Condensation

by Huina Zheng

My brother taught me how to draw on the window.

On winter mornings he would come to my bed and wake me, then pull me—still half asleep—to the biggest window in the living room. That was our canvas.

“Make your mouth an O.” Then he breathed onto the glass. A warm patch spread across it and gathered into a pale fog. “Not too fast. And not too close,” he said. “Or it disappears.”

His finger moved across the glass, and the fog thinned wherever he touched it, leaving wet trails. One line, then another. Sometimes a neat cross, sometimes a slanted X. Most of the time he drew smiley faces. The eyes curved like little bridges, the mouth a half circle, and teeth, one, two, or sometimes a whole row. When he finished, he lowered his hand and stood beside me.

We watched. The lines blurred at the edges. The mist thinned. Only damp marks remained. At last, even those faded back into the glass. As if nothing was there before.

Like him.

In the reflection we stood close together, one tall and one small. He was still there in the glass, a ten-year-old boy.

After our parents took him to the city for a month-long hospital stay, they never let him outside again.

“I want to climb trees,” he shouted. “I want to dig for bird eggs.”

“You can’t get hurt,’ Mother’s voice caught in her throat. “If you start bleeding, it won’t stop.”

“I don’t care. I want to play. Staying inside is boring.”

“Be good,” she coaxed. “Your sister can keep you company. You can draw together.”

“Drawing on paper is boring.”

So he taught me to turn the whole house into a canvas. With Mother’s eyebrow pencil he drew enormous, lopsided suns on the white walls, monsters with fangs. With my crayons he covered the wooden dining table with battling warriors. He even dipped his fingers into black fountain-pen ink to draw countless ants across the faded blue-checked bedsheets.

Father never scolded him for any of it. He’d just come home and stand on the balcony smoking, one cigarette after another, acrid smoke drifting into the living room now and then. Mother wept constantly, her eyes swollen, blowing her nose into tissues that piled up in the trash.

My brother said he could do magic, that he could make summer draw on glass too. He turned the air conditioner to its lowest setting and pulled me out to the balcony. He breathed against the glass.

I stared at the mist. “How did you do that?”

“I just felt like it would work,” he said. “But I can’t really explain why.”

He taught me to wipe the pane with a damp towel. We breathed, drew crosses, watched them disappear. We breathed again.

But the next day, he had a fever again. The medicine didn’t help. The clinic doctor’s injections didn’t help either. The fevers came more and more often. He lay in bed all day, his cheeks sinking in. Mother wouldn’t let me disturb him. He never left that room again. “Next time, let’s draw smiley faces on the window.” Those were the last words he ever said to me.

The air conditioner was never turned that low again. Dust slowly gathered on the glass. I sat where he used to stand, sometimes for hours. The house was quiet, only the cicadas outside droning on and on. Sometimes Mother’s sobs would suddenly rise, like a cicada flying into the room, piercing the heavy silence, then fading away.

Seven years after my brother died, I learned a word in my eighth-grade physics textbook: condensation. Printed neatly on the page was its definition: the process by which a substance changes from a gas to a liquid, usually caused by cooling. Beside it was a diagram of a cold drink, beads of water clinging to the outside of the cup. The teacher explained that the water came from vapor in the air meeting a colder surface.

I stared at the illustrated droplets, my fingertips going numb. I understood all at once. All it required was the simplest thing: a temperature difference. Heat, rushing unconditionally toward cold. The next Qingming Festival, as I stood at my brother’s grave, I knew what I could say to him.

Those countless winter mornings we created together were held up by one of the universe's most universal, most unshakable physical laws. It explained my mornings. It explained my glass of water. It explained the clouds over distant mountains, and the rain falling into the sea.

I breathed out into the air. No white mist appeared, but I knew. All my longing was in it.