Surely there were the discontented among those originals, but which of them could deny the promise of this place? Here was an entire community, ready for revitalization. Yes, the houses were basically shells, but in fact many still had roofs and walls and sturdy stairs; yes, few had any boilers, but the majority had salvageable wiring and plumbing; yes, the floors had to be scraped and sanded and refinished, every cabinet and counter scrubbed and disinfected of the leavings of birds and vermin and insects, and yet what activity offers more immediate, honest gratification than shining up a seemingly ruined surface back to the distinctive grain of its essence?
After you tour the museum with the school groups and senior outings and those foreign visitors who come from time to time to study the society we’ve built, you could only emphatically agree to the leaps we’ve made. From the utter desiccation of the long-abandoned blocks, and the clearing and emptying of the huge city cemetery, to the early structures they were tasked to construct upon that plot, which would house the first truly uncontaminated grow beds that are now a B-Mor trademark, and the parallel complex of fish tanks that were conceived later once the Charter villages officially organized themselves and boosted demand, we have drawn up the map, as it were, by our daily labors, and we etch it still.
We should concede that unlike the experience of most immigrants, there was very little to encounter by way of an indigenous population. There were smatterings of them, to be sure, pockets of residents on the outskirts of what is now the heart of B-Mor, these descendants of nineteenth-century African slaves and twentieth-century laborers from Central America and even bands of twenty-first-century urban-nostalgics, all of whom settled the intimate grid of these blocks and thrived for a time and, for reasons that history can confidently trace and identify but never quite seem to solve, inexorably declined and finally disappeared. Our predecessors had the unique advantage of being husbanded by one of the federated companies, rather than the revolving cast of governmental bodies that overreached in their efforts or were disastrously neglectful, all of them downright clueless. The originals were brought in en masse for a strict purpose but with their work- and family-centric culture intact, such that they would not only endure and eventually profit the seed investors but also prosper in a manner that would be perpetually regenerative.
And while all this is true, and uplifting, and everyone you might greet on a stroll down Longevity Way will automatically trill It is fine or It is right, one has to accept that deformations have appeared on the surface of our serene terra, where even the most positive feelings can begin to pool, and seep down through new fissures, and trickle away.
For it’s like this: soon after Reg disappeared and Fan departed, other people began to disappear, too. Not many, perhaps one or two a month, certainly no more. The difference was that these people were officially dispatched, the notifications, unlike Reg’s, both posted in the grow house and also messaged to all of B-Mor. For example, there will be a general notification that James Beltran Ho, forty-four, has been dispatched, or that Pei-Pei Xu-Tidewater, twenty-nine, has been dispatched, or that an unnamed infant of the Reynolds-Wang clan of Bright Diamond Lane is now dispatched, information that we know not to inquire about further. But their relatives, unlike Reg’s people, didn’t go away. What was unusual, at least at first, was that they simply acted as if their loved one had died, just as if from a disease or unfortunate facility accident or old age, and even held memorial ceremonies in the customary way, inviting us, depending on the age and status of the deceased, to view the bodies, which were, of course, not there, just framed photographs of them. We would don our mourning costumes, wail softly or loudly as appropriate, burn paper offerings, do everything we’re supposed to do; there was no difference in this regard. Everything was conducted as though life and death, as always, were ceaselessly trundling on, nothing to indicate that they had been instructed or directed to act the way they did, nothing to suggest they were forced to accede or comply.
Perhaps it was the same with our originals, though in a different circumstance. They went about their first labors, renovating the row houses in the same way, it turns out, that certain antique American communities used to do, the foreman or forewoman of each block marshaling all its residents to converge on one address and revamp, say, the bathrooms or kitchen, the museum clips just like a science class vid of hundreds of ants tugging a sourball-sized rock. You can picture it now. They’d go from one house to the next, right on down the block, this mobile, instantly adaptive assembly line, each person assigned a function, with the children passing beach pails of dust and rubble in a brigade, the elderly offering sips of cool chrysanthemum tea from canteens, even the unwell propped up in chairs close by or even inside the site, so that they might lend moral support or learn by watching.
Painters to the fore! or Tilers will proceed! the forewoman would brightly holler, and the troop would rush forward. Maybe the feeling in the group was reminiscent of the early days back in Xixu, before the river was blighted, before the hills were gouged away, before the province and country and world all discovered they craved a piece of us, when each soul recognized the face of every other and did not think it a belittling fact.
Yet to go back to that moment would be a sentimental journey. We have grown up now, generations deep, generations strong. And have we not lasted long enough to dare say all the hopes of our forebears have come true?
Have we not done the job of becoming our best selves?
3
The day Fan left was soon after the last big flooding. Naturally, there is a record of her departure but no one paid much mind to it at the time. We have mild floods early each autumn because of the hurricanes that sweep up from the South Atlantic and arrive here as somewhat diminished but still formidable storms, but it was especially bad then, as there were several storms back to back to back, with the rainwater having eventually nowhere to go. We remember it well because a number of B-Mors perished during the third and final storm, including a popular twelve-year-old boy named Joseph, who died while trying to save his brother’s friend from drowning. It was a tragic occurrence that shook everyone in B-Mor, and perhaps, it turns out, Fan most of all.
For it had hardly been more than a week since Reg disappeared, and poor Joseph had been his friend. They weren’t “best friends” but lived on the same block, and Reg had known Joseph from the time the boy was an infant and they still regularly spent time together. Of course, Reg was nineteen and the substantial difference in their ages would have normally precluded any such terming, at least by the older one, but Reg was young at heart, as they say, and not in the least self-conscious about hanging out and playing with whoever happened to be out on the street. On their free-days Fan might scooter over there to pick up Reg but then happily sit and watch for a while as he kicked the soccer ball around with Joseph and his gang, Reg the only non-peer. He was much taller and more maturely built than all of them but they had the advantage of nimbleness and speed (Reg, as has been noted, not being the most agile of fellows), for every shot Reg blocked by simply craning out his pontoonlike foot, Joseph and the others scooted a pass between his legs or deftly maneuvered the ball around his too-upright frame, Fan unable to suppress her giggles whenever Reg stumbled and nearly lost his balance, his lankiness unsuited to quick pivots and reversals.
Naturally there were moments Reg would steam with frustration, as anyone swatting at gnats would, especially if one of the boys got past him with the same old feint or won the ball from him too easily. But there was never any taunting or lingering funny feeling, and when he said he had to go, the boys would plead for him to stay through one more goal and turn with him to Fan and await her signal, sending up a stout cheer when she said Sure, which she always did. When they were finally done, they’d each leap up and double high-five Reg’s hands raised high, and in the sharpness of the smacks Fan could hear how pumped they were, how literally uplifted, how much bigger and brighter they must have felt themselves to be by virtue of his wholly generous being.