Adam meant to obey him, even began looking for a taxi, but the few in sight were occupied. He started to walk in the general direction of his apartment, not bothering to select a route. There was a major road just ahead, a cluster of pedestrians and bicycles waiting at the intersection. The air hung white above the traffic.
He was not unwell, or not in the ordinary way. Something wasn’t right. He had been breathing the germy air in the office. The faulty air conditioning had been running, distributing its molecular junk into the lungs. Now he seemed to be fighting an infection. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead, but the gesture felt melodramatic and he withdrew it again quickly. In that brief assessment, his skin seemed the usual temperature. The headache was still there, moving just beneath the surface, its source hard to place. The body was maddeningly cryptic.
He stopped at the intersection just as a bus sailed past, felt it disturb the air dangerously close to his chest. Driver mustn’t have seen him. The rest of the pedestrians were already halfway across, gathered under the overpass. Adam waited for the lights to change before joining them. He pressed the jacket against his chest, warm enough now without it. The shouty, automated voice of a reversing sānlúnchē startled him. When he looked up, a car was inching towards his feet. He picked up the pace, vaguely shamed by the encroachment, the bluntness of his instincts. When he reached the opposite corner, he stopped to catch his breath.
He looked up at an empty shop, a handwritten sign scrawled in big red marker in the window. Closing down? Help wanted? He couldn’t read the characters. The glass was so dusty, it looked like it had been abandoned for years. He thought it had been a shoe store last week, but maybe that was a different corner. The dust might have been from construction. He was not sure where he was. After a moment his reflection resolved in the glass and he saw himself, his face flushed, the eyes small and sunken. He did not look unwell. The jacket was a burden against his chest.
Adam resisted the impulse to touch the glass. Nor would he get out his phone and check the map. He would keep walking in what he felt to be the right direction, trust his instincts, his internal compass. Of course he knew which way he was headed; he had walked home before. He peered down the road until he recognised the convenience store where he had once stopped for a cold drink. And there was the woman who sold plants from the roadside beyond it, squatting beside her charges, staring out at the legs of passers-by. He looked over the road to see if the snack stall where he had once bought a steamed bun was open. The window had been piled with bamboo steamers, pancakes, eggs, frankfurts, spicy shredded potato, but now the shutters were down. The morning rush was over, or it had gone out of business.
His legs complained as he crossed the road. First the calves pinged, and for a minute there was an unidentifiable pain in his thigh. The ache was moving through his body like some kind of clot. It was definitely aiming for his head. The pain gathered at the back of his skull. What if this was an incipient migraine, or worse, some bleeding on the brain that had gone undiagnosed for years, an aneurysm? With a surge of self-compassion, he imagined himself collapsed in the street. He was invisible. His body would not be identified. The trauma to the back of the head would erase him. The mind shuttered through a set of images; he did not understand where they came from. He folded them away. He had his wallet in his pocket, an Australian driver’s licence, a name. He was being ridiculous.
He began to focus on the breath, to count his steps. One hundred to the next intersection, he estimated, maybe more. It was an adolescent strategy, he didn’t need it now, but it was there for him regardless. He would be twenty-eight in a few weeks. His breaths came short.
Probably he was just unfit, unused to walking; he had not been to the gym since he had moved to the new neighbourhood. The gyms he had found were outrageously expensive. He didn’t mind the team-building ball games with the guys from work but he wasn’t one of those people who loved the physicality of exercise. It was social, that was all. (One hundred and thirty seven.) And the gym was a chore, not a pleasure; when he did go he needed music to get through it. Manu had told him to persist, that he would get a buzz off it eventually. The closest he had come was afterwards, standing outside and looking back in through the glass at the other people on their machines, so focused they were oblivious to his presence metres from their faces, watching. He loved the concentration in their bodies, the inward attention.
He had liked that about Natasha too, her self-containment, until she had turned that against him.
Adam spotted a taxi, raised a hand. The passenger seats were empty, but it sailed past him. He was tired now, too tired to walk. He was definitely coming down with something; all he wanted was to sleep. If he turned here, followed the elevated ring road, he thought he could cut underneath it and get back onto the subway. Suddenly he was struck by a longing to be down there, in among the crowds, alone as he could not be in the street. With the bodies packed close together.
That didn’t make sense. He wasn’t thinking straight. He should stay on the surface.
He avoided the stairs of a pedestrian overpass, cut across to the next intersection and picked his way through a crowd gathered outside a market. Someone was selling rambutans from a cart, calling the price. Women pushed past him with both arms loaded, hefting bags or yanking children. Bicycles and electric scooters lined up side by side, ready to domino. There was a restlessness; he felt it pass through or around him. A mild panic in the tone of voices. Maybe the fruit was running out, or some bigger catastrophe was coming – a weather event, a police crackdown. He had no way of knowing. He stared at a mountain of leeks piled on a tarpaulin. A calm young man behind them, smoking, gave him a nod. Adam pretended not to see him.
He let the sense of panic wash over him. There was nothing he could do about it. It was part of the machinery that rumbled through the city, another layer of noise beneath the traffic, angle grinders, traffic, breaking glass, traffic. Noise had official colours, white and pink and so on, Adam could not remember what the codes meant. If it had a colour, Beijing’s noise would be orange-grey, like its air. Or the blue-grey of the city’s bricks. Manu would appreciate these thoughts. Adam stepped away from the crowd and stood on the thin strip of green at the verge. An inexplicable sadness rippled through him, from the stomach out. A white couple walked past, arm in arm, tanned with travel. They glanced at him without acknowledgement. He smiled too late, resumed his walking.
In a fenced, postage-stamp park on the next corner, a clutch of elderly Beijingers played cards, their wheelchairs and walking sticks lined up against the garden beds. As he watched, a woman looked up, frowned at the air around him. The fever must be showing through his skin. An ancient man on the exercise bar behind her pulled himself to a slow chin-up, his equally ancient companion chatting away on another contraption beside him. They were calm enough on the surface, but even away from the market there was a charge, an electricity; he could almost hear the energy of the city moving, redistributing itself, unable to settle. And then he felt the air shift, the light grow subtly lighter. Whatever had hold of him loosened its grip for a moment.
He put a hand to the back of his head. The pain had retreated there. But why should that part of the skull hurt, and nothing else? He turned to see what was behind him.
Across the street a group of young people leaving a chain-store bakery gripped each other’s arms, pulled out coats. A girl shrieked as a gust of cool air blew the leaves from a pile where a streetsweeper had gathered them; the sweeper turned, unperturbed, and began to sweep them up again. The young people rushed into a taxi and he gave up on the idea of finding one for himself. He had all day. Maybe the walk would do him good. This wind might clear the air. He crushed the jacket under his arm and kept moving.
He had walked everywhere when he’d first moved to the city, trying to form his map, looking for stores or restaurants that he’d read about in the foreigner magazines. They were always in a different location than he expected or had closed down by the time he found them. Things were never in the same place twice and this had been exciting. But everything was just too far away, the roads too wide, the cars too unpredictable. The map stayed fixed while the city expanded and transformed. Walking began to seem perverse, not worth the effort. He had let go, he thought, of trying to pin things down to their locations. He had accepted something about Beijing, or himself.
Natasha had claimed to get lost here too, but always argued fluently with taxi drivers nonetheless. He only had to sit there while she got him home. From the beginning, they had both preferred his place. She lived alone in a tiny ground-floor apartment, one of the newer and cheaper hutong renovations, damp and poorly ventilated. He thought about walking that way now, pictured himself making his way through the maze of streets to stand at her window. He wasn’t sure if someone else lived there already, or if it was empty, waiting for her return. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to find it again.
He should not have let her leave. He had taken a wrong step, made a wrong entrance somewhere, and could not find his way out again.
Wind collected in certain streets, gusting, perpendicular. He pushed on, his nose smarting. A voice in his head, his mother’s voice, told him he should be more careful, rug up, seek shelter. He ignored it. And, crossing another road, he tossed the jacket over a fence that separated the pedestrian footpath from the bike lane. It was an awful, rotten thing. Someone would use it. Nothing here was ever wasted.
Adam’s eyes and nose were leaking. He kept having to sniff. After Sydney, every other climate was an affront. He had taken it for granted, or maybe it was just better in hindsight. He tried to think of humid nights and global warming, sea level rise, the rage of lightning and of highways, but pictured only high trees waving greenly from a boy-blue sky. It had been that way when he lived there, too. The unrelenting pleasantness erased hostilities. Even when bushfire smoke had stretched to fill and dim the sun, it had always brought beautiful dusks and dawns with it, like offerings. Catastrophe could not be believed in. Nothing had prepared him for Beijing’s sky, for the way it could turn against life.
He crossed at the lights, more carefully now, and left the road, stepped through a gate, followed a path to a canal that had a shaky sort of parkland along one side, half-trimmed hedges turning brown in the cool air. He skirted a pile of materials that might have been a dismantled structure or one about to be built, or just a collection of items unceremoniously dumped behind the buildings. The soil was pale, bone dry, but plants were somehow able to thrive in it. He passed a gate guarded by a sleeping man in uniform, rugged up despite the mild day. A woman looking into the water spoke softly to her child. He thought he recognised the word for fish. They, too, were warmly dressed. He stood behind them, watching, and when they moved on he took their place. The water was sluggish, silted, soiled with algae but, yes, there were fish there, grey forms suspended beneath the city’s reflection. Further along, a man had dangled a bamboo rod over the water and was sitting with it, smoking, in a greatcoat. Willows slung their limbs over the white stone walls that rimmed the edge of the canal. He leaned in with them. The mirror buildings below sank just out of reach, a level of the game Adam had yet to enter. An insect glided across the surface and destroyed the illusion. He could smell the fisherman’s cigarette. In a few weeks it would all be frozen.
There was a machine sound through the trees across the canal, construction or demolition. He followed the water until it descended and turned a corner. A sign, illustrated with a smiling cartoon policeman, might have been telling him not to walk this way, but he could not read it. The corner was sunless and the wind made it hard to see what was ahead. Everything was moving in it: leaves, concrete, dirt. Cars roared like the ocean above him, and the buildings above the cars were enormous, watchful, armour-plated, holding their brand signs aloft against the weather. He did not know where this path led except down. His eyes were stinging. He needed to get home, he wasn’t well. He knew this even as he stepped into the tunnel beneath the road, where the wind reverberated, and where nothing grew.