And he told her more or less this: that they were in Quig’s place, and had been for as long as he could remember. Sewey was born here, in fact: Loreen was indeed his mother. She had come to give birth to him and was lucky she had because he needed to be cut out of her to be born and Quig was the only person in the Smokes and within a two-day’s drive around who could do it, at least without killing the mother most of the time. Loreen had then stayed on, at first to work off the debt she owed Quig, eventually becoming his main assistant and scheduler. It was the most important job at Quig’s because of the dozens of people who showed up every day with injuries from bad accidents like severe cuts and burns and broken bones, not even mentioning the pains from the C-illnesses that pretty much afflicted every adult. Each arrival was an emergency — it had to be, to burn fuel for the winding trek into these hills — and each arrival knew to bring money or gold or jewelry or else some special offer of barter or services. Loreen’s job was to assign an order to them determined by injury but mostly by what they could offer to move up a few spots or even to the head of the line. Naturally there were constant renegotiations: if someone came and got a place ahead of you, you could offer something more, or else different. It was your decision, and then Loreen’s, and of course, ultimately Quig’s, Sewey tasked as the messenger whenever the batteries for the two-ways went out, conveying word of a young man with two fingers crushed and near amputated offering twenty dollars to cut them off cleanly, or a lady with a festering rash covering half her back who will give him a gold wedding band, or an older man with a terrible pain in his side who will leave his pretty daughter for three days in exchange for surgery, four if the “doctor” could also pull a bad tooth, and every once in a while a younger person might be left there, indefinitely, as payment; it went like this all day and every day, Sewey describing it with a much younger child’s innocent delight, the terribly sick and injured queued up beneath the ferocious sun or pelting rain to have Quig take a look and say if he could fix them. Most times he could, which is why so many people were journeying to the Smokes, word of his skills having spread across the region over the last fifteen or so years after Quig had left the big Charter village down south where he once lived.
Apparently, Quig had not been a physician in his village, but rather a veterinarian with a large, successful practice. With a few partners, he owned an animal hospital and operated a small fleet of house-call vans, the business thriving until that infamous year of the bird and swine flu epidemics that hit in rapid succession and crossed the species barrier to infect and kill dozens of Charters in a village out west. In the ensuing panic across the Charter Association every last home-raised fowl and toy swine was destroyed and soon after all the dogs and even the cats and ornamental birds, with a permanent ban on all nonmarine pets instituted, and soon thereafter even on pet fish, just to be safe. His profession was gone overnight. He and his wife eventually lost their condo to the bank and were living month to month in a trades- and services-people’s dormitory when they were caught in a sting selling animal tranquilizers at a health club. They were arrested, swiftly tried and convicted, their sentence immediate banishment; Quig and his wife had a young daughter and the three of them had to leave behind whatever they couldn’t fit into their car, the very same that Fan rode in the back of that first drenching night. Apparently, his wife and daughter did not last long.
They got dead like right away, Sewey told her now. And adding as if quoting: How it always goes.
Fan asked him what happened, but he shook his head.
Momma won’t say. And she told me to never ask him and to never bring it up. So we shouldn’t.
They were quiet for a minute, Sewey unfurling his yo-yo up and down, getting it to hover, skitter across the floor, snap back.
Momma says we got a good thing here, even if B-Mors or Charters would never believe it. Is that why you came out here? To see if it was as awful as people say?
Fan didn’t answer. While it didn’t matter because the rhetorical was Sewey’s optimal mode, as he got his wind and proceeded to ramble about how sometimes people died before they could be seen by Quig, literally collapsing while waiting, and how if they had come alone it was Sewey’s job to go through their clothes for anything of value before summoning certain of Quig’s men to haul the body away, it strikes us that Fan must have posed his question to herself again. It couldn’t have been just Reg she had gone to search out. She had no real leads as to where he might be, or if he was even alive. So why would any sane person leave our cloister for such uncertainties? He was the impetus, yes, the veritable without which, but not the whole story. One person or thing can never comprise that, no matter how much one is cherished, no matter how much one is loved. A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.
6
So let us keep our attention on the small. which means, for the moment, that we should consider Reg with special focus. To be sure, Reg was unaware of himself as anything but a keeper of Building Six vegetable beds F-8 through F-24, a fourth-generation member of the Xi-Jang household, and the first and only boyfriend of Fan.
Let’s not forget he meant the world to her, and even if that speaks more to the limited extent of her experience than his personal qualities, we ought to remind ourselves of how fetching a young man he was in sum. Very tall, as noted, around 180 centimeters not counting the fluffy pad of his hair, which made him seem at least six or seven centimeters taller. We have, of course, described his amazing skin, its hue and hand. He was by nature filial to his household, bringing home whenever he could hard candies for the younger ones and sticky rice cakes for his elders, and then without exception (after maybe playing with Joseph et al.) taking out Fan on their free-days, most often spending the entire afternoon in the subterranean mall shopping for stickers and costume jewelry and other trinkets and splitting a lychee smoothie and basket of spicy-sweet fried chicken wings with her. He always treated for the movies or games or photo-booth images of themselves that each carried in an old-fashioned hand-sized folding album, one of our favorite shots showing Reg having to tilt far down to sip his straw from their shared drink, Fan craning up for hers, their smooth cheeks drawn in. Both are looking at the camera with a mirthful conspiracy in their eyes that is part of the animated moment but also suggests how wonderfully unadulterated their romance was, as yet free of the grit of life that accumulates, inexorably, no matter what you do to screen it out. Call it first love, puppy love, but in this case Fan and Reg didn’t just rush away on their free-day to the pillowed compartment of a mini-inn like so many of our youth (and not-youth) now do and on the roaring pyre of their lust self-immolate. Fan and Reg were as keen on each other as any, let us say that. The difference lies in their easeful lingering, in their letting the time simply pass, thereby unbinding themselves from the false insistence of the hours. They were not the only couple, of course, to do this, but it was plainly heartening to see good young people, out in public, enjoying in quiet thrall the company of the other while welcoming the rest of us to draw upon their contentment, the gleam of which broadcasts wider than one can ever believe, which warms from within.