Edward Allen – ‘Other People’

Edward Allen is a PhD student in archaeology at Fudan University and occasional translator. This is his first short story.

Other People

 I always found the look of another special, though I rarely caught their eyes directly. I can remember this in specific moments. An ice-cream van, a soft scrape from the metal scoop, dollops of vanilla smooshed on my cone. It was a van upon short grass in a country field, and a man passed me a cone with a hand from the sliding window. A gravelly parking spot lay behind us, glistening under quiet sun and pleasingly fronted by the ocean. I went back to our car past the local boys and girls, holding the cone with my left hand. A voice intruded into my mind that we were sharing something. I must have believed they offered their own thought back, though I could have been imagining it, in the rapid exchange of glances.

I lived with my father, an undertaker with a certain noblesse oblige. It seemed he was always tearing apart one organization to help an even larger one. I must have been around ten when I first tagged along to the social events. My impression, indistinct but striking even then, was that we needed each other. We liked one another and would have done so in any case. I smelt like an apple and I was always among different groups of suits and dresses. But I might feel distracted by the presence of the overlooked waiters and waitresses. “Don’t make it awkward,” I ordered myself, time and time again. I had to interest the person opposite just I was magnifying the imagined, split-second glare from the servers.

Then I went off to my further schooling, while, to linger for a time here, I gradually observed a wholehearted retreat from dad’s former life and the roast-meat parties. I’m only adding this because I feel it’s relevant. Country hedges became his new life. I’d say there was now no earlier life at all. We went back, to the sticks, as he referred to them (a London perspective). Modest garden, more spacious rooms, fewer visitors, longer journeys for food and comfort. Coming down from college, we still met in the heart of the city. Time passed quickly in London. This street was once lined up as so – bookmaker, off-license, fry-up, laundry, artist-operated gallery, accountancy offices, For Rent signs, inexplicably, eternally, in the upper floors. Now it was recombined under one-stop shops and coffee bars. They glassed out entire façades in one part of the city, while a multitude of languages and cultures took over the other. I could have sworn to you that it meant to coincide with my departure for uni. The baristas at Costa were indifferent. It was like they owned the place, every coffee particle in the air. The streets were the starting point for our new regional foot-surveys where we visited his angel investments. We renewed a sense of pride at each other’s side. We engaged with groups of time- and space-travelers. I felt a quiet pain that I never quite got rid of at that gradual diminishment in the scale of plans. It’s been there ever since, I realize. High above us there remained the undertakers in glossy suits, only now I imagined them as like the ones in TV series. Maybe there weren’t men at all. Still they re-arranged and re-constituted whole groups around us.

Hydraulic engineering may seem like a commitment, but I graduated with no idea of a career or specific focus. The only thought that had grabbed me was… not quite escape, more the notion of prolonging a process begun at some nebulous point in time. I lived with a comforting thought of friendlessness or loneliness. It was like I’d counted time to this point, deliberately and methodically and also unknowingly. I was proud of it. I didn’t despise any of the groups forming close to me or now and then latching on. I dehisced naturally or never glommed on. I suppose I had nothing to regret. You’ll know some of the next stage. With two years of Japanese study and a summer camp under my belt and crucial support from various quarters (the kindnesses you would encounter, heading East…), I segued to a study-apprenticeship at an engineering firm (that we all know) in Nagoya, northwest of Tokyo.

What can I remember from the first few months in Japan? To me it condenses to a stunning if skewed confirmation of that previous, compelling loneliness. The friendship denied or else acquainted-with was also there – in the places I visited in my foreign clothes, and not the offices or laboratories or our firm’s projects, which I remember finding alternately fascinating and bland (the linking of logic, facilitated by separation of culture and place, occasionally glistened brilliantly before my eyes; everything was worthwhile and critical in the world of sanitation if you just thought long enough about it) but the interstices of the suburban town where we lived. Did I find a kind of lodge for my mind and heart, I wonder? There was the restaurant with leather-padded stools and the wooden bar, whose manageress never seemed to change a jot, but whose edges were as if painted thin, new elements and colors flecking from walls and surfaces on every visit, new books appearing on the sporadic shelves, and of course new customers, new empties on other shelves. We had an understated aquarium, and a borderless lake that was intoxicating in the autumn mist. This is a particularly Japanese type of endlessness because the mind refuses to imagine a body of water like this within an island so neatly surrounded by ocean, so the horizon, when you stare at it searching for the other shore, looks back at you even harder. At this lake, also, and tucked away at one afterthought of a building, was a coffee shop where suited men and women and regulars and irregulars in sweaters, caps and jeans enjoyed the quiet, each other, or the view. They were as assuredly there as I felt I was. Which was hardly anywhere. I never made a single friend or (I think) managed a conversation outside the firm. But I could have known the country for decades.

Other people tell me they went through much the same thing. I was so stimulated that I hardly read a book for months. Partly that was the catacombs of files encircling us inside the office. A typing patience was required to implement rules and programs on the computer. Under my breath I called this the gorgeousness of papers and hardback binders. Our office was never musty but crisp and clean. There was my history, my literature – an archive to enliven more creatively than some library or museum catalog. The key was only in my mind. Things were indescribably solid as well as fictional, fantastical – the limitless potential of a sanitation grid. Some have told me their own eye-opening moments started with a book. That felt perilous to me. To live always with that writer in your mind like they’d never leave. Like designing clothes with a brand and model stamped onto your brain. I felt the relationship should be the opposite. I should be the creator with my own characters written by me for them, or for me by them. I wasn’t to write myself anywhere or write them anywhere; we weren’t to be sure where either of us would go. Characters existed and I was the better for them. The characters as far as I could see them were the lists and rows of other people in the files, at the ends of our projects, those faces I could see hiding in the hundreds and thousands at the terminus of this or that point.

Indistinctly I wondered where this would end, if it would, and in one or two flashes of insight whether it already had long ago, or a path already laid. Soon my apprenticeship was in its eighteenth month and I was summoned to meeting with Hirota, as we’ll call him. Hirota supervised about a dozen of us. Given the general positive rapport I had, I thought I could qualify for a full-time post in Japan, or that I could negotiate or be expected to ask for a place back in Europe. I hadn’t really pushed myself further, much as I hadn’t disintegrated like some do. I’d just plodded on assuming something would happen one day. And here it was. The possibility was not raised obliquely as you might imagine it would be. Rather, I was asked straight up what my keikaku (plans) were for the ambiguous atode (after this…). When I told Hirota how I could see myself staying here or there, if the opportunity was furnished, etc., he proceeded to open a whole new box of possibilities. With that in the air, Hirota could give voice to his idea. I could hone my skills and acquire practice on the ground in a third environment and country. I nodded, curious about what came next. “The company’s hoping to expand operations in Southeast Asia,” he carried on….

So, twenty-four hours later, with generous forewarning, Hirota ushered me into a rarely-opened conference room. I was struck with a wave of leather. A PowerPoint slide presented the grid of a huge, sprawling urban district with planned water points in bright blue dots like nails on a crazy octopus, purification centers in yellow, red capillaries for the unbreakable body of substations, pumps, channels and pipes. What was going to happen, and it had only been talked about in secret till then, was that the government would make the primary investment in a pilot scheme for purifying the worst slums in the city at really bargain basement prices. But we might end up cleaning half the dirty water (the half that needed to be cleaned) of the population of that city and then who could imagine which other parts of that large nation if we had our foot in the door and if, as the government was suggesting, other installations would be needed. So, if we do a good job, the anonymous-looking project manager stressed towards the end, then we will achieve a triple goal of advancing the credibility of Japanese technology in this competitive industry, of expanding our firm’s footprint and improving its reputation internationally, and finally, he concluded, raising living standards and potentially saving innumerable lives.

It wasn’t long before my mind grabbed hold of the proposal. It connected with what I had always been or had been becoming, which was neither on nor off this enormous chain of events beginning in a place that wasn’t my own but fitting the size of the thoughts that I’d always had. It would go back to my roots and indeed higher, because the passage between was logical. The strong compulsion came either out of admiration for and desire to emulate teachers like Hirota or that chain of thoughts deep in my memory bank, an impulse sown deep in childhood. Both urged me forward.

We had a huge task ahead of us, and only a small body of core employees to execute the plans. The entire city had to be mapped or re-mapped in order to draw out purification centers, pumps, connecting points, inspection points, all while liaising with Nagoya and working within an impractical timeframe, a foreign government to please and wheedle assistance from at every juncture, all before we knew how to deal with them or even how to say “Hello.” We’d have a pair of mysterious offices, in a sweltering and moist environment thousands of miles from my current home and even further away from London. And the more I embraced the facts as they appeared – millions whose lives we could impact positively; what the company considered the innate scalability of our plans – the more I see now that the germ of a second thought began to sprout in my mind. Now I was engaged in my story. It was one that had evolved more professionally than naturally, or even vocationally. I’m a professional – that was my mantra.

In Japan I’d learned how the collection, filtration, processing and delivery of water through inner-city pipelines and related infrastructure across urban and non-urban landscapes and its accompanying network of supply, pricing, costs and subsidization wove seamlessly into the national fabric. There was a breathless need for higher-quality materials emanating from updated procedures, and higher environmental and sanitation demands in government buildings, multinationals and Japanese zaibatsu that in a sense pushed the whole economy upwards along with it like one big boat. The destination country ran an opposing course, however. That was clear. Costs were cut rather than raised in all but the highest echelons. About halfway down, what should have been brought together fell apart. Pipes soon literally collapsed or corroded. People lived with stop-gap solutions until once or twice a decade the crisis struck. Cholera devastated a city or class; endemics that we hardly heard the name of raced through the population. Staring down such issues elicited a physical response before even help and hope. It was enough to think about that middle-point where the possibility had been allowed and to feel anxious from a thousand miles away for decisions made or not made.

So I remember how I spaced out over the refracted light in my coffee by the aquarium – the white cup and its iridescent contents. I swapped my old coats for long-sleeved sweaters. I craved comfort and warmth. I saw the acquaintances at my old haunts far more intermittently. If I’d been feeding off something appealing and grounding in my environment, I now starved myself. Meanwhile, Hirota and I had a handful of meetings with government representatives, bashing out some of the final details. I began to share something of the ambiguity of hope and despair that we both likely felt. I tried to observe these new characters to break them down into types, as if we could get things easier once there. In my enthusiasm I shared some first thoughts with Hirota. To my surprise he broke out in an expression bordering on a frown. We forged ahead with another topic for a while. The following day, a small manila file had appeared in my keyboard drawer. In it were some short biographies of former government ministers from that country and some business leaders from my adopted one with long-term investments there. I packed that into my personal archives, though I didn’t think much further of it for years. Yet I think it had a sobering effect, just prior to the plunge.

Then I was switching sweaters for jeans and T-shirts; thick hiking shoes for sandals. I was a plant nurtured anew on foreign soil, a brain walking un-resting between a new home and the country and city in England. My father treated it as all natural. I could have said we were working on the moon and he’d have been just as excited. A third space thrust itself upon me, and it was difficult to share how that felt. Giving back to myself or others from this new position in a third place meant removing something from one of others, in other words from myself.  Our long-term projects had to be my rescue. I had to eke out the requisite space to keep going and keep breaking even. Days piled on through introductions and liaisons with government departments and the maintenance of a steady stream of updates from headquarters. We powered through, and gradually my spirits were uplifted by the strength of healthy technical procedure. Meetings were set with higher-ups, and budgets finalized for laying of pipeline and building of stations.

When I left a conference with some sub-mayoral office one day I remember receiving a vision of the city. It was a three-dimensional model that I witnessed as if it was pulling away from me, on the top deck of a ferry leaving port. As we dragged ourselves further from the shore the image entered my view of homes watered in brilliant blue for a few zones that I knew with assurance were secure against the pollution of earth, air and mercury. Yet I saw alongside this, also, the tentacles of fetid water in other areas, the lingering possibility of a punctured and pustule-ridden humanity that might still emerge from that ground. The work still to be done. If I’d been born with a name, that name was meant to be inscribed with this work. In fact I could even watch my name being laid down. There I was. Here the projects powered on. I was glad not to think further. Having sat down and revised this narrative a few times, this point, that vision, seems the best place to pause.

 

About three months into planning – it must have been, around January or February that year – a journalist turned up at the lobby of the high-rise that contained our offices. Everybody exchanged glances when the information came through from reception. I couldn’t tell what almost any of those looks meant. Don’t they normally call ahead? asked one of our number, in Japanese. It was quite the scene, and I should say I agree, although that is how Mesh did his business. We couldn’t have him and we couldn’t not have him. Our proper natures were just about intact. I felt less confident than I had in months, maybe years, the way we promptly agreed to offer something while giving up nothing. It was agreed that I’d go downstairs, as the best face they could put on this. I felt crude the whole way down, like a creature crawling from under a shell into the brilliant sunlight. The second-floor stairwell where I liked to take off at times like this had a window with a view on paddy-fields and a few distant apartment blocks. The colors came together to show me for a moment how this country and its people might see us – connected by dark tentacles to the central government trying to remove the stain of filthy water for months and years. I was practically shaking.

I entered the lobby to present Mesh with what my authority had granted. We had a short conference and training program where he might find answers to any questions about what we were doing and how we were doing it. Clothed in this company armor, I shook his hand, and was totally disarmed. Not by the man but by the actions, and the thought preceding it. Was I feeling loyalty or its opposite? Suddenly I was face-to-face with a man who inspired dedication. I would tell him everything we envisage and my little adventure besides. The idea of being written at another level. I saw myself zoom out from first-person and observe the scene. Did it look like the unbudgeable employee and the fact-finding… intruder? I asked this alongside question of whether Mesh was my Angel of Deliverance, why that thought came in, where it belonged.

Mesh’s only substantive question wasn’t about the company or much myself, however. He wanted to know more about our relationship with a Mr. C – This wasn’t a name to set alarm bells ringing, but I certainly couldn’t answer it at once. A vista appeared at the back of my mind. Some connection was made between the recently retired finance minister being mentioned and the rumblings and stirring beneath our feet, first stirring at the conference tables in Nagoya. I could practically read the exposé that he was writing (he later did). It was glorious but I wanted us well out of it. I had to turn away while trying to preserve this invader, this dear and trusted friend. I gave myself some clairvoyant power as well. I could see Mesh for the strength behind the strength. There were always stories far greater than this for Mesh to uncover.

It was a let-down for him, of course. Yet it could have been everything for me. Following a quick search online, I was eager to buy into my first friendship. In essay after essay I studied how the journalist, my journalist, beat a path connecting states, cities, communities and families back through the core of this country’s issues. Life there was gargantuan and silent yelling of the mess of human problems, needs with endless complications, and Mesh was on top of it. The investigations were more tangible than if I’d imagined them, because apart from speaking to the subtexts, they spoke to continuing actors and villains and victims. He was the other end of an equation I could have been near to my whole life. I was pulled back to some feeling of co-existence, to the afternoon by the sea. The children, the passersby, the great blue sparkling behind us. Thrown out, eventually, here. People had wandered the streets of this or any country in the meantime. Into the darkest alleys and most sinister gangs, just to see where those paths led them.

Hirota wrote to report that the firm’s relationship with Mr. C-  was out of bounds. In fact I’m sure obscure to him at his level and that if he cast the lamp upwards we wouldn’t have heard from him again. He may have implied he would – I wasn’t sure. Better he said if the journalist-san might sit down with a company representative, present some questions or themes in advance on the company’s word for forthcoming answers and follow-ups. I dialed my journalist’s cell-phone, strategizing even as the tone rang on how to arrange this information, and crucially where I could slip in my thoughts. “Listen!” he yelled down the line (demolition work was underway in the background), “It’s alright –” cutting me off quarter-way through the explanation, “I sent off the article already. You foreign firms aren’t so easy. OK!” he cried out again. I felt breathless. The clanging and banging escalated. They were circling around him. “OK! So thanks!” He was on the edge of hanging up. The phrase It’s now or never ran through my skull. My mouth half-formed the shape of the words. Then I experienced that half-second of absolutely certainty characterized by the absence of any thought that must be the trailer to any buckshot question in the history of mankind. I asked if maybe I could call or text or write even at a more convenient time. Not much for a girl from London to ask but it sure felt like something at the time. “No problem! Sure!” was the clear-throated response down line, “Ok! Ok!” I replied, smiling broadly, “We’ll I’ll be in touch then! Goodbye!” Finally able to breathe.

The morning we met my ears were ringing. I wasn’t clear if it was my own or everybody’s problem, nor when it had started, but there it was. We were then driving a jeep around the outskirts of the city and my ears were ringing. We were jittering along and my ears were ringing. My left shoulder careened back and forth along the window, back to the seatbelt holder. I looked towards the front passenger seat, where Mesh in his perennial, unforgettable shades expatiated with the local driver. My left ear kept on its ineradicable ringing. I saw endless grey I saw through the glass.

I asked to see the invisible side of water management, which some of you will have heard about in your careers. This was the second major decision I must have made, after going to Japan. I theorized that he must know something, though in hindsight I think he really dug for me. We were headed to the most concealed edges of the city. These were the communities I imagined we were serving, but so often it seemed I’d never heard of them. I had an oversized buzz in my brain. We stepped out upon a large triangle of mud before a path to a group of shacks up ahead. We met the de facto mayor. I took in his clothing, his kind expression, the animated gestures he made in the local language. Children rushed around, kicking a brown football. We then passed through rows of shacks with all kinds of extraneous clutter in an endless variety forcing us to zigzag and duck through, past stores and beat-up homes, rooms with silent folk and rooms with wailing babies. In the tiny mayor’s office Mesh and he spoke in half-code about a gang that seemed to have an agent in the town. That was his expertise and prerogative, but for my sake they pushed the conversation to some failed sanitation program. We crammed inside a miniscule annex with files and photographs of how it was done. As we stood and squatted outside I leaned gently on a warm metal frame of the office, sure I tasted mercury on my tongue. My ears were still ringing. The sun shone bravely through the haze as we walked over the river. On their haunches a small gang of girls played some improvised game with the pebbles. I caught the eye of one like it was scene from my childhood. The ringing began to fade. It hardly mattered which space I was in.

Water remained the focus. I paid rapt attention. Then, I might say now, the third thing happened. I sensed I had to be disregarding something. Space was opening up, and a larger, perhaps infinite room beyond that. There was some terminal point to the journey I’d stuck with or dragged myself through till now. Mesh was inspecting a low-lying drainage pipe by the river, the flow practically stagnant and dead. He had one foot in a boot in the grimy pool and must have been surprised when I asked if there was a school. He relayed the question to the obliging group. I came to and focused on the water, did my best to follow the story of sabotage and offer opinions on the rudimentary system they dealt with now. Then I found myself inside a small brick building tucked away even further the shacks. Things were less chaotic. It was a clean single classroom. There was a way around if you fancied the muddy shore, but we took instead a snaking route between the homes. The rooftops were scalding in the heat of the midday sun.

Fortunately the one teacher was visiting. Schools there couldn’t afford to open on Monday through Friday so did so odd days as teachers became available. Those instructors were always volunteers who had about a thousand other lines of business but never failed to find the time. Sheilar – I only ever learned her English name – regularly commuted from several dozen kilometers out here and to another school in another similarly immiserated neighborhood. I entered her details into my phone and sent across my own number immediately.

She belonged to – and, I’d say, was – the backbone of a charity school system dependent upon donations from a small group of wealthy businessmen and a much larger number sourced from churches and mosques. For a reasonable reimbursement a teacher could take on full- or part-time duties. With the teachers driven to the task through love, they persisted despite the harsher of reality of hours, effort, and emotional wear-and-tear. I was enraptured by something that others might find overbearing in Sheilar. It could have been her wavy, dark hair or the appeal of one totally secure and present in their role. If I was discovering friendship with Mesh, here I had a sense of sisterhood. Not instantly in the classroom. More it evolved through the experiences we shared, though we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.

 

I was recruited to provide English lessons, which covered math and geography and principally anything using the English language. The point as Sheilar presented it was to inspire with the story of how a young woman could build her own world and future. We agreed to give it a shot. To them it was natural. But it felt painfully ironic, at first, to lecture these children on chances they’d never had. It was impossible to distinguish that right from wrong. What I can say is that I did it, and the fact of the matter was their eyes lit up just I was in their home. They could relate through that and so see themselves anywhere. Write yourself into their story, and they’ll feel they’ll have it any possible world. It’s become their own.

So I became involved in a new social, educational mix. I was giving classes to the students on the weekends, as well as spending occasional time with Mesh. In time I associated with his close colleagues and friends inside and outside work. I usually feeling like an interloper of sorts, but I was always unselfishly welcomed into their midst. From those corners I heard tales of the ministers and the generals; of the partition of the country and the myriad related problems. The undertow and the underbelly. Theirs was a nation like many others, where the automobile and train had conquered the city, everything promising to aggregate as one under a novel, intermediate core to the world economy. It wasn’t the holistic integration I could see going on so effortlessly in Japan or London. Fresh ideas were brought in but they often revolved back on themselves – marriages of a colonial core with a new shadow. It ran around itself enough to smack of prophesy. I offered what I could, proofreading our materials, working on new books, planning small library that was open to anyone able to make the trip to the center of town. Our own archive. From the talk of billions flowing into the country and nodes into the national elite, American senators and finance ministers everywhere, the specter of money’s silent hand, lingering in the air in balmy late night talks with Mesh and co., I would be thrown back into a world of only tens and hundreds. I watched the numbers with pride and frustration. The thing with tens and hundreds is that they titrate, like some sick coin-game machine, into tens and even single digits. To be left with nothing and potentially less. The larger numbers divided one way – firm funds ultimately decanted into or hundreds- or tens-of-thousands and went contentedly into all kinds of life. The only sky above us was the realm of terror, of war, information and mega-firms, figures inflated to sky-size. Figures that couldn’t ever be brought down, figures that were in fact elemental. I’d be stuck in this thought, and then a student of mine might start missing class for want of a few pennies, a lamp-light economized through the night, a book or a pen, or entering the labor market at the age of eleven. Our resources were not infrequently destroyed, purloined or redistributed by students or parents, willingly or not. We made do. But we could see that our charity, even if playing the machine with utmost skill, lost out in fractions, and was always barely hanging on. Everything was never-ending fashion and that, so long as the technology slowly improved, whoever was inflating it from the top felt welcome to their extra share – yet the fractions persisted.

I could bring myself back to earth if I reminded myself that I’d come here through those three decisions. I had by now an ingrained sense of a combination lock, a combined call to action at the back of my mind. I was engaged in something qualitative: I offered and exhausted what I could, the result being that a new space would unravel in my mind, a new story to fill in. People stayed, people learned, and there were always characters such as Sheilar to inspire me with a steely energy I hadn’t come close to acquiring through practice. Sometimes I felt it had to catch up with me one day. I was walking the thinnest line.

Different from Sheilar and the others, I suspect, was how my mind soon began to process this information and experience. I mean this as a difference, perhaps the one main difference between myself as an outsider and them as insider-outsiders. Patterns started nagging at the back of my mind, like a new itch to scratch. It occurred to me, for instance, that over time a number of my students, though in separate neighborhoods were statistically (felt emotionally) prone to a kind of memory loss. This was quite a nebulous idea for me until one afternoon with Mesh, uncovering some hidden factories near a similar neighborhood as the one I taught in, I noticed a similar glazed-over look on the children. Not even Mesh would visit those sites without a camera crew or escort. If I could take measurements from the wells and streams nearby I could prove the presence of some shared toxicity. It wasn’t like they suffered from this daily, but that intermediate exposure still had its effects. These must combine with the social pressures and somehow in the expectations people grew to have of themselves. Sheilar had comforted me previously, when I’d lamented the loss of one promising student. Here I could at least lay out the metrics. But the thought implied a challenge, in that context, equivalent to shifting the earth.

 

I must have had over two-hundred students over the shortest of tenures or the entirety of my brief spell, distributed in over a dozen classrooms, mostly on the edges. Over time I’d strived to learn more about their backgrounds. Many were rural children whose parents couldn’t afford anywhere else to call home and held on wherever was available. The men worked in construction, sometimes on the most mundane projects, even in a few cases working underground; the women worked all kinds of jobs, some of which don’t bear going into. The difference between hanging on in those frequently miserable homes and moving further out was time – even though hours could be spent commuting, the slums were their only and best option. Some kids were born nearby, but emigrated in what was a descent into greater poverty that seemed to have taken over many of them and their families. At the forefront of my mind at this point was their age. Most weren’t any older than twelve, when I had to expect some of the girls to begin to drop out and into marriages. As I saw it we served the purpose of helping them, to hope and anticipate those cases where the mothers and fathers understood the abilities those daughters acquired through further education – a ticket back to the nearer suburbs or newer communities. It was what you call work in progress. The majority of our cohort hadn’t hit double-digits. Even so there had been some, and I began to hear more and more stories as time went on, who were taking on preternaturally early employment at the factories. Like it had been so long ago in my memory, the process was one of disarticulation, but this time financed by organs working sideways through society, the same ones that should have been organizing for these communities’ betterment.

Both Sheilar and I felt those seeds of improvement were beginning to be blown over broader space, pushing students away from even the towns, occasionally into forbidding villages. Students hurled outwards on that wind would never return. If they did they might be missing digits or even hands, or have an eye knocked put. I have to stop myself here. What mattered was, if I could render the parameters properly, I could determine the damage to young minds in ways un-appreciated by the literature, with a theory of how minds might also limit themselves under the circumstances. It was something unmeasurable. You didn’t just have to boil the water; you had to perform some unknown magic. The children were always compelled into a relative decline. Sanitation, clean water, removing the worst elements at the source – any technique still kept some chemicals and toxicity for them, and I reckoned more in some places than others.

How that work came together was like this. Over nearly two years of instruction I’d implemented all variety of small quizzes, and optional monthly thirty minute exam on what we’d been studying. I had stored all such material two large boxes that, more for convenience than anything, that were stacked by the wall by my two-chair dining table. On a handful of evenings one October, with the balmy breeze frequently whistling through my fingers and hair, circling round my legs like smoke, and with dim lamplight my sole company, I roamed through this harvest. I pieced together the correlating factors, grades and performances, dropout rates and in-class performance of all analyzable students over time. I made what I thought was a valid metric – a combination of sanitation and a quantity of factors, including vicinity to essential services, gender, family opportunity, gang activity. Too many factors not to precipitate disaster. I was transported by that sniffing sense of being tantalizingly close to my prey. Nothing else in my schedule could compare next to the argument I could present, on the extensive and prolonged negative impact of even short-term negligence of sanitation… and the unplanned and uncontrolled illegal construction that clogged the downstream with dirt and shit no matter what we did. On the peril of general development when avoiding the tragedy of typhus and cholera, which we’d enjoyed an almost miraculous absence of in ___ .

As far as myself and the firm were concerned, this was test of time and nothing else. Not commitment or loyalty: I’d say those are grounded in me. Again, the simple facet of time. The more the paper came together, the more I imagined a clock candidly ticking away in the background. Gently it was, like a partitioning cell, pulling apart the curtains. My world and the firm’s appeared to be separating. It didn’t have to be, though. I locked myself in both worlds for the time being. More time passed as I wrote my ideas down and continued to teach, work at the offices and perform the tasks of bringing our new sanitation systems slowly online. I pieced together my arguments and read what literature I could find in other countries. I saw the great spread of poverty and slums and the unwanted population of the earth that defined all but the core I knew myself to be from. I found new heroes who wrote about this globally or in their meticulous case studies, the heart beating through every sentence. I was loyal, but a voice had grown inside of me, like a plant in the mind.

I could also say that I know what broke down the walls or that I could sense it coming. That I know how eventually this would culminate in bigger events which forced a change, which forced me away from other people, which compelled them to be in my mind forever, like I’d perhaps always asked for. It happened subtly, silently and overnight. A huge, migrant population had been hurriedly settled in a makeshift spread of tents on the edge our inner-city village. It was like discovering a person sleeping in your corridor. We stepped lightly around them at first, before we took them in. Refugees from the most suffering and despised peoples across the planet – we had to. The government might have let them in the country on a legal matter, but it fell on us imperfectly and haphazardly accept them. The men were hired, like the locals themselves, as workhands and short-term contractors; the women found themselves in the same factories and garment warehouses. The boys, more querulous than the salt-of-the-earth lads I’d known, after turning football matches into stake-outs, almost started a war before parents and elders defused the situation. So the boys kept to their own, and I never saw all but a few of the girls at first. Short lives of toil beheld them to the maintenance of the elderly.

So it dawned on us all that the R– wouldn’t be returning home and we had to bring them out of the corridor. I was sure word enough would go around and they’d visit our classroom. Again, though, I think Sheilar may have been behind this. A fortnight passed before a half-dozen new students all sat sheepishly on the back rows one morning. Two boys and four girls. The remaining students were quieter than usual. Some, I remember, had adorable smiles, waiting to see how teacher Jill would react. One of the overseers for our community, a kind of matriarchal figure known there and further abroad, stepped in just as I was equivocating. With her were some of the mothers and one father that I all knew well, a lady of the R. – and Mr. E, the ever-bespectacled and much-loved music teacher, who ran a similar double-life to mine, though he taught at the university, and to be honest I don’t think either of us would have called it a double-life at the time. If it was – and just as mine whispered that it might pull itself apart – here was the final rope to tie it together. With their introduction and a good warning for the students to behave, I launched into the lesson as if not much had changed.

Eagle was the name of one of the new students. She was slightly older than the majority of the class, and possessed the most exquisite handwriting I’d ever seen. The tails of letters dipped and curled below every imagined (or real) line; each word was exquisitely formed. Fanning open one of her answer booklets was like communicating with a grown-up. She was an adult in a child’s body, and also a force partly constituted of everything I’d imagined about her people. In a way, she was my partner in another life. To the best of my knowledge from the staggered meetings with family members, seeing her as an adult-child was closer to the truth than I knew. Back in her homeland she’d been educated as best they could manage. She could have advanced and continued to advance had the situation not taken her away. To my fancy she was extraordinary in some other, undefined sense. In a practical sense when we got into the math and science as I instructed, she was average or uninterested. But the delicacy of her self-presentation, the detail on the clothes and the items they brought from their homeland, took me somewhere deeper. It was like the community was finally made living and breathing for me. I might ask myself how many experiences I needed to finally reach this point. I certainly did need an Eagle.

It was my little secret. Furtively, I spent the next week on evenings with the answer-books, once more roaming through the figures. On this iteration, I thumbed through six months, a year or more of calligraphy from a number of students – kids who’d dropped in and flunked out as time had passed. Some seemed to have gained strength as they first picked up writing, only to lose it after in some unwelcome snap. Others maintained a steady albeit imperfect hand throughout. Rarer were those who showed consistent progress. A few gave me the impression of having forgotten how to write entirely; a handful of students I realized I couldn’t recall, despite much head-scratching. It dawned on me more than ever that I was only ever recording segments of time, small patterns in a loop that ran on its own course. There was potential beauty in it at all times, but so many of them were snapped off, taken away, removed from that soul of loveliness. With just the figures and no heart I was only giving weak premeditation of some more massive change beyond anybody’s power to change. I had been sprinting to keep up with it, the gift of creativity and the wounds of the devil.

 

Meanwhile, I hadn’t left the country in almost two years. Any vacation time had been given over to these projects, and Dad was fully supportive of things in South East Asia. As it was fate or organizational mechanics, started to intervene. It was clear that some movement was on the cards. Rumors had spread through our offices of a new regional hub in Singapore. Employees were being hired with specialties that were still only theoretical when I was coming up – hyper-advanced chemical treatments, micro-plastics and the sort. Some staff, untrained in these matters but essential company personnel, were getting oriented Europe, acquiring knowledge from larger firms or partner labs. We were rushing headlong into the realm of a panacea. Once the plastics, the water and the fumes were identified and segregated, was there anywhere they could hide? Was there anything to prevent our slowly laid plains from coming to fruition, any government or politician who wouldn’t in time and with budgeting be brought into the fold? So I brought it all together – the figures, factors and theory – the words and writing of Eagle and others, packed into a handful of essays, a few journals outlined, a few proposals sent off, and took the opposite route from all of this, back to our headquarters in Nagoya.

 

The rumors were accurate. We were scaling up once more. Our glowing reputation for excellence in sanitation would be translated through new investment and government and international funding to the syncretic world of renewables and smart materials. One division, in five years, we envisaged, could position itself as a world-leader in the solution of problems relating to the hazards of micro- and macro-plastic; another would latch onto that and strike out with a whole new generation of materials, materials that might breed their own problems and already came with some known imperfections there at the back of the data. We’d expanded into regions elsewhere in Southeast Asia, as well. I felt indifferent, but most employees were thrilled at the prospect of a Singapore hub. Much as I protest, I sensed the power of some of inherent casualness towards life. It was working out while I was doing other things. Though when I look at it now I was the opposite of who I became. To the outside world and more often than not within it, I was demure. I was waiting for them to approach me, waiting to be placed in the position the meet seem always to inherit. Inwards I wasn’t ever meek or ever quite making that final step.

One morning I was waiting on the sidelines, a take-out cup from the aquarium coffee house, reliably caffeinated as ever in my hands, when Hirota, more primly dressed than I remembered, sat down in the chair beside me. “Jill-san,” he asked, “would you not have any other keikaku apart from joining the company at the Singapore offices?” I warbled, uttering a solid Japanese ummm for the first time in years, before launching into a roundabout digression, Hirota nodding and humming. I lead him through the experiences I’d had, fleshing out a story I knew had partially reached his ears. It wasn’t premeditated, I’m still certain, though why at certain points I could hear that voice declaring “You always planned this!” even once “This was always your keikaku.” Now I was opening the Word-docs and spreadsheets that prevented the best chronological progression of my research and even some of the essays with my name on them like a diamond on a golden ring. “Jill-san,” he interrupted, shortly (some meeting room would open soon), “this is not the kind of work that you should stop.” Later that day “This is the kind of work that the company can sponsor. I think we would be willing to sponsor. I’d like to mention your study with the directors.”

I nearly spilled my coffee. I surrendered my entire research project on a USB. As reunions and meetings carried on to the following day, I remember this occasional pang of embarrassment at my behavior – too sentimental, too gushing. I almost felt sick. My essays – three of them, I think – were nicely presented and properly tied together, like a quipu. They walked the reader recursively back to the point where they began and they said they would go, demonstrating the cruel double bind of poor sanitation and social factors unique to those communities, links between declines in mental capacity and ingestion of certain compounds whether once or dozens of times, I theorized, with that undercurrent of communities matching themselves to expectations. Statistically only the fundamental argument was solid and I felt unimpeachable. It ran around like a perfect story. But through a fog of exceptional cases at the back of my thinking, each piece moved quietly or like cannon-fire towards a kind of improvised clarion call towards the end. At one point, in an experimental archaeology of the written word, I’d tried to show through an analysis of descender and ascender letters and the jaggedness and roundedness of the students’ scripts, how that imbalance and shakiness had crept into the writing of so many, including those dozens, some with small biographies who left and never came back. I copy-pasted beautiful calligraphy deteriorating over time. One of my students wrote short-stories months apart that I picked apart for the language, the presentation and the imagination and found lacking in the latter case. But I felt all I had were paragraphs at most. I wanted to find an overarching name for it.

I don’t know what caught their eye, but I suspect it may have been the practical afterthought, the concluding remarks and correlating advise that remained consistent throughout. Those were lines written after the final expenditure of energy, often in a kind of trance, like jogging the extra five-minutes after an hour on the treadmill. I worried more that this might be interpreted, especially in this culture, as a letter of resignation or veiled criticism of our entire program. As evening crept in on the third day these questions were finally put to rest, obliquely, with new words and thoughts, by Mr. Takeshi, who served as a Vice President. I’ve asked people about this experience since, and read a few times of what I might call a similar sensation in others – a similar transformative act of persuasion. Takeshi was colorblind in that other sense. That, or like a consummate chess master, you received this sense that Takeshi knew where the pieces were and where they belonged. He could intuit what a person was and where he, in his momentary engagement with them, might be able to direct them according to their innate movement, where they belonged on the board and how they were creating their own game, searching for the optimal move, often in the critical position. Something in his manner, modesty or forthcoming nature was disengaging. It was like I never fully grasped the implications of what I was writing and doing for almost all other people. In his words I saw myself, the London girl from a good family crashing almost blindly along, something of the good collected, but where and how to sow that seed, I realized in a flash of near-blinding light, still there in the ever-unexplored unknown. It was only by him standing in my shoes, almost as if I was him – not that he said it, but his words, phrasing and personhood implied it – that had the effect of casting me fully in his and then so many other’s eyes. It raised the question of how, though this continuing swathes of interactions and projects, something more, something defined in the world could become of me, Jill-san.

In simple contractual terms, I was offered the chance to expand my scope of enquiry nationwide and to the wider region if I felt it necessary – anywhere they had offices. Takeshi’s department funded several research groups, until then confined to their own quiet rooms, now opening up in their own worlds. Here the practical difficulties of any company operation might distill into elegant, ground-based solutions. We’d need the full regalia of possibilities, so tying in every single aspect of pollution and its control would be crucial. That meant all the new technology we were talking about then, and throw in the cultural, political and economic worlds I knew. In the medium- to long-run Takeshi suggested that this be synthesized in the form of a degree, conveniently enough in Singapore. I could do that with their supported provide I kept up duties and was there for the standard planned maintenance of existing projects on the firm’s behalf.

I went back and locked the hotel room door. I pulled the latch all the way across, and sat cross-legged on my bed. The core of it was that, in taking their offer on hand, I’d be relegating my school and acquaintances. He may have known and wanted me to take this plunge. The ever-developing group I was a part of would be relegated to research subject. The paperwork would process the same, still through the company and with the same old visa. I could come and go between the university, its burgeoning new headquarters, and my projects. Further schooling was less appealing than the accompanying promise of wider knowledge. Takeshi’s offer of full support was persuasive. As he’d spoken it had occurred to me, I’ll admit as a vision from deep within, of the power of some higher scholarship, some grand intellectual framework which I hoped could encompass mine. For their part, as long as the firm name was associated with Jill-san and I stayed in the fold, it was an unmitigated positive. For my part, whether through Takeshi’s inspiration or my own crystallization of the essays I’d written till then, I almost spotted a guiding light, a universe of light that led back to the schools and the R. – as much as myself. Embalmed in this, I was brought off the bed, marching on the soft floor to the laptop on the desk, writing to Takeshi to accept the offer I felt giddy and nervous. I went outside onto the chilly streets. I must have walked for two or three hours that night.

 

No matter how I might think things would stay the same, I sensed I was moving up, or on. It was then that I changed, and the world around began to go its way. Maybe because it could never be otherwise, I sensed barriers I had not known existed, roadblocks I’d drawn up, cutting off zones of the imagination, temporarily, suddenly vanishing like simple illusions. It was a contagious feeling, emanating from some center I hadn’t known previously. It was unprecedented, though I dealt with things as someone familiar to herself and as some key part of the firm’s apparatus.

I think it oozed in naturally, if eerily. We’d taken on a number of other Europeans and North Europeans. Some I had heard of or corresponded with in e-mails from their regional offices. Others I couldn’t tell from a clean bar of soap. Few spoke a lick of Japanese, but they made a natural roving band of foreigners. I’d never had such a pack much less embraced the awesome feeling of superiority that came with showing them around. I felt chuffed even describing even the simpler problems of getting on in Japan. When this group quickly hunted down a few of the more notorious watering holes in Nagoya, I tried to dissuade them with some more localized suggestions. But I made a plan – it must have been the first time; I let it happen – to let my hair own and enjoy time with these gaijin (foreigner) strangers. Yet I didn’t arrange so without booking a flight, north to Hokkaido, for the morning after. I can’t explain. It was a week before my return in a flight around China to my third home. Those seven days took on a limited and endless dimension, as did my finances. It was all beyond my control and I liked it.

Old colleagues appeared that evening, their faces freshened, and escorted our new friends to restaurants and bars, put forward the bulk of the toasts. I slugged it through. A fresh graduate by the name of ‘Toby’ was the quietest among us until (as happened numerous times after and had happened often enough before), Toby got the right amount of liquor in him. Several hours into the evening he leaned against a metal frame outside, reminding me of myself at the kombini, smoking a Marlboro, and I went to bum one off him. We watched the pitter-patter of small conspiracies of slightly drunken salarymen stumbling by. Toby was gesticulating with his fingers, like he wanted to place a hand on my knee, I guessed. “You’re quite the legend back home” he said, with a kind of understated, un-invasive but resolute bravery. “You remind me of a big sister or summat.” I chuckled. “Noooo!” he carried on, “I’m not implying anything, man.” “It’s sweet, it’s sweet,” I said, echoing some line from somewhere. “This is a good place to be,” he said. “For sure.” We headed back inside, Toby only a few inches from my back.

Hokkaido came and went. A frigid, pure, blue air. Snacks and even bottled water twice the regular price in Japan. The curious beauty and intrigue of that part of the world, where only a slighter of ocean on the map suddenly presents itself from the plane window as a true sleeve of water defining the main island from its eternal north. The towns and villages – I could have looked into the backyards. The child in the middle seat pointed out of the window past me. He hadn’t had manners instilled in him yet, his hand flirting with my personal space. Some reminder of the previous night, I thought, and let the sweetness pass. Now was the sense of moving around new places, of ladders going ever downwards, upwards, sideways. I was alone throughout. I wondered now and then about the impossibility of thinking about Mesh, Sheilar or Eagle at that time and what that said about me. It was like the end of the universe a fork two leading in equally meaningless or meaningful paths. Determined to travel overland to the cities in the farthest north, I decided at the last call to head back to Honshu (Japan’s main island) by ferry. As we pulled out of the harbor I looked down on the land-borne crew below, waving upwards with Mickey Mouse white gloves. I stayed on duck until the maximum reach of the island came into view in the cold and fading light. We disembarked at around midnight. I spent an hour strolling through the belly of the small town before settling into a warm lodge.

I’d written to Hirota before leaving, with thanks for the kindness and suggesting a meal or drink I return. Back in the outskirts of Nagoya, I wrote again. The response came back almost immediately that a group from the firm had some junket-based tickets to an amusement park. It was on the other side of the city and departure was from the HQ in thirty minutes. Hiro and I set a collection point halfway, where I sat by a landmark, taking in a Marlboro and the view. We had the best part of a half-day traipsing around the park and the rides. The mascots, the rides, the blaring sounds were like a fantasy. Yet, following I think the principles of the Japanese historical royal garden, the architects had excavated a full-blown lake in the heart of the park. Here visitors imperceptibly entered a realm of peace that was punctuated by snack and refreshment bars. Like notes on a scale I could hear something I calling back from memory as a watched a group of boys sharing fried fish balls by a red-and-white striped snack booth. At the next a boy and girl, holding ice-cream, brought from a van that could have been on any green or parking lot in England, half-skipped by and half-started up at us with bright eyes.

Once again the community drank until late in the evening. My colleagues, seniors and now some juniors dropped off from the meal back to the accommodation, the weaklings, and Hirota and I were left alone much later and stumbling through the hotel lobby and corridors. I’d never been sure of Hirota’s status or defined any sensation towards him outside of trust and occasionally a sense of humor from selflessness Now he was in my room and we were holdings hands, and I couldn’t tell you who started that because I can’t remember. He was attentive, methodical, never rushing, and awkwardness gave way to ticklish pleasure and then more. I didn’t know much about how to move but I was a quick learner. It was about time some concept of a man might develop. The meaning of desire changed and maybe only then was introduced. After one round, interrupted and occasionally fumbling, we took showers, slept, and near the break of dawn Hirota pottered back to his room. I placed my head against the cold window, taking in a view of the hills that seemed to extend infinitely to the north.

The firm and I laid plans that must have been the fantasy of any researcher. They’d help liaise with anyone, anywhere, provided they had feet on the ground. Some fate of my past would fit in the with the destiny of their future. Towards, well, towards what was the question. Just as the visual image of surveying that entire geography entered my head, events began to work in their own fashion. In the way of a dog ripping off his leash. Even in my third home, which I now returned to.

 

Mesh and I always kept close contact, but his investigations had veered in a different direction. Around one-hundred kilometers south of the city was a port town. It was depressing and glum on the exterior, but increasingly rampant around the docks. Mesh had segued into an obsessive interest in the world erected around all this infrastructure. As he put it, the thing started in the mountainous center of the country. It was a sight I must have witnessed before my brief departure – more and more glassed-eyes on the faces of more and more youths. It was a dual tier system – the white stuff was purveyed through the country and some supply points before it went extraterritorial north, east and west. It was all under established gangs but bore the dangerous promise of new challengers. Then there was the peppery stuff, the dreaded bootlegged powder, a dirt-cheap quick hit produced thousands of miles away and that sold well here as anywhere. The upper tier scarped the foam off the lower tier and strong-armed them into new careers in their gangs, while the tower tier declined, as fast as you could go back and forth from Japan, into the synthetic underworld. It was like a sadistic renovation of society. Some fortunes were made and a wave of political figures were being mentioned among Mesh’s crowds; but a pall of secrecy much darker than before begun to loom over everything. For the time being Mesh was limited to an implicit reportage – not naming names, apart from the deceased, where the mentioning was a salve for the communities. The full breadth and depth of events had to be crowded into the dark.

As the inner-city blocs and larger slums of Mesh’s world grew and brewed these struggles daily, my teaching posts became quite tranquil. I explained that I wouldn’t be around every weekend, while we worked around-the-clock on to take more and more students. We were thinking of a combination of funding leading to sponsored study, towards higher schooling and potentially universities. We were on the edge. The edge of achieving what Sheilar had imagined and inspired many others to join – at least its first phase, its proof of concept. Eagle, everyone noticed, was maturing into a beautiful young woman. Through her natural talents she’d outperformed all the other students. Meanwhile either through her culture or her refugee status she took an affectionate care for the other kids, whether their kind or ours. But there were threats, and I became acutely aware of them at points, on this rosy horizon. We’d started an hour-long advanced study session for Eagle and a handful of other advanced students. As part of our logistical planning we met when time allowed to share our more private evaluations of the students. While neither of us doubted Eagle or, from our professional standpoints, any aspect of her abilities – she had in fact begun to excel in math to an astounding degree – I remember my counterpart addressing her case with an air of unfamiliar despondency. It was a long road for Eagle to tread, he said, and we didn’t know where her or her people, almost any of the boys or girls, might end up. “You have to see it as they do,” he pointed out, “There’s not one family or extended family that doesn’t have someone in that industry, or someone who died in the wars long ago, or maybe just last month. We’re like as island of paradise in an archipelago of fire. We just hope to maintain them long enough for them to make the next step to safety.”

Leaving the country for my first semester in Singapore, the plane took off amidst the strongest tropical rain for decades. It lifted, my stomach dropped, and I felt an unfamiliar lump in my throat. For the next thirty seconds I was crying, silently, so as not to move or betray the emotion to the stranger beside me. I smiled as well,. Memories fly past at this point. To my pleasant surprise, terrified that I wouldn’t fit in, or straggle behind my classmates, I was considered the new golden girl of the department. I had experience in industry and its charitable arm but others had precious little. Long as it related to water, I could go on at will. Any other aspect I could bring back to my own. My project, still a molting chick, caught plenty of imaginations. As never before, I became loquacious; even loud. The thought of colleagues back home really got me inflamed, times some smart-Alec digressed on the virtues of grand solutions, or failed to grasp some of the complexities I’d come to understand. Do you know the significance of the different way a man and woman has to relieve themselves, the demands on privacy and dignity we have to fulfil for the latter bud don’t? Do you not see that without a process that understands the damage being done and seeks to correct it, we can’t actually do better than standing still, or sit here and talk about it?

With a few weeks I also had my eyes on a certain person: a tall boy working in some peripheral relationship to our field. I kept up my Nagoya coffee shop habit, engrained, always associated with the neutrality of good things, and around about the third week he walked in and sat opposite. By which I mean we were separated by several tables, as imposing as ocean waves. He looked disinterested in his surroundings and fascinated, constantly, in whatever he read. I liked that. We rubbed shoulders once, twice, three times in the weeks ahead, at the kisatten (coffee shop) or this or that hotspot. Once I thought he was going to approach, but he spilled or dropped something. Another time we stood waiting at entrance to the same event, glued together with a gaggle of other students, but my mouth was stuck shut, and I’m sure his was too. The final time I returned from a brisk walk around the bay and spotted him directly opposite. It was our just so happened moment.

The main adjective that comes to mind is handsome. It wasn’t hard for him, being a mixed kid. I thought he could have been a spy in a thriller, and told him so. It felt that he’d waltzed in from some novel. He worked out in Yunnan, southwest China. Ethics of public health, of the treatment of the critically ill and other types of therapeutic care. When a person digresses on the complexities of human interaction and solicitude in those situations, you can tell the great enhancing effect it must have on them and others. I began to enjoy my bit, though unspoken, in the special privilege of hearing him lecture in front of others. He seemed to love the roles being reversed, and more often than not I was rushing back to work on some idea after a speech or class, sometimes with whoever had extended some invitation that evening, and he’d always see me off with a smile and an “Off you go” or some stage lines like that. It made me chuckle at first, but it was also erotic. That’s getting ahead of a few things, though. I was hungry. Weak and strong alternatively. I wasn’t particularly romantic. I liked to play him songs by the Beatles, lyrics we all know by heart in my edge of the world. It started in this confused way when the lines from “All I’ve Got To Do” entered my brain. The saccharine lilting about wanting to kiss or hold someone whose presence alone mattered.. My wanting it just one more time, twice, three times, n more times. Resurrecting some ancient memory of my parents or siblings singing some carefree part of the song, I sang any number of lyrics over the next few months.

I went with Derek back and forth around Singapore over the next few months, to his sites in Yunnan as well. Invited to the home of one of his study families, I had the sense of almost suffocating joy. Walks on beaches, hikes through the mountains, in short some giddy feeling that as simply, whenever I got down to thinking about it, going at the pace of life. Over six months, closer to a year later, his father called in sick. His mother was also unwell, quite uninterruptedly. You have to get back home, they said. So he took them into his care. That was a chapter in my life for the longest time. Of course when I married later it was for love as much as the next person.

No one was ever to blame, but it’s true that I visited my survey area less and less. Around or after the time we separated I must have spent a month to myself at the now near empty campus, in the eerie silence, among small islands of stragglers in the main library. The urge was there, a call at the back of my mind, to find a plane ticket and surprise him at home, to make the necessary clicks on a few webpages. I couldn’t tell what kept me back – the fear of another home to add to the list, of another part of the world where my emotions and self would gradually and this time, in some final way, seep out? Was it another way of avoiding thinking about what I was gaining and losing elsewhere?

Instead I brought myself back to the UK. There I was with my father again. London was freezing. I wore a scarf and thick coat and sweated at the sight of a Christmas tree. I was looking at new stores behind giant glass windows, at products stacked like mountain bedrock, newly glistening. I was watching the broken-down poor shuffle past with their rickety prams and Benson & Hedges teeth. I waited to meet an acquaintance, wearing a gilet. He escorts me – many people may have had the same experience – to a bookstore, then Starbucks. He digresses on a girl and some love affair when he’s not asking after my work and praising it to the skies. He’s the kind of individual forever on the cusp of maturity in five years’ time. Or do I mean seven? Five, a voice intrudes. He’ll hurt, he’ll suffer, it says, uncharitably. I feel like I’m missing something, Maybe the pace of the beaches and mountains. I’m scrolling through social media, unfocused for the first time I know, uncharacteristically curious. So-and-so looks good now and so-and-so is balding. So-and-so plays music and so-and-so shadows some politician, and this might ultimately go back to where I’m from, to the R. – as well. Then, one day, a long paragraph shows up on Mesh’s page: Our great friend, colleague and inspiring mentor… has passed away… unflagging commitment and bravery even in the face of mortal danger… The events that transpired… a tragedy that shows the grave threat faced by the journalistic community in … and other states where freedom of the press is not considered by all to be a right.. our only solace that… doing what he loved. The search for justice will go on. I pack my mental luggage and re-route myself through streets we wandered together. I refrain from weeping, telling myself it’ll happen when it happens. What I feel instead is a slow bleeding, seeping through my body and breathing. Like the bullet that struck him.

Then it’s passed on that the funeral’s in two weeks. When it happens – and all the landing, check-in, night-time walks and catch-ups in-between slip out of memory – it’s oddly formal, like filling in paperwork. One solid, heavy outpouring of tears, when I finally let it go. The momentary awareness of a total belief in the spirits when we lay him in the ground. Then a long and protracted social event which I spend mostly listening and learning. Mesh was a man adored by many – hundreds, thousands. They’re all new to me. Not a fresh face in the room outside his closest colleagues. No Sheilar? There, within the same land where it began, the untrimmed edges of the city are even more distant memory.

I sit up against the hotel bed-board that evening, aware of the present loss, cognizant of the other thing – some gradual return to the present tense. As the sensation returned, it brought with it nerves, near immobility. I couldn’t write, couldn’t speak a word to them until I was back. I felt I should apologize. From downtown the following morning I took the long-legged bus to the east, disembarked and took the familiar, smaller service in the direction of ___ . Your memory’s a broken clock, I told myself. We’re not there. We’re still at the factories. Just look. You’re confusing things – that wasn’t the hairpin prior to the bend that you think it was. You’ve been away too long and they’ve changed routes for some sharper turn you never took. I kept up such a monologue as this, until we stop at a makeshift terminal of dust-covered  buses. ___ is gone, blandly stated the conductor, who I hadn’t noticed through his beard. You have to take of at E.S. (Electricity Station).

Define gone, I commented, over and over that day, half to the image of the driver still in my mind, half for myself. For all intents and purposes, as they say, ___was flattened. In more official parlance, ___was cleared. My eyes followed the former row of stores and shacks now torn down. I walked alongside then, and an old man, arms behind his back, came passively up to me and past, trailing a large garbage bag half-satisfied with plastic bottles. The old lakeside view behind us had vanished, transformed forever by new dirt and weeds. To my right, the former makeshift entrance through to the labyrinth of backstreets and my school – every possible edge was sealed. The flimsy steel fence might as well have been made of concrete. A prison wall for my and their memories, weighing on me from the outside. Everything inside was levelled. A greater transformation I hadn’t seen in all those years, than this sudden flattening of grey tarmac.

“This is not yours anymore,” I said to myself, uncontrollably. Visible in the background were the mechanical contraptions, earth-movers, diggers – layers of a new foundation. I could see – whispering prophetically in the wind and in my recollections after – the thin laminated notice that laid out in half-detail the construction work ahead. I approached the sign. Maybe it could speak to me and tell me where my friends had gone. But it wasn’t about them. It was about all those other people. I tried to peer through this haze and plan my next move. I tunneled through my list of contacts, past those potential carriers of information whom I thought it impolite to bother, almost embarrassed to do so, in fact. I reached Sheilar’s name and finally called after several failed attempts to press down. “If she’s not dead too,” I pushed the voice out of my mind.

We talk enough to convince ourselves we grasp the idea and even the experience of breakneck development in up-and-coming countries. We know there’s something discomfiting at the core but that it’s inevitable as shopping malls and highways. When it does happen to you, when it descends like an alien spaceship across your rotoscope view of the world it feels incalculably different. It was almost my badge of honor – to be wearing that experience, to have it pinned on me and to embody it. I daresay I felt a spring in my step to accept that. But was me, and me alone. I recognized that the others had to be accounted for. I lived for them, I’m sure. I had to know where they were and what we were doing, if we could be doing anything. “Shipped off,” Sheilar answered, “They packed them off to three different parts of the city, if you can call them parts of the city, if you can call it anything. It happened about two months ago. We didn’t think to disturb you.” The following morning I was in her small office, unchanged, chaotic as ever, as she slammed a sheet of paper on the desk. On it were the names of the three different address, all wildly far apart, only half-familiar to me. Images of the children and their parents swam into view. “We’ll go there, won’t we?” I asked. “Sure we will,” Sheilar answered. Then she was spirited away to some other arresting matter.

 

I was barely working. Deadlines, whatever they meant, were off. A mile off. Any work with the firm was streamlined and infrequent enough that it would have grabbed undivided attention had it come. But it didn’t. My thoughts wondered towards what were suddenly loose ends. It didn’t seem that I’d exist at the end of them. I had a week remaining in the country and Hirota was asking about my keikaku for the New Year. My heart beat fast enough to keep me awake at night. I’d been up in this other thing – with myself, the new developments in my life, with all of us – for many months that now seemed entirely fruitless.

I’d done it all willingly, I said, not without a quiet regret. I’d taken a step in some unspoken and treacherous direction. I sat wondering how to respond to Hirota. It may have been the years together, the implicit trust, that compelled me to type out the slow response: Plan to seek out some of my old students. One of my volunteer areas was demolished. My students have scattered like the autumn leaves in the wind. Hirota replied: zannen (What a shame). Shame! I added, though not without the counterthought of something beautiful and natural in that decay.

I took the temporary view of being engaged in yet another round of transformation. Losing one home shouldn’t prevent me from further engagement with three more promising communities. More were involved this way, not less. The story was simply carrying on in new form. I could visit the estates on alternate days and strike the addresses off my list as I went. I’d send pictures to Hirota, who’d recently taken to sharing shots of his hometown. (Till today I feel embraced by the undying call of the Japanese winter – the only permanence I ever found.)

The southern districts of – have always been a land of hills. Shaped like steam buns, they were furry with trees when I first arrived. Villages and estates crawled around the back some hills. Poorer communities were laid out over others. I’m sure you have the right image in your mind when you think of this – but I didn’t. Now the postcard view of the city, taking facing north, which ignores these hills of humanity, is equally foreign. Not the city I know either. Not a place I can refer to. The point is, and I’m not trying to be naïve, but I’d never considered from my vantage point what seems like an obvious fact – that all hills have another side, that it’s even possible for life to hold out there. As the bus trundled along the path to the first address, I noted that this indeed was what we were doing, first meandering through an established, old neighborhood, then through more metal-frame homes and endless appended alleys appended, finally around the belly of the hill to a site down-wind. From one side we felt ourselves to be standing on the aorta of the city. From another we felt like guardians of the panoramic view along the flats through to Mesh’s port city.

The first new home was built on a steep incline, contraptions spread out like a starfish around us. I could see how their water supply lynched onto the existing network as did electricity. The type or arrangement for the most impoverished. The self-organization we wished to prolong and ameliorate had been given over to a rental system. Those directly above them on the precipice or some organization back on the sunny side of the slope paid directly for their utilities and rented energy downwards at an inflated cost that no family could cover. This explained the black-outs in many of the homes I passed and the eerie light emerging from computer screens in one from which a boy stalked out and walked past with darkened eyes. Sheilar and I exchanged glances, while my mind weaved together picture acquired only from reading. At least you could say the pipes were clean. No more mercury and no more filthy rivers and less cholera. The experience was near-automatic. It was like returning to a home I’d known all my life but never visited, except in dreams that had replaced reality.

I felt a hand tugging at the hem of my dress. We’d been exposed by a former student of mine. She promptly dragged us along to see mother, father and brother. A cubby-hole room, whose one light was switched on for our impromptu visit, Sheilar and the mother launching into a long and undulating discussion. The sense returned of having been here before – knowing each and every face. My reverie broken by Sheilar, who spoke to me in English: I don’t think they’re safe here. They’re saving up to move out, like they were back in ___. They’ve always been saving up. Probably they’ll do it a hundred-years from now. It’s not in them to leave, but still I’m worried. My student left to play outside. We sat for ten more minutes or so, then departed. I walked, sweating buckets, up and around the hill again, until the scene in its entirety was out of view. I could have left a whole world behind; such was the sharp and sudden sense of loss.

Back in my lodgings that night, I slipped into a confused sleep, then a long dream. Mesh and I were driving along a narrow trail by the port. He seemed to be massaging some of the green fur into a roll. He smiled with black molars. I felt a foul taste in my mouth and my teeth clicking as if out of place. The car raced forward, apparently over or through the flanking vehicles. A metallic crush reverberated through my skull and around my ringing ears. My body experienced the paralytic pain only administered in a dream. I slipped from this into a second dream standing among faces that were mostly blank and anonymous, statues at Mesh’s funeral. “You didn’t have to do this!” I screamed at a group of young boys, fancying I’d identified the killers. “You didn’t have to! You always had a choice!” I rang Sheilar the following morning. “I don’t think I can handle this, my dear,” (we’d used the epithet since early on) “Yesterday was rough. I let them down.” She paused and I heard her sigh. “We all feel like this from time-to-time. I believe you ought to come tomorrow. There are people there we’ve known from the beginning. I’m sure they’d love to see you, Jill.”

Forty-eight hours later, we sought out the second group of dispossessed. They’d relocated deep into the heart of the city. One wave of development seemed to have washed over the area and left in the devastation a small chain of aging apartments. It was a free-for-all initially. As much as forty percent of our number squatted in the leftover apartments, aware there was nothing permanent here, aware as we all were that they waited for The Man. But he was busy elsewhere, and fortunately any of rougher elements were in abeyance. The one commonality was the rationing of running water a strict regimen on lighting and appliances. They’d been the first group to leave, which they did practically the minute the order came down. They’d mixed with rural and gypsy folk peacefully. “There’s someone I’ll reintroduce you to,” whispered Sheilar, ushering down a corridor, eyes occasionally glaring at door numbers. At the end of a third floor row she opens a door, we walk inside, and I strain to work out the face in front. Thoughts meander back through rapidly opening portals to the same pony-tailed girl who placed herself in Mesh’s arms (hadn’t they all?) and brought me to my first classroom. She was taller and as anybody from there would notice, at marriageable age. Her legs had grown long and spindly and her hips widened. In a side-kitchen her mother stirred the contents of a large wok. We sat for lunch, and as I looked between Dot and her mother, I realized this wasn’t the only time I’d seen them recently. Unsure where this tale was headed, I stood by the window afterwards, looking down on a miniature playground. Dot appeared by my side. Into my hands she placed – I felt the hardened sides first – a black-and-white photograph. I turned it right-ways up to see Mesh’s beaming smile. “Uncle,” said Dot. I put one arm around her shoulders and we took in the temporary view outside.

“The last one’s always the hardest,” commented Sheilar, nonchalantly. We were seated on the bus headed back downtown. A light drizzle pattered down outside. I brought the folded single A4 sheet from my pocket and studied the third address for a good while. I didn’t recognize the street or even neighborhood; even the general part of the city was unknown to me. “That’s because it’s not in – ” explained Sheilar, looking away. “It must be a good three-hour drive.” My heart sank as I figured this was where the K– had ended up. I thought of them and my dear Eagle.

Three days passed before we were sat in a minivan headed for the northern plains, beyond even the wetlands, through towns screaming with cabbies and hustlers, to a place triangulated not between our capital and its countryside but some urban identity even further out on one side and, almost in another universe, a notorious border city from a neighboring state. It wasn’t anywhere closer to home for Eagle or her people, but the thought felt insignificant against the background, where it was taking all these other people, what it might mean and what they might be through it. At length we emerged from a hilly valley, down a sharp corner and a kind of ring-road allied to a train track; I peeked out at the passengers, their eyes all turned forward; out of the dusty window.

We parked in a square on the edge of town. Space was arranged in grids of interlocked pentagons, settlements lining the intersections, each with their central square and standard sets of stones and conveniences and transport down the chain. We knew the K– had been centrally placed. We hopped down from the bus headed for the perceived core.

We never could have anticipated the scene before us. Bright yellow K- garb against the blacks and greys of the local uniform. We watched a member of their community push through a crowd, towards a bustling market. We followed like spies until we found ourselves in the shaded lanes of the market. Several of Eagle’s countrymen stood out strikingly in stalls. I thought I recognized a few. Like any old marketplace, I repeated to myself. Then turned to the owner of one store and saw the outlook of my former student. From the look in Eagle’s eye, she’d seen us approaching. She was taller, and what I immediately recognized as womanhood was fully blossomed upon her. There was also that local style, as we’d never known ten minutes previously. I was saved from any awkward pretense at asking the price of fruit when she shimmied out and put an arm around each of myself and Sheilar. With a few rushed and excited words she transferred duties to an assistant who’d appeared magically beside her. “Please meet my family,” she said, leading us through the endpoints of the marketplace and down an alleyway. But I’ve met them before, I thought, as she looked back at me, with the same confident eyes. Out of the alleyway, we entered a block of cream-terraced buildings, two-floor homes with surrounding walls and metal fences for entrances. A dog ran up to the gate, followed by a nanny, who led us up to the door that opened to a room with a glass chandelier above and modest leather sofa. She bid us to sit and wait. A phone-call and fifteen minutes later we were shaking hands with her husband, a balding man in his thirties who’d hurried back from business to honor the teachers Eagle spoke so highly of.

It came to a close and reached a beginning at that point. Eagle’s home, the grace our host, the pieces of their engagement and hasty marriage – I was able to situate it within its own logic and time and space. But at the same time it was disconcerting, and strangely discontinuous. I felt my body separate from my thoughts. I felt the intruder. The more they smiled, the more Eagle showed contentedness and joy at her new position, the stronger my sense of thoughts and emotions moved in the opposite direction.

 

I’ve told the story in bits and pieces over the years, but I’ve never had the time to sit down and write it out. Closest I came was when I achieved this career of mine and managed to have subordinates, and even adversaries. Sometimes I ended up at parties where, engaged something genuine in his or her curiosity, I ran through this or that part of my experience. There were longer stories, laugh-out-loud moments, and I think I few less sanguine tales as well. But they’re locked in their own box, contained in the above. This record is only for myself, as much as it’s for you. I can only bring you the sketch of what survives. I want to live on.

I left the country soon after the meeting with Eagle. I settled on the culture of academic work, further procuration and presentation of data. It was almost as if nothing else had ever happened or mattered, almost as if Japan or ___ no longer existed. I was doing it, I felt, in a body that was slowly transforming. It was as if I’d returned to a natural indifference, revealed to a younger version of myself, with no friends, only acquaintances and contacts. Yet I was also aware, presently aware – especially when we’d discuss a place I knew, somewhere from the past – of a new warmth of feeling, an unfamiliar smile appearing over my face, stretching my cheeks.

Strange still, that while acting in this way I knew, or came around to knowing, that I was burying all the older thoughts, one memory at a time. I’d relinquished any hope to be at the center of changes in Eagle’s life or the lives of others, and along with that (or should I have this the other way round?) the thought of any area of the world beyond my front door as mutable under present conditions. The problem was one of so many patterns that I had to imagine between areas. I wasn’t wedded to the law of averages, more the case-by-case scenario that we call the world. Frankly I was convinced that only scandals could force the hand of change that would improve other lives, or issues so dire that international effort could subsidized for misplaced ill will and insecurity. It wasn’t possible to go further. Best we could settle on was a five-percent improvement, I said to myself. Five percent more staying in school and not paralyzed by basis lack of access or custom, or the ways of local and global sabotage that I was in and out of. Even then I’ve never been close to that I really think would work, which would be for the states themselves to be annulled and replaced with ethnic or geographic groups capable of representing their interests all the way through, to the very marrow. This dreamed future I only peer at through a veil, only envisage through what is not, what was not for them. I hope we reach a technological singularity when all we’ve done is driven to involute scandalously and drag everybody up with it – then we can talk about races and nations.

I wonder if all this doesn’t constitute something secretive about me and that’s what I always was, despite the openness with which I acted and did things in my own mind. Hirota and Takeshi and a great many others must have been shocked and betrayed when I switched to the people we all saw as our main rivals upon graduation. We sought to disentangle the networks of other firms in across a bewildering stretch of the globe. Rather infamously for some, we lobbied for and succeeded in acquiring Hirota’s firm. We didn’t break that car into parts, but clumped it together with our own magic adhesive. I sent my people. We launched a behemoth, without knowing what it meant, headed somewhere, also guided by fate.

Inevitably and I bottomed out. I moved from one thing to another. Most if not all of the remainder has been peeled away, irretrievably. I don’t know why I won’t think of it but it stopped remembering at one point. It might be like others experience their memories of school. Sometimes indeed I dream of that classroom, only its theirs now, in the village that was destroyed. We’re hurrying around, concocting plans, screaming out that we’ll salvage what we can. The demolition crew’s due to arrive tomorrow morning. The pervasive dread of unpreparedness haunts the dream. It prolongs through to the following day. I have to tell myself the time has passed, but unlike dreaming and waking from the dream, there’s none of the slow relief, and after all it’s not clear what there is to be relieved from. I can’t tell if I grew up or stayed a child. I don’t know whether I’m immature or the mother of the universe. I don’t know if I’m standing above it, or if something deeper canvasses everything. But the night presents an answer to me, once in a while, through an unspoken fear.

This is the final stretch – that extra half-hour at the end of a marathon. Mesh reached the end of his life but he’s always stayed with me. Never could I accommodate that loss. He still lives and breathes somewhere, I believe. I also believe the other thing, that somehow by virtue of being alive and in completely different terms with the world, Eagle has become, impossibly, not a part of me. There are times I try to arrest this by some trick of the brain. I give her not just a home but a new project, one suited to her abilities and great latent talents. She connects with local and international fundraisers to set up a clothing workshop for her people; not at a choking, poking slum cabin. A courtyard in some unknown valley, blue skies, where they sell the garments at a steady profit and educate the women about writing, mathematics and business. One becomes a lawyer and represents the rights of her people. Another becomes an actress and marries into Indian film royalty, divorces and is later feted as a singer popular in her new home and Pakistan. People from those countries drink and toast to her in revels on lakes in Peshawar. Maybe in that future past Eagle grows to be the person with qualities that I’ve lost. Still a part of me registers her as mine. But she and they have become others.

That is how it is to be made by someone. We don’t ask them for permission. For our own reasons and through our own causes we make ourselves through them. Their departure from us is a gift, most of the time. I’m fortunate that the search took me this way, but part of me wonders whether I’d feel the loss I imagine if her fate was worse. Part of me imagines, too, whether all this musing is in vain. Part of me still has to ask, why this irrepressible urge to finally write about it? Then I’m reminded of how I see all those characters in places they shouldn’t be found. In faces that aren’t their own. There were dozens of other girls and boys, and almost each one transposed to someone in my own culture. I find myself speaking to them in a different, softer, maybe kinder tone. I wonder if they are aware of it. Sometimes I hear a voice beyond that which says, It doesn’t matter what we think, even what we feel, but what happens. It started there; it carried on till now.

These memories have become all about the future, informed and built through the past. Still building. Yet their essence has no past. I’ve only been able to sit down and write so far. Maybe there’s something personally epochal in the rehearsal. It’s never a story that looks for another, at least of the same kind. But something in it repeats. Finally, there’s myself, pushing and pulling at the bottom of this. I might on occasion see the Jill of five years from now. In some metropole, preferably a European one with an old district, perusing bookstores, locating the best paella or underground bars at night, cultivating a new interest or acquiring literacy in history of film. These imaginings are, suitably or not, now empty of others. To imagine others is to see them like pieces on a chessboard.

Times I feel I was meant to be elsewhere. I was meant to spend my later years there. I should have arrived there already. Now and then I feel dragged down by the thought. A girl on the subway in this city, her hair curls the way a student of mine did. Unconsciously I register the language in background whispers – that same subway, a mall, a park – and I’m transported to what’s an indistinct place now. No Mesh, no friends. I picked up a bit of knowledge the other day, on the influence of posture / diet on complications during pregnancy. My mind had to bring it back to them. They’re my teachers now.

Other times I say I’ve positioned myself outside it all – the hierarchy of gains and losses to which everything succumbs. I don’t think it’s ever possible to be empty and give. It’s more about the movement. If you want to give, simply position yourself away, harness your skills and build around them. Welcome visitors as they arrive. Times like those I think I’ve paid back the debt for a thread that was slowly lost. Then I wonder what other people might say.