Dream of the Blue Room

by Michelle Richmond

  “Famous Wind Moving Pagoda of Anqing,” The Voice says. “It is king of all pagodas.” I feel sometimes as though The Voice is wired to my brain, as if she knows what I’m thinking.

  I turn to Graham. “Why is this one king?”

  “Legend has it that the autumn moon festival brings pagodas here from all over the world to pay homage. It’s called Wind Moving Pagoda because it sometimes sways with the breeze.”

  At the moment, the air is calm and the pagoda is perfectly still.

  The door from the lounge opens and slams shut. Loud footsteps approach. A big man in a wide white hat and cowboy boots appears at the rail several yards away. Arms crossed over his chest, he surveys the riverbank. His wife sidles up to him. She wears a pink nylon jogging suit with gold trim, lots of gold bracelets and necklaces, big turquoise rings, shockingly white leather Nikes, tennis socks with little pink pompoms dangling from her ankles. The couple doesn’t seem to notice us.

  “What a shame,” the man booms. His accent is unmistakable, the long deep drawl of Texas. “Just look at those hills over there. They could be gorgeous, no kidding, this place could be top-notch. If I could have a whack at it, do you know what I’d do? I’d tear down all those factories and shacks and ragtag apartment buildings. And then I’d put up a brand spanking new resort—the works—palatial rooms, marble floors, claw-foot tubs, a state-of-the art gymnasium. Hell, I might even level a mountain and add a golf course.”

  “Sounds like paradise,” his wife says.

  “And I’d hire these pretty little Chinese girls, and I’d make them wear those long silk dresses with the slits up to here, and they’d wait on you hand and foot. They’d fetch your slippers, do your laundry, give you a massage. They’d wear red lipstick, and fingernails out to here painted with white dragons. I’d charge an arm and a leg, and people would be lining up to pay for it. I’d put together a package deal—airfare to China, a cruise up the Yangtze, one week in the Oriental Palace.”

  His wife corrects him gently. “You can’t say ‘Oriental’ anymore, hon. Let’s call it the Yangtze Jewel.”

  “Yeah, the Yangtze Jewel. And it’d be like you’re in China, only better—because you’ve got all the comforts of home. We’d serve steak and potatoes, hamburgers and hash browns. It’d mean jobs for all these poor folks you see washing laundry in the river and selling wrinkled little vegetables and driving rickshaws. What a mess they’ve made of this place.”

  “Indeed,” his wife says. She turns to me and Graham with a slightly surprised look, as if she’s just realized she and her husband aren’t alone on deck. “I tell you, the air’s so filthy I can’t even breathe. It ought to be illegal, what they’re doing to this river.”

  Graham frowns in their direction.

  The man hitches his pants over his enormous belly and says, “Well,” as if it’s the last word, the end of the matter. Then, as quickly as they came, they are gone. They retreat back into the glass walls of the lounge, a too-flowery perfume and the stench of cigarette smoke trailing after.

  Our ship trundles along, its big engine humming, churning up silt and debris. Sampans and junks unlucky enough to be caught in our wake bob up and down like corks on the choppy waves. I think of Demopolis River and how it used to flow through Greenbrook and out into the Gulf, rich with fish and growing things. A couple of years ago, when I went home to Mobile to see my family, I took a drive out to Greenbrook. An entire section of the town along the river had been demolished. Where Amanda Ruth’s house used to stand, there was a huge shopping complex: Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Pottery Barn, Chili’s, PetSmart, Payless Shoes. The river itself had been diverted. I had a lunch of green beans, macaroni and cheese, and banana pudding at a diner Amanda Ruth and I used to frequent, a diner fortunate enough not to lie in the path of destruction.

  “What happened?” I asked Miss Betsy, the woman who’d run the place as long as I could remember. She had dyed black hair, enormous breasts, and crow’s feet made deeper by layers of dark foundation. There was a rumor that she’d once had an affair with Lyndon B. Johnson. She was one of those women who could have been forty or sixty-five; it was impossible to tell.

  “Nobody here wanted the project,” she said, refilling my coffee. “Most of the property along the river belonged to a man named Grady Watson, and everybody leased from him. He lived on the river his whole life, and loved it just as much as he loved his wife and kids. But when Grady died, another developer came calling, and Grady’s kids saw dollar signs.”

  Two miles of Demopolis River now run through a man-made concrete canal that forms the back border of the shopping mall and an adjacent golf course. The developer put in a few benches and a stand of azalea bushes, so the shoppers who purchase hamburgers and frozen yogurt cones and stuffed potatoes from the food court can watch the river rippling past. The complex is called River Eden Shopping Center, and, perhaps in the spirit of this misnomer, the developer allowed three giant old oaks that stood in the way of the parking lot to remain. Now the oaks are stapled with banners and flyers, and when something happens to inflame the public spirit—a missing girl or a national disaster—the oaks are adorned with big yellow ribbons. In the last ten years, Greenbrook has gone from a quaint town of 4,000 to a poorly planned suburban mess of 35,000. Big green swaths of land that used to hold a single home or cabin are now dotted with dozens of identical houses, placed primly on clear-cut cul-de-sacs with names like Oak Branch Court and Dogwood Grove.

  At night, when the River Eden Shopping Center is closed, kids go down to the edge of the canal to smoke pot and drink beer and listen to music and have sex. Their used condoms mingle with beer cans and Cracker Jack boxes. The adults in town complain that kids have no respect for Greenbrook, but it is no wonder. Living in Greenbrook once meant living on the river. To be from Greenbrook was to know a certain smell of moss-hung trees after the rain, the specific sound of frogs on summer nights, the particular feel of the mud at the bottom of your river, Demopolis River, which was different from the algae-slicked bottom of Dog River or the crab-scuttled silt around Petit Bois Island or the silky white sand of Gulf Shores. To be from Greenbrook, in those days, was to be from a particular place.

  THIRTEEN

  Each day with the break in the rain, I look up and see that the sky has gone soft—a low, plush layer of silver-white, furrowed like plowed snow. Sometimes the clouds thin, and for a moment the sun is visible, a surprising blaze of light high above the gloom of the river. More often, though, the ship is shrouded in mist, so that we cannot see more than a few yards in front of us. Drifting along the river in the fog, no land or ships in sight, it seems we could be anywhere, that China is only a distant dream.

  Early in the morning on the ninth day of the cruise, The Voice comes over the loudspeaker. “We have encountered small problem. Please come to Yangtze Room.” By the time Dave and I arrive, the room is already crowded with panicked tourists. The guides are waving their flags, shouting orders, trying to run damage control. Jane Madonna, the entertainment director, stands at the center of the dance floor, her usually perfect hair uncombed, her uniform slightly askew. She speaks into a megaphone. “When everyone sit down we begin.”

  After about fifteen minutes of chaos, Elvis Paris takes over. “We have small problem with boat,” Elvis says. “We maybe not have dinner tonight in Wuhan.” The disco ball revolves slowly above his head, showering him with triangular specks of colored light.

  Gradually, after much hemming and hawing on the part of the crew, we learn that there is a problem with the engine. We have dropped anchor to keep the current from dragging us back downstream. A voice in the crowd says gruffly, “Just how long are we gonna be stuck here?”

  “Maybe one day, maybe two, maybe three,” Elvis says. “No worry! We play games! Please sign up for tournament.” The guides pass around clipboards and pens. They move through the crowd, urging us to sign up for badminton, table tennis, backgammon, and shuffleboard. They have even organized a tournament for video s
trip mahjong. Dave and I found the mahjong game our first night on board. Each time you win a game, the animated woman on the video screen takes off an item of clothing. We got her down to her bra and panties before our losing streak set in.

  Amid a noticeable air of discontent, the crowd slowly disperses. Dave stretches, yawns. “I’m off for a nap,” he says. At the back of the room I find Graham sitting in a chair that’s too small for him, resting his elbow on a metal table.

  He sees me, smiles. “So. We’re stranded.”

  I pull a chair up next to him, take a deck of airline cards out of my purse, shuffle, deal seven cards to each of us, place the deck facedown on the middle of the table. He gathers his cards, concentrating on arranging them. “What are we playing?”

  “Go Fish.”

  An hour later, wandering the hallways, we come upon a door with a hand-lettered sign that says “No Entry.” Graham tries the knob anyway and it opens. Chairs are stacked four deep around the room, and the bar is covered with dust. The ship is full of such rooms, which seem to have been abandoned for no reason. Sometimes it feels as if we’re traveling on a ghost ship, as if the spirits of other, better cruises, of lavish parties and elegant dinners, lurk mockingly in dark corners. We slide into a vinyl booth in the corner. A dish of stale ginger candy gathers grime on the table.

  “Sorry I’m not much fun to be with today,” Graham says. “I wish someone would just shoot me full of morphine.”

  “What hurts?”

  “My hands, my feet, my back, my joints.”

  The lights are off in the windowless room, and the big brass clock on the wall registers an eternal 2:35. As the afternoon slides past, we lose all sense of time. Graham is in so much pain that his eyes begin to water. “I hate being this way,” he says. I try to comfort him, brush his hair with my fingers. I hate that I can’t help him.

  “It’s so hot,” he says.

  I fetch ice from the dispenser in the hallway; the small cubes clink together in the plastic liner. I hold the ice to his forehead, his collarbone, the soft skin of his inner elbow. “I wish I could do something.”

  “Just talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “Tell me about your time in the hospital, after the accident with the horse. What do you remember?”

  “They were always bringing me ice cream and Jell-O. The ice cream tasted grainy and sweet. The nurses smelled like the rubber of their orthopedic shoes, and the washed metal of the trays they used to carry instruments and needles. Every couple of hours a woman with orange hair came to check my catheter. When it was time to change my sheets it took four of them to roll me. They lifted me on a sheet, and I was suspended in air above the bed. Leave It to Beaver played on the television. A boy in a wheelchair passed back and forth in the hallway, stopping over and over again at my door. He had an enormous forehead and no jaw on the right side of his face. He wore the plastic rings that the Candy Stripers brought around in Tupperware boxes, spiders and smiley faces.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Two months, maybe? Three? It’s all very blurry.”

  What I remember most from that time is strange hands hovering over me all the time, orderlies and nurses moving my body from one surface to another, the chill of the X-ray table, the hum of the machine. I thought all my bones were being pulled apart.

  “Did you have visitors?”

  “My family was there. And sometimes Amanda Ruth came to see me. Once she brought me a Rubik’s Cube, another time a Lite-Brite. For her birthday she’d gotten a rock tumbling kit, so she brought me polished stones.”

  Graham talks of his time in hospitals, months of misdiagnosis. “The symptoms are similar to other diseases so it’s a tricky one to diagnose. ALS is only determined by process of elimination. Once they had decided it might be ALS, they conducted electomyography tests, tests to determine nerve conduction velocity, blood and urine studies including high-resolution serum protein electrophoresis, thyroid and parathyroid hormone levels, twenty-four-hour urine collection for heavy metals, spinal tap and X rays, MRI.”

  “How do you remember all that?”

  “I wrote it down. I studied it. I wanted to know what they were doing to me. On the Internet I found others with ALS. I started e-mailing with them.” He picks a piece of lint off his sleeve. “They’d write every day, then once a week, once a month, and pretty soon not at all.”

  In the afternoon, his pain subsides. We don parkas and go up on deck. The rain rocks the ship. Were we to lift anchor we would be dragged downstream. The world turns gray, we can see only a few inches in front of us. Every now and then a bolt of lightning slices through the thick air.

  “Look,” says Graham, awed. “You can see the exact spot where it touches.”

  I too believe that I see this, that I can know the lightning as surely as I know a drop of rain that splatters on my outstretched hand. All my senses seem heightened. Even the heat of the lightning is known to me, the sudden death of the tree it touches, the burning odor of the bark, the taste of everything: charred root, spent electricity, rain.

  Graham collects a pool of rain in his palms, holds it out to me. “Drink.” I dip my tongue into the cool, still water. I am Eve, reversed. From this man I would accept water, a poisoned apple, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

  Drink, and you shall never thirst, said Amanda Ruth’s preacher at the church in Greenbrook. Sometimes she took me there. Her mother wore a yellow robe and was placed front and center in the choir. Her father sat alone with his hands folded in his lap, the only nonwhite in a congregation of two hundred. For the Lord’s Supper, held four times a year, the deacons passed out tiny pewter cups, like thimbles, filled with grape juice, pale oyster crackers with no taste that left a residue of flour on our fingers. During the Lord’s Supper I could hear the cups rattling in the trays—hundreds of tiny cups, a dozen big silver trays, the pad of the deacons’ shoes on the thick red carpet. After the drinking of the blood of Christ, the deacons collected the cups, dropped them into small round slots in the trays. A man in a shiny brown suit took Mr. Lee’s cup and placed it upside down; in this way it was marked for special cleaning, perhaps disposal. Mr. Lee pretended not to notice.

  I lay my head against Graham’s chest. I can’t stop thinking about our time in the cave. Now, on board this ship, surrounded by chrome and plastic and other passengers, subject to the whims of the crew and the maddening sound of The Voice, it is almost as if I imagined the cobblestone path, the cave, Graham’s hands pressing against my thighs.

  “Thirty-two,” he says. “You’re a child. Do you know this is the first time I’ve been with a younger woman?”

  I can smell the fiber of his shirt, damp from these days of rain. My own clothes are permanently wrinkled, all the crispness gone out of them; they hang limply from the wooden hangers in our tiny closet. Housekeeping cleans the cabins thoroughly every morning, but still the dampness holds on, mold grows in the crevices, strange smells attach themselves to our summer fabrics.

  “And do you think I’m good for you?”

  He smiles. “Too early to tell.”

  In the evening I go to the cabin and find Dave sprawled on top of the covers, snoring. “Dave?” I say. He doesn’t wake. I touch him on the shoulder. “Dave?”

  “Hmm?” He opens his eyes for a moment, closes them again.

  “Time for dinner.”

  “Do you mind eating without me? I’m beat.” He rolls over and is instantly asleep again. I never cease to be amazed by his ability to sleep, to go into a deep and dreamless hibernation no matter the time of day—as if his body is programmed to store up sleep whenever possible, imbuing him with a superhuman supply of energy, enabling him to spring into immediate action whenever his services are needed.

  In the dining room I join Graham and Stacy for a dinner of bean curd, salted pork, and cabbage—the first Chinese food we’ve had on the ship, our best meal so far. Stacy keeps tapping her water glass wit
h a fingernail, glancing toward the door. “Where’s Dave?” she asks finally.

  “Asleep.”

  “It’s way too early for bed.”

  “He sleeps a lot.”

  “Maybe he has that condition—what’s it called—chronic fatigue.”

  “He’s just resting up for the next big emergency.”

  She barely touches her food and is quiet during the entire meal.

  “Everything okay?”

  “I just thought he’d be joining us.” She excuses herself before dessert.

  When she’s gone, Graham relaxes, reaches across the table to touch my arm. “It’s not easy. Keeping up this charade, trying to act like we’re just friends.”

  “What are we, exactly?”

  He laughs. “Scoundrels, I suppose.”

  Matt Dillon brings us coffee and cheesecake and clean forks, clears Stacy’s place. His movements are small and precise, his carriage so graceful that he seems to come from another century.

  “Not that Stacy would have noticed,” Graham adds. “Looks like she has something else on her mind.”

  “True.” I picture Stacy in the hallway, knocking on our cabin door. I imagine Dave, groggy from sleep, getting out of bed, opening the door in his underwear. Seeing her there, he looks down the hallway in both directions, pauses for a moment, considering. “Come in,” he says. She does.

  Should I follow her? Catch them in the act? Maybe I’m making this whole thing up. Maybe it’s true what Dave says—he just wants to help her. In any case, I don’t go. There are other factors to consider. The other factor is sitting right here, scraping the last bit of cheesecake off his plate.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Did I lose you?”

  “I’m right here.”