Craig Smith

Late last decade, I found myself sitting in the foyer of the Shanghai Sunshine Rehabilitation Centre with a colleague from Orange and Mike, a man in his fifties, one of the organisers of the United Nations conference we were attending. Mike had dedicated his life to the conference theme - predictive algorithms and political game theory. I was in my twenties and just starting to make a name for myself academically in the same field when Mike, sitting deep in a plastic lawn chair on saffron vinyl flooring, told the two of us a story that is, today, giving me pause. It relates to a decision about my life’s direction and, considering that you might square up against a similar situation, I will recount, in full, Mike’s story.

It takes place thirty years ago. Mike was coming up on his fifth wedding anniversary, which, he said, equated to almost as many days (five) that he and his wife, Janet, had spent together that year. That wouldn’t have been much of a claim if it were early January, but this was late September. Mike and Janet travelled constantly, separately, attending conferences worldwide, presenting papers, delivering keynotes, chairing sessions. Their fields of expertise were not wholly foreign to one another, but they rarely ended up in the same place. An apartment they owned in London was permanently occupied by graduate students for low rent. By good fortune and strategic scheduling, however, they were both able to secure spots on the same agenda for a conference off the coast of what was, at the time, West Shanbudia.

Not long after they arrived - lanyards and name tags were still being handed out - the delegates were made aware of civil unrest in the north and told that the situation was being closely monitored. An hour later, everyone was ushered by security into taxis and onto the back of motorbikes as the upheaval was essentially knocking on the door. Within minutes, an assembly of academics, Mike and Janet among them, had been dropped off at a marina where a seaplane began to ferry people to a nearby fishing island that would act as a safe house until the violence dissipated or other travel plans could be coordinated. 

Mike described the island as one of those places that almost anybody would label, quote, a little slice of paradise/heaven, unquote. The thing is, it wasn’t a tourist destination, although today it would be, or possibly already is. At the time, it was simply home to a hundred locals, mainly those in the fishing trade, which became apparent as the new arrivals found there were no hotels on the island. The UN rapidly arranged for a schoolhouse to contain everybody. Most were assigned classrooms to share, with allowances for distribution of gender and age – again, the idea of how long everyone would be staying here was unknown – but Mike and Janet, being one of the only couples present, were shown to what was essentially a sports storage cupboard, just big enough for a gym mat that would be their mattress for the night.

As utopian as the island looked (taking in a panorama in any direction revealed lush green hillsides creasing into diamond sparkle seas necklacing pastel-dusted shacks with colourful blinking flags everywhere), it bore with it the most tremendous heat that threatened to render faint the entire delegation. It seemed counterintuitive to Mike that the island would be hotter than the mainland, but something about the topography trapped the heat like nothing else. He and Janet dropped their bags in their storage cupboard/room and took a walk to find relief.

By the time they found a supermarket with – halleluiah – refrigerators they could loiter near, they were almost delirious with laughter. Whether it was the heat or the shock of the situation or, as Mike would later decide, the ecstatic feeling of being airdropped so rapidly into what seemed the most oasis-like of places, it was taking its effect. And, importantly, Mike and Janet were together for the first time in how many months. They were hand in sweaty hand during this dreamlike fiasco as violence swelled within audible range across the bay.

Between the refrigerators and the toiletries at the back of the store there was, of all things, a pinball machine. It showed a couple playing tennis on the backlit art. Janet popped a coin in the machine and a ball clanged against the plunger. Now, this might sound like an unnecessary salacious detail or a baseline product of male-gaze fantasy, but Mike then told us how Janet casually took off her top as she played her game of pinball and how he looked at her standing there in her tan slacks and black bra and was struck, and he knows how this sounds, as if by some cosmic revelation. He thought - this is my wife. And, then - why is this not our everyday? Why the itinerary of lonely hotels, single plate breakfast buffets of dull eggs and pastries, the hollow applause for one professor after another delivering lectures cribbed from their doctoral students? At this moment, with Janet already twenty thousand points in with three balls remaining, Mike never wanted to leave the island. 

Bottles of water in hand, they return to their room where Janet rests, fanning herself with copies of their prepared remarks for the conference, while Mike heads back out for a wander. He heads towards the coast where fishermen have congregated. They get chatting, and they ask him what he does for work. He says that he writes formulas to predict social and political trends, and one of the fishermen gestures towards the mainland and says, so how’d you go with predicting that, and everybody, Mike included, has a good laugh.

They invite Mike to a party they’re holding tonight on the beach, a welcome to the visitors. Mike says he has nothing to bring, and they laugh again. They say not to worry, we love to drink and eat and have plenty of everything, just enjoy yourself. It all sounds like such a stereotype of the overly generous and hospitable nature of those who live simply and within their modest means, but honestly, the way Mike described it was like the whole place was a fulfilment of this kind of trope in the best possible way.

On returning to the hotel room, Janet is pensive. She’s holding Mike’s conference paper, the keynote he would have been presenting pretty much right then, at that same hour, had events tracked differently. He asks what’s wrong, and she says his algorithms are all wrong. Mike had made some serious miscalculations. She points the errors out to him, and he regards them seriously, so seriously that he cannot stop a grin from stretching wide across his face. He places the papers down on the bed and hugs Janet tight. Thank you, he says. This is such a gift. And, of course, he means it, not just, or at least not really, because he’s relieved he didn’t present such drastically inaccurate information at a conference of his peers, but rather because this is the sign he has been looking for that he is finished with his former life. Done with academia, done with patterns and politics. No more algorithms. Better living without geometry.

At dusk, Mike and Janet arrive at the party and start revelling. Most delegates are there with around fifty or sixty island residents, all told around a hundred folks milling around, and drinks are flowing. Within an hour, the only thing more lubricated than everyone’s social inhibitions were the sweat-soaked clothes of the delegates, who were prepared for air-conditioned rooms and not this intense tropical heat.

The fisherman who ribbed Mike earlier that afternoon passes around plates of calamari and rice when he notices one of the delegates looking up at a bird perched on a canopy, singing a bright tune. Jerdon’s Babbler, the fisherman says, and the delegate says, do they always sing at this time of day, and the fisherman says no, but this one does. He was born upside down, on the middle of the ocean floor. He is unique. Everyone laughs at this, and then someone, one of the delegates, says how it is impossible for people to imitate bird songs. They say someone once tricked attendees at an ethnomusicology conference by whistling into a tape recorder and speeding it up, pretending it was a bird. Someone else, another delegate, says that Mozart had a pet starling that inspired him to write the melody for the last movement of his seventeenth piano concerto.

The fisherman laughs, I wish I could do that, listen to this bird and write an excellent piece of music, when Mike pipes up, feeling a bit caustic, like he wants to take some of the stuffing out of the air, and he proclaims loudly that Mozart never really liked music, that he just kept on doing it because of his oppressive childhood, and that it didn’t even pay well, he pretty much died in poverty. Mike stands up and laughs, almost definitely drunk, and says that after Mozart died, they found pretty much no possessions in his apartment, just a scrap of the requiem he had been working on, which had been jammed under the table leg of the only piece of furniture in the apartment – a billiard table with five balls and twelve cues.

Mike and Janet leave not long after and walk along the beach. The moon took up most of the sky, infusing long ocean waves with chalk dust turned milk. Don’t let me leave here, Mike tells Janet. And don’t you go, either. He says, we’re home, we’re home, and Janet says, you’re drunk, you’re drunk, and Mike says, yes, but still.

By the time morning comes around, Mike isn’t sure if they’ve been walking all night or if they’ve just returned to the same spot after presumably fading to black in the storage room of the schoolhouse. Either way, he and Janet are walking hand in hand up the coast towards where Mike met the fishermen yesterday. They are there again, no doubt since early, given the number of fish they already have in their immense wooden tub mounted on what looks like a security door with skateboard wheels.

Janet looks in and says something about what a haul they have there, and the fishermen laugh and agree, always laughing, always good-natured. Mike pokes his head above the tub and sees the fish, perhaps thirty or forty mullet, swimming over and around each other. He notices that if a mullet flicks its tail upwards, out of the water, it means it is going to dive to the bottom of the tub, which will lead to three or four surrounding fish to expand their nares and dart counter-clockwise, always the same direction, in near-rhythmic cycles. He notes too how the smaller fish are less likely by at least one standard deviation to congregate near those that dive.

Mike looks up and sees that Janet is watching him with an expression somewhere between sorrow and grace. She smiles and turns away. Someone from the street is calling out to them, something about getting ready to board the seaplane back to the mainland. Now, if you ask Mike, he’ll swear that he doesn’t remember getting on a flight out of there, but then there he was, telling my colleague from Orange and me this story in the foyer of the Shanghai Sunshine Rehabilitation Centre, only hours after having given a rousing presentation on the impact of machine learning properties on predictive voting trends, so you know, he didn’t swim back to the mainland, did he. As for me, there is a, quote-unquote, seaplane waiting to take me somewhere, back to what I’ve always known, but for the life of me, please - I want it to stay grounded.