“Whoa,” he said.
“You felt it?”
“Of course.” He felt it again. “What, is it kicking?”
“I think so.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No. It feels weird, but not painful.” Then she winced. “Uncomfortable sometimes.”
“Like it’s turning over in bed,” Fred suggested.
She shook her head, but smiling a little. “Getting crowded in there.”
She stood and let her shirt down, put her hands overhead, leaned to right and left, then forward and back. Some rotations. She put her back to a wall, causing a gecko to relocate in haste. Squats up and down against the wall. Pink-cheeked and sweating. The AC came on. She sat down, then got up again and went over to the kitchen corner. Poured rice and two cups of water in the rice cooker and turned it on. Banged around in their food cabinet and at the sink.
Fred regarded her. Now, even when her back was turned to him, he could see she was pregnant. He thought about how fermions had to rotate 720 degrees before they returned to their original position. This was one of the first facts that had snagged his mind when learning about the subatomic realm. Fermions existed in a Hilbert four-space, in dimensions beyond what humans could see at the macro-scale. What would it be like to see something like a fermion’s spin? Would it pulsate in place, would it shimmer and gleam, would it overwhelm the senses to look at it? Maybe it would look like Qi did now.
Then one day she spent a lot of time in the bathroom, sighing and groaning to the point that Fred got worried. It wasn’t typical. In the late afternoon, after she came out, he ventured to say,
“Can I help?”
“No.”
She looked around the room for a while and then announced, “I can’t stand this. Let’s go down and have dinner on the water. I want some food that isn’t this same stuff. I’m sick of my own cooking.”
I never liked it, Fred didn’t say. “Are you sure that’s smart?”
“I’m sure it’s not smart. And yet nevertheless in spite of that.”
“All right, whatever you say.”
She stared at him as if he had said something offensive. Maybe he had.
“I’m tired of this,” she said.
“I know.”
It had been thirty-six days, he thought. He realized suddenly that he was probably finding these days more interesting than she was. Realizing that did not help his mood. So he liked to sit around doing nothing in particular, thinking things over—was that strange? Yes, it was. He sighed.
She looked out the window. After a while she said, “I think we can do it. Have dinner right at the water’s edge, no one will see us.”
“The waiters?”
“I’ll wear a hat and glasses.”
You can’t hide those cheekbones, he didn’t say. Nor the way you walk. Probably they should trade shoes. Probably she would think that was stupid.
“Come on,” she said. “I can’t stand it anymore.”
They left the apartment and went down its stairs. Right next to their concrete cube stood a tall multicolored brick building. Gray bricks held an inset of brick-colored bricks, which framed a gray doorway in which gold-leaf tree trunks were set. Some kind of shrine, it appeared. Gold Chinese characters covered the doorframe and lintel.
“What is this?” Fred asked.
“Ta Hu,” Qi explained. “The goddess who protects those who go to sea.”
“In what religion?”
She shrugged. “Chinese religion.”
“Daoist? Buddhist?”
“Older than those, I think.”
They followed the little harbor’s only sidewalk to the long tarp roof that covered all the restaurants. Qi chose one of them to enter, speaking briefly to a waiter. He nodded and led them to a small table at the railing overlooking the water. It was near sunset, light frilly clouds turning yellow and pink overhead. Another waiter approached and Qi ordered something. “I ordered us a variety,” she said. “You can try a little of everything.”
“Sounds good,” Fred lied.
The waiters brought out dishes and water and tea for each of them, then tureens of soup and plates of rice, and after that, dish after dish of other food. Some things Fred recognized, especially an entire fish, that was easy, of course; but a lot of the dishes were filled with foods he couldn’t identify. Clumps of greenery; squares and balls of maybe tofu, or gelatin, or pork belly, or what have you. Gamely Fred tried everything, concealing from Qi as best he could that this was very difficult for him. He hated new foods. And many of the tastes, as with the appearances, completely baffled him. He had eaten a few times in China before, but never like this; he had protected himself by eating mostly rice and chicken. Now clams arrived, followed by mussels, then more cooked lumps of who knew what.
Around them the sunset turned to dusk, and the string of lights edging the tarp overhead grew brighter. Their restaurant was almost completely empty. On the other side of the sidewalk running along the back of the restaurants, tall banks of lit fish tanks glowed like an aquarium wall. Fred watched as the waiters or cooks stood on ladders to maneuver nets around in the tanks, scooping up fish with deft quick turns and then taking them back where presumably the kitchens were. Fresh fish indeed.
Then their waiter brought out two plates that held crustaceans so big they overhung the plates on all sides. Bigger than lobsters, with more legs than lobsters, sporting spikier shells that were blond in color. They both laughed. The scissors provided to cut through these shells were as heavy-duty as tin snips. Fred had a little experience with eating lobsters, so he accepted with some interest the challenge of getting to the meat of this armored beast. He had to be careful not to poke or slice his fingers in the effort. For a while they were both silent as they snipped away, making loud cracks when they succeeded in bringing enough pressure to bear. The meat tasted like crab, or lobster, or something like those.
“What is this thing?” Fred asked.
“Shrimp.”
“Really? This big?”
“Around here that’s how big they get.”
“Hard to believe.”
“And yet here it is.”
“I’m trying to imagine the first person who hauled one of these out of the ocean and said, Oh yeah, let’s eat this.”
She laughed again. “My dad used to say, we Chinese eat everything with legs except the table.”
Later, when they had shifted into the realm of unidentifiable desserts, they sat back in their chairs and watched twilight breathing on the bay and the hills.
“What do you think will happen?” Fred asked.
She frowned. “To us, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure yet. I don’t think it’s the right moment yet for the movement to act. And I can’t see a way to get a truly private word to my dad.”
“You two don’t have some private line?”
She shook her head. “Even if I did, his security team is always listening.”
Fred thought it over as he picked through the desserts, hoping for something he liked enough to fill up on; despite his attempt to seem normal, he had eaten very little. His taste buds by now were terrifically confused, and he felt just slightly ill.
He ventured to say, “Do you think the heavy surveillance comes from having a one-party state?”
She stared at him. “Why would you say that?”
“It’s not true?”
“It is true. But all one-party states have problems. That’s why America is so messed up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean America is more of a one-party state than China. It’s entirely ruled by the market. Actually the market is the only party in the world now, or it wants to be. So every nation has to deal with that in its own way.”