A Map for the Missing(3)

“It’s not that. I just think it’s not so strange, right? To leave and go on a trip. Old people forget to tell others these things, sometimes. He can’t have gone so far.”

He looked across the table at her face, searching for some hope that he could latch on to and steal for himself. She seemed so certain as she reassured him—but she was always so certain, he realized.

“It would be a big trip for you.” She bit her lip. “And I wonder if by the time you get there, he’ll already be back.”

“Maybe.” Mali’s practicality and optimism didn’t have their usual effect tonight. Over the years he’d told her so little about his father, keeping the terms vague enough that she knew about the estrangement but not its reason. She thought this was a simple matter of an old man traveling in his later years to see friends. But his father hadn’t left the village in years, never breaking the outline of that circumscribed space where things were familiar to him, which protected him from the dangers he’d seen of the world outside.

“I didn’t mean I don’t want you to go,” she said, and he could see that she felt she’d misstepped. She’d gone to see her family in Beijing twice since they’d come to America, each time with excitement and a suitcase packed full of gifts. “If you think it would help—of course you should go.”

While she warmed up leftovers in the microwave, she called the airline to purchase the tickets.

“One way. What’s the earliest available?” She knit her eyebrows together. “Are you sure there isn’t anything sooner? It’s a family emergency.” A pause. “Okay. Book that.” He wouldn’t have been able to summon such precise English at a time like this. One hand checking the food’s temperature, another twisting her finger around the cord of the receiver cradled against her ear. How was she so practiced, so calm? He was overtaken by sudden gratitude.

She hung up the phone and balanced dishes in both hands as she brought them to the table. “Tomorrow afternoon at four, there’s a flight leaving from SFO. Connecting through Seoul. I booked it for you. You’ll be home the next day. All good?”

He nodded. Home. Her words, not his.



* * *



—

Perhaps if Yitian and his father spoke, he would have been able to piece together a story for where his father might have gone, but he didn’t know what shape his father’s life might have taken in the fifteen years since they’d last seen each other.

In bed beside Mali that evening, he couldn’t make himself sleep. They’d purchased an ultraplush mattress for his benefit, as he often had trouble at night, but Mali swore she could fall asleep anywhere.

Tonight the softness discomfited him. In the darkness he lay awake and tried to imagine what his father’s body and face would look like after all the time that had passed. He looked into the shadows of their bedroom and tried to fill in his father’s features, piece by piece. He began with the eyes. He could not imagine them ever giving up their opacity. The eyelids that drooped over them acted like a blanket for the pupils, dark as wet soil after a rainstorm. Even in Yitian’s childhood, those eyes seemed to belong to a man much older. On rare occasions when his father laughed, the heavy lids made it impossible to tell if the smile reached upward.

Then the mouth, which he remembered mostly by the recoil he’d felt whenever his father opened it and the harsh words strung themselves out. Inside was the damp smell of rot, something Yitian was only able to name after leaving the village. His father never once in his entire life had brushed his teeth.

Yitian rose from bed. He craved a piece of paper upon which he could follow thoughts to their conclusions. He felt unsettled by Mali’s quiet breathing and suddenly missed the noisy nights of his earlier life, when his sleep was punctuated by the rumbling sounds of others.

In his study, he clicked on the desk lamp and then extracted a single sheet of white paper from the drawer. The bulb’s light cast oblong shadows on the smooth eggshell surface, upon which he began doing what he knew best—sketching out a model:


Let f(x) be the time in China (in hours), x hours after midnight where

{x : x ε , 0 ≤ x < 24}

then f(x) is a function defined by:

f : x ? (x + 16)

y → y(g)

and g(y) is my father’s activity at y hours in Tang Family Village, defined partially by the following diagram:

                     y

                        y(g)



                           5.5

                →

                waking in muted dawn light then steam rising from face with hot towel



               11

                →

                returning home to lunch after morning in the fields