A Map for the Missing(56)

The room numbers rushed past. The clack of high heels beat a frenzied rhythm behind him, then Hanwen’s fingers were pressing into his arm, holding him back. She was saying something—Just wait one moment.

He threw off her hand and kept running.

He realized he had no idea what room he was looking for. He reached the end of the hall and doubled over, panting.

“Which room is he in?” he shouted, but when he was told the number, even the simple math of calculating in which direction to walk seemed impossibly hard, his brain performing the subtraction as if moving through sludge.

Then he was there, in front of the right room, as if by accident, as if guided by God. Three nurses gathered around a bed in the corner. The one with his father. The patient monitor pushed to the side, the air of defeat and an ending, another stretcher, bare and utilitarian, already prepared for the departure.

The nurses pulled the curtain.

“I’m sorry, sir, you can’t come in here. We’re still preparing—”

He pushed her aside and threw the curtain back. Not until later did he wonder if he might have hurt the nurse, but by that time her face had disappeared from his memory, indistinguishable from all the others he’d passed.

The paper curtain, sliding on its rusted rings, ripped in his hands. Then he looked—



* * *



—

It was the posture of his jaw that gave him away, even before Yitian had time to hesitate. The man’s jaw was held slack. The pose was languid, belonging to someone who had lived his life in contentment. Though death could suddenly change the shape of a body, surely there had to be some melding to the soul that preserved the truth of the lived person.

He did not need to get any closer to tell: the man was not his father.





Twenty


DECEMBER 1977


They rode the final stretch back from Hefei on a tractor wagon, its only two passengers. As soon as they’d hopped over the barrier, Yishou tucked his body against a corner of the siding, squatted down, and slouched his head into the angular pillow he created out of his arms. As they passed under trees, the shadows of branches flitted birdlike, over his hands, crosshatching and webbing dark over his fingers.

Yitian, crouching against the opposite siding, watched his brother as the tractor ambled on along the dusty roads. He was amazed that Yishou could sleep against the bumpy jerking of the vehicle. He himself had too much on his mind to rest. Driving away from the city, he’d felt an unexpected wave of sadness and loss at the thought of returning home. The gaokao was done, its end arriving so much quicker than he’d expected, and he felt already the absence of purpose in its wake. And if he dared to imagine that he’d passed the exam, how would he tell his father? He wasn’t afraid of a beating as punishment, as he’d been when he was younger. There were consequences much worse than that.

He reached his foot across the length of the wagon and nudged Yishou’s thigh. His brother didn’t even register the movement.

“Yishou! We’re almost there!” He dug the toe of his shoe into Yishou’s pants, harder this time.

Yishou lifted his head and squinted against the sunlight.

“What will Ba say?” Yitian asked. He had to yell in order to make himself heard over the tractor’s loud rumbles, and he felt self-conscious and melodramatic at the volume.

“I was just in the middle of a dream! We’re nowhere near home yet.”

“Never mind that. Do you think Ba is going to be angry?”

Yishou rubbed his eyes, then wiped his forehead. “Not if you stick to the story we made up. Remember, Uncle hurt his arm in the harvest, so he doesn’t want Ba to visit for a little while—”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about after, if I get to go to college. How will I explain to Ba?”

“Easy. I’ll sneak off with you again to get you there. We’ll make up another story, another uncle in another village where I have a girl I need to see.”

“I’m serious! Can’t you see why this is a big issue?”

“There are still months until you have to think about that, Yitian. Don’t worry about it now.”

It was useless to ask his brother for help with a problem like this. Yishou was adept at finding solutions to concrete questions, but it wasn’t in his nature to worry about a future that had not yet arrived.

“Fine.” He squinted. “Are you all right?”

Yishou had leaned forward and was holding his stomach with both hands. “God, I hate riding these tractors. The drivers are awful. It’s like they drive badly just to annoy us.”

Yitian didn’t feel anything himself, but when the tractor slowed down, he yelled, “Can you slow down? My brother is feeling sick.”

“It must have been the food we ate at the stall last night,” Yishou said. “That proprietress, who was staring at us the whole time, she didn’t seem clean at all. I knew that food wasn’t to be trusted. This is why you can’t eat on the street. And I have a headache, too.”

Yitian supposed the real cause was all the alcohol Yishou had drunk the night before. Now that Yishou had shifted his face out of the sun, Yitian could see that what he’d thought was simply yellow cast by the light was actually his brother’s sallow skin. The sheen of sweat on his forehead had reappeared.