The Airways Read online

  About The Airways

  I had a body once before. I didn’t always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it.

  I knew better than to wish for this.

  This is the story of Yun. It’s the story of Adam.

  Two young people. A familiar chase.

  But this is not a love story.

  It’s a story of revenge, transformation, survival.

  Feel something, the body commands. Feel this.

  But it’s a phantom . . . I go untouched.

  They want their body back.

  Who are we, if we lose hold of the body?

  What might we become?

  The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death.

  A powerful, inventive, and immersive novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.

  Praise for The Airways:

  ‘Sensational. The Airways is an intricate, existential wonder – Mills’ ability to inhabit boundlessness is astonishing. A deeply empathetic genius flows through these pages.’ – Josephine Rowe

  ‘A haunting and intimate examination of violence, alienation, dislocation and possession, and the need to reckon with the past. The Airways is a masterful novel: Mills writes prose of rare distinction.’ – Julie Koh

  Begin with the material.

  – Adrienne Rich

  没身不殆

  – Tao Te Ching

  Contents

  About The Airways

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  THE BODY

  SYDNEY

  THE END

  BEIJING

  FLICKER

  BEIJING

  GRAVITY

  BEIJING

  SMOKE

  BEIJING

  BLOOD

  BEIJING

  HEAT

  SYDNEY

  RIVER

  BEIJING

  HUNGER

  BEIJING

  STEAM

  SYDNEY

  SHIVER

  BEIJING

  GHOST

  SYDNEY

  FURY

  BEIJING

  LIGHT

  SYDNEY

  SWEETHEART

  BEIJING

  ROSES

  SYDNEY

  TRANSIT

  BEIJING

  FLIGHT

  BEIDAIHE

  BORDER

  BEIJING

  WIRE

  SYDNEY

  SLEEPER

  BEIJING

  TURN

  BEIJING

  CIRCLE

  SYDNEY

  FLICKER

  BEIJING

  INTERFACE

  BEIJING

  THE AIRWAYS

  BEIJING

  THE BODY

  Acknowledgements

  About Jennifer Mills

  Also by Jennifer Mills

  Copyright

  Newsletter

  THE BODY

  I had a body once before. I didn’t always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it. Days I wanted to claw my way out of the earth, out of this shell. To become something else, something as yet unseen, untethered. To take flight.

  I knew better than to wish for this.

  A light went off in a house as I brushed against its fence, a light I barely registered. Jangled day-thoughts burst and faded, brief as insects. The night was humid. I hunched myself smaller, eyes down. A familiar footpath scrolled beneath my feet. I knew my body in the world: the weight of it, the way it hit the uneven cement, how it felt to step across the place where the roots under the asphalt showed as blisters. We had a history together; we had a culture. I possessed myself.

  I was three blocks, then two from where I lived. Lived there just long enough for this walk to be a habit; the body remembered the way. I might have been stalling, walking more slowly, making sure it got late. I know I wanted to be alone, to enter the house undisturbed.

  Mind afloat, I counted the pools beneath streetlights: seven, six. Long shadow, short shadow, long. Pink graffiti in the white cut of tree where a branch was sawn and taken, a new wound. Warm scent of night flowers. An ache where the toe roughed against the shoe. The heat gathered at the tips of the ears. Slight gut discomfort, gases in process, but nothing specific enough to call hunger. The house key cutting into one thigh through the fabric of a pocket, jeans too tight. The hum of wires, and five pools of light.

  That body was always a little alert, a little vigilant. It was part of who I was then, what I carried: memories of how others saw and described me. The fact of being watched. I had absorbed it into how I moved, let it become me. I no longer thought about it.

  Adam had disturbed my surfaces. But even after his transgressions, after the vigil, I thought I was safe enough. I did not feel followed, or observed. If there were signals – a prickle of hair at the nape of the neck, a sharpening in the heart, a sudden chill, or a tickle of sweat in the hand – then I accepted them as normal. If these alarms were sounding inside me, they were so familiar that they had become faint and distant. My body let me down because of what it knew.

  Four pools. One cicada trilling in the artificial light. Feet behind me, at a distance. I did not look back. There was so much I felt without noticing. So much I missed, counting lights, counting my steps. I was hardly aware of myself at all. A body isn’t there until something goes wrong.

  There was a small sound, a rip in the air at my neck. I must have smelled them then, or felt their breath. Too close to my surface. Too swift to judge if I knew them.

  Fear shot through me. I felt it wake in every ready cell. Blood in the mouth, the wet of nostril. Oxygen running under skin.

  Two hundred steps from home.

  Time stopped to let sensation take hold. I saw and felt the shape I had: I lived fully in the earth of it. I lifted my head, if only to feel its motion. Every detail of an exquisite, co-ordinated system. The mutual exchanges of bones, blood, muscle. Home. Alert to life, I felt at last what delicate machinery the body was, how complex and improbable and necessary. Its gifts of circulation, respiration, sustenance, that returned this rich awareness. The news of myself was an extravagance. A perfect form, I was, if I had only known. All this in the space of a breath – and there was a soundless kick-drum contact, an asphalt length against a blur too near.

  fall, falling. Back of the head.

  (grunts and drunk scents, sweat)

  the eyes went for a white moment, contents tipped out, nonsense

  (what sharp rib this)

  the sense of harm arrived before pain

  (and gut. two or. laughing or)

  so violence seemed continuous with being

  (shit, man, running)

  which I knew. My face on a dark path.

  Are they running? Am I?

  I heard no sirens. Felt no hands

  not breathing. Clear the airways

  So it went: with the body that possessed me, the nothing that was all I knew.

  SYDNEY

  They did not stir when Adam came into the room. He pushed at the door, felt the pile of books that stopped it from swinging fully open slide against the floorboards, caught it before it creaked. He stopped just inside the door, held it almost closed behind him with a shoulder, unwilling to sound the latch. They didn’t wake. Their limbs lay still, one arm exposed across the sheet.

  His
own breath was loud inside him. He felt the weight of the timber adjust with it, pressing against his shoulder with the rhythm. Standing like that, with the door behind him, everything seemed to travel through his body before it reached him: through the lungs, the heat of blood, the pull of his arms hanging motionless. Slowly he became aware of a world outside himself. The night warmth on his skin. The scents that breath could carry. Damp plaster. A stale, medicated odour. The salt-and-vinegar of used sheets. Then something sweet.

  There was no sound from the rest of the house. Beyond that, a low drumming. A truck on the main road, a few blocks away, slow to fade. He could feel it through the soles of his feet, but after the sound was gone the vibration remained, moving up from below. A tightness in his chest. Not pain but a drawstring at the muscle, the pressure of the heart suspended inside the ribs. It was nothing serious, he was only twenty-three, fit and unafraid. He would not let it worry him.

  They were not moving. He focused on the arm, the line of the chest. They were too still, a photograph, and what if –

  He saw their body rising.

  They were asleep, just deeply asleep and peaceful. The shoulder, smooth skin over muscle where it met the neck, formed a hollow that suggested bareness beneath the sheet. Their breath was slow, that’s why it seemed so still. The austere curves were taut under the cotton. The fall of the sheets was like a settled landscape from the air: a cleared land, hills worn smooth by time and agriculture. In his mouth he felt the chill of altitude. Cells swelled against a drop in pressure, though the air in the room was thick and hot.

  Yun was not a land, he knew that. They were a person. But a person could disappear while sleeping. Slip out of themselves. A person could be free like this, be open, though they were not awake to see it.

  The pain in his chest – it wasn’t pain exactly but, yes, he could have described himself as suffering from it; that wasn’t an exaggeration. He began to inventory himself, then chased the habit out. It was in the body but not only the body, both inside and apart from it. He looked again, his eyes better adjusted to the room dim-lit with streetlight, moon. He found their face, which had almost turned to him, still closed away. Where the eyes lay in their cradles, there were two thin lines, each like the dark rim of a moon, distant and still.

  They slept on, contained and remote. It disappointed him. Had he wanted to wake them? He didn’t think so. But he wanted his presence to mean something, even as he stayed unseen.

  The door had been left ajar, a clear invitation. But then there was that weight against the floor. It might have just been propped like that for the air. These nights were humid, the old house stuffy with encroaching summer. Made it hard to sleep. For him, anyway. Yun seemed to have no trouble.

  He watched their eyelids, alert to any movement. If a car passed, they might see the light change through their skin and wake and see him. The pressure of the door was beginning to burn his shoulder. There was no message, no sign. There had been no invitation. He was intruding on an intimacy, a private peace. A memory caught in his throat. I’m not doing anything. I’m only looking. He would go before they woke. He would bend towards them, let the door swing open, turn his back on them and walk into the hallway. Those were the steps. Replace the books with an arm, close the room. He pictured it, saw the door left ajar behind him, heard the soft sound of his bare feet in the hall. He tried to shift his weight, and could not move.

  He steadied his breath. There was a catch in it: a slight high wheeze at the end of the exhale.

  He was dreaming. That was why he couldn’t move, wasn’t certain. He could not think how to wake himself. Held fast by something unnatural. Weeks of this doubling in his body, shifting in and out of himself. Feet stuck in place as if glued. The dreams of falling, and now this, this nightmare. But he didn’t want to leave. If he was dreaming, he did not have to leave. He felt for what connected them, and what held him in place. As if he could lift himself into them. Climb inside them, and exchange himself. He couldn’t explain it.

  A car outside, lights slowly tracing the room like a search. It didn’t find the face. Adam knew he wasn’t dreaming. He was thinking of the fox. A month ago, a woman in one of his classes had seen it, right on campus, crossing the football field between her college and the English department. It was so close, it was right there, she said. It didn’t run away from me. It just stood there, looking back.

  It watched me.

  The way she’d said it had annoyed him. The fox’s gaze had offended her, as if its eyes had touched her in the dark. It was too much. An animal was an animal, incapable of human malice. He believed her, then doubted her. The fox itself, its predatory stillness – who could confirm it? After class, after she had left the room, he joined the rest of them in laughing. Foxes, here, as if, they said. A dog, they said, or a stray cat; the groundskeeper feeds them. A fucking thylacine, said someone, escaped from the (Rocky Horror voice) lab. Hilarious. Still, he checked shadows. Crossing campus, and in the street at night. Alert to something small and shifty, moving just out of sight.

  Yun should have woken by now. A minute ago he might have lifted the sheet, bent to them. Now it was impossible, a shocking thought. The door pushed him forward, moved by the air or his own weakening. He pushed back enough to hold it still.

  A small sound, rough and sweet on the exhale. Each time it came, a beat pulsed through him. The wheeze was theirs, not his. His own breathing had slowed to match, was all. The rise and fall of the sheet, barely visible before, was becoming more pronounced. They were returning to life. His blood moved hotly at the base of his ears, in the inside thigh. He held his breath for a moment, an attempt to break the synchrony, a test.

  They paused with him. Then both resumed.

  He shuddered. Their eyes had fallen still again, the rims dark, the soft mouth closed. A coincidence, and nothing more.

  He would go.

  He could almost go.

  But there were raised voices in the street. Keys shaken at the door. Familiar laughter. Too quick, too late to move. Marita’s voice came flooding in. The front door thumped the inner hallway. She stumbled, making too much noise, shushing whoever was with her. Drunk laughter, not Kate. The connection dissolved. He heard two sets of feet, heavy pauses, hums of want near satisfaction. A kicked cardboard box below the coat rack, and something (bike helmet? drink bottle?) slipping to the floor. Again, he held his breath, heart going like a rattle drum now. The door trembled at his back. No lights came on, but the feet thundered. He heard Marita’s bedroom door, the next one down, pushed shut from inside; then more laughter, duller; then nothing.

  Yun’s breath went on, its rhythm undisturbed. But he had broken with it.

  Adam let the door swing open. He knew better than to look back. He slipped out, turned to pull it closed, silently handling the knob, flinching at the slightest click of the latch. Life in the house made him listen.

  In the narrow hall, at a safe distance, he paused.

  Shower running in the bathroom upstairs. A knocking sound in Marita’s room. A clink, a delicate item – an earring, maybe – lifted from a surface, then dropped back. A stranger looking at his flatmate’s careful arrangement of objects, the neat law books on her flat-pack shelves, the desk where she organised her thesis before a row of family photographs. An altar of the suburbs. Adam had looked at this altar himself, in daylight. Not in the dark. He wouldn’t enter her room without her knowledge. He wouldn’t watch her sleep under those white sheets, the covers like a rich cloud, inhumanly perfumed. It wouldn’t feel right.

  He’d closed the door behind him without thinking. He hadn’t meant to leave a sign.

  His breath was hot in his throat as he thought of going back. He could say he was sleepwalking. Pretend to wake.

  There was a creak as Marita’s guest, his tread heavy, moved across the floor, sat down, perhaps, took off his shoes, cleared his throat. Adam smelled a man, saw a man
posed on the white bedcovers, his knees apart, looking in the mirror that dominated her desk. He would look at her body like this, watch its softnesses spread over him. Or laid out face down.

  Adam swallowed. When the shower stopped, he moved quickly past the turn for the kitchen, safe in this region of the house, with its reasonable excuses. Still quiet, but less careful, he began to climb the stairs. Boards creaked and settled behind him. He reached his room and stood just inside the door. He could hear her passing below, the hurried barefoot steps, the low voices, the door of her room. His eyes were burning.

  The streetlight projected a white parallelogram on the wall of his room. It seemed to swell. He turned from it, breath shallow, to watch his own empty bed. It felt like an observance, the way the dead watch over the living. But his body wasn’t there. His chest was tight again. His thoughts were scattered. What was happening to him? He meant the living, the living watch over the dead. Had he been sleepwalking after all? His arms and legs and eyes might have moved without him. It wasn’t a dream, it was possession. A fever. He understood that he had never wanted anything in his life until now. He understood that he did not want this either.

  Only sleep. Sleep returns everything to order.

  His body fell gracelessly onto the futon slumped on its frame beneath the window. He pressed his face against the sheets. He could hear them having sex now, noisily, as if for an audience. They wouldn’t know he was awake. People devoured each other like animals. He rolled onto his back, tried to keep his eyes open just a sliver, but they ached too much. He let go. The mind evaporated from his body, released by heat. It moved above a city he had never visited, a place he couldn’t read. A grainy image, made faint by dust. He didn’t know where it was or why he was flying over it, only that he was lost when he looked down, the intricacies of its map dissolved beneath him. He would wake, as he always did, just before his body hit the ground.

  THE END

  No sirens.

  Dark.

  Blood slowed. Set an eyelid.

  Then something new. A lifting, gentle. From the shoulders almost, but without them. As if by hands, but without them. I draw away.