. They have all the hunger of a long journey, uncertain what it’s for. What draws them, whether it will meet their need. The train begins to rock to a stop, sliding up against blank cement platforms. A woman out there shakes a garbage bag, opens a cage.

  They think of Adam: the figure outside the morgue, the mirror met in the rain, the image of him appearing and disappearing on trains, the way he made an image of them. There’s no reason for them to think he’s here, and yet they do. If they find him, what will they make of him? How will they speak? Fragments of memory, elusive, refuse to cohere. They shimmer at the edges, cruel the man’s chest on their way out, hear the cough from a body’s distance.

  They dart from one body to the next. Each with its own life to live, its pre-existence. Shuttered out. None will keep. None will satisfy. They don’t want to hurt anyone, but maybe they will have to.

  Hurt. That old fury rises in them, they feel its fuel. A life taken. They disembark and disentangle, rushing into crowds and through them, as careless and determined as electricity. Where, and when, and why them: it almost dissolves in the transitions. In the interaction and exchange. A vast station, crowds shifting towards exits, gates, walking too slowly under the high roof, feeling each step. Wanting the poisoned air in his lungs, tasting it. He can’t resist; they draw it in, until it burns him.

  They slip away. A man, neither young nor old, who immediately starts to jiggle one arm, the back of the hand slapping at his thigh. A compulsion he can’t fight. They won’t let him, though the arm begins to ache, its socket twisted. There’s a struggle. The shoulder begins to swell. They feed on his anxiety, move faster, let him go. Through gates and exits, queues and barricades. Bodies push back.

  The girl pulls the buds from the soft parts of her ears. The sound that exits her is scrambled: white noise, or tuneless music. The signals are always starting to decay, to collapse, and they hasten the work. She blinks up at the complex map of subway lines. She is completely lost. They can feel it in her wrists. Not freedom, just this awful, undirected longing, this confusion. Some space in her that they might access, use.

  Then she finds her place, and her body fixes, turns. Somewhere in that map, a life awaits her. They feel it in her bones.

  They take what they need, and let her go.

  BEIJING

  There were hardly any stalls at the subway entrance when Adam emerged. He didn’t think it was late. The police must have been around and scared people away. There was often a crackdown of some kind, but the traders kept reappearing in more or less the same positions. He looked for the flower seller, but her usual place outside the mall was empty.

  Children were leaving the mall, wheeled or carried by their parents. Many of the children were asleep; he watched a man march past with a small boy under one arm like a handbag, the legs stuck out stiffly behind him. There must have been an event inside. He could not see in because the heavy winter blankets had been hung across the entrance, but when anyone emerged, they let out a snatch of music, brash and distorted: that damned apple song refused to die.

  He crossed the road, took a shortcut through the complex opposite his own. Smiled at a man out walking his dog, but it was dark and the man’s face was lowered, preoccupied by the miniature poodle’s needs. He walked behind a woman in a pink tracksuit until she disappeared down a stairwell and he paused, confused as to how she had entered the building. Big characters had been written on the wall in pink chalk. He thought he recognised the characters for house and rent. He knew that people lived below the city, in dormitories in basements below blocks of flats. He had read an article about them. They were people without work permits, migrant workers from all over China; the article had described them as a tribe of rats. He did not think that this sort of thing happened in his neighbourhood. The woman hadn’t looked poor. But who knew what Beijing hid beneath its upper layers, what it was capable of hiding from itself?

  He crossed to the top of the stairwell, looked down into the dark below. The doors at the bottom were closed, unmoving; he could not see lights at their edges. He descended, his heart beating in his jaw, puzzled by the hold curiosity had over him but unable to resist. It was colder at the bottom of the cement depression. The double doors each had a small square window at eye level and Adam put his face to the chilled glass, his hands cupped against his temples, trying to see in. It was dark inside, and he could only see the shadow of his forehead, the mask of his eyes. He pushed at the door, tried to turn the handle, but it was locked. The woman must have had a key. He pulled back, and the mask fell away, his own gaze startlingly close. A chill caught hold of him. As he let go of the door, he remembered the feeling of the water at his feet, the little waves climbing his calves and drawing him down, his legs stuck in the sand like two old posts. His feet seemed very far away. It took a great effort to lift one from the concrete, then the other, to step back, to turn away from the doors. The cold had entered his bones.

  What was happening to him?

  He hadn’t been following her. He knew no-one had seen him, but in the concrete well’s enclosure, he felt observed. He hurried up the stairs, eager to join the guardianship of streetlights that swam above the surface. He pushed his way through the air, struggling for control. Somewhere overhead, a cricket sang from a cage in a window, confused perhaps by the artificial light.

  He followed the road to the exit, past the security box, the dumpling place, the vegetable shop, all of which were empty and closed, and a barricade of new blue fencing. He wanted familiarity, but the city was rearranging itself; he could not remember what had been demolished behind that fence, what new edifice was being made. He crossed to the gate of his own set of apartments, glancing up to make sure that he had the right building. In certain lights the structure looked futuristic, but now its milky gleam seemed to gaze down mournfully from a distant past. The agent had said it was only four or five years old. For the first time, he wondered what had stood here before it.

  The gate was open, the guard fast asleep in his little room, his head against his uniformed chest. Adam crept past and walked quietly to his entrance, feeling like a trespasser. But he had his keycards, and the elevator sprang open for him instantly, had been waiting on the ground floor to let him in. And inside stood his own slightly blurred reflection, just the same as it always had. He did not meet its eye. They travelled together to the fourth floor.

  When Adam opened his door, he thought he must have made a mistake, pressed the wrong button, entered the wrong apartment, because this one was filled with the rich, ripe scent of flowers. When he turned the li
ght on, everything inside was familiar but he felt certain this was not his place. A vase of white lilies stood on the plastic-covered coffee table. No, not a vase, but a jar. Yes, this was his coffee table, there were his footprints in the dust on the floor. There was his black down coat spread out on the couch, ready for winter. He did not remember the flowers. He must have bought them from the woman at the corner sometime in the last couple of days, before she was driven away. Their scent was overwhelming.

  Adam put his bag on the couch beside the coat and dropped to his knees. Up close, the lilies weren’t white at all but cream, gold and yellowish brown. A trail of pollen lay beneath them on the plastic. He touched it with a finger, and hoped that it would not stain.

  ‘Natasha?’ he called out. But of course she was not here. He took his phone from his pocket, plugged it into the charger at the wall by the couch, sat perched on the edge and waited. The battery symbol appeared, but it wouldn’t wake.

  It was good to buy the flowers, he thought, if that’s what he had done. Natasha would like them. He allowed himself to forget for a moment. It was tempting, a small, illicit delight, but he could not sustain it. He knew she would not be returning. Even if he deleted the video, apologised, went to the trouble of begging her forgiveness, it was too late, there was no going back. It was too much of a breach. He had crossed a line of acceptability, stumbled into this grim position from which he could not escape. He wondered now if he had moved deliberately, if he had wanted to end it. She had not been right for him; he had not been himself around her.

  It was good of him to buy the flowers. He felt glad to see their welcome. He looked hard into the spotted centre of one open bloom and inhaled deeply. The scent seemed to magnify. It tickled the inside of his nostrils, caught his eyes, and inflamed them. They began to water. Suddenly exhausted, he kicked off his shoes and lay down on the couch, just to stretch his muscles.