Free On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee Page A

jerky, Sewey was her sole sustained contact with the world. The injury was more minor than Quig had surmised, for her leg was only moderately painful and already seemed to be healing. She kept this fact to herself, an instinct for discretion overriding any fears she had for what might befall her, good leg or no. Quig came briefly to examine her leg and the splint, but he appeared both times in the middle of the night, his mini-flashlight rousing her from sleep, her heart bounding in a fitful dash; and before she could form any words, he’d have retightened the cord and checked the splint bindings and extinguished the light and left, depositing her back in her dreams. And what were those dreams? They were tableaus of the unknown, naturally, visions of anxiety and miserable solitude, the kind you might have when you are a child and clenched by high fever, when you see your loved ones from the bottom of a salt pit and they are as far off as the moon, when your arms are too heavy to lift, much less wave, and your voice has no carry. Fan’s dreams were all this but shot through as well with what surely were figments of a self-doubt characterized in her mind by the silhouette of our row houses set against a blood-orange haze of sky, the line of the roofs deviating by certain centimeters as they spanned the endless street, the segments discernibly shifting but never quite broken.
    During those first visits from Sewey, Fan learned about life in the compound. She hardly had to ask any questions; Sewey was a born talker, the kind of talker you meet and have to nod at frequently and right off think about how to slip away from, but of course, Fan was going nowhere and Sewey had the companion he’d always longed for and no adults or older kids around to tell him to shut up. Fan was not just the quiet type but someone with a bountiful store of patience who didn’t mind following the endless branches of his thoughts as they reached skyward and backward and around the corner, toward whatever sun he alone felt the warmth of and could see. He brought another old bucket for a seat (she using hers to relieve herself, which he happily emptied and hosed out at day’s end), while she ate or drank or mostly just lay there and listened to Sewey talk while playing with something he called a yo-yo, a translucent orange plastic disc with a string wound about its split middle that he made go up and down, up and down, and sometimes would let spin in place, magically suspended a few centimeters above the floor, before flicking it back up.
    And he told her more or less this: that they were in Quig’s place, and had been for as long as he could remember. Sewey was born here, in fact: Loreen was indeed his mother. She had come to give birth to him and was lucky she had because he needed to be cut out of her to be born and Quig was the only person in the Smokes and within a two-day’s drive around who could do it, at least without killing the mother most of the time. Loreen had then stayed on, at first to work off the debt she owed Quig, eventually becoming his main assistant and scheduler. It was the most important job at Quig’s because of the dozens of people who showed up every day with injuries from bad accidents like severe cuts and burns and broken bones, not even mentioning the pains from the C-illnesses that pretty much afflicted every adult. Each arrival was an emergency—it had to be, to burn fuel for the winding trek into these hills—and each arrival knew to bring money or gold or jewelry or else some special offer of barter or services. Loreen’s job was to assign an order to them determined by injury but mostly by what they could offer to move up a few spots or even to the head of the line. Naturally there were constant renegotiations: if someone came and got a place ahead of you, you could offer something more, or else different. It was your decision, and then Loreen’s, and of course, ultimately Quig’s, Sewey tasked as the