Possessed by the Skies

The sky framed by the window of my dormitory room is as blank as a sheet of paper. It is my third year at Durham as a math major. It is also a bitterly cold Saturday morning, and I’ve been plotting derivatives since about eight on what started out as another blank sheet. To cool my brain down, I bundle up and head over to the university library in search of nothing having to do with math or science or philosophy. Nothing cerebral. Searching the humanities stacks, I find a collection of poems by Dylan Thomas and bring these back to my room, my cave, to gnaw on for breakfast. Their tangle of metaphors is tough chewing, let me tell you.

I leave my portable TV on. In this day and age, it seems prevalent enough to assume that whatever headline gets piped out of any major news outlet ought to be believed without a doubt. Believe it, they say, or you’re not living in the modern world. And this, despite those incredible images now appearing on the screen, broadcast supposedly from thousands of miles from where I’m sitting. Because the magic box does not lie. Yet, I could say the same thing about what I saw earlier from my window — a raggedy man shuffling his way down a back lot and trying every knob on every door to see if it would magically open for him. And my window does not lie, either.

Having propped up a pillow, I can now test my mettle on Thomas’ poem “Before I knocked”. Outside my window an icy wind is prowling, but under the lamp over my bed it is warm and safe.

“Jamie-San!” Once more, Nao’s voice beckons from the outer side of my door. Only then does she herself knock. Nao is a classmate, a Japanese exchange student. She will wait for half a minute then leave, if I don’t open to her. When I do, she extends her arms, thrusting a sheet of paper up into my face. It is her Algebra II worksheet, ten-percent completed. Ten-percent, only because I have already filled in two of the answers for her and tried to convey the best I could that she needed to do the rest for herself. She grins as a kind of down-payment for my doing so again with the third problem.

“Are you even trying?” I say, seemingly to deaf ears.

She simply points to the sheet and tacks on a “ha ha” as if offering the first interest payment, too. In fact, she’s been making these little contributions to her favors account since last evening. I should have enough by now to buy both of us lunch, if smiles and giggles were valid currency at the Herbie’s in the university student center.

I should also point out that Nao speaks no English — at least, to me she hasn’t. How she got into Durham on a scholarship has to have been as magical as my tuning in WWK-TV all the way out of New Orleans. One of the girls in calculus class cited nepotism over magic, having heard that the university president’s gardener is Nao’s uncle. On top of which, she owns a laptop with unlimited wifi access, while I have to shell out three dollars an hour to use the desktop in the student lounge in the math department. I would ask to borrow hers sometime — and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind — except that the letter keys are all stamped with hiragana characters.

I pull a pen from my shirt pocket and turn the sheet so she sees what I’m being generous enough to show her. “See, if you carry this expression over here and divide both sides by this variable, you’ll solve for this expression right here.”

Nao nods at intervals which don’t jive with the jabs of my pen against the sheet. Her gesturing now with both hands is a way of saying, “I want to see you do it, you’re so smart.” It’s a bit of an ego booster, I’ll admit, especially coming from someone as cute as Nao is. She is just barely over half my height, with dark shaggy hair and shiny charcoal briquettes for irises.

Actually, what my ego should really be asking for is a cognitive evaluation, since I find myself for the third and probably not the last time today surrendering to said-cuteness by working out the problem and filling in the blank for her. With the thing back in her happy hands, she then bows to me three times and heads back to her room down the hall.

One should not be surprised to learn that this little tune has been danced to more than once before. Perhaps it could be traced back to two weeks ago when I saw her having trouble with her bicycle, offered to look at it and found that the chain had simply come loose from the axle gear. We’d already been attending some of the same classes but without having exchanged a single word until that day. And the only word out of her mouth after I’d realigned the chain was something which sounded like “alligator”, punctuated with repeated bows. Her being Japanese, I later tried speaking “alligator” into a translator app and eventually got back five characters which processed as “thank you” in English.

I then asked around and learned her name. She learned mine, Jameson, from when an instructor called on me, but mistook the last syllable for an honorific. It was not long afterward that Nao was calling on “Jamie-San” to help with any and every problem of hers, course-related or otherwise. I’d become her how-to-go-to on two legs.

I now go back again to how any televised news story spread from one side of the planet to the other gets thus deemed as truth, because today is January 24th but the screen on my portable is showing large-scale demonstrations in Beijing with people in short-sleeves and sweating like it’s the middle of July. Can the magic box be doubted, when even the anchors insist this is happened right now? And those various shots of mass gatherings over there, can these already be baffling politicians as much as inciting sympathetic demonstrations among the younger generation over here?

I’ve laid aside the book and become so absorbed by these images of revolution and transformation, that I hardly hear the tapping on my door. When I open it, there stands Nao once more. She has the worksheet in her hands but folded around some object this time. After scanning the hallway, she slips through the door. This is a first for me, since she has never before seemed to express an interest in visiting my room, despite my having visited hers from time to time for occasional howbeit pointless tutoring. The cute one motions for me to sit on the bed, turns off the lamp, and in the near-dimness has shed the paper from the object. It is a round box of some sort which she then switches on, causing it to emit the sounds of ocean surf. She seats herself beside me, placing the box near our feet on the floor.

Nao says nothing for a few minutes. Even before she has taken hold of my hand, my mind is already generating its own crazy notions of how she has now come to reward my abundant kindnesses with a romantic evening together. But such turns out to be anything but.

“My name is Huang Li,” she says, speaking with a high-pitched twangy voice. “I am an agent of my country’s Ministry of State Security, comparable to your country’s Central Intelligence Agency. I have placed this device to cloak our conversation. Do you understand me thus far?”

“Yeah, I guess so. You’re a spy then?”

“Infiltrator. I monitor dissident activities on campus and in the local Chinese community. But that is not the reason I am speaking to you right now. To put it bluntly, I need your help to leave the country. Will you help me?”

I can detect through her hand a definite trembling in Nao’s body. I continue to call her Nao, since I haven’t yet adjusted to this new persona and the Chinese name she gave has already slipped out of recollection.

“You want me to … help you cross the border? Are you serious?”

“I have cash which I will give you to compensate. All I need is for you to accompany me as though we are visiting Mexico together. You will pretend to be my husband. Will you agree to do this for me?”

(…for me?)

What have I not done for her? She’s been like a pestering child these past several days, and I’ve grown weary of the clingyness, without the slightest effort on her part to fend for herself.

“Aren’t there people from your Ministry who can help you?”

“My country is in transition at the moment. If I try to contact my superiors, the new regime will detect this and have me detained and deported. I worked for their predecessors, after all. Actually, I had plans to defect to your country. But now, I do not … I feel I will not be allowed.”

“Argh! Why me? Why do I have to do everything for you? Or have you been pretending this whole time?”

“I had to convince you and others that I was a Japanese exchange student who could speak no English. That was my cover. But I have no one else I can turn to. If I go to other Chinese students now, they will know that I was working against them and will … mistreat me. I am sorry for having used you. Please do not hate me.”

My brain now tired from dining on poetic hard-tack and aborted espionage, I am thinking on something more succulent for my stomach to process.

“Man, I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

Nao returns to her room for her protective gear. I slip on and zip up the parka I ordered through a catalog, then squeeze my head into the thick knit cap my sister gave me for Christmas. We cross the street, navigate the network of walkways and enter the university center. Nao said she has cash, so my hopes are that she’ll spring for the meal at least, considering I have only four dollar bills left in my wallet.

To my astonishment, Nao inserts herself between me and the counter and hands a twenty to the cashier. It’s the first time ever I’ve seen her do anything on her own. I follow her all the way to the far end of the lounge. She seems intent on distancing us from what’s left of the lunch crowd.

I haven’t even unwrapped my burger yet, and Nao is already biting into her chicken sandwich like a starving dog.

“Is it good?” I ask.

She takes a minute to swallow, sips from her drink, and says, “I have not eaten since Thursday.”

“You mean no food for two days? You have money. Why didn’t you …”

“I have not left my room except to visit yours. I was not sure I should venture out. There are too many variables right now.”

After chewing on some burger, I ask her, “So, what are your plans, once you’re in Mexico? Or is that top secret?”

“I do not know. Normally, I rely on my superiors to inform me of changes to my itinerary. It is how I have been living, day to day. However, I have not heard from them for five days. I felt that I needed to act on my own. The decision to do so has taken time. Jamie-San, do you believe in destiny?”

“Well, I’ve felt destined to have to keep solving one problem after another for you, wondering when you were going to stand on your own. But it turns out you’ve been fooling me this whole time. So, I have to wonder if you had a valid reason for choosing me instead of someone else. I mean, what are the probable distributions? Out of all the hundreds of students on campus, you picked me as the likeliest random variable, which tells me it wasn’t really that random at all.”

“Jamie-San, you must understand. My life has been nothing if not guided by my loyalty to the Party’s objectives. I was ready to betray those, when I had decided to defect. But now, I have no choice but to seek a new path for myself. It is … frightening.”

“And you needed my help, to know what it feels like to go it on your own, to not let others tell you where to go and what to do. I know. I’ve been … thinking on that myself for quite some time now. I’ve had enough of trying to keep up a certain grade point average. Grades suck! I want to do something with my life. It’s … like I’m at a turning point — keep going the way others expect me to, or head off in a different direction. You’re right, it’s scary. I wonder what I’ll do for money. I could go live with my parents for a while. But then what?”

“You live in a country where you are free to do that. I do not. And I am far from my home and family. The only safety I see is to flee to another locale, before the new regime releases to your government a list of operatives living abroad. I am sure that is coming.”

“I still don’t …”

“You have been like a lighthouse in a storm for me, since that day you fixed my bicycle. I have no real friends here other than you. But if you are really regretting my having chosen you …”

Nao props her elbow on the table and rests her chin, sighing and staring at the other students eating or talking or studying. I continue taking bites of my burger.

We are walking back. The sky has cleared and the sunlight feels good against my skin. Still, the breeze snaps at me, as I’m sure it does Nao.

“I have to apologize to you,” she says. “Actually, I do not believe we choose our friends. There is some other connective force in the universe that draws two people together. You can call it randomness, if you like. I believe the universe has a mind and sorts us like socks in a drawer. You laugh. But have you not heard of quantum entanglement? You and I are two peas in a pod, as you say in English. I sensed that as soon as I met you.”

“Quantum entanglement. I’ll have to look that one up. Sounds like a poem I was reading earlier, ‘Love in the Asylum’. I don’t remember the complete verse, but it mentions the ‘vision that set fire to the stars’, or something like that. I’m not sure what that means, how a vision can set things on fire. The only thing I can think of is from reading Superman comics where he could start a fire with his eyes.”

“There is also that painting by Van Gogh, ‘Starry Night’, where the stars are swirling in the sky. Perhaps it is like that.”

“You must be into art, then.”

“If I had defected, I would have quit mathematics and changed my major to art. I want to learn to paint like Van Gogh or Matisse or Hokusai.”

“So do it.”

Nao looks up at me, then stops and sits on a bench. “It is so easy for you. ‘Do it,’ he says. How can you not see that I would have lost my support, if I had went against my assignment? And now, with what is happening …”

I try to think of the rest of the verse from the poem. “Damn, I wish I had a better memory. It’s back in my room, too … ‘set fire to the stars’, and then what?”

Nao takes her phone from a coat pocket. “What is the title?”

“Love in the Asylum. Dylan Thomas.”

After half a minute’s worth of swiping the screen, she slows her finger. “Yes. It says the first vision. Is not that the mind of the universe?”

A man is now coming down the walkway, speaking what I figure is Chinese. Nao responds to him in words I cannot comprehend. He seems to be scolding her. She gets up. “My uncle. He is here to take me where they cannot find me. I must go with him. Arigato, Jamie-San.” She bows to me, and they walk away together. Just like that.

The wind is still merciless, icy. I turn to head back. So, that’s it. I had her, and now she’s gone. What happened to two peas in a pod and all that? I wonder.

“Jamie-San!” she calls to me. “Set fire to the stars!”

A gust of air stirs and sets to swirling some dried leaves collected on the walkway between us. She is fleeing like a leaf on the wind now.