He recounted to Fan that once assigned to a Charter foster family, a childless older couple (whom he had not been in contact with for a long time), he’d continued with the violin lessons and swim team he’d been doing in B-Mor, plus started a genetics club at the secondary school (where he met Vik, eventually convincing him to start swimming competitively because of his wingspan) and was involved with a social-service group that gave free math tutoring on the weekends to the children who lived in the service people’s dorms.
I certainly found them engaging and enjoyable, Oliver told her. He took a sip from his iced coffee (which was all he drank besides a little wine in the evenings). But can I say that those were the things I really wanted to do? I started on the violin and swimming so early that that was never a question, and because I was good at both, there was no thought that they weren’t the right activities. The other things I chose because there again I was very good at them and wouldn’t waste my time or anyone else’s, plus they fit in with my vita for medical studies. So does something you’re excellent at and that people admire you for and that does some good for all make for an “interest”?
Fan said she didn’t see why not.
It certainly can, he replied. But all that doesn’t confirm that it really is. Maybe it should mean you can’t love it, because what if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted, and then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit. But that you still come back for more. You’re good at free diving, right? That must be why they put you in the tanks. But did you always like it, even before it was clear that that’s what you should do? Was it something you loved? Or were there other things that you were doing that you might have enjoyed even more?
There weren’t other pursuits for our Fan, of course, as it was only ever one boy or girl in any generation of a household who was allotted such opportunities, and only if they showed highest promise, a custom that Oliver had clearly forgotten or had never noticed. But Fan didn’t tell him this, nor that when the first few times she dove as a little girl she nearly drowned. Nor did she tell him how much indeed she had loved it anyway, just as he was positing, even before she was able to describe the feeling to anyone in the household, and through force of will and mastery of her fears had made herself into a fine diver. Or that she sometimes trembled at the prospect of having been cut from the tank-diving track, despite all her efforts.
She told him there was nothing she found more enjoyable.
You’re lucky, Fan. But what will you do now? There’s no work like that here.
I’ll find something else, she said. You can still play the violin so well.
I like that I can, he said, not in the least bragging. But if I never played it again, I wouldn’t even think about it. I hadn’t, for years, until the other night, when I was actually playing. Do you find that strange?
This indeed puzzled Fan, as he had played so very beautifully, making a kind of music she had not encountered on any evening program or even at the underground mall during the New Year celebrations, when B-Mor’s best musicians would perform swingy, upbeat pieces, the instrument seeming to become creaturely the moment Oliver tucked it under his chin, it seemingly animated by its own wants and voice. She had never felt such pure, lovely, sad sound.
Each day they would jog together like this, and each day Oliver would ask something about B-Mor, what things were like in the facilities and at the mall, what people in the clan were up to, though not inquiring too deeply into any particular person. If there was a theme to his queries about an uncle or cousin or one of their parents, it was about how they had gotten on over the years, how they’d aged physically and which C-illnesses they’d suffered and how they managed the early mandatory retirement and what they did with their free-days. When Fan asked what he remembered of the older people doing around the row houses and stoops, he said smoking and drinking tea and gossiping and eating snacks and watching the programs and farting and belching, to which Fan said, Yes, that’s what they still do, to which he shook his head and laughed, though with a quizzical expression that made Fan think he believed she was trying to tell him something else.
In fact, he responded to much of what she said in this way, with a half-incredulous grin that quickly compressed into a tiny pout of wonder, just as if a monk had uttered a particularly imponderable koan for him to unravel. But he continued to ask all about B-Mor, never anything serious or weighty like school or facilities issues or the directorate, but about what kinds of eateries there were in the mall these days, or the kinds of street games the children were playing, or facts he didn’t get to know because he left too early to be interested in, for example, how the retirees going on a lifetime global were chosen, or what music and vids and games teenagers liked best, and where they went to meet for dates, and whether it still mattered which clan you were from, or which neighborhood, for someone to like you in that way. He was trying to get a feel again for what basic life in B-Mor was like, the day to day to day, which Fan thought he would certainly find dull and common but that he seemed to get more curious about as they spoke, wanting the most insignificant details that Fan herself could hardly recall (if she ever noticed them), like the colors of the sash and uniform of the salesgirls at the department store (crème and mocha), and the price of a mochi (hardly changed), and if the great aunties still used those long-bristled Stone Age hand brooms that the counties peddlers brought in to sell to sweep the walk in front of the houses (yes). In fact, their light jogs, which had eased to walks, became a shared act of cataloguing the many patterns and textures of B-Mor life, a modest cloth indeed, but one that Oliver kept wanting to examine and handle and measure against his newly aroused memories.
For in recent years, and as the promise of his research solidified, he had been thinking more and more of his time in B-Mor with a deepening glow of nostalgia, though one surely too warm and bright and that he was skeptical of, being trained as a scientist. He told Fan how after he was Chartered, as it was known here, he had truly not thought of B-Mor at all, not because he wanted to forget it, but because after all the celebrations and commemorations and absolute good-byes — there were no see-you-laters, no au revoirs — the feeling he had was that he was embarking on his own private global, out past any atmosphere, and leaving behind a world at which he could not gaze back, as it had already been erased. Everyone knows how hard it is for any Charter kid to do well, but he was a newcomer with surprisingly indifferent foster parents who were more interested in keeping than raising him, and so he realized that there was just himself, that he was the only person who would educate this unfledged boy.
In the first overwhelming and chaotic weeks of his new life at school and swim practice he’d come home and, after a mostly silent meal, retreat to his room and stand before the mirror in his dressing room full of new clothes and berate himself for the various mistakes and idiocies he’d committed and revealed that day. He hated the new name he’d been given and he channeled his fury at this pathetic Oliver, calling him out for his failings, starting with his vocabulary, which he’d prided himself on in B-Mor but was shockingly lacking here. He even misused the words he had, no teacher in B-Mor ever correcting him, confusing paramount with tantamount, egress and aegis, his teacher holding forth upon their etymologies for the class, to his utter humiliation. He was excellent at math but found he was a half year behind his new classmates, most of whom were not gifted at all, and he stayed up all night for a week to teach himself the units he was missing, soon enough leaping past them, though he never let on. And while in the pool he was nearly as fast as the others, he realized how much harder he was working because of his faulty technique and mechanics, his teammates languidly pulling themselves through the water with butter-smooth strokes while he brutally chopped at it, as his coach said, like a madman having a fit.