On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee

vacant attic room. That was all it took. One phase had given way to another, the realm shifting without the least tremor. The new occupants stayed there until they had too many children to live in the tiny room, by which time Uncle Kellen and Auntie Virginia were just another faded memory.
    These days we accept the various legacies of our corpus, from the time of the natives and originals right up to now, and live together in harmony as long as we don’t linger too much on those legacies, which we have all agreed to do. We don’t want trouble. Though looking back on it now, there were more tussles and even outright fights at school, when before there had been hardly any; or how certain cliques one had not really noticed in the lunchrooms and playgrounds and food courts seemed suddenly and sharply manifest; or how over the years as we grew up, certain, more mixed clans were more regularly pairing off, which is how someone like Reg can look like he does, the scantest fractions combining in that reversed, serendipitous math.
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    SO, DID THE SAME math deliver Reg to be C-free? They tell us every destiny is ordered and yet this one, concerning our Reg and our Fan, seems intent on exhibiting properties as apparent and ungraspable as the smoke from a mystic’s joss stick. Where will the ribboning trail of this pair ultimately lead? How far and high can we rise?
    This is the question girding all other questions.
    Fan left B-Mor for love, but perhaps not for love alone. About the neighborhoods there is a steadily growing lore about their relationship, sundry anecdotes about the game parlors they frequented and the eateries they liked best and how, when the proprietor wasn’t looking, Reg might puckishly reach over the glass partition at the gelateria and poke a spoon into one of the tubs to get Fan a free taste. There is also talk of their more intimate moments, how they sat on a blanket in the cloistered lovers’ glade of the nearest park along with the other young couples sharing music through their earbuds and, of course, nuzzling and kissing. They were in the first blush of true romance and being sixteen and nineteen you would say it must be so that they were also sneaking off to the mini-inns. But they didn’t, amazing to say, which the mini-inn records show; people who knew them corroborate this, insisting that Fan and Reg were happy to show each other their affections in the park, in the café, on the periphery of busy clan gatherings. There was no way they could be alone together in their respective houses with so many relatives ever present, and thus by all accounts they were chaste.
    It certainly seems they were content, and yet at some point the pair consummated their love. This must have been Fan’s initiation, for Reg was a young man who blessedly could not view his present station as anything but highly satisfactory. He was not in essence desirous. It should have been our expectation that Fan was the opposite, if not obviously so. She was the one who arranged their free-day itineraries, she was the packer of the drinks and snacks, she the one directionally leading their scooters, with Reg winged behind her like a potted young palm. And we won’t draw up some image of the two of them entwined the very night before he disappeared to illustrate the fact that Fan departed B-Mor in search of the father of her child.

Aside from the unfortunate souls who came and went daily at Quig’s compound there were forty or so people who were settled there, children included. Most all of them, like Loreen, had first come as patients or else had accompanied patients who died and then, if they could perform some function or service the place required, were allowed to stay on. The still luckier ones—chosen by Quig and Quig alone—could reside in one of the rooms of the winged main house, while the rest lived a few steps down the hill in the complex of shanties that hugged the slope. Over the years these