When we returned to the room we stripped to our underwear, the sticky heat overcoming any sense of modesty we might feel in one another’s presence. The first undressing, the night before, had been more difficult, each of us looking away from the other as cottony fabrics slipped over shoulders and thighs. The mystery of the dark cave on Mount Lushan, the spontaneity of the racquetball court, eluded us. Last night, alone in this room, its purpose so clear and unmistakable, we became suddenly shy. He removed his socks and shoes, placed them in the closet and closed the door. He then stepped into the bathroom, and I could hear water splashing in the tub as he washed his feet. This morning, however, we woke like married people, turning to kiss one another before even brushing our teeth.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Hungry?”
“Famished.”
As I walked naked to the window and opened the drapes, I felt no shame for the roundness of my stomach, the imperfections of my thighs. The shyness of the night before seemed like something from a long time ago. We took our time at breakfast, drinking two pots of tea and savoring our noodles, which were spiced with fish sauce and hot pepper. The proprietor sat down and carried on a long conversation with Graham.
After breakfast we returned to our room, and he disrobed while facing me. I reached forward to touch the thin gray patch of hair on his chest, just above the sternum. He placed his hand in the small of my back and guided me to the bed, where he lay me back and arranged me in a pose that pleased him: knees bent slightly to one side, arms stretched above my head.
“If only I had the talent to paint you,” he said. “A Polaroid will have to do.” He took his boxy black camera from the table and shot me, the camera clicking and humming. He was amazed by the flexibility of his own fingers as he compressed the black button, the control he had over his hands.
“Strange,” he said, “I feel a clarity coming on. Have you ever heard of the Chinese poet Tong Sing?”
I shook my head.
“In his old age, he succumbed to an arthritis so severe that his hands were curled like paws. Supposedly, he experienced a miraculous flexibility in the hours leading up to his death.” Graham held his hands in front of him in the light, as if he were witnessing a miracle. They did not shake. He came around the side of the bed and knelt beside me. I placed my hand on his neck and felt the toughness of his skin, the uppermost knob of his vertebrae lodged like a tiny stone beneath his skull.
Lying faceup on the bed, Graham lifts a leg and taps the naked bulb with his foot. The bulb moves in small circles above us, its pale glow illuminating scars and cracks along the shabbily papered walls. He follows the tail of light with his eyes, tapping his fingers on his chest.
“Tien means heaven. We’re in the Hotel Heaven. Did I ever mention my paper route?” He turns to face me. “This was in Perth. I was seven. I rode a red bicycle that was much too small for me. I carried the papers in a metal basket between the handlebars.”
I try to imagine Graham at age seven, that thick, coarse hair framing a much younger face. I try to imagine him youthful, without pain, the ease with which he took a newspaper from the basket, snapped his wrist, and sent it sailing onto a vacant porch. I imagine his knees jutting up above the handlebars as his feet pumped the pedals. His legs, even then, must have been long. Not until I saw him unclothed in this room did I realize that the length of his legs is disproportionate to his body, that he possesses the legs of a taller man.
The bathroom has a tub, but no sink. Lightbulbs above a rectangular mirror flicker on and off. Warm brown water sputters from the faucet, a plain copper spigot with a circle of rust on the rim. I let the water run for a few minutes before it lightens to amber, then plug the drain and step into the shallow tub. Through the crack in the bathroom door I can see the little wooden desk, and on top of it the sheaf of rice paper on which Graham had been writing before I called him to bed on the second night. I had come up behind him, leaning quietly over his shoulder, and when my shadow intersected the page he had been startled, drawing the brush clumsily across the page.
“What are you writing?” I asked.
“A note to the housekeeper. I’m telling her not to come into the room for a couple of days.”
“How long are we going to stay here?”
“Not long.”
He slipped the note into a large envelope. I could see that it also contained other things—a key, a letter, a wad of paper money. “What’s that?”
He sealed the envelope, placed it carefully on the center of the desk. “A getaway plan,” he said, smiling.
“Who’s getting away? From what?”
He pulled me to him and began kissing my belly, my breasts. He turned me around, lifted my shirt, and planted kisses along the length of my spine. We made love for the third time that day. Straddling him on the chair, staring into the window of an empty apartment across the street, I felt suddenly young—as if, in time, I might forget everything that came before.
It is morning. Our third day in Fengdu. A light rain is falling. The bulb above the bed has sputtered out. Everything is darkened, damp.
“I need your help,” he says.
I hold my breath. Not now; he can’t do this now. I’d almost begun to believe that he would change his mind.
From a drawer he takes a small plastic bag—the one he got from his friend in Shashi. Inside the bag is a vial of clear medicine, a syringe. He lays these things carefully on the little wooden table beside the bed. The vial catches a dim ray of light. “It isn’t fair to ask this of you. But you must understand.”
“Ask what of me?” I say, but I know the answer.
He lines the items up neatly across the table’s scratched surface: syringe, vial, towel, alcohol, cotton swabs. “I don’t want to be alone when it happens.” He looks at me. Looks into me. “Jenny,” he says.
Only then do I allow myself to admit just what it is he wants of me, what he has been preparing me for these last few days. I feel my heart splitting open. I feel everything slipping—the floor, time, everything that holds my life together.
“No,” I say. “That’s crazy.”
He sits on the edge of the bed, fingers spread over his knees. He is looking at the floor, where a tiny black spider makes its way across the carpet. Everything is blurry. The room feels very hot.
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to.”
“It’s out of the question. I can’t.”
“You care about me?”
“Of course.”
“Then you can.”
“No.”
“Try to imagine not being able to walk or talk or eat. Not being able to make love. Imagine spending your last months on a respirator.”
I’m sobbing now. I can’t control my tears, the tone of my voice. “Why not a nurse? Someone who knows what she’s doing?”
“I don’t want to die with a stranger. I want to be with you.”
I think of Amanda Ruth’s ashes, floating down the long and ancient river, to the sea. I think of Graham’s body, upturned and buoyant, sharing the river with her. “This is absurd,” I say through my tears. “I came to China to leave one body behind. And now you’re asking me this?”
“There are people who can do this sort of thing. You’re one of them. I sensed it in you the first time we met. I sense it now. That night on deck, when you told me Amanda Ruth’s story, it became clear to me.”
“You’re wrong.”
Even as I say this, even as I shake my head in denial, I’m thinking of my first cousin Debbie, who died in a car wreck in New Jersey the year I finished college. We were never close. But after the accident, I was the one who was chosen to identify the body. Her father called from Georgia and said, “We can’t think of anyone else.” Standing in the cold mortuary, looking into Debbie’s expressionless face, I said, “It’s her.” I didn’t cry.
A couple of years ago, my upstairs neighbor knocked on my door and told me she had a rat trapped in her bathtub. It was a W
ednesday night, and several other people in the building were home, but I was the one she came to. “Could you kill it?” she said. I got Dave’s baseball bat from the closet, went upstairs, entered my neighbor’s bathroom, and shut the door behind me. The rat was fat and gray; it squealed and clawed the porcelain. I lifted the bat in the air, and the rat was suddenly still, looking up at me. For a moment we locked eyes. I hit it five times on the head. There was no blood, nothing. When I left the bathroom, my neighbor, who was standing in the hallway, said, “Is it dead?” I nodded. I asked her for a garbage bag and took the rat out to the alley. Back in my apartment, washing my hands, I felt only an overwhelming emptiness.
I was not always this way. Some time after Amanda Ruth died, some strength that I did not know I possessed slowly began to surface. It did not happen right away; it took months, years even. But to me it has always felt like a borrowed strength—not an essential element of my nature, but a mere act. I have never wanted to be this person. I did not want to accept Amanda Ruth’s ashes the day her mother showed up at my door, pale and shaking. I did not want to identify my cousin or kill the rat. Most of all, I do not want to usher Graham along his final journey. Yet it seems I bear some false identifying mark that indicates I am capable of carrying out the undesirable tasks. Do I give off some signal, some vague unsettling vibration? Maybe Dave and I are not as different as I have always believed.
The brush, dipped in deep black ink. Graham holds it above the bottle, lets the extra ink run down, blots the brush on the yellow pad. He stands by the window in the dusky light, stretches out his arm, searches for something, touches the tip of the bristles to the soft white skin of his inner elbow. A single dot, a perfect black circle inscribed on the blue fullness of a vein.
I stare at the vein, mesmerized. That blue. Like something not quite real. I have a colorized photograph of my mother when she was a child. Her hair is yellow, her naturally brown eyes a clear and frozen blue—some photographer’s ideal of what a young girl should look like. And I have seen this color somewhere else. It is the blue of Amanda Ruth’s bathing suit in my favorite photograph of her—she is standing at the bow of her father’s boat, leaning slightly forward, arms above her head, poised to dive. It is the blue of that room, our room, at a certain time of day, just as the sun was slipping behind the long row of pines across the river. And somewhere else, I’ve seen it.
Graham reaches up and touches my hair, brushes a tear from my face. “What are you thinking?”
“About this block in New York where I walk sometimes. Eighty-sixth Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam. There’s a huge brick apartment building. On the seventh floor, there’s a row of tall windows that spans the entire width of the building. From the street, all you can see is this incredibly bright blue glow. I passed by that building dozens of times, wondering what was behind the windows that could give off this strange, brilliant color. One winter afternoon about three years ago, as I stood across the street, staring up, two girls came out of the big double doors. They were sixteen, maybe seventeen. They were laughing and whispering to each other, lost to the rest of the world, as though there was no one else in New York City, just them. Their hair was wet, clinging to their cheeks and necks. They wore long dresses that stuck to their damp skin. Through the dresses, I could see the outlines of their bathing suits.”
“It’s a pool,” Graham says. He smiles.
“Here it was, the middle of winter in New York City, snow in Central Park, everybody bundled up in scarves and mittens. Just that weekend I’d watched the lighting of the tree at Rockefeller Center. I thought of all those people high up in that building, in bathing suits and swim caps, traipsing barefoot around this huge indoor pool. I found it somehow exciting—the idea of a big warm body of water on the seventh floor of an apartment building on the Upper West Side, this room where it was perpetually summer. I wanted to go swimming in that pool. Who knows, maybe I even wanted in a small way to be friends with those two girls. So I did something that’s always surprised me a little since. I crossed the street and walked up to them. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. They stopped talking and looked at me politely, a little impatiently. I asked them who owned the pool, if they knew how I might buy a membership. The girls giggled. The taller one said, ‘That’s the Upper West Side Youth Club.’ The other one said, ‘You have to be, like, a teenager to use that pool.’ I thanked them. ‘Sorry, lady,’ the taller girl said. I could tell she really meant it, she felt sorry for me.”
“It’s a good story,” Graham says.
“I still pass by that building every now and then and look up at the blue room. It’s a blue you wouldn’t believe, with this deep miraculous shine. Even though I can’t use the pool, for some reason it’s comforting to know it’s there.”
Graham blows the ink dry. The vein is wide and sure, a hard line inscribed on the muscled length of his arm.
“Why here?” I ask. “Why this awful hotel?”
Graham stares up at the ceiling for a moment, then looks at me, puts one finger to his lips. “Hear that?” he whispers.
“What?”
“The room isn’t much, but the river…”
I close my eyes and listen. Down below, the river rushes, a continuous, comforting white noise. I’ve become so accustomed to that sound, I no longer notice it.
“What happens afterward?”
He points to the sealed envelope on the desk. “I’ve left instructions, made arrangements. You’ll leave as soon as it’s done.”
“Surely you don’t want to be left in this room?”
He sits on the bed, pulls me down beside him. “What matters is that I’m with you.”
“But what about a grave? Or at least cremation. You can’t just stay here.” I’m lying beside him, my head resting on his shoulder.
He laughs. “Stay here? You make it sound like I’m moving in.” He kisses my eyelids. The front of his shirt is damp from my tears. A warm breeze sifts through the window, and the bulb above the bed sways.
“I could come to Australia with you, you could think about it for a few weeks, and then, if you still want to do it, I’ll help you. Wouldn’t it be better at home?”
He props himself on his elbow and looks down into my face. “This morning, while you were asleep, I counted. I’ve traveled the Yangtze sixteen times. It feels more like home to me than Perth ever did. You can understand that, can’t you?”
I think about my small apartment by the park in New York City, and the path around the reservoir that I’ve jogged every Sunday morning for years. The water of the reservoir changes with the seasons—an opaque cold gray in winter, a glassy blue in spring, and in the summer a greenish white alive with birds and growing things. The path is less than two miles around, and I know every dip and curve of it—which spots turn muddy in the rain, where I’ll have to slow to make way for the tourists, where to keep my eyes on the ground to avoid stepping in horse droppings, the exact bend at which I stop and look up to see the maple trees changing colors. There is nothing of that path that reminds me of the place I grew up, nothing in it that would seem to beckon to a girl from Alabama, but when I am there I feel as if my body has come home, and the sound of the pebbles crunching beneath my feet is comforting, familiar.
I put my arms around Graham’s neck, pull him closer. “I guess I do understand. But why now?”
“I’ve gone through my whole life alone,” he says, brushing my hair away from my face. “I decided to do this months ago. I wanted to spend my last few days on the river, with someone special, but I was afraid it wouldn’t be possible. I was afraid I’d have to end it in some hospital, with strangers, cold white walls and cafeteria food and all that nonsense. Promise you won’t laugh if I tell you something?”
“Of course.”
“This is my third Yangzte River cruise this year. I’ve been looking for someone—I just didn’t know who. I didn’t know it was going to be you. Now you’re here, and these past few days have been perfect.” He breathe
s in, out. A light breeze rattles the windowpanes. “Just think of this place a few months from now. Everything here is going back to the river soon. I’ll be happy to go with it. It’s just—right.
“If you want me to explain the pain I’ve felt for the past year, if you really want to know just how bad it is, and how much worse it gets day by day, then I’ll go into all the unpleasant details.”
We lie for a while in silence. The decision has already been made. I am trying to figure out how things came to this. How did the trajectory of my life bring me to this moment—on a bed in an abandoned motel in China, holding on to a dying man?
“I’m glad we met,” I say. I don’t know what else to tell him. That nothing I have known or believed could have prepared me for this? No words are sufficient.
The syringe, shimmering in the yellowish light. Graham’s finger tapping the side of the syringe, his thumb pressing the plunger, a thin stream of liquid shooting through the needle. He gets up and goes to the window, takes another look at the river, that brown ribbon threading past. He comes to me, puts his hands on my shoulders. Can he tell that my body is a package of taut electrical wires? I imagine the wires exploding, bursting into flame. I imagine the fire licking the yellowed walls of this room, leaping from the windows, turning the hotel into a heap of ash, racing through the abandoned streets, rushing lava-hot down to the river, catching everything in its path: ships exploding like firecrackers, rickshaws splintering like matchsticks, stray dogs screaming, the tips of their matted fur aflame.
“You can do this,” he says, looking into my eyes. He wraps me up in his arms, buries his face in my hair. I can feel the warmth of his breath on my scalp. “You’re saving me.”
Dream of the Blue Room Page 19