Air

by Geoff Ryman

  Well, Mae, apart from anything else, you have to make money. All your life you have done that by staying ahead of the village. You better get to that TV and find out what everyone has been watching on it.

  With no more precise thought than that, she stood up and walked out into the courtyard.

  And in the courtyard, Mr. Ken was staggering with a wheelbarrow of mucked straw.

  Oh, wonderful.

  “Good morning, Mr. Ken-sir!” Mae called brightly, for the village to hear. She walked more quickly to escape. To her horror, Mr. Ken lowered the barrow and began to walk towards her with an expression of perplexed sincerity, even solemnity. At least this time he was fully dressed.

  Mae started to walk more quickly. She wanted to avoid any chat in public places such as her house. He began to smile slightly. He walked faster.

  He stood in the gateway, of all the silly places! There was still a hint of a smile in the creases of his mature face, but he said the most direct thing: “Do you regret last night?”

  “No,” she said, before realizing that she had spoken. She wanted to escape.

  “Do you want to go on?”

  Mae felt something akin to panic; she wanted him to stand out of the gate, to keep his voice down. He looked like both her husband and her son at once.

  “Yes,” she said, quickly.

  So, this was love. Ken Kuei stood before her and she could scarcely bear to look at him. She felt old and misshapen in comparison. He was her boy, her baby, she saw in him the beauty and sadness of passing generations. It was as though Mr. Ken were a corridor into which she could shout and hear echoes resonate like sad voices. Into a lost past, into lost chances.

  No wonder she had never had love. Mae knew now that she had avoided it. Love hurt. She had known inside that love would make her guts twist, her eyes weep. She wanted to be with Ken Kuei; it hurt that she found no light and easy words with him, it hurt that their situation was dreadful, that they would have to slip and slide, hide, do it in corners like something dirty. It hurt worse than childbirth, worse than anything.

  Mr. Ken said, “I will see you when I can.” His jaw worked with something unsaid. “I do not want to cause you trouble.”

  Mae cupped her forehead between her hands. Oh, that is nice. Trouble, what trouble could there be, fucking another man than your husband? All disaster loomed there.

  “I am a widower, there will be no blame on me,” he said, looking at the ground.

  “We have been talking long enough, and too solemnly,” she murmured, and mimed the pleased and neighborly smile that kept distance.

  Mae raised her voice for the sake of the walls. “It is so sad about your wife, I still feel for you,” she said. “If there is anything you need, please ask my husband.”

  Mr. Ken was still smiling. “There’s no one to hear you.”

  She felt silly, frightened, but she couldn’t help it. She remembered the listening lights of the night before.

  “It will be no trouble. Just talk to Joe.” She felt like weeping in panic.

  “When. How?” he demanded.

  “I will leave my house tonight,” she whispered. “We can go out into the fields, into the reeds. Three A.M.?”

  That firm, old light was in his eyes again. He kept shifting in her vision between man and boy. Now he seemed older. He nodded once: Good.

  “This will end well,” he promised her.

  She shook her head with misgiving, and left him.

  And so she was reduced to being a young girl, addled by love instead of money. Love catches up with you if you ignore it, she thought. She wanted to be with him, now. She wanted to suckle on his nipples as though they were breasts. All these things shocked her, overturned her. She was upended like a boat.

  “I am bereft,” Mae said. She said it to Old Mrs. Tung.

  She answered. When I was in trouble, I started a school.

  Mae walked on, towards the television set.

  AND THERE WERE THE MEN OF THE VILLAGE, AT THIS HOUR OF THE MORNING, WATCHING KUNG FU.

  There was Joe.

  “I knew!” she exclaimed. “I knew I would find you here! Shiftless, feckless man!”

  Joe shifted his feet staring at them, wincing with hangover and embarrassment.

  “You comic character,” she told him, more in frustration, sadness, and affection than anything else. Young Mr. Doh, Old Mr. Doh, Mr. Ali—they all chuckled, too.

  “Your wife is well again, I see, Joe,” said Young Mr. Doh.

  “A good hand with knives I hear, too,” said Old Mr. Doh. And they all laughed. Which meant that yes, they all knew she had chased Mr. Haseem out of her house, Did Joe? He kept grinning, looking baffled.

  Mae needed the men to be away. She needed the television. “What are we to do with you small boys?” Mae said, shaking her head. “Ah? You have families, you have fields, you have duties, what are you doing here?”

  “Watching the movie?” shrugged Joe. More laughter.

  “Joe, you dolt,” she said, simply, quickly. That made the men laugh again.

  “Wifely humors,” Young Mr. Doh said. It was a way of saying a woman was right. He leaned forward and pushed some buttons. “Okay, I’ve saved the movie. What time?”

  The men frowned and wobbled their heads. They murmured times, but Old Mr. Doh was something of a leader. “Eight o clock,” he said.

  With a flourish, his son moved the hands of the clock to eight.

  Mae felt a stab of something icy in her chest. They can do that? Go back to a movie? The movie folded up like a picture and was dropped into a pink piggy bank. Mae thought, Mr. Doh knows how to do that? And I don’t? The men stood up with a murmuring and an exchange of cigarettes. They nodded goodbye to Mae.

  She was left standing alone in the courtyard.

  The screen showed nothing but a door.

  Mae sat in front of the screen. She touched the door. It creaked, it opened.

  There were pictures with words underneath. Mae couldn’t read. On the screen was a picture of an hourglass with running sand, like her life draining away, and there were rows of pictures: books and magnifying glasses and things that had no meaning for Mae at all. Mae saw a drawing of a newsreader. News would be good. She touched the newsreader and up came a screen of words.

  Too many words, too complicated. It assumed so much, this machine—that you understood what the signs meant, that you could read, that you could guess what lay behind each door or each word. Her heart was sinking.

  Then she saw a picture of an ear.

  “Touch the ear,” said a woman’s voice: Kwan, behind her

  Kwan was wearing a folded headdress, the peasant dress of her ethnic minority. She had never done that before. She stood over Mae.

  “Go on,” she said.

  Mae did.

  The TV replied, “You have chosen the talking option.” Mae felt both relief and shame. Kwan knew the fashion expert found it difficult to read.

  “It is good you are learning,” said Kwan, suddenly relaxing. “It is good you are not afraid of it.”

  Afraid? Well, yes, this was new stuff.

  The TV kept talking. “The list of available topics is very long. It is probably easier if you tell me what you want to know.” It was as if the television were inhabited by a ghost. Like Old Mrs. Tung.

  “Fashion,” said Mae.

  And for some reason, as if on impulse or from affection, Kwan had taken hold of the muscles between Mae’s neck and shoulder and given them a squeeze.

  “So you are going to fight,” said Kwan.

  Mae paused. “You know,” she sighed.

  “In this village? There is nothing to do but talk.”

  Mae was ashamed, fearful, and angry. “There is everything to do!”

  Mae amazed herself again with the passion, almost the frenzy, that welled up inside her. “The village is like a goose without a head when the legs keep twitching. The whole world has died, and we have a year to learn how to live all over again!”


  She spun around to look at Kwan. Kwan was blinking in surprise.

  The television said in a honeyed voice, “You have a choice of looking at the Paris spring collections, the Beijing Festival of Culture, or the Vogue channel.”

  “I do not need to be beholden to that dog of a man now! I need to be doing this!”

  “Pause,” Kwan said once, to the machine. It whirred in place. “Mae, we could loan you the money to pay him back. What is the interest?”

  “Joe was so drunk, he did not even ask!” Mae swayed under the weight of it all.

  “We would not charge interest,” murmured Kwan.

  Mae felt many things, all at once—gratitude, relief, and wariness. She feared that they would end up replacing one loan with another. You and Wing make yourselves rich the same way Haseem does, she thought, only, you are more polite. Though she loved Kwan, Mae did not entirely trust her.

  “We would stand in an echoing corridor of loans,” Mae said quietly.

  “That is true,” said Kwan, calmly. “But the offer will stay open, if you need it.”

  “Thank you, Wing’s-wife, ma’am.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Kwan, for Mae had addressed her as an employer.

  Mae sighed. “Until we have money, I am everyone’s servant,” she said. “The offer is kind and will be remembered. Paris,” she told the television. “Show me Paris.”

  “I will leave you to it, then,” said Kwan. She turned and walked away.

  She has changed, too, thought Mae. We will all change.

  So Mae looked at the ghosts of Paris, and they were no help. These were clothes that no human being could wear, let alone farming women in the Happy Province. The television talked and talked. It explained why it was such a revolution that long flaps of cloth hung uselessly down to the knees from the shoulders, or that someone called Giannini had gone for splashes of color.

  Mae already knew. It is just a special way of talking. It sounds grand, but it offers nothing to actually do.

  What … she asked herself, What actually am I trying to do?

  I am trying to find something that will make me money. I think if I spend more time at this machine, then I can stay ahead of my clients, find something to sell them. But they are ahead of me.

  Paris fashion kept parading, as if to say, look, peasant, look what you cannot afford to even look at. Look at what your world could never have in it. Learn the lesson of your poverty and your distance and your unimportance.

  She looked around. Two little village girls stood in Kwan’s courtyard, twisting in place with coy naughtiness.

  “Who told you you could come to Mrs. Wing’s house? Go on, go away.”

  “We want to watch the television,” one of them said—determined to stay, hopeful of being allowed to.

  “You should be in school,” Mae said.

  They said nothing, but their eyes and smiles grew brighter. A little boy ran up to them and stopped, dead, to see an adult by the television. The girls burst into fits of naughty giggles.

  Then An, Kai-hui’s daughter, sauntered in. Her eyes widened, she bowed briefly towards Mae. “Children,” said An, newly graduated. “You should be in school.”

  More giggles.

  Mae reached up, to find some way to turn it off, to hoard the fashion information. How had Young Mr. Doh done it? Mae touched something and another screenful of words appeared. “Main menu,” said the screen. Were they in a restaurant?

  An said, “No, no, don’t change it for my sake.” Then she used a new word. “Undo,” she said, and they went back to the fashion show.

  The sun kept rising, the courtyard kept filling. An’s friend Ling-so walked in as well. Ling-so said that she had preferred the Singapore fashion show last week. But then she said, “Eastern couture suits our tastes better.”

  Mae felt like she had swallowed an ice cube whole. While she had been ill and wasting time, all the village had been watching television. Mae felt a kind of hungry panic. She had fallen so far behind!

  In desperation she turned around. “What do the children want?” she asked.

  She knew the answer: kung fu. She knew also that the children would run forward and push the button for themselves.

  The children sat openmouthed as the kung fu hero met a man whom they all knew was a dragon in disguise. The secret dragon breathed out fire. For some reason he could fly, with a sound like a sliding whistle. Even An and Ling appeared to be content. This confirmed Mae’s suspicion that people would watch anything so long as it was on TV.

  Mae didn’t watch. She sat thinking over and over, What do I do? What can I do?

  At high noon, Mr. Shen arrived from the school.

  He was shaking with rage. “All of you, back into class. All of you, what are you doing, when you should be at your lessons!” He cuffed the boys about the head. They ran off giggling.

  Mr. Shen glared at Mae. “You have let this sickness take you over!”

  Mae was shocked to have Teacher Shen, of all people, be angry with her.

  “I was trying to use it for information…” she began. Her voice sounded weak, even to her.

  “Oh, yes, it looks like it! Hong Kong indulgence. This whole country is sinking into it.” He spun on his heel and marched to the television set. He pulled out its plug. In a fury, he pulled at the plug until, by adrenaline strength, he succeeded in hauling the wires free from their screws.

  “There,” he said, shaking the naked wires at Mae. Then he walked away, taking the plug with him. He stopped at the foot of the stone staircase leading up to the Wing house.

  “Mrs. Wing-ma’am!” Shen shouted. “I have taken the liberty of turning off your machine. Perhaps I can advise you to keep it inside your house and away from my students.”

  The children were gone, still giggling, like laughing leaves blown in the wind. Shen marched off, through the dust, without a further word to Mae. She looked up and saw Kwan already descending the stairs to the courtyard. She had a screwdriver and a replacement plug.

  The village was a boat that had come free from its anchor. Mae shook her head.

  An was elegantly scornful. “He’s scared because he is Teacher and he knows nothing about all this.”

  “Tuh. My parents pretend nothing has happened,” said Ling-so, even more beautifully turning away. Her lipstick was perfect.

  Kwan knelt beside the TV, quietly replacing the plug.

  “Why don’t you take it inside?” Mae asked.

  “Because we want the village to have it,” said Kwan, still kneeling.

  “At least now we can look at fashion in peace,” said An.

  On came Paris again. Kwan walked back up the stairs to her laundry or her sweeping. The Paris show ended, and the two girls changed to the Vogue Channel. More ghosts, in silver fabric, and Mae found that she had nothing to say that was any different from what the two girls said. Finally, when a shadow had crept across the wall and touched the screen, it was like a sorrowful spell. Quietly she bid the girls farewell. Young, poised, beautiful. They could read. They had no dinners to cook. This new world was theirs.

  WHEN MAE GOT HOME, JOE WAS WAITING WITH MR. HASEEM.

  Joe did not look like a dolt now. He looked very upright and angry. “You will apologize to Mr. Haseem,” he demanded.

  Mr. Haseem’s face seemed to be made of old porridge—heavy, dour, unmoving—and he looked without blinking at Mae. She looked back. She calculated quickly, knowing what had happened. Someone had told Joe about the attack, and honest Joe, moral Joe, was appalled. He had no understanding that sometimes morality was not enough. There was one quick way out.

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Haseem,” Mae said coolly. “I have not been myself lately.”

  Joe nodded once, abruptly. Quite right and proper, the nod said. “To chase a guest with knives from our house!” Joe murmured.

  You have to cling to something, if all the world is changing. Joe clung to rules. He was stiff, formal, but dignified. Mae’s heart
wanted to break for him; he just did not understand.

  “Mr. Haseem-sir,” said Joe, “please accept an invitation to dinner.”

  Haseem was as slow as a frog on a lily pad, with its sticky tongue curled up, waiting to lunge. “I am afraid, Mr. Chung-sir, that my wife would not consent. She is too upset by the events of last night.”

  “Oh!” said Joe, in shock. He turned and glared at his wife.

  “Things were said to her that cannot be easily forgiven.” Mr. Haseem pressed his advantage. “I accept the apology for your good sake, Mr. Chung. I have to say that nothing in your wife’s manner makes me think her apology is genuine.”

  He was trying to enlist Joe, force more out of her. No, thought Mae. You will not humiliate me further. Mae said, “It was genuine enough, Mr. Haseem-sir, when I got down to you on my knees and begged you to take back the money. If you are so insulted, perhaps you will withdraw your generous loan.”

  She held out the money again.

  Sunni’s-man leapt to his feet. “Really, this is too much. You let your wife drive you, Joe. She has no place in interfering with our business! You and I are friends, but I want no dealings with her.”

  That’s because, thought Mae, I am a match for you.

  “Any further business will be conducted in my house. She is not welcome there.” Mr. Haseem stalked out.

  Joe blinked at her in fury, speechless. He was not used to scenes of any sort, least of all in his own kitchen.

  Mae felt detached. It was strange, the mix of feelings. She thought of Joe in a kindly, distanced way. It was part of the beauty of their way of life that he should be so small, so constrained, and so insistent on good behavior. That way of life was dead.

  “What is the interest rate?” Mae asked Joe, in a small, clear voice.

  “What?” He clamped a hand on his forehead. His head shook in disbelief. “Do you care only for money?”

  She stayed in the same mode, still and cool. “Is anything in writing?”