Kartika_Issue15

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
“Ba! Lao K! I’m up!” Chenxi shouted. If she’d noticed our departure, it
hadn’t fazed her. She was due for her second redemptive dive. She climbed
the stair’s spokes, crested the board like a sunrise. Coach Peng stood crossarmed
across the pool next to the seated judges. He still wore his sunglasses
and a calm, unsmiling face. What did he see through those dark lenses?
Although I’d never owned sunglasses, suddenly, I wanted more than ever to
wear them, to wash the world in red and brown—to stamp out, once and for
all, the unbearable honesty of sunlight peeling past the skylights to play with
the pool’s surface, blinding us if we stared too long.
“I’m coming, Sister,” Lao K shouted, jogging on tiptoes then dipping
smoothly into the water, holding the camera to her eye and descending
below the surface, beyond my reach. What she saw beneath the waves that
day at the Beijing Normal University swimming pool I’d never know—if she
ever developed that photograph, she never showed us. And Li-Ming was in
no position to expose the film herself, her illness quickly devouring what
was left of her, every bone, every lymph node and organ riddled with cancer
in the coming weeks. But I will remember what I want of Lao K surfacing
briefly for a breath, just long enough to shout to her sister: “Remember:
don’t look down!” then submerging herself as Chenxi did exactly as Lao K
reminded her not to—she looked to the water glistening meters below and as
she did, her tentative toe grip on the edge of the board slipped.
The crowd behind us gasped.
Li-Ming shouted from the distance, “Lao Chen, do something!” as our
daughter’s body faltered, as her feet struggled to retain their grip on the slick
board, her knees bending to push herself off prematurely. But it was too late:
Lao K was already underwater, already snapping the photograph that would
last beyond our lives, those paper objects outliving the bodies they contain—
this time, our daughter’s body, taut and perfectly-straight, slicing the water
like a knife. Like perfection alone could heal us. Or at least our belief in it.
She didn’t make a splash.
“Did you hear that, Ba?” It wasn’t Chenxi’s voice, but Lao K’s, her proper
Beijing accent with all it’s rolling ‘er’ sounds exaggerated. We were alone—
Li-Ming had rolled herself home immediately following Chenxi’s
redemptive dive and Chenxi went to McDonalds for her post-dive
celebration with Lili’s family. Already, we’d lost our daughter to someone
43