The train turns, and they lose him, but that doesn’t matter. They let go of the young man’s body, hear it gasp for air behind them. They swing from wrist to back to chest, a breeze passing down through the passengers, tickling skirts, triggering sneezes, pimpling the skin on forearms. Each hair has its own muscle. The train seems a looping creature, a curved snake circling back into itself, and they are a phoretic organism passing through its body, using these human forms for strategic dispersal, seeking out the rare host in which they might transform. They know that Adam will not have moved. His body will not let him get away. He is weak, and they are strong now. They have been waiting a long time for this. They know he has been waiting too.
They want to tear him apart.
The thought shocks them, as life once did. It seems a terrible violence, a desperate risk. But where does desire end, and violence begin? Which of them is the parasite, and which the host? They only know the need to climb inside that singular body, cross its borders, crack its glass. Enter the space in him and pull it open, until he breaks apart like a flower. They pause to watch him from up close, they tug one sleeve of the yellow cardigan over this chilled and slender wrist. His face is undefended. There it is again, the heaviness that could be light, that simple, annihilating need. He has come all this way to put history behind him, to be relieved of his own weight. A white boy’s fantasy. He could not leave them alone, and of course he can’t escape.
He glances at her, and catches there. His eyes go wide, as if he’s falling from a great height. The carriages unwind behind him, and they feel the pull of recognition, but nobody falls. Gravity holds them. They grasp the gaze, reach through it. The fury in them balled up for release like lightning. It leaps across the train. The windows shimmer, a glittering mirror. All this glass might shatter.
They want to destroy him. Make space to hold a self again. The elusive image, formed in the body’s private world, worn pale by a thousand acts of seeing, telling, wanting, forgetting. Burned in one act of violence. Ashes now, and yet persisting.
The body opens. Lets them in.
I flicker through.
BEIJING
A convenience store glowed in the murky light ahead. The city was never dark enough. The roads, all but empty, were lit by shop lights, streetlights, the dirty orange sky. A solitary cyclist passed with a look of concentration, pure and sleepless. A truck behind him heaved its pneumatic confession. Cameras watched from street lamps, buildings. Adam was very thirsty. He pushed the door, which voiced a jaunty welcome.
A song was playing, a bleating melody he felt sure he should recognise through its soft-instrumental code. The thin boy behind the counter smiled at him. Adam smiled back, looked right into his eyes. The boy was pretty, but he looked uncomfortable, shifted his gaze away, and Adam felt his heart rate increase as he headed for the fridge, blinking in the harsh light. He was a good guy, but he was tired.
His feet hurt. He wasn’t sure how far he had walked, or for how long, but he knew that he was thirsty. He found a row of cans of Japanese coffee and took one down, his hands shaking. It must be the cold, he thought, though the fridge was only slightly cooler than the room. At the counter the boy turned his screen so that Adam could see the numbers. He paid without troubling to look him in the eye again, grateful he’d avoided speaking. Adam backed out the door, disoriented by the sudden alarm, a harsh buzzer that he hadn’t remembered on entering. The bright light seemed to follow him outside; it stained the air around him. In the street he opened the can and drank. The coffee, too sweet and milky, left a sticky trace inside his lips; it did nothing for his thirst, but in spite of himself he felt the pleasure in it.
The sun was coming up through the murk, intruding everywhere in slow increments. The light had no direction, made no demands as yet. He kept walking. Past a street-cleaning machine that hissed liquids onto the road, past a delivery truck that whisked some important prop towards its mark, past a flagging security guard who stood in his box, checked his watch, waiting for the end of the night shift. It was all theatre, staged for the security network. Adam had caught Beijing as it was dressing, but nothing was private here, someone was always watching. He stopped in the street, aware of a breath at the back of his neck, a change in the scent of the air, approaching footsteps. He turned, but it was a lone jogger, an older man in a green tracksuit who passed him without acknowledgement. A tiny dog trailed him, and Adam watched it until they were both dwarfed beneath the overpass. The dog did not look back. He was lost, invisible, saved.
He could see the marks on the road from all its resurfacing, the edges and details slowly emerging from the dark. It was too cold to stand still for long; his breath came out of him in a soft grey cloud that mingled quickly with the moisture in the air. He watched it dissipate, and wondered at its number.
Uncertain of the direction, he walked automatically, letting his body lead the way like an old horse. He had not slept, he was sure of that much; his vision was fuzzy. The ring road formed a barrier he followed past the back of the bus station, the construction site, the new mall that rose copper-toned over a grey park. Alongside the park an elderly man rode past with a stack of magazines on the back of his bike. A group of white-coated workers chanted something on a street corner, their faces disciplined and serious.
He wanted to sleep. Sleep was restorative. Sleep would return his body to its rightful owner.
The sky was turning white, revealing the shapes of familiar buildings. He saw that he was only a few blocks from his apartment, felt it draw him forward. Underfoot, the subway would be open by now, but he didn’t need to go back there. His lungs ached. It was not his eyes but the air. He was tired of resisting.
A taxi sailed past slowly. A minute later he overtook a woman who was struggling with a rolling suitcase on the uneven footpath. Adam watched his hand reach to grip a railing, then noticed that his legs were weak as they began to stumble. The hand had known before he did.
He let the body go on. It turned beneath the ginkgo trees, nearly skeletal now. The gate of his apartment hung open. The security guard was asleep in his enclosure, and Adam slipped past unseen. At the entrance to his building a woman in a pink vest was emptying the garbage into a cart, sorting everything with slow caution, taking time to contemplate its value. Beijing had a forest’s efficiency, it was a wonder of coexisting systems. He’d thought he had no part in them, thought he was floating through the place unchanged. Adam pushed past her, swiped his card at the door and waited. The elevator took forever to arrive but he could barely stand now, let alone force his legs up four flights of stairs. He clutched his card until it came for him.
When he opened his door, the scent of death poured over him. He stood in the entrance, one hand on the doorhandle, the other over his mouth, and scanned the room. For a moment he thought it was him, that he would enter the bedroom and find his own body lying there, stretched out and beginning to swell. But that could not be, could it? He was standing right here.
Then he saw the flowers.
The jar with the lilies was standing on the coffee table. There was a collection of brown pollen on the plastic around the base, like little piles of unsent messages. The flowers were ripe and beautiful, the water clear. But he caught the scent in his mouth when he breathed, and it tasted rotten.
Adam remembered carrying the jar and the lilies downstairs, opening the lid of the bin, tipping the water out. He remembered sniffing his hands, the trace of rot on them. He wanted to go downstairs and peer into the garbage to check that he had thrown them away as he remembered. But the woman he had just seen, or someone like her, would already have processed and disposed of them. There would be no evidence by now.
Was it days ago, or years? He thought he could remember, if he concentrated. But the body distracted him. The print of walking was in his limbs, or maybe dancing, all that strain of effort. He could not remember where he’d been.
It was
a joke they were playing on him, this repetition. He walked past the flowers, opened the window, let the air in. The scent dissipated.
From here, he could see that the air was turning bad again. Fine particles entered the room, some visible. These tiny shards would pierce his skin, float through his body, scoring and scarring his internal membranes. His heart began to constrict with an old pain, an old doubt made new. When he looked out, he could not see as far as the end of the street. His eyes had already taken in some of the damage.
A thought arose in him, but it kept sliding beneath the surface. Something from a long time ago. A feeling of weightlessness, of pure pleasure: that lovely even pressure on the skin. A taste in his mouth. He knew he had to breathe in order to go on. So he inhaled deeply.
He shivered, dropped his coat on the floor, removed his shoes and carried the flowers into the kitchen. He tipped the water into the sink. He wrapped the flowers in plastic, pushed them into the bin, and rinsed the jar. Then he washed his hands in dish soap, closed the kitchen door and walked into the bedroom. The floor of the apartment was warm against the soles of his feet, like something living. His skin was still cold from the outside air, but it was lifting from him, mingling with the atmosphere, the heat transferring. The bed was empty. He turned on the balls of his feet, felt the dust against the ground, felt something in him slacken.
He slid to the floor. He would deal with remembering later. His body demanded rest.
When he turned on his side, he was looking into the long thin mirror, a strip on one part of the wall. It was there to disguise the wiring, he thought, or an air-conditioning duct, or something. Now it showed a slice of his reflection. His face was different, looking sideways. It seemed looser, softer. But that wasn’t all. He didn’t understand his own expression. He got on his hands and knees, crawled to the mirror and looked himself in the eyes. They seemed to have turned grey. It was only dust on the glass that distorted the image, he thought, as he shifted from one eye to the other. He felt the heat in the floor rise up through his knees. He could stay here as long as he needed to. On the floor of this room. In this bad atmosphere. He put his head back and inhaled deeply. The skin between his chin and chest stretched tightly when he moved; he felt the tension right down in his belly. He wanted to sleep, but his eyes refused to close.
He looked again, and he was not alone. If it was a joke, he could not see whether it was a funny or a cruel one. The mouth, he saw, was bent into an unfamiliar smile.
INTERFACE
In his eyes, there is the glip of a fish unsettling from its resting place. It looks up through the water at the city looking back. We are all aware of the encroaching ice.
I remember swimming. As a child, before the body grew complicated. In the indoor pool, in a new country, the water lifting and protecting me. A voice too loud and close above, and my head sinking into the water, deaf to that harsh upper language, enclosed and listening to my own breath and blood and volume as I became weightless. Before the body demanded air, it demanded joy and buoyancy. It knew what it could bear.
He remembers the pool in the park, the wave on my chest. A weight lifts. My voice rises.
I remember flying alone. Waking just before dawn to watch the bright dot at the edge of the wing. I mistook that light for the earth, at first. A distant city. Moving in that half-tone, above clouds or racing beside them, and the blue that came over the sky like a friend, a guide, to show me I had broken through.
We remember.
And feeling buried again as we sank through the rainclouds to Sydney, the pewter harbour gleaming. I imagined falling into the water, the emergency life jackets bursting open at the neck. I worried I had forgotten the instructions. But we did not fall. The huge steward brought me half a cup of apple juice, touched a finger to his lips. I was unaccompanied, unafraid. The body knew that it was exiled, condemned. The body dreaded landing. Because up there we were yet to arrive. We were anything at all. That juice was sweet.
I remember wanting to be air. As the body grew complicated and I grew careful. I wanted to be invisible and everywhere, I wanted to be safe. I kept the colour blue, felt it hovering above any weather. A place between, where I could breathe. A city waited below where I might become, and keep becoming, someone new.
He doesn’t know what this is like. Never had to think about it, until now.
I remember the compression of my grandparents’ house, the shame at taking up space, developing asthma, anxiety, slowly learning to move unseen. Damp carpet, strange food that soon became ordinary. Parent–teacher nights without parents, notes I lost. Studying by torchlight, believing the body was a way out, but wanting something more fundamental than microbiology. To enter my skin in order to leave it. With no clear image of the future, only that high air between.
I learned that a body can’t breathe up there. The air’s too thin.
He remembers looking through his mother’s things. The ghost in his chest. Phantom pains. Carrying the body like it was made of glass. He watched me, but he didn’t want me; he wanted to occupy my space. Take all the air. Make it impossible to breathe. And what entitled him? What made him believe that this was good?
I refused to become that image.
I remember landing in myself. Choosing myself. By then I was settled. I possessed myself. I knew how to speak. There were still times I thought that I wanted to leave my body. Release myself into the airways. There were times when I thought I was safe.
He remembers his goodness, inconsolable. Walking in his sleep. He remembers avoiding that street.
I remember buying lilies. The indulgence of it, buying flowers for no reason, knowing that they were already close to dying. What had moved me? Pity, perhaps, or an affinity. The lilies were half-price. It was the end of the day and the flowers stood in a blue plastic bucket out the front of a convenience store, waiting to be thrown away. The woman behind the counter had a child with her, she might have taken them home herself if I hadn’t bought them. It wasn’t a rescue. It was the scent of them on the warm air, the scent that refused to dissipate. Seven dollars and fifty cents. I thought at the time that it was not much, a meal, that I would skip a meal for this. I could think like this only when I was not hungry. Now the body is free, and I am always hungry.
He remembers buying the flowers himself.
I recall quite clearly my own generosity in bringing them into the house. Into the kitchen, where I cut the stems and filled a jar from the tap, not arranging them but letting them fall, which they did perfectly, eloquent in their living-dying bodies, the miracle of severed limbs that still drank water as though they lived. The way they dropped their pollen, envelope-brown.
Only later did I see that I was mourning.
He remembers wanting the flowers more than anything, that memory creeping into him at the top of the subway steps, outside the mall, when he wasn’t looking. Did he know then that I was with him? I was learning. I knew just how to let his body lean down and take the lilies, fresh, and separate the notes in his pocket, and smile at the woman and her little daughter, who looked and looked at us and saw me there and turned and hid her face behind her mother’s shoulder, laughing.
I want to be remembered.
He is helpless, lying here. He remembers all his dreams of falling.
He is still falling.
I loved my body. There were days that the city would open for me, frangipanis strewn across the asphalt, the scent of wild fruit rotting in people’s tiny front gardens, that sky. The tangled backstreets, a luxury of wrong directions. Days when even the stench of garbage left in alleys was intoxicating. Damp forest air without a forest. Cool sea perfumed by diesel. The air was astonishing. The air.
I remember his eyes on me. That suffocation.
I remember walking home in the dark, through the orange smog, my eyes his eyes stinging from the fighting and the air, from inside and out, the membranes all dissolvin
g.
I remember that night, the way he crossed the room as I was sleeping, touched the light, reached for my skin. It was as though I was not there at all, a ghost, translucent. It wasn’t possible to leave my body. It wasn’t safe to stay. So I refused to sleep.
I refused.
And he went out into the hall and did not look back.
I refuse.
I look back now, from this unforgiving glass, and I make him remember me.
These lilies have outlived us, Adam. Do you see this? We are new.
I remember myself.
BEIJING
Adam turned his head from the mirror and lay on the floor on his back like a corpse. He did not sleep, but waited with his eyes open and his arms straight beside him. He entered the old accountancy. He thought of the blood in him, the muscle. He concentrated on his awareness of his body, as he had learned. Every ache, each intimation of a heartbeat, especially the breath.
It was different. He could not quite catch hold of it. There was too much interference, the systems scrambled, music lost. He had breathed in too much dust.
Yun would let him breathe. A person could not stop breathing, could they?
He got up finally and went to the kitchen. There was the glass jar, grimy and malodorous on the counter. The flowers in the garbage bin, reeking through the plastic. He picked up the jar and examined the label: white scraps where the text had washed away. It felt like days since he had eaten, but he was not hungry now; his body had found a way to crawl through hunger and arrive on the other side with another energy. This thought elated him. He dropped the jar in on top of the rotten flowers, pulled the plastic bag out, carried his burden to the door, had to rest it on the floor to get his shoes on. His muscles sang. When he lifted it again there were traces of pollen and juice on the tile, and a print in the dust where the bag had rested. So much dust on the floor that the apartment could have been abandoned. He might have died weeks ago.
The Airways Page 25