He has the ability to imagine himself a minor incident in the lives of others. It is not an abstract thing. He would not know quite what you meant by “abstract”: he is twelve. He simply knows that if he imagines swimming in the sea, well, while most children will think immediately of the cinematic shark below them, Alex-Li Tandem is with the lifeguard. He can see himself as that smudge on the horizon, his head mistaken for a bobbing buoy; his wild arms hidden by the roll of the surf. He can see the lifeguard, a bronzed and languid American, standing on the sand with his arms folded, deciding there’s nothing out there. Alex sees the lifeguard wander off down the beach in search of those German girls from yesterday, and a cold drink. The lifeguard buys a Coke from a passing vendor. The shark severs Alex’s right calf from his body. The lifeguard sidles up to Tanya, the pretty one. The shark drags Alex in a bloody semicircle through the water. The lifeguard speaks kindly to her ugly friend with the flat chest, hoping for brownie points. Some vertebrae snap. Did you see that? A seal! says Tanya, mistaking Alex’s desperate hand for the turn of a glossy flipper. And then he’s gone. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a seal? No, it’s me, drowning. This is how things go for Alex-Li. He deals in a shorthand of experience. The TV version. He is one of this generation who watch themselves.
Just now, he is in his father’s car, on a day trip. Overhead flies a plane, so low it looks as if it might worry the corrugated roofs of an industrial estate to the left. They are on a minor A-road, in congestion, near an airport. To his right sits his father, Li-Jin, who is also his best friend. From the back seats, two boys repeatedly flick an elastic band at his head for no reason. Now he leans forward out of their reach and puts his pale, fleshy arm out of the passenger window—can he really be seen from up there? Hello! The anorexic February trees stretch towards him on either side. In return he offers an open hand to let the wind shuttle through his fingers. He catches a slick leaf round his thumb like a bandage. Ug ug. Uggarama. They are going to see a wrestling match. This is unusual. Alex is not a very social fellow. His spare time is spent either in front of the TV or accompanying his father to his surgery. He is perfectly content to skulk around the reception area speculating on who has what while Dr. Tandem does whatever he does in the small room with the white door. Alex will take with him a book of crossword puzzles, or a comic, and is always left alone, which is the way he likes it. Foot fungus, angina, the plague: he assigns these diseases willy-nilly to the simply bronchial or menopausal as they slump in the child-sized plastic chairs. No one ever notices him. He’s just a boy, watching. It is like a TV show. Except in the past year he has become conspicuous. He has grown and filled; he’s now soft-bellied, woman-hipped and sallow. His new glasses magnify the crescents of his eyes—does he look more Chinese? His boyhood is falling away. People have started to fuss with him. Constantly he is being grabbed by the shoulder and asked idiotic questions by the elderly. If you are twelve, suddenly everyone has an opinion about you and the open air, and you and a good football game, and you versus the sporty, red-cheeked boys of some godforsaken distant era. The consensus is that he should get out more. Alex has sensed that some kind of day trip, if not this particular day trip, was inevitable.