• • •
I wake up again, now, a haze of light filling the gauze bandages over my eyes. A white world, inside a fluorescent tube. The airplane window vibrates against my cheek. Sunlight above the clouds, the brightest sunlight, unfiltered, un-ozoned, cell-killing, cell-dividing. It’ll hurt to open them at first, Silpa said, under the bandages, but you shouldn’t hesitate. Move those babies around. You don’t want the eye muscles to atrophy. Anyway, by that time you’ll only be a day or so away from full use.
You there? Martin asks. You there, Kelly?
Curtis, I say, through a dry mouth. It’s Curtis.
Shit. Sorry. Curtis. Now I can stop taking your pulse. I was sure those Vicodins were really something stronger. Never seen anyone sleep so long.
I wasn’t asleep the whole time.
I hear him taking a moment to digest this.
The important thing, he says, is that we’ve got your back. Nothing changes. Payments as normal. Deliveries as normal. Here we are, landing in Shanghai in forty-five minutes. As promised. Passport in hand.
It didn’t sound that way to me.
Forget what you heard. You were addled. I could have been talking Klingon.
Silpa’s dead, I say. Isn’t he? Did I get that much right?
The alert bell pings overhead, and a voice comes over the loudspeaker. Dajia hao, the flight attendant says. She has a chirpy Shandong accent. A warm tear rests on my upper lip. How good it is, I’m thinking, to hear a language I completely understand.
Here. Martin presses a cold glass into my hand. Don’t worry, he says. Ginger ale. I’m not trying to knock you back out.
So I guess your plans are off the table.
For now, he says. For now. The moment has to be right. Think globally, act locally. You have to expand your consciousness. The world is Baltimore, remember? It just doesn’t know it yet. His face slackens; he might be, impossibly, about to cry. I’m always at home, he says. You know why? My money travels with me. There’s nothing more beautiful than stepping up to that ATM for the first time, wherever you are, putting your card in and watching the color of the bills shooting out. It’s like sex. That’s when I think, there’s nothing I can’t do.
Not me, I say. That’s never worked on me.
Tell me about it.
No, I mean, in my universe, Baltimore is a fixed point. It doesn’t expand and contract.
You’ll see how that changes when you come back to visit.
What do you mean, come back? I’ve never been there before.
Heh-heh-heh, he says. Don’t fuck with me. Trying to give yourself retrograde amnesia? It’s not that easy. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Seriously, I say. I’m from Athens, Georgia. Didn’t you know that? Never been to Baltimore in my life. I mean, I passed through on 95 on the way up to Cambridge.
As I say it, I will it into being: an orb, a warm, pulsing thing, orange-yellow, the color of butterscotch candy, rising again out of my very center, up into my throat. My guide-light. It points only in one direction. The future vibrates in me; my legs are shaking. I want to tear off the bandages right now.
Do I feel sadness? I ought to ask myself that, but it seems like an impossible question. Should I grieve for them, for my lost girl, for the woman who could finish my sentences in two languages? And spend my life, waste my life, along with theirs? I’ve become them. I didn’t make the world. Should I give up on it?
My senses have grown sharper, I’m thinking: I can hear a magazine rustling in the seat behind us, keys clicking on a laptop, a can of Diet Coke snapping open. The rustle of life itself. The impatience of it. All these people fidgeting with their phones, drumming their fingers, feeling money trickling away with every waiting second. The towers of Shanghai, towers I won’t even recognize, floating up out of an electric haze. The light thrown off by assets multiplying. Isn’t this the pattern of heaven? I’ve grown old, I’m thinking. Old and slack, in my original habitat, in the cage of one body, hardly even aware that it is a cage. Time to wake up. Time to plant some seed capital. Who cares if it’s with Orchid, or with Hue, or Hue.2, or something I haven’t dreamed up yet? Money, I’m thinking, to paraphrase The Art of War, always finds its place. And when I have enough, whatever enough means, I’ll endow another wing of the Harvard Library. The Wang Center for Translation Studies. Or maybe the Miao Center for Translation Studies. Or, if the time is right, the Thorndike Center. The Wendy and Meimei Thorndike Center.
Because that story, too, will have to be told.
Don’t fuck with me, Martin says. I’m not your goddamned life coach. For the first time I can hear the ticking of fear in his voice. This isn’t about your journey, he says, so let’s get some things on the record. You signed a contract. You have duties to perform. A fiduciary obligation. And don’t think that you can hit the ground and go all renegade on us. We’ll find Julie-nah, and we’ll find you.
Okay, I say, just to keep him calm. You’re right.
We’ll be in touch when it’s all arranged, he says. In the meantime, you have a Bank of China account set up for you. Here’s the card. Here’s the passport. I’ll whisper the PIN in your ear. You ready? He leans over until I can feel the warmth of his lips glowing on my ear. 2526. There’s an easier way to remember it, though.
Because it spells Alan? I say. Who’s Alan? Am I supposed to remember him?
The plane is descending now; I feel it in my knees, my hips, the pull of the atmosphere, the engines measuring out the shock of gravity in little tugs and dips. Martin says nothing. I remember, just now, something he said to me on the flight out of BWI, when we’d just settled into our seats. I love taking off, he said, but I hate to land. Gives me the creeps. Can’t get it over with soon enough. Those flaps, you know, that flip up on the wings? Doesn’t it just seem like a toy, when you look at those things? Like fingernails. All that momentum, and then they flick a switch and squash you like an ant.
You going to be okay getting out of the airport? he asks suddenly. Because I’m not staying overnight. My flight’s in two hours.
Back to Bangkok?
Almaty. Kazakhstan.
What’s in Kazakhstan?
I don’t know. Fur hats? Lamb skewers? Mostly an oil pipeline, that’s what I hear. Oil going to China. No, seriously. Potential clients. And investors. It’s been in the works for months. No point canceling when we could be on the cusp of something new.
The alert bell pings again. We’re on the ground, we’ve taxied, without noticing it, and bumped up against the boarding gate. We stand up together, or rather he lifts me up, by the elbow. Careful, he says, watch your head. Here. He binds my hands around the handle of my laptop bag.
Martin, I say, suddenly overcome. You thought of everything.
Don’t worry about it. What else was I supposed to do? Go on, I’ll be right behind you.
These are my last few minutes, I’m thinking, or, more precisely, the thought wandering through my mind, looking for a feeling to settle on. Goodbye, Kelly. I ought to hug myself. Instead, I reach up and lock him in an awkward, grappling, swaying embrace. And then I turn and find the back of the next seat, pulling myself into the aisle. In front of me, it seems, to the left, at the exit door, is an intense brightness, and there’s a cloud of some floral perfume, as if someone’s dropped a duty-free bag. It doesn’t matter. I hear the babble of voices, dialects, accents, the toddler saying lift me up! lift me up! The wife calling, old man, don’t forget the camera, it’s right by your foot.