A Map for the Missing(106)
“How many would you like to buy?” The male shopkeeper motioned to the set of books he’d revealed in the cabinet, all without binding, their paper signatures showing.
“All of them.”
The shopkeeper laughed. “I don’t think you have enough money for all of them. Besides, how will you carry them home?”
They told him the price.
“I’ll go get the money together, and then come back,” he said.
“All right. Would you like to stay for dinner before you go?” the woman said to him, but her husband shushed her.
“He can’t stay. He needs to go collect the money to buy the set, right?”
Right, right, he said. Even though he could sense the other man’s rudeness to him, he didn’t retort. There wasn’t a point to wasting any more time.
How strangely they spoke to me, as if they did not believe me, he thought, after he’d left the shop. People spoke to him slowly and strangely all the time now, as if he were too stupid to understand what they said. He never could find the words to make them believe his mind worked.
As he walked on, he spoke to his father, to Yishou, and to Yitian. He tried to explain to them how much there was still left to say. I will go get money and buy the entire set of books, so we can finish our conversation, he told them.
The shopkeepers did not believe me because Yitian chose to leave forever. He realized this with a shock. He did not know where the sudden thought came from, but he knew immediately that it was the truth. He stopped walking, somewhere on this empty street in a town he’d never seen before. It took him every bit of concentration he had to follow the memory to its origin. Dimly, he saw Yishou lying on his stomach on a hospital bed. The awful red rash that had appeared, as if conjured by magic, on his back.
The sunset had begun while he was thinking and staring at his feet. He did not know what to do next. Beside him, there was a stoop leading to a closed store and he decided to sit there while he pondered his dilemma. What was he doing here? What had he been thinking, to believe he could make it all the way out here alone? He could no longer feel his hands, he noticed suddenly. He wanted, surely and desperately, to go home. His son was gone. Another was dead. How many days had it been since he left? Two, he thought. He could make it back. He had some money left. He rose, but instead of walking out of Five Groves Township toward Hefei, he turned around and tried to retrace his steps to the ones he’d taken out of the village.
As he walked, something amazing began to happen, something he could hardly believe. It was snowing! So rapidly, fat white flakes falling on his nose and eyelashes and exposed hands and then melting. Like he’d done when he was a child, he stuck out his tongue to catch the snowflakes and taste the bursts of coolness in his mouth. He was cold, colder than he ever remembered feeling before, but seeing the snowflakes made him happy.
His entire body was shivering, he realized. He needed to hurry. There was a woman waiting for him back home, and he did not know who she was, but she would be angry if he did not return in time for dinner. It was cold, so cold. How had the years accumulated and counted themselves, leaving him here? He could not remember.
原谅我, he thought. He repeated the words out loud, and dropped to his knees in the snow. He brought his forehead to the ground. Please forgive me. This one time, I ask for your pardon.
* * *
—
What does he look like as he falls? Yitian used to watch the men in the fields, their hoes arcing up and down as the farmers drove them again and again into the dirt. Or the men leading plows, rope drawn taut behind their backs, all the tension pulled there in an unbroken line.
He always thought they seemed as if they were just about to fall. How would that look—clumsy and hard, face-first into the yellow soil? No, it would be like this: the knees catching upon the ground before the fall, a moment of pleading in the snow before the body gave out.
Acknowledgments
When I first began harboring the secret dream of writing, I could not have imagined that I’d really one day get to have a published book, and I would really never have, if not for the kindness shown to me by friends, family, and teachers in the years since then.
Maria Hummel, my first writing professor, was so warm and insightful that a confused economics major began to consider the possibilities of writing. Since then, I’ve been lucky to have the kindest teachers and mentors to guide me: Garth Greenwell, Liam Callanan, Rachel Smith, Christopher Tilghman, Jeffery Renard Allen, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Tracie Morris, Ethan Canin, Jamel Brinkley, and Charles D’Ambrosio. Thank you, especially, to Lan Samantha Chang, for letting me come to Iowa twice, and for the hours of life and writing advice. I look up to you very much.
Thank you to the members of Garth Greenwell’s 2020 Tin House Summer Workshop and Liam Callanan’s 2019 Bread Loaf Summer Workshop for their comments on this book. Particular gratitude goes to the 2019 Novel Workshop at Iowa, for reading 150+ pages and helping me to figure out where it was going. Several early readers provided much-needed feedback: Samantha Xu, Alonzo Vereen, Gemma Sieff, Ada Zhang, Niuniu Teo, and Amir Tarsha. Xochitl Gonzalez and IfeOluwa Nihinlola read almost as many drafts of this book as I did myself.
I am indebted to my team of Juli(e)’s. I could not have dreamed I’d get such a supportive team. To my agent Julie Barer, thank you for believing in this book and for generously providing helpful comments through so many rounds of edits. I feel unbelievably lucky to work with you. To my editor, Juliana Kiyan, thank you for your vision of this book and helping me to see my own more clearly. I’m so glad we get to do our first books together. Thanks also to Nicole Cunningham for her smart comments, and the entire team at the Book Group. At Penguin Press, I’d like to thank Victoria Lopez and Lavina Lee for all their help with production, and Grace Han for the beautiful cover design. Sam Mitchell and Lauren Lauzon have been amazing and enthusiastic shepherds of this book into the world.