The sun has emerged from behind a dark layer of clouds, and the river slides swiftly beneath us. Hills slope away from the river, every inch cultivated, the bright green rows interspersed with stripes of burnt orange earth. We pass two boys playing on the banks. Beside them is a bamboo raft, neatly constructed, tied together with rope. One boy is naked, the other is wearing white underwear. When they see us they jump into the river and swim toward us, shouting. Graham translates: “I am a big fish. I am swimming to your boat. I am going to eat you up. Fear me, small boat, for I am the big fish of the rushing river.”
“They’ll grow up to be poets,” I say.
Graham waves to them. “Or criminals.”
A little farther down the river, a girl is standing in a tree. She wears a brown dress that skims her skinny knees. Carefully she turns her back to us. The limb upon which she is standing shakes, it is very thin, I am sure it will collapse beneath her. She shouts something into the weeping willows, which seem to sway at the sound of her voice. An elderly woman emerges from the green. She smiles and waves at the boat, shouts, and then the girl begins waving too.
“What are they saying?”
“The woman wants us to come to shore,” Graham says. “She wants to sell us tortoise wine.”
Oxen bathe near the muddy banks of the river, their corpulent bodies rolling in the brown water. Here and there a single ox is led along by its owner, its neck encircled in a tattered piece of rope. When wet, the oxen are slick and black, their broad backs shining. When dry, their skin is gray and dusty, and they all have an ancient, worn-out look. The sight of them becomes so familiar that, when I spot a bloated lump drifting downstream toward our ship, I think it must be a dead ox. But it is much too small for that.
I point toward the floating object. “Look.”
Graham has already seen it and is leaning over the rail to get a closer look. “Is it?” he asks, obviously thinking the same thing I’m thinking.
“Hard to tell.”
Finally we come within a few yards of it. The body lies facedown; the gray shirt and pants balloon with water. The only visible flesh is the grotesque back of a neck, and a pallid foot puffed to twice its normal size. “Oh my God.”
“Better get used to it,” Graham says. “You’re going to see a lot of them. During the rainy season, people working on the dikes get washed into the river and drown. On the rougher parts of the river it’s not uncommon for someone to fall out of a sampan and simply disappear. Then, of course, there are the suicides.”
“Doesn’t someone go looking for them?”
“Rarely. The Chinese are rather fatalistic about this river. The families mourn, of course, but seldom does anyone try to find the body.”
“Why not?”
“It would be near to impossible. British travel logs from the early part of this century are filled with accounts of people going overboard or being swept from the riverbank. Even in those cases when it would’ve been easy to reach in and rescue the drowning person, the Chinese invariably steered their boats away. In those days, anyone who rescued someone from the river was responsible for that person for the rest of his life. No one could afford another mouth to feed.”
A wave catches the body, rolling it over like a big floating toy. The other foot comes into view, clad in a red cloth shoe. I look into the face of a young man, puffed and pale and strangely lifelike despite the stillness of the features. The eyes are closed, the skin slick.
“What should we do?” I say.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
“Shouldn’t we inform the crew?”
As if on cue, Elvis Paris appears beside us. “Very inviting scenery, yes?”
“We just saw a dead body.”
Elvis Paris doesn’t even pause to consider the possibility. “I think there are no bodies here.”
“Look.” I point to the corpse, which is drifting away from us, moving slowly downstream. Anyone can tell from the red shoe, the clothes, the hands that have just come into view and look as if they are waving, that the figure is human.
“This is not body.” He smiles patronizingly, like an adult trying to convince a child that there are no monsters under the bed.
“Look here,” Graham says. “If it’s not a body, then what is it?”
Elvis glances again, feigning curiosity. “Ah, is a dog!”
Graham smiles. “Isn’t it a bit large for that?”
“Is a very big dog!” Elvis Paris says, quite serious.
Graham laughs. “Do dogs wear shoes?”
Elvis thinks for a moment. His eyebrows arch. “Maybe it is a very wealthy dog! Maybe this dog is capitalist roader!” He turns on his heels and walks away, laughing at his own joke. Graham and I stand side by side, watching the body become smaller, disappear.
“I suppose corpses are bad for tourism.”
After a few minutes, I’ve already forgotten the facial features of the dead man. I try to re-create him in my mind, but only the red shoe and the waving hands form a clear picture. The massive river fills my vision. It is wide here, home to hundreds of boats whose collective rumble reminds me of Saturday mornings in Alabama, dozens of lawnmowers kicking to life. Along the riverbank women are doing laundry and bathing their children. The sun blazes red. I scan the river for fish, but don’t see any. The air is strangely absent of birds. Graham has become quiet. He leans on the rail, his hands shaking violently.
“Are you all right?”
He remains quiet for a moment, as if he’s deciding whether or not to tell me something. “How much do you want to know about me?”
I look away from him, scan the unfamiliar landscape, and say, “As much as you’re willing to tell me.”
His shirt smells faintly of starch. His hands, clenched and shaking, strike me as beautiful. I imagine his hands beneath my skirt, moving up the backs of my thighs. I imagine them on my breasts, the slight pressure of them against my neck.
“Very well,” he says. “I have ALS.”
“ALS?”
“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. A mouthful, huh? You’d know it as Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
I’m caught off guard, unable to think of the appropriate words. Late-night telethons flash through my mind, some sitcom actor pleading for donations in front of a bank of phone volunteers. In the background phones ring, while numbers blink urgently on the screen. With just a dollar a day, the price of a cup of coffee, you can help us in the race to the cure. I say the only thing I can think of. “How long have you known?”
“Eleven months.”
I try to think of anyone I know who has ALS, some acquaintance or friend of my parents, but no one comes to mind. I’ve heard of the disease, of course, but I don’t know its causes and effects, whether or not it is deadly, what kind of toll it takes on its victims. “Are you in pain?”
“It comes and goes. At this moment, my hands hurt. An hour from now they may not. But then there are pressure sores, muscle cramps. Sometimes my eyes burn. My feet swell up. I have difficulty speaking. There’s a long list. I won’t bore you with it.”
“Is there a cure?”
“No. Just painkillers, and a drug called Rilutek that slows the progression but doesn’t stop it. It’s degenerative. You get worse and worse, and then you die. Half of us are gone within eighteen months of diagnosis. I’m one of the fortunate ones. The doctors say I may have another year in me.”
I hesitate for a moment, then reach over and hold his hands, feeling their tremor. “God. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.” Another year, a death sentence. It occurs to me that no one can save him. This is not a burning car, an earthquake, an overdose. This is not an emergency that can be contained.
He moves toward me, so close I can feel heat on my bare arm, the pressure of his leg against mine. We’re standing side by side, saying nothing, when the sky opens up. The rain does not ease in like the rain in New York City, which is laughable. The rain here is like rain in Alabama in the summer: it starts w
ith drops as big as my fingertips. It ends in exactly the same manner.
SIX
Too often I find myself thinking of Amanda Ruth, summers by Demopolis River, her parents’ cabin in Greenbrook with the path that led down to the water. In the afternoons Amanda Ruth and I would walk out to the pier, which swayed so wide beneath us I thought it might collapse, plunging us into the murky water, where thin snakes curled their slick, harmless bodies around the barnacled stilts. At the end of the pier was the boathouse with its sun-bleached door. She would slide her finger under the rusty latch, coax it out of the hook, and swing the door open. When the light flooded in, dozens of roaches scurried into the corners.
The boathouse had only two rooms. The blue room was the one farthest from the door. It had no floor, just the water rising against three wooden walls and, on the far side, a blue canvas curtain. When the tide was out you could see the film left on the walls, a slimy green line marking where the water had been. The blue room housed the boat, which bobbed on the surface like an immense fiberglass toy. Amanda Ruth would climb in first, then hold my hands as I stepped carefully over the rail. We would descend into the hull and lie on the narrow vinyl seats. We closed our eyes and listened to the boat knocking against the wooden walls, the stilts of the boathouse creaking beneath us, the occasional hum of passing Jet Skis, the voices of kids as they floated downstream on inflatable rafts. There in our secret room, Amanda Ruth told me stories of her grandparents’ lives in China, and of her father’s immigration to San Francisco when he was a boy. The stories were her own invention, a rich history to substitute for the one her father refused to reveal. “That makes me first generation,” she would say.
“First generation what?”
“American, doofus. My dad says he’ll take me to China, to my ancestral village.”
This was only wishful thinking. Both of us knew that Mr. Lee would never take her there. China was Amanda Ruth’s romance, not her father’s.
The door from the pier opened onto the barbecue room, which had a small metal table, two wooden chairs, and a grill on wheels, the lid always raised to reveal a dusty pile of charcoal. In one corner there was an old mattress and, beside it, an Igloo chest. A small window faced out to the river. It was in the barbecue room during our sophomore year of high school that Mr. Lee came upon us, Amanda Ruth lying on her back, her short summer skirt hiked high above her knees, her bare stomach glistening with sweat. We had the boom box on, some heart-shattering Ella Fitzgerald tune, so we didn’t hear the rubber soles of his deck shoes padding down the pier. I remember how, when he opened the door, a shaft of light shot through and set Amanda Ruth’s legs aglow, and how, for the split second before I saw him, I believed something otherworldly had happened, that my touch had set in motion some miraculous transformation. Amanda Ruth gasped and shot upright, tugging at her skirt, and then Mr. Lee’s shadow intersected the sunlight, and I knew we’d been caught. His hand came down hard against the boom box, the music shut off, and without a word he toppled the grill, which struck Amanda Ruth on the shoulder. Coal dust filled the air, blinding us, and in an instant he was gone. Ashes and bits of charred shrimp settled in our hair, on our tongues.
Amanda Ruth was crying, her shoulder cut and bleeding. “We should leave,” I said. “We can go to my house.” But Mobile was half an hour away, and besides, we were too young to drive.
After a few minutes Amanda Ruth combed her hair with her fingers, wiped her eyes, and became very businesslike. “We’ll wait until he leaves and then we can go up to the house. Mom will talk to him, calm him down.”
“What if he comes back?”
“He won’t.”
“Do you think he’ll call my parents?”
“No. He’d be too embarrassed.”
We huddled there in the room where he had left us, not talking, suddenly unsure how to be with each other, how to act. The sun beat down on the boathouse. We were thirsty, but we didn’t dare go up to the house for water. For the rest of the day we listened for his steps, which didn’t come. In the evening, when it began to cool and a slight wind rippled the water, we slept as much from boredom as exhaustion. In the middle of the night, we finally heard his car kicking to life in the driveway.
The next day, Mr. Lee took away all of Amanda Ruth’s privileges—television, music, weekend outings with friends—and forbade her to socialize with me. We saw one another at school and ate lunch with the same group of kids under the oak tree beside the science building. But she was required to come straight home after seventh period, and the only activities he allowed her to take part in were those involving the youth group at their church. For two summers he sent her to an expensive camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where she sang religious songs around a campfire, rode horses, and attended mandatory weekly mixers with the boys from the neighboring camp. At the mixers they were not allowed to dance. Instead they played Scrabble and swung baseball bats at unbreakable piñatas, stuffed themselves with chips and miniature pretzels, Coca-Cola that came not in cans, but in bottles. “It’s like something out of the fifties,” she wrote in one of her letters from camp. “Any minute you expect Richie Cunningham to walk in and fire up the jukebox.”
The summer after our senior year, things changed. Mr. Lee was having problems with his printing business. He couldn’t afford to send Amanda Ruth to camp and had no time to keep watch over her, a task he entrusted to Mrs. Lee, who refused privately to enforce her husband’s rules. That summer, I spent long weeks with Amanda Ruth at Demopolis River. Her father spent weeknights at their house in Mobile and only came to the river on weekends. Friday mornings we would search the cabin for any evidence I had been there: a pair of my size 6 sandals, articles of clothing left in the laundry, strands of my hair captured in the prongs of her hairbrush. Amanda Ruth’s mother became our ally, participating in those weekly searches to rid the house of me.
In the woods a couple of hundred yards from the river house, there was a pond beneath the willows where Amanda Ruth and I lounged when the pier became too hot. Tadpoles clustered in the shallows, their tiny bodies shining blue in pools of sunlight. From a distance the disturbances they made on the surface of the water would fool us into thinking it had just begun to rain. Dragonflies dipped and soared on the edges of the pond, sometimes racing by within an inch of our heads, their buzz louder than a bee or yellow jacket, like a zipper being pulled right beside our ears. The dragonflies always played in pairs. They had green bodies with maroon or black wings that lost their color at the outer tip. Sometimes one would light on our towel and lie there so long we thought it must be dying.
Amanda Ruth was enthralled by the minutia of insect life: the high, tittering racket of the crickets, the lethargy of yellow jackets who fumbled across the window screens; they seemed to always be stumbling, unsure of their direction, yet somehow more dangerous than the bees who plunged their furry heads into the petals of the wildflowers. Once, a yellow jacket lit on the tank top she wore with the bikini bottom of her bathing suit. By the time we got the shirt off her, the yellow jacket had made its way inside and stung her in the small of her back. I made her lie flat on her stomach on a towel while I extracted the tiny stinger with my fingernails. It was the beginning of summer, and we had already spent hours on inflatable rafts, drifting, eyes closed as we talked and planned, falling into the easy friendship we’d shared throughout childhood and into adolescence. Our skin, pale from days indoors, had quickly blistered and her shoulders had begun to peel. After pulling the stinger I rubbed her back with lotion, then sat in the shade beside her, braiding a length of pine straw.
“No fair,” she said. “You’re wearing your top.”
“So?”
“So take it off.” “Dare me?”
“I double dog dare you.”
I untied the bow behind my neck, then the other between my shoulder blades, and tossed the bikini top onto the grass. I lay on top of her, feeling the cool stickiness of her skin, the curve of her back b
eneath my stomach.
I hadn’t touched another girl since that day we’d been caught, both of us reduced to frightened tears and shame. The boys at school liked me and were insistent; on many occasions I had found myself stripped bare in the bedrooms of those whose parents were out of town. More often than not I enjoyed it, although it seemed that only my body was involved, while my emotions and intellect remained detached. The boys all seemed so young, either too confident or too shy. Hair grew in unusual patterns on their bodies. Too often there was the smell of sweat on them, or worse, the overbearing scent of cologne. They talked about things that did not interest me: soccer and beer and TV, loud high school bands with meaningless names like Fruit and Not the Senate whose music did not move me.
As I lay on top of Amanda Ruth, I felt a nervousness rattling in my stomach, and along with it a feeling of being in exactly the right place and with the right person, a wholeness I had not felt since we’d last been together. Her body felt as familiar as my own, although she had changed since that day in the boathouse, gained a softness and a stillness that wasn’t there before.
After a while she moved, repositioning herself so that she was lying on her side on the towel, facing me, her head propped on her hand. We lay there for a minute or more, looking at one another, and I did not know what to do. I sensed that she was different now, experienced.
Dream of the Blue Room Page 4