Memory Wall: Stories (15 page)

They have IVs in my arms. The diarrhea is awful; I can feel everything flowing out. Giardia lamblia, Doc tells me. When it gets very bad it’s a feeling like watching those poplars of Grandpop’s rush past, and that light at the end repeating like that.

There won’t be a court martial, anything like that. Word is they’ll send me home. Ahn will be okay, too—his sergeant likes birds.

It is a day before the solstice, and just after dark, when the phone rings and my son is on the other end. Already I can feel the tears starting, somewhere in the backs of my eyes. “Day after tomorrow,” he says, and all I can think of is Christmas morning, and his mother, how she used to sit on the stairs, looking down at the tree, waiting for us to wake up so we could start in on the gifts.

“About Mom,” I say, but he has already hung up. Upstairs I get the shoebox of letters and tie it shut with ribbon. I put Pop in his coat and gloves, and together we leave the house and climb toward the saddle.

The snow falls softly, just enough to carry a little light in it. Pop climbs steadily, stepping in my footprints.

At the Big Wood Condos we walk to the end of the first floor. I listen a moment—it is quiet—and leave the shoebox at the door.

Then we turn, climb back to the saddle, and make the top of the hill, our breath standing out in front of us. From there we can see the lights of Ketchum below: the dark spread of the golf course, the Christmas lights along the fence into town, the
headlights of snowcats roving the flanks of the ski mountain, packing the snow in—and the town itself, twinkling in the valley, the little roof of our house small among the snowy rooftops, and all the mountains of Idaho beyond it. Somewhere, above it all, our boy is crossing over the ocean, coming home.

T
HE
D
AM

The Village Director stands under an umbrella with the façade of the Government House dripping behind him. The sky is a threadbare curtain of silver. “It’s true,” he says. “We’ve been slated for submergence. Property will be compensated. Moving expenses will be provided. We have eleven months.” Below him, on the bottom stair, his daughters hug their knees. Men shuffle in their slickers and murmur. A dozen gulls float past, calling to one another.

On project maps, amidst tangles of contour lines, the village is circled with a red submergence halo scarcely bigger than a speck of dust. Its only label is a number.

One-one-three, one-thirteen, one plus one plus three is five. The fortune-teller crouches in her stall and shakes pollen across a field of numbers. “I see selfishness,” she says. “I see recompense. The chalice of ecstasy. The end of the world.”

Far-off cousins from other river towns, already relocated, send letters testifying to the good life. Real schools, worthwhile
clinics, furnaces, refrigerators, karaoke machines. Resettlement districts have everything the villages do not. Electricity is available twenty-four hours a day. Red meat is everywhere. You will leapfrog half a century, they write.

The Village Director donates kegs; there’s a festival. Generators rumble on the wharf and lights burn in the trees and occasionally a bulb bursts and villagers cheer as smoke ascends from the branches.

The dam commission tacks photos of resettlement districts to the walls of the Government House—two girls ride swings, pigtails flying; models in khaki lean on leather furniture and laugh.
The river bottled,
a caption says,
the nation fed. Why wait?
Farmers on their way back from market pause, rest their empty baskets across their shoulders, and stare.

Q
UESTIONS

Teacher Ke shakes his cane at passersby; his coat is a rag, his house a shed. He has lived through two wars and a cultural purge and the Winter of Eating Weeds. Even to the oldest villagers Teacher Ke is old: no family, no teeth. He reads three languages; he has been in the gorges, they say, longer than the rocks.

“They spread a truckload of soil in the desert and call it farmland? They take our river and give us bus tickets?”

The seed keeper keeps her head down. She thinks of her garden, the broad heads of cabbages, the spreading squash. She thinks of the seeds in her shop: pepper seeds, cream and white; kurrat seeds, black as obsidian. Seeds in jars, seeds in funnels, seeds smaller than snowflakes.

“Aren’t you betrayed?” the schoolteacher calls after her. “Aren’t you angry?”

O
CTOBER

Blades of light slip between clouds; the air smells of flying leaves, rain, and gravel. Farmers drag out their wagons for harvest. Orchardists stare gray-eyed down their rows of trees.

The dam has been whispered about for years: an end to flooding in the lower reaches, clean power for the city. Broken lines, solid lines, a spring at the center of every village—wasn’t all this foretold in the oldest stories? The rivers will rise to cover the earth, the seas will bloom, mountains become islands; the word is the water and the earth is the well. Everything rotates back to itself. In the temple such phrases are carved above the windows.

The seed keeper ascends the staircases, past women yoked with firewood, past the porters in their newspaper hats, past the benches and ginkgo trees in the Park of Heroes, onto the trails above the village. Soon forest closes around her: the smell of pine needles, the roar of air. Above are cliffs, tombs, caves walled in with mud.

Here, a thousand years ago, monks lashed themselves to boulders. Here a hunter stood motionless sixteen winters until his toes became roots and his fingers twigs.

Her legs are heavy with blood. Below, through branches, she can see a hundred huddled rooftops. Beyond them is the river: its big, sleek bend, its green and restless face.

L
I
Q
ING

After midnight the seed keeper’s only son appears in her doorway. He wears huge eyeglasses; a gold-papered cigarette is pinched between his lips.

He lives two hundred miles downriver in the city and she has not seen him in four years. His forehead is shinier than she remembers and his eyes are damp and rimmed with pink. In one hand he extends a single white peony.

“Li Qing.”

“Mother.”

He’s forty-four. Stray hairs float behind his ears. Above his collar his throat looks as if it is made of soft, pale dough.

She puts the peony in a jar and serves him noodles with ginger and leeks. He eats carefully and delicately. When he finishes he sips tea with his back completely straight.

“First-rate,” he says.

Outside a dog barks and falls quiet and the air in the room is warm and still. The bottles and sachets and packets of seeds are crowded around the table and their odor—a smell like oiled wood—is suddenly very strong.

“You’ve come back,” she says.

“For a week.”

A pyramid of sugar cubes rises slowly in front of him. The lines in his forehead, the sheen on his ears—in his nervous, pale fingers she sees his boyhood fingers; where his big, round chin tucks in against his throat, she sees his chin as a newborn—blood whispering down through the years.

She says, “Those are new glasses.”

He nods and pushes them higher on his nose. “Some of the other guards, they make fun. They say: ‘Don’t make spectacles of yourself, Li Qing,’ and laugh and laugh.”

She smiles. Out on the river a barge sounds its horn. “You can sleep here,” she says, but her son is already shaking his head.

S
URVEY

All the next day Li Qing walks the staircases talking to villagers and writing numbers in a pad. Surveying, he says. Assessing. Children trail him and collect the butts of his cigarettes and examine the gold paper.

Again he does not appear in her doorway until close to midnight; again he eats like an aging prince. She finds imperfections she didn’t notice the day before: a fraying button thread, a missed patch of whiskers. His glasses are cloudy with smudges. A grain of rice clings to his lower lip and she has to restrain herself from brushing it free.

“I’m walking around,” he says, “and I’m wondering: How many plants—how much of the structure of this village—came from your seeds? The rice stubble, the fields of potatoes. The beans and lettuce the farmers bring to market, their very muscles. All from your seeds.”

“Some people still keep their own seeds. In the old days there was not even a need for a seed keeper. Every family stored and traded their own.”

“I mean it as a compliment.”

“Okay,” she says.

He jogs a pencil up and down in his shirt pocket. The lantern is twinned in his glasses. When he was a boy he would fall asleep with a math book beneath his cheek. Even then his hair was the color of shadows and his pencils were cratered with teethmarks. She marvels at how having her son at her table can be a deep pleasure and at the same time a thorn in her heart.

The lantern sputters. He lights a cigarette.

“You are here to see how we feel about the dam,” she says. “No one cares. They only want to know who will get the biggest resettlement check.”

His index finger makes small circles on the table. “And you? Do you care?”

Out the window a rectangle of paper, a letter, or a page of a book, spins past, blowing up the street and hurtling out over the roof toward the river. She thinks of her mother, cleaving melons with her knife—the wet, shining rind, the sound of yielding as the hemispheres came apart. She thinks of water closing over the backs of the two stone lions in the Park of Heroes. She does not answer.

A
LL
T
HAT
W
EEK

Dam commission engineers pile ropes and tripods and blueprint tubes onto the docks. At night they throw noisy, well-lit banquets; during the day they spray-paint red characters—water level markers—on houses.

The seed keeper disembowels pumpkins and spreads the pulp across ragged sheets of plastic. The seeds are shining and white. The insides of the pumpkins smell like the river.

When she looks up Teacher Ke is standing in front of her, thin, impossibly old. “Your son,” he says. “He is one of them.”

It is drizzling and the garden is damp and quiet. “He’s a grown man. He makes his own decisions.”

“We’re numbers to him. We’re less than that.”

“It’s okay, Teacher,” she says. “Here.” She drags a wet hand across her forehead. “I’m almost done. You must be cold. I’ll make some tea.”

The schoolteacher backs away, palms up. The wind moves in his coat and she has the sudden impression his whole body is made of cloth and could blow away at any moment.

“He’s here to arrest me,” he hisses. “He’s here to kill me.”

N
UMBERS

Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated. The seed keeper sees six-year-old Li Qing wading in mud at the edges of the docks. She sees him peering past the temple eaves at stars.

He was born with hair so thick and black it seemed to swallow light. His father drowned three months later and she brought up the boy alone. Math was the only schoolwork he cared for: algebra, geometry, graphs, and diagrams; incorruptible rules and explicit conclusions. A world not of mud, trees, and barges, but of volumes, circumferences, and surface areas.

“Equations are complete,” he told her once. “If they have a solution, the solution is the same for everybody. Not like”—he gestured at her seedlings, the house, the gorge beyond—“
this
place.” At fourteen he started school in the city. By seventeen he had enrolled in civil engineering school and had no time for anything else.
I am so busy,
he would write.
The environment here is very competitive.

He joined Public Security; he patrolled the aisles of train cars wearing a handgun, a short-brimmed cap, and trousers with stripes down the legs. Each time he returned, he looked slightly different, not merely older, but changed: a new accent, the cigarettes, three sharp knocks on the door. It was as if the city was entering his body and remaking it; he’d look at the low dark houses and wandering hens and farmers with their rope belts as if at film from another century.

There was no dramatic falling-out, no climactic fight. He’d send teapots for her birthdays. On New Year’s he’d send a little glass dolphin, or an electric toothbrush, or seven clouds made from sequins. Whatever space existed between them
somehow extended itself, growing invisibly, the aerial roots of ivy burrowing into mortar. A year would revolve. Then another.

Now it is dusk again and Li Qing sits at her table in his jacket and tie and recites numbers. The dam will be made from eleven million tons of concrete: Its parapet will be a mile long; its impoundment will swallow a dozen cities, a hundred towns, a thousand villages. The river will become a lake and the lake will be visible from the moon.

“The size of the thing,” he says, and smoke rises past his glasses.

T
HE
L
EAVING

Heads of families are summoned to the Government House in groups of six. The choice is a government job or a year’s wages in cash. Apartments in resettlement towns will be discounted. Everyone takes the money.

The ore factory closes. The owner of the noodle restaurant leaves. The barber leaves. Every day wedding armoires and baskets of cloth and boxes and crates trundle past the seed keeper’s window on the backs of porters.

Hardly anyone buys seeds for winter wheat. The seed keeper stares at her containers and thinks: It would be easier if I had traveled. I could have gone to see Li Qing in the city. I could have climbed onto a ferry and seen something of the world.

By the end of the week the engineers are gone. The uppermost row of red markers bisects the rock face above town. The river will rise sixty-four meters. The tops of the oldest trees won’t reach the surface; the gable of the Government House’s
roof won’t come close. She tries to imagine what her garden will look like through all that water—China pear and persimmon, the muddy elbows of pumpkin vines, the underside of a barge passing fifty feet above her roof.