The way they would do this, Oliver explained, was not simply by “wanting to” and “promise keeping” but by making, literally, structural changes; the plan, still preliminary, of course, but at the same time something he had seriously thought through last night, was to reorient this brand-new house, changing everything so that the entrance and front were on the driveway side, which would be mirrored by a similar construction on the abutting lot that he was going to buy. He made a quick perspective drawing of the imagined site on one of Josey’s big sketch pads, his breezy, flowing hand impressively rendering the brick and plaster façades of now more conventional doors and windows. The two new structures would face each other, with the current driveway widened past the lot line and curbed just like a street, though it would serve more as a gathering place than an avenue for cars, the sidewalk lined with healthy young trees, the asphalt marked by the chalk of a few children playing knockout, an older couple cheering them. It was homey and tidy, safe and happy, a prettified version, Fan could see now, of a B-Mor street, one that seemed like theirs, as he rendered what appeared to be a tiny lion head on one of the front doors.
He was going to build the old neighborhood, right here in the Charter.
It would be inhabited, in their vision, by their many children (and helpers, though this was understood), and her parents, and her siblings’ families, and any other relatives who might want to live there, rent-free of course, as long as they understood and believed in their “familial project” of not simply spending a few prescribed if pleasant hours of the holidays and birthdays together but engaging in the “real business” of living, the modest quarters, the joys and frictions of the communal table, the intimacy naturally elaborated enough to encompass every moment of their days, which, frankly, none of them had been experiencing much, if at all, and would have gone on missing if this great fortune had not come.
This is why we’re asking you to stay here with us, Betty said. You know what it’s like to live in this way. I never knew, nor did my parents and siblings, and Liwei — she paused and he smiled gently at her — he’s all but forgotten. You can be our guide, Fan, you can show us what to do when we’re not sure or doing things all wrong.
Now Oliver said, And we’ll do everything we can to find out what’s happening with your friend. I have colleagues all over, likely some with connections to the board of the directorate for B-Mor, if not on the board themselves. I’ll bet someone is. Regardless, we’ll get the information. And if it’s something we can file a formal petition on, we will. Obviously I’ll have more standing now, and so I have to expect that whatever can happen will happen.
And once we find him, Betty added, he can come live here, too, and be a part of the family, part of, what do you call it, the household?
She winked. Though best for a while in his own room, right?
Fan nodded, to this and the rest of what they were saying, not exactly because it was all pleasant and good (even if it was) but because the manner in which they spoke, with such confidence and reason and the heat of just enough ardor, made it impossible to view them and their desires as anything but highly agreeable, this being a Charter trait in general but one that Oliver and Betty had refined to a spell of enchantment. Indeed, Fan couldn’t help but picture her Reg clopping down the stairs in the morning, sleep still sanding his eyes, delighting in the arrangement of fresh fruits and baked goods (just like what was put out this morning, none of it repurposed from yesterday), or using his height to allow Josey to decorate the street trees for Lunar New Year, or just riding scooters together again, feeling free enough to fly away. For none of us can resist such hopeful flashes, which are, in the end, what lights our way through this ever-dimming world.
24
Sometimes of late, we get scared. it’s surprising when it happens, because it’s often at a moment when our feeling should be the opposite of fear or panicked worry, a moment, for example, such as the other afternoon, when many of us were having a free-day, plenty of folks enjoying the temperate weather and sitting beneath a peerless clear sky in our rear plots or on the stoops, the children engaging one another in their street games with sweaty-headed abandon, scooting and dashing between the various food-hawker carts that seemingly materialize in precise accordance with our as yet unregistered hankerings. And just when we have a treat in hand, this most humble savor that nevertheless speaks so aptly to our clement realm, we wonder why it is that we now pause and loll the morsel on our tongues until it’s common mush, why there’s a shivering in the belly, which should otherwise be ever ready, avid.
It’s irrational, for sure, maybe even mad, but as our recent hopes for B-Mor have evolved, everything else has begun to seem precarious. Suddenly all the sturdy engineering and constructing, from the originals to now, feels as though it’s been resting upon an insufficient base, the same way a thoroughly elaborate and convincing dream can hinge upon an entirely impossible premise, which, once examined, exposes the rest as a mirage. The pilings are dust, the slab a matrix of silken spiderwebbing, and the very place we reside, our narrow row houses that have stood stalwartly wall-to-wall through a checkered history of caring and neglect, are but cells in a chimera, some bloodless being in whose myth we have believed too deeply and too long.
What we have left is our assembly, and therein lies the unexpected trepidation. We have lashed ourselves together, we are cheek by jowl but now in an entirely different way, yet we can’t help but murmur the question that is surfacing in all our eyes: so who are we now? Yes, we are figuring out our conduct — the demonstrations, the speeches, the murals, even the improvisational work slowdowns by the more daring teams — but none of that retrofits or instructs us on how to think about what we believe in and why. For what are we aiming for, in the end? To be more like Charters? To have built, each of us, some private fortress impenetrable to everyone save a few cousin achievers? We allow that it’s simple instinct to wish to be secured against all manner of riot, whether natural or human, and to strive however long — and sometimes ruthlessly — to make that so. We’re not the kind to decry such pursuits and the fruits that might come of them, even when they are so luscious and rarefied that they become the cardinal imperative, the first and last passion. We won’t fret when someone perches upon his lofty black rock; he can look down without having to endure any harsh caws from us.
At the same time, however, it chills us to think that despite how much we care about one another, and trust that we always will, some fundamental shift is under way. The more we modify longstanding assumptions and practices of B-Mor, the more we can’t help but worry that rather than evolving our corpus we’re in fact undermining it, just as some unrelenting C-illness would rewrite the normal patterns with an adverse instruction set of its own. These days you can even hear the refrain of a certain wild sentiment, basically summarized to this: that someday we’ll have out-Chartered the Charters, that they’ll be bunched about in the cool shadows of our walls, queuing all around to get through our main gate. As much as we’d like to see it — can you imagine? — we pause with what it would mean for us, what price we would have exacted from one another, to become so special and dear.