Grace Hu

 
 
 
Chinoiserie

“It’s Nietzschean slave morality, satisfaction is enough. It meets people’s needs like they’re cattle, without recognition of individual spark and what actually leads to human dignity. But people can tell themselves it’s good enough,” Arlin said. “It’s all capitalist gobbledygook, they won’t fix the problems that are actually killing us.”

“I know what you’re saying, Arlin. But we can’t debate this right now.” 

Arlin stood awkwardly in the doorway and watched as Esther packed the hospital bag. She found herself reminded of how Esther had changed from when she first got to uni. Esther had come to uni with a cookie-cutter personality, she had tried to be more alternative than she was. Arlin had ignored her for months. There was something definite about how Esther did things, as if she had schemas in her head indicating to her how to chop a vegetable neatly, how to greet someone in a hallway or a housemate who’d just woken up, how she wanted to judge a person’s actions. It seemed to Arlin that Esther knew what she was going to think before she even thought it. When she placed things in the bag, the same one they used when Tom’s antibiotics stopped working, it was as if she was confident of exactly where they would land, without straightening or re-arranging. 

The rush of the highway in the distance sounded like the wind. Arlin could just see the church’s window outside, which she always thought looked like a big slice of lotus root, casting shadows into its own hollows in the grey night. 

“It encourages people to stop fighting. They don’t have the will to recover.” 

“And what do you want?” Esther said. “Beck has a bacterial infection. It’s not going to resolve.” 

She didn’t like what happened next. To the people. 

They became too consistently themselves. They were slow to react, as if the thoughts had to twist through the hallways of their congenital minds, but she was slow to react too, had been since she was last ill. They had been playing cards under a fluorescent light strip in Tom’s kitchen. It had been so humid Arlin thought she had stopped sweating. It felt like she was breathing water or breathing through thick rain. Then someone had mentioned as she was itching herself that they had forgotten to turn on the mosquito net and she realised, remembered, these people no longer had such vulnerabilities. She had felt then like she was in a room full of mirrors and the vividness of their eyes only reflected her own humanity back at her. Then she had heard a metal clatter outside the window as something, not the rails, changed on the track. 

She still thought it was that mosquito which got her sick, although she could not be certain. It had been summer and she was bitten a few more times. 

“Are we still going to Beck’s 21st?” she said.

“Yeah of course, he’d kill us if we didn’t and you’re against that.”  

*

“Hey,” he said, “it’s good to see you.” 

Beck looked better, she assumed. They hadn’t been allowed to see him when he was ill. It was meant to make it easier, so when they looked at him they wouldn’t remember how ill he had been, how he looked. Now there was a new shine at the edge of his temple like the dried sweat people had sometimes after a fever. 

She fancied there was a sheen on him also, as if the colour was applied to his skin, not a carefully built up pigment, lighter in some spots, darker in others, almost pointillist. He was dark, but now he looked, she thought, dark but not translucent. But she had seen them in the dark, had shone her phone torch on their hands. They glowed through with light, orange and embryonic, just like people did. 

The air came in humid through the vents. Arlin wondered, not for the first time, if that’s what finally killed him. 

It was how hospitals in China must have been like. Her mum had told her, although not, seemingly, from memory. Even the official signs seemed like a pretence, or a grandiose performance, when the outcomes were so uncertain. 

The walls looked vaguely like they were covered by a very thin layer of yellow grime. The paint was tacky, any touch would leave wet fingerprints. The humidity. 

“You know I’ve always loved you,” she said. 

“You’re a strange one, Arlin. Come sit down!”

Arlin sat down and pulled out the corduroy bear from her tote bag and put it on the hospital sheets, thin and like mountains, under which were Beck’s new legs and his new alien body. 

“Look,” she said. “He’s wearing a bowtie.” 

He went to touch it. His hands were still like hands in pictures, completely steady.

“How did your mum take it?” she said. 

“You know I get your anxiety, my mum’s a neuroscientist.”

“Yeah yeah, your crazy mum.” 

“And she kept us indoors as kids. No sport, no pools, remote learning all the way.”

“Summer cancelled every summer.”

“Yeah, God forbid we interact with the material world and all its varied and dangerous diseases.” 

“Yep, it’s fine as scientific policy but not for her own kids.”

“Yep exactly, not for my kids. Nope!”

“So, how’d she take it?”

“Oh, she got with the program so quick. That scientific consensus in her mind, just changed, just changed like that! But yeah, I know what you mean, Arlin. I wish I got longer in my my body. I feel there’s something missing.”

She felt completely separate from him then. Contemptuous. Their fates had been intertwined but now she realised they had never shared anything that mattered. She was left completely unaffected by what happened to him, and had felt the pain of his death about as much as his new body. Arlin would go on living and Beck would continue to be dead. 

She felt then like she could hate him for bringing her into contact with weakness, but that too would be exhausting. There had been an interplay between them, like harmonic motion between two sets of concentric ripples but now they were the pebbles sinking to the bottom of the pond.

“But the doctors say there’s some function I can recover, so I’m going to work hard at that.” 

“Yeah, you should give it a shot,” she said. 

“It’s okay to accept that things aren’t how you wanted them to be,” he said.  

“Yeah.” 

They were quiet for a moment. Beck was looking straight on at her so that she could see the whites of his eyes with perfect clarity as, she realised, she had never seen them before. 

“You know, I’ve been thinking. I never got to experience much in my body. And what was the point of that? How much faster could I possibly have died if I lived a little. I just feel different about things now, I feel older.” 

He had lost the fight in him, the animal in him. He was almost sedate now. 

“You know, in our group only you and Esther are actually still alive. I want us to stay together and still have those experiences. We’re here for you, even if you don’t feel that way.” 

He was retreating into his memories already, Arlin thought, like he was trying to reach a resolution by replaying who he was, and that was why he desired all of a sudden for them to be happy, and when he spoke he lacked franticness. It was like her and Esther being happy was a path laid out in front of them, he seemed so sure it would happen, or an equation crafted from the Jungian demons of his mind. His desire was entirely divorced from reality, it consisted in himself. He was too consistently himself. A martyr and too reasonable.

And that was how they got you.

As he smiled, the line between his two front teeth was not aligned to the flesh between his nostrils in the middle of his nose. His top teeth were slightly off centre. Had they always been like that, they must have been. Where else could they have gotten that detail. 

“Remember when we were at Margiela and Tom just threw up spontaneously after I told him he’d had enough to drink?”

“I had to throw out a perfectly good pair of Doc Martens after that. Do you remember your boyfriend threw up ON ME? They were leather, they literally don’t make them anymore. ”

“Okay I forgot that part. That was really nice, I really enjoyed it. It was a really good night. We should do it again sometime.”

“Oh my god yeah, definitely,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

*

“You know,” Esther said, “When I first joined the group I thought Beck hated me.” 

Arlin smiled. “You told me. He’s pretty aloof unless you get to know him.”

“He’s pretty hard to get to know, pretty hard to understand as well. I feel like you’re the only one who understands him, you’re like evil sidekicks looking for a third.” 

“Like Flotsam and Jetsam?”

“What’s Flotsam and Jetsam?” 

“They’re from this kids show.” 

Their apartment, the first place either of them ever had to call their own, smelt like garlic and fried oil from dinner, even in their bedroom. 

The landlord had tried to give it a decadent look. It had glass crystals that hung around the bare living room bulb like a chandelier and that European wallpaper that was meant to look Chinese. Chinoiserie, Beck had said. Arlin didn’t think it looked Chinese at all. It failed to understand how Chinese symmetry worked. The birds, flowers, branches were too evenly spaced, it lacked the subtleness, the sense of movement. 

So close, Arlin could smell the sweet fried leek infusing into Esther’s long straight hair. It looked rough, un-smoothed and shaggy even spread out on their pillows and blankets, coarse and thick like a horse’s mane. 

Outside the highway rushed like the wind. 

Esther was very proud of her hair. It was one of the few things she would own up to being proud of. Even her relentless efficiency was, she claimed, just how things were done properly. She didn’t put it up, even when cooking.

Arlin didn’t trust herself with knives anymore. She’d picked up a tremor when she was ill. 

They heard then the shuddering twinge of their upstairs neighbour wrestling open the bathroom door, and moments later the familiar rush of water and jamming the door closed, and then footsteps the sound of which after a few steps mysteriously went away. 

They lay with a space between them and their heads close together and knees touching, like twins, like sisters. 

The overhead light was dizzyingly bright. When Arlin closed her eyes, it left an imprint that stayed momentarily large, kaleidoscopic. She put her arm over her face and turned in towards Esther. 

“Hey, don’t react badly,” Esther said. 

“Okay.”

“I got my head scanned today.”

“Why would I react badly,” Arlin said. “It’s your choice.”

“I’ve been thinking about Beck. He looks really good. I can’t convince myself that if something were to happen to me, that it would be so bad.” 

“You’d literally be dead.”

“Yeah, but you’ve seen Beck. He has great continuity. If I’m dead, at least I won’t be completely gone.”

Hypothetically, she would have closure. Every unsaid apology, every end of hers would draw to a neat bow in a future she’d never see. Would Esther feel better on her death-bed knowing some version of her would be out there reaching the happiness, the completeness she had desired. And even if she never knew, everyone would recognise that that person was who she had the potential to be. Some version of her would live to experience the excruciating length of life, dark nights of faith and questioning about the world and her own ability that felt as claustrophobic as the night before an execution, to grow old enough to recognise the self-possessed wisdom she had in her youth, to understand things about adulthood Arlin was only now realising she did not understand, how was it that she was still learning such simple things. 

She had been watching adults, who, she found, were all confusing, strange and intensely, singularly themselves, so that they were monstrous and so internal and different from each other, like wells, that it became impossible to imagine them as anything but alone. They grew around their deficiencies, which sometimes grew wider even as they healed. They accumulated more damage and more dysfunction. As the vagueness of young adulthood gave way to the unrelenting precision of maturity, carefully cultivated traits, intensities left in isolation for years, mannerisms developed over years of being the same person. A lifetime of idiosyncrasies. How the same story could change over the years. How a relationship could ebb and flow, draw between understanding and misunderstanding. All things Arlin had only begun to see were things that happened to people. All things Esther could only tell herself Beck would continue to experience.  

“I know you’re really sensitive about things like this.”

“I won’t stay with you after,” Arlin said. “If you die.” 

“Okay, I think I knew that.” 

“You won’t fight as hard to live.”

“You can’t know that.” 

“I’ve seen it.”

“Stop being childish, Arlin. You act like not signing that paper is going to protect you from the things that could kill you, but you’re not any safer.”

She felt in that moment disgusted by Esther, like every little moment, every annoying thing, had been building to this revelation. It was entirely consistent with her character. 

What was it she had done the other day? She was forgetting. How could she forget something that irritated her so much at the time, only the other day. She found it hard to recall examples now, but there had been so many things, they left a feeling, a memory of a feeling that she could recall at will and experience almost impassively.

The outer corners of Esther’s eyelashes had become distinctly curled up, like she had been rubbing her eyes or had lain too hard into the pillow, or like they had been replaced by something that tried to recreate their sense of life, the haphazard way they would sometimes be curled, but without understanding, like chinoiserie.

When she looked at her face, smoothed out and waiting, Arlin wondered if Esther was becoming resigned already. 

“If I died and came back as one of them, I’d fucking kill myself.”

“No,” Esther said. “You’d want to live.”