“I had an eye infection while I was in Hong Kong. I’m still recovering.” Her gaze drifted away from him and out over the water. “I swam here for the first time in the spring. It’s quite an experience.”
A few minutes later, he was standing in the shallow end. Naemi was sitting on a white plastic sun lounger, her elbows on her knees. What did she mean—an experience?
“You’ll need the goggles,” she called out.
He wet the goggles and put them on, then he pushed gently out into the pool.
It wasn’t until he was approaching the deep end that it happened. One moment, the bottom of the pool was lined with pale blue tiles, as most pools are, the lanes marked by slender strips of a much darker blue. The next moment, the tiles were replaced by glass, through which he could see the concrete side wall of the hotel dropping away, and the cars in the car park, small as toys. There was the feeling that he might fall, and he had the urge to hold on to something solid. He had stopped swimming, and was floating facedown, like someone snorkeling, and it felt unnatural, and miraculous, though the sense that he might be in danger hadn’t gone away. His brain seemed unable to choose between two equally compelling interpretations of reality.
He started to swim again, keeping his eyes on the ground twenty-four floors down. When he reached the deep end, he realized that the last third of the pool extended horizontally from the side of an otherwise sheer building, and that it must be visible from the street below. He would also be visible, a tiny figure suspended in the water, in the air.
Naemi called out to him again. He couldn’t hear what she was saying.
He swam back to the shallow end, then turned around. Though he was prepared this time, there was still a part of his brain that feared he might plummet to his death. But there was another part that looked forward to the moment when he swam out beyond the edge of the building, into space. There was another part that couldn’t wait.
Later, when he’d had enough, Naemi wrapped him in a white bathrobe.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He pushed the hair back off his forehead. “It reminded me of something that happened the last time we made love.”
“Really?”
“I had a kind of fantasy or daydream,” he said. “I was flying over fields or meadows, the grass flattened by the wind. I flew over some wooden houses too. A blue river. A row of trees. Then the ground dropped away, and there was just the air rushing in my ears, and all that green and blue a long way down…”
Naemi’s enthusiasm for the pool had turned into something else—a strange blend of fascination and disquiet.
“That’s what you saw?” she said.
“Yes.” He looked at her. “Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing’s wrong.” She seemed to shake herself, and her mood changed again. “When you got into the taxi, I had to make sure you sat on the left side. I didn’t want you to see the hotel—the way the pool sticks out from the side of it.”
“How did you know I could swim?”
“I didn’t.”
“What would have happened if I couldn’t?”
She smiled. “That would have ruined everything.”
* * *
—
When Zhang arrived back at work, his secretary said that his father was waiting for him. It was a day of surprises, it seemed. But then his father made a habit of appearing unexpectedly. He had once told Zhang that unpredictability and the exercise of power were linked. Zhang consulted his watch. 4:25. His father might pride himself on being unpredictable, but Zhang already knew what he was going to say.
In his office, he found his father sitting at his desk, eyes lowered. He moved to the window and leaned on the sill, facing away from the view.
“Long lunch,” his father said.
Zhang smiled.
After his swim, Naemi had taken him to a room on the eighteenth floor, where they had made love. Later, as they lay on the bed, half asleep, she asked if he had seen anything this time. Not this time, he said. You weren’t too bored, I hope, she said. He laughed. No, he said. I wasn’t bored.
His father looked at him and shook his head. “You lack focus. Drive. You always have.”
“That’s not what they told me at Sauder.” Zhang had studied for his MBA at the Sauder School of Business in Vancouver.
“Are you going to contradict everything I say?”
“Only if I disagree with you.”
His father pointed to the chair on the other side of Zhang’s desk. “Sit down.”
Zhang sighed, then took a seat.
For several long seconds, the two men eyed each other. Zhang’s father’s hair was cut brutally short, as always, and he wore a heavy gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. He was shorter than Zhang, and stockier, a physique that had been molded by decades of Sanshou. Unusually for someone of his generation, he didn’t smoke. In fact, he had never smoked. Among his colleagues in the Party—he had worked for the ministry of foreign affairs, and had acted as adviser to two successive presidents, Yang Shangkun and Jiang Zemin—his nickname had been “Fresh Air.” He was seventy-three, but looked fifteen years younger.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“I went for a swim in Kangqiao,” Zhang said. “The traffic was bad on the way back.”
His father didn’t seem surprised, though Zhang knew he was. The old man never gave anything away. During the years when he moved in political circles, he had cultivated a look of blankness that masked every human emotion, including anger.
“Why Kangqiao?”
Zhang began to describe the pool at the Holiday Inn, but as he spoke he saw his father beginning to lose interest. He had always found it hard to hold his attention, even as a boy.
“Find somewhere closer to the office,” his father said. “All the hotels round here have pools.”
He didn’t compliment Zhang on having taken exercise. Praise fed complacency. Or perhaps he thought Zhang was lying.
“I’m sure you didn’t come here to discuss my fitness,” Zhang said.
His father leaned forwards, his hands folded on the desk, his thumbs sticking up like chicken wings. “It’s your sister.”
“What’s she done now?”
“She’s seeing somebody who isn’t suitable.”
“That’s hardly a first.”
“I want you to intervene. She listens to you.”
“Not always. Have you spoken to her?”