Dream of the Blue Room

by Michelle Richmond

  I sob into his chest; the cotton of his shirt grows damper. I unbutton his shirt slowly, unzip his pants, pull him onto the bed, take him into me. That filling up, that deep slow heat, that fullness, that completion. We take our time, make it last as long as we can. An hour passes, more, that throbbing, that feeling of the world splitting open. “Get closer,” he says, and though it seems we cannot get any closer than we already are, somehow we do; everything is fluid, molten matter, there is no separation. Afterward, we stay together, sweating, tired, breathing together, one breath, two breaths, three, a matching rhythm that slows and slows.

  We get up from the bed, retrieve our clothes from the floor. I button his shirt for him, he zips my dress. The cool metal of the zipper snakes up my spine, and I think of the girls in red dresses at the staged funeral procession in Yeuyang, their long black braids switching down their backs, their stained shoes padding down the dusty road. We stand for a long time by the window. Down on the river, ships float past. In the streets, there is no one, nothing, just strange geometric shadows cast by the leaving sun. “It’s time,” he says. He goes over to the table, picks up the syringe, presses it into my hand. He lies down on the bed. His body seems impossibly long. His calves and feet hang over the edge of the mattress. He’s wearing khaki shorts and a white linen shirt, crisp and cool-looking even in this suffocating heat. I sit on the side of the bed. I look into his face and make one more plea. “I’ll go back to Australia with you. I’ll nurse you. Anything.”

  “Please, Jenny. If you want me to beg, I will.”

  His lips are full and pale. I lean down to kiss him. His trembling hands touch my shoulder, my neck, my breasts, my thigh. He lays his arm across the sheet.

  My eyes blur. I wipe them, concentrate, focus on the black dot. The syringe in my hand feels cold, impossibly light. I touch the gleaming tip of the needle to his skin and push. His skin is surprisingly strong. I push harder; my breath stops as I break skin. The vein bubbles slightly as I enter him. The slide of the long thin needle, the shape of it moving along the underside of his skin. I hesitate.

  “Good,” he says. “You’re doing well.”

  I press the plunger. It moves so slowly, as if his very blood is resisting me. I press until my thumb hits the base of the syringe.

  “Yes,” he says. “Now, lie down with me.”

  I pull the needle out, by instinct press my finger to his arm where a spot of red blood glistens. I lie down, and he takes me in his arms. For the longest time I try to match his breaths. At first it is easy, but then his breaths become longer, and I am holding my own breath just to keep time with him. His body begins to shake, then he coughs and spits up blood. I rush to the bathroom for towels. It is uglier than I imagined. There is no such thing as a clean and easy death. “I’ll go get someone,” I say, crying.

  “No.” He takes my hand, his grip surprisingly strong, his voice so weak I can barely hear him.

  Time unwinds. The world unspools. My body feels light and hollow. I lie down beside him and hold on. “I love you.” By the time it occurs to me to say this, he is already far past hearing.

  Now, the bathwater has gone cool around me. A tiny bar of soap floats on the surface, leaving behind a thin white trail, losing its words in the water. When I unwrapped the small square of paper, which had gone soft and damp in the heat, I couldn’t help but laugh at the inscription carved into the flesh of the soap: Happy Wash. In the room, nothing moves. There is a glint of glass on the carpet. On the bedside table, a cup of water, and the deep green of a parched banana leaf from which we ate a feast of cold rice and pork. A boat howls on the river. In the hallway, the cleaning woman knocks about, despite the fact that there is nothing to clean.

  If I lean back in the tub and tilt my head to the left I can see his thin legs stretched out on the bed, astonishingly white and nearly hairless. The yellowing sheet drapes over his head, falling to meet his wide chest, his stomach, his pelvis, the frayed hem ending just above his knees.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  In Greenbrook on Sundays Amanda Ruth and I would rise early, tiptoe to the kitchen, fill a bowl with blueberries and strawberries, sliced banana and cantaloupe. In our T-shirts and underwear we would traipse down to the pier, sit on the farthest edge, dangle our toes into the river. We would go before the sun made its appearance over the thick line of trees, so there was only a suggestion of light, the knowledge of day in the making. We ate the fruit with our hands, our fingers turned sticky and sweet, and when we were done we stripped off our shirts and slid into the river. We swam out to the center, beneath the still-visible moon, while all along the riverbank birds began to call.

  On the beach near the pier the water was shallow and warm, but the farther we swam from the narrow beach the colder the water became. We did the backstroke and the butterfly; we dog-paddled and floated, weightless, on our backs. I made my body stiff and, facing downward, arms straight at my sides, head plunged underwater, propelled myself with hips and thighs in the manner of The Man from Atlantis. We did not talk but instead listened to the good sounds of our river—the dip and splash of the water in response to the movement of our bodies, the slow call of a bullfrog, the high hum of a fishing boat in the distance. When we were tired we swam back to the pier, climbed the creaking wooden ladder, then lay with our bare backs to the sun until we heard Amanda Ruth’s mother calling us in.

  Inside the house, we would shower and dress for church. Her parents must have assumed we stopped showering together when we passed a certain age, but at eleven and twelve and thirteen we still closed the bathroom door, flung our wet swimsuits on the floor, and stepped side by side into the narrow tub. She would stand beneath the spray, her back to me, and I would work up a lather in my palms then slide my hands across her shoulders, down the groove in her spine. She would turn to face me, and I would rub the soap in circles over her flat belly. When I was finished she would do the same for me, and we would step out of the tub, wrap ourselves in thick towels, and open the closet door in the bedroom to choose our clothes for church.

  I didn’t own any church dresses and so I would have to borrow one of hers, which was usually too loose across the chest and too tight in the hips. By the time we had finished blow-drying our hair and shimmying into slips and dresses and sandals, Amanda Ruth’s parents would be waiting in the car. The blue Impala smelled of some flowery perfume her mother wore, a fragrance that made Amanda Ruth sneeze. I remember her father on those Sundays as silent and solemn. While her mother played with the radio dial, searching for the voice of Elvis or Buddy Holly, Mr. Lee sat with both hands on the wheel and drove, occasionally glancing in the rearview mirror or lifting a hand from the wheel to adjust his collar. When he did speak, it was to instruct us to roll up our windows or to be quiet during the service.

  There was no hint of China in Mr. Lee’s voice. But in Greenbrook on Sundays he was nothing if not Chinese. You could see it in the faces of the churchgoers who turned to stare as he walked down the aisle with his voluptuous blonde wife and American daughter, headed for the second row in the center. Those Sundays after church we ate lunch at the Red Lobster. Amanda Ruth and I always ordered the popcorn shrimp. The regular wait staff knew the Lees by name, but the new waitresses would often talk about Mr. Lee rather than to him. “What does he want?” they would say to Amanda Ruth’s mother, looking surprised when he said, “I’ll have the fried oysters and iced tea.” Once, in response, a very skinny waitress with brown hair that swung down to her waist said, “Oh! Your English is perfect!”

  I always wondered why Mr. Lee agreed to stay there. I never understood how he could endure another Sunday in Greenbrook, or why he would even want to try.

  And in Fengdu? What does one do on Sunday in this ghost of a city, this place that will soon be submerged, this city that has houses but no people, roads but no bicycles, graven images but no one to worship them?

  You can take your clothes from the dresser, your passport, your empty tin, your bottle of lotion, th
e Polaroid photos he made of you, place these things in the pack that you brought here before you understood the manner in which you would be leaving. You can look out the window of your motel room, at the ships coming in to port, to be loaded with things that must be taken away. It is a lengthy business to dismantle a city.

  You can think of your husband aboard that other ship, sailing westward, away from you. You can go away and lock the door behind you, leaving on it in plain view the note that Graham wrote in Chinese characters. “It says that we will be staying for two more days,” he explained, “that we have paid up and do not want the room cleaned. It says not to disturb us. This will give you time to get away. Please put this note on the door when you leave.”

  Walking down the crumbling stairwell, you hold the envelope tightly. Inside it, the instructions that Graham wrote for you: Go down to the dock at 4 p.m. A sampan will be waiting to take you to Chongching. The envelope also contains Chinese currency, a key, and an address. The key is to a house in Sydney. “It’s your house now,” he told you earlier, “if you’ll have it. Everything inside is yours.”

  In Fengdu on Sunday you can still climb one thousand stone steps to the top of Mount Minshan, from which you can view the abandoned city below. From the single vendor who remains here, who has been allowed to stay in case any officials venture to Mount Minshan before it is drowned, you can purchase a type of currency known as Hell Bank Notes to burn on the graves of your ancestors, a bribe for the celestial judges. The water is rising, the people are leaving, the graven images are spending their last days in the light; nonetheless you can pretend that you are on vacation in this, the City of Ghosts.

  There are things you must not do in Fengdu on Sunday, things better left undone.

  You must not refuse to think in terms of degree, for degree is your only salvation. Without degree murder is murder, you have killed a man—no matter that he wanted it, that he begged for you to do so, that he used many sensible words to persuade you.

  “I do not want to live in pain,” he said. You were lying naked beside him when he said this. His hand rested on your breast. You lay on top of the sheets, not beneath them, because the heat was intense, despite the rain. You could hear rain on the window, and see mud forming on the cracked pane. “I chose you,” he said. All of the heat of the dying city had come to bear upon you in this room. Humid heat, unbreathable, giving birth to mold along the edges of the carpet, in the crevice behind the lamp. “I can’t abide the thought of slow death.” A ship howled in the distance, a rickshaw rattled past. “I love you.” Doorknobs shook in the hallway as the housekeeper made her pointless rounds. His hand, even then, moving across your body. His lips in the hollow of your throat, his mouth on your mouth, the slight bitterness of pain medication on his tongue. Even then, the pressure of him against your thigh, the good warmth, the slow arousal, and how to confront it, then, the specter of life stirring in the body of a man who has chosen to die, a man who has chosen you.

  What can be done in Fengdu on Sunday?

  You can take into account circumstances, degrees, the demands of the dead.

  The chill has reached into everything. At some point it subdued the heat, though you do not know when this reversal took place, at what minute and what hour you understood that your skin had gone cold, and that you had no sweater, no blanket, no means of getting warm. You cannot say how long ago it was that you ran hot water in the tub to warm yourself, waiting for the dark brown water to lighten to amber before dropping the rubber stopper into the rusty drain. The rain does not stop. You listen for the rickshaw boy, but he is gone. The ships are gone. The housekeeper in the hallway is gone. The bathwater has gone cool around you. The soap loses its words in the water, leaving behind a thin white trail. You have neglected nothing. You have done just as you were told.

  There are things you must not do in Fengdu on Sunday, this Sunday or any other.

  You must not think of the blue room, and how, waking from the dream of her, you went down into the boat, stepping first over the fishing poles with their lines gone slack from disuse, and then through the low doorway into the cabin. You must not think of how you searched for her there but did not find her—not in the narrow hold where you used to lie, not in the hollow space beneath the cushions where she sometimes hid. You must not dwell on how she was not there, and how the river did not rattle the boathouse, how the boathouse did not move at all, for the river was still, it was night and the river was dark, and the moon did not shine down upon it, and she did not lie with her back to the buckling boards of the pier, or on the old familiar mattress, and your fingers did not slip together in the slick warmth of river water.

  You must not peer through the crack in the door, see his thin legs stretched out on the bed, startlingly white and nearly hairless. You must not hold yourself accountable.

  Rising from the bath, draping the white towel around your shoulders, going out into the room as if it were any room in any town, you must not look into the face of the man you have just murdered, though he does not quite yet look dead. Save for the stillness, he could be sleeping.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  In the morning, a thick mist hangs over the city. Doors stand open, but the businesses are gone. In the apartments above the shops, bright curtains flutter through open windows. A plastic cup skitters toward me on the breeze. At the base of a sycamore tree, a rusty bicycle wheel rests on a crate of kitchen sundries. There are no voices, no jingling of bicycle bells. Here and there are relics of the old life left behind: a pot perched on a stove, burnt black; three bowls of half-eaten rice on an outdoor table; laundry hanging stiffly from a window; a set of mahjong tiles atop a cardboard box. From the arrangement of the tiles I can tell that a game was stopped midway. I am reminded of photographs of Chernobyl, of the abandoned homes on the island of Destiny. It is as if life, one minute, was in full swing. Moments later, the people stood up and walked away.

  I bend to dislodge a pebble caught in my sandal. As I rise a figure comes into view—an old woman standing at a tea stall. She is dressed in loose blue pants and a blouse. Her short hair is the same silver as the baiji we saw in captivity in Nanjing. I believe at first that I have imagined her, but then the apparition calls out to me. Although I can’t understand the words, the gesture is familiar. With one hand she tends her stove. With the other she beckons me over.

  She points to a wooden chair in front of her stall, and I sit down. In front of us, the river. Behind us, the empty city. To our right, terraced hills rise toward the deep green pleats of mountains towering in the mist. In the air, the sweet fragrance of paddy fields mingles with the ancient smell of the river. The old woman fills two cups with steaming tea, then sits down beside me. She begins to talk. She talks for some time, her voice rising and falling, occasionally laughing at some joke she has made. All the while she looks straight ahead.

  I can’t understand a word she is saying, but she goes on weaving her stories, every now and then lifting her arm to point this way or that, or to make a sweeping gesture with her hand, indicating a wide expanse. I imagine that she is telling me the story of her childhood, how, as a girl, she played in these very streets. My mind is set adrift on her stories.

  In those days, there were children everywhere. We skipped stones down by the river. We wore yellow dresses. My mother ran this tea shop, which before had been run by her mother, and her mother before her. My father worked the fields. I had two older sisters and a younger brother, whom we called Little Panda, because he had dark circles beneath his eyes. In those days we woke early to climb the tall steps to the temple, where we burned incense and said our prayers. Before Little Panda came, we went there with our mother to pray for a baby boy. Can you see the temple? Maybe it is gone now. For a long time I have not heard anyone saying prayers.

  In the morning we went to school. We practiced calligraphy with paintbrushes on the street. On our brushes there was only water, and when the sun emerged from behind the mountains our characters disappeare
d. Teacher Li said that it was a good thing to paint characters in this way. “Everything vanishes,” he said. “All things go away.” But I drew beautiful characters, and I was angry to see them fade. So one day I secretly dipped my wet paintbrush into coal. When Teacher Li saw my characters on the street long after the sun had dried the rest, he gave me a long lecture. He was angry at my disobedience, but it was worth it!

  On that street over there I met my husband. He was a tracker. He came here from Fuling, upriver. He was the tallest man in the village, and strong like an ox. The muscles of his legs were like iron from climbing the hills and pulling the junks through the rapids. He had a deep groove around his waist from the rope that was fastened around him. I was so afraid for him. Sometimes I would walk to the end of the street and look down and see a line of trackers staggering up the hill above the river, the heavy ship laboring behind. Every day we would hear about a different tracker, or several, who had died. Each day and night I waited for him to come home. When word came to the village, “Two trackers died today,” I would line up with the other young wives to hear the names. But my husband only died last year, after our children and grandchildren moved into the new settlement.

  The old woman talks on and on, and I wonder how disparate are the stories I imagine for her and the stories she really tells. As I listen, the threads of the stories wind around themselves in my head, old stories unraveling as new ones take shape.

  The old woman pauses, as if waiting for me to say something. Then she speaks again, and from the tone of her voice I can tell she is asking a question.

  “Wo bu hui shuo zhongwen,” I say. I don’t speak Chinese.

  For a long moment she is silent. She drains the last tea from her cup, then, with much effort, stands and walks over to me. She puts a hand on my shoulder, then feels my face, my hair. Although her eyes are trained on me, she seems to be gazing through me rather than at me. A look of recognition crosses her face.