She’s Fan! Josey cried, unlatching herself from Oliver and taking Fan’s hand. And it’s not her fault!
It’s not anyone’s fault, honey, Oliver said to her, though the flash of his icy regard for the nanny seemed to wither the woman instantly. He told her that she could go home for the day. Dr. Oliver, please, I will stay, the helper meekly said, patting Josey on the back, but before anyone could say another word, the grandparents had already summoned a brace of other helpers to lead the helper away, all of them whoop-cooing the shunned one like she was a strange, just-alighted bird.
I’m going to play with Fan! announced Josey. Oliver, craning about the crowded party and the various guests signaling him with their wineglasses, asked Fan if she would stay with her for a while. Josey immediately led her upstairs to her bedroom, a pink-and-white paradise of frilly-gowned dolls and sleepy polar bears and herds of unicorns, her canopied and skirted bed made to look like an icing-dotted pink princess cake, wall-to-wall fluffy sheepskins carpeting the floor. They played some vid games and next with the dolls and animals and then a pretend, with Josey as the nanny and Fan as Josey, in which nothing unusual happened, just Josey combing Fan’s hair and rattling away idly in remarkable detail about the troubles of her adult son, Raymundo, who evidently drank and gambled away most of his meager counties earnings, as did all of his friends. No worlds made for us, little girl. At one point Josey stopped brushing and tapped Fan on the shoulder and whispered: I have to do a stinky. Fan took this to mean what it did, Josey leading her through a short hallway of closets to the connected bathroom and having her stand sentinel while she sat on the toilet. This always takes forever, Josey said theatrically, rolling her eyes, and then picked up one of the handscreens from a bin of toys beside her to start a game.
Fan heard some muted voices — the bathroom was Jack-n-Jill, shared on the other side by an as yet unoccupied child’s bedroom — and as Josey became engrossed in her game, Fan drifted toward the sounds, realizing she was hearing Betty and Vik. They were trying to keep their voices down but they were arguing. They were arguing about messages, and no longer sending messages, about the sweet gone past and the harsh press of the present, about the time being wrong and then never wrong, which even Vik, clearly the more wounded and angry party, didn’t sound convinced of. But he kept on beseeching Betty. She was now rich beyond imagining, yes, he could never offer her such heights, but at least they weren’t bloodless and joyless together, and cast to conduct their lives ever the same, merely with nicer things, the same-same-same. You’ll take a global every month but you’ll never go for pie! He was not sounding very rational now. Then it was silent for a moment, like they were embracing, even kissing, and then all there was to be heard was some shuffling of feet and Vik’s groan of Oh, come on, before the sounds of a door slowly opening, and closing.
When she and Josey finally returned downstairs, the determined girl at last successful in her business, people were gathered in the main hall around the collection of gifts they’d brought and deposited there, Betty and her helpers presiding.
There you are, sweetie! We’re going to open the house presents now. Didn’t you want to help?
Josey squealed and threw herself into the pile. She shred away the wrapping papers like a ravenous big cat, precariously showcasing each gift over her head — a custom-forged chef’s knife, a crystal wine decanter — and then handing it to a helper, who would put it away safely and catalogue it for Betty. There were thirty or forty presents, all so luxuriously wrapped and fancifully ribboned, the strappings slowing Josey down enough that another helper was tasked to snip them unobtrusively so when she touched them, they fell away like loose straw. Still it was going to be a lengthy process, everyone fully indulging the giving and the delight of the child.
Fan looked for Vik but he wasn’t there. Was he still up in the bedroom, slumped in a chair, disabled by heartbreak? Or was he alone in the conservatory, trying to stunt his grief with drink? Suddenly she felt herself lost. After Betty left him, Fan had tried to listen for his movements, she had nearly gone into the other room to console him. But like too many of us would, she determined he was better left undisturbed than be forced to commune with her. No matter, solace; the problem of sympathy is that it requires two. Despite having followed her many travails, whenever we put ourselves in Fan’s place, we can’t help but feel unsettled. It’s not because of the many palpable dangers, or the strings of awful suffering she had to witness, the homeliest aspects of our citizenry. Instead the feeling can come from something as unpitched as this: standing among a roomful of strangers in a house far away.
After a few more unwrappings, Josey discovered there was a very big present that had been hidden by the stacks of others, covered in sparkly white paper with a huge sky-blue bow. It was nearly the size of an outdoor AC unit. Though it wasn’t labeled, Fan knew it was Vik’s gift. Josey brazenly shoved a few smaller presents aside and paused a moment before it, as if taking its measure. The helper unclipped the bow and then Josey clawed a corner and ripped at the paper, dragging it across the front. There was a cardboard hood over it and together Betty and the helper lifted it up and off.
It was an aquarium. Someone said plug it in, and someone did. Its lights flicked on and everyone clapped. It was a popular new kind, called the Full Sea, one that was already filled with water and completely sealed. There was a gravelly seafloor and a mass of gnarly coral and sea plants that looked like threaded sugar and ribbons of dark green silk, which swayed with an invisible, gentle current. There was a remote that came with it, and someone pressed it and out of the gaps in the coral came tropical fish. They looked so alive and real someone gasped — all household creatures having been banned — but these were artificial, if perfect, spotted catfish and striped angelfish and red discus fish and iridescent barbs, their fins fluttering, their mouths working, their bodies flashing away whenever someone tapped at the glass.
It was then Fan strode quickly from the main hall to the front door, coming out on the landing. When she got there, she saw Vik’s coupe, already backed out and just now spinning away. She waved for him to stop. She didn’t want to be left. She shouted, running down the steps and across the front grass. But he was gone.
And it was now that she saw Oliver had watched him drive away, too. He had been standing in the driveway on the other side of the catering vans. He approached her slowly, his face somehow somber and sated all at once.
And in a voice that shook her, he said, I know who you are, Fan.
She didn’t answer, or couldn’t, sure that she’d now come to the end of a line.
You’re my sister.
23
Our sister Fan.
Brother Reg.
Sisters Claire and Ji, brothers Darren, Sho, Tien; we will say it like that now, wherever we are, to those beyond our households, beyond our clans, unafraid of what might happen if the bosom address is spurned. Flag us if you must. What can they do? Detain us all? Have most of B-Mor disappear? It’s a matter of numbers, yes, but there is an altered thrum in the air. Too many of us are together now. When we’re at the theater, even for a wildly popular film, not a single seat free, the murmur before the lights dim is often word of the latest gatherings around the settlement, demonstrations that are no longer just spontaneous (like the littering of ponds), or stray (tags on walls), these keen if mostly isolated bursts of feeling. Talk has it there was a meeting at the big children’s park in West B-Mor, openly planned and announced, and at the appointed hour, instead of the wary, measured trickle that might have come before, a few elders sent out with toddlers in tow to test the directorate’s response; they say the grounds were filled nearly all at once, adults with infants strapped to their chests sitting on the swings, the abler-bodied climbing into the rope structure of the forts, the organizers standing on facilities palettes stacked three high so that everyone could see them, passing the bullhorn to one another to speak about the recent raising of the qualifying score of B-Mor children for promotion to a Charter, ours now having to test in their top 1.25 percent instead of the 2 percent before, which seemed already unfair. This is not about the price of fish anymore. Regular people, including people who were even childless, asked to be helped up onto the palettes, to speak of our most talented children and our bittersweet willingness to part with them, and did so without attempting to mask their faces. In fact, someone with high access leaked a security vid of the rally, the face ID predictably focusing on the organizers first and their deputies next and then systematically sectioning the crowd, but the drone’s zoom-and-pan kept moving too slowly and then too fast, perhaps not programmed for such large and dense and shifting numbers, and in the end the vid was rendered unviewable, jittery and useless, until it zoomed out to capture the entire massing. It turns out we are one, if not ever how we expected.