A Map for the Missing(65)
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The production team was cleaning and fixing the old pesticide sprayers in the barn when she returned from Yitian’s. During the slack season, the team leader was always finding tasks like this for them, anything so that the sent-down youth wouldn’t spend the days playing cards in their dormitories, mucking through the empty time of the winter days. Normally, she enjoyed this kind of work—she would get to examine the old equipment carefully, learning how all the pieces slid and fit perfectly together to make a well-greased whole; she loved, especially, the miraculous moment when something broken would begin to whir again, after which she would see her own hands as if they were made of magic.
Today, she didn’t have any of her old enthusiasm. She hadn’t been back to the barn since she and Yitian had studied there. She saw someone had dragged their old desk into the corner, already layered with cobwebs.
Niannian, squatting by the doorway of the barn over her machine, gave her a searching look as she entered. Hanwen dragged a sprayer into the corner so that she wouldn’t have to speak with her. She sat down on an old brick and examined the machine. When she pressed the lever, the nozzle emitted a defeated sputter. No liquid came out, though the tank was more than half full with the milky pesticide. The issue had to be in the pressure chamber. She had to work to unscrew the cap, breaking the places where liquid had congealed along the ridges of the lid. When it finally came loose suddenly, her nose was assaulted with a sharp smell that burned her nostrils. She quickly moved to cover her mouth with her hand, but the smell had already diffused through the air and up to her head, making her feel woozy at once. She searched for the handkerchief she usually carried with her, but she couldn’t find it.
“Come out of there and work in the open air, Hanwen, what are you thinking?” Niannian shouted. “It’s dangerous.”
Hanwen ignored her, but took the handkerchief that Niannian threw across the barn. When she tied the cloth around the back of her head, the world suddenly became fuzzy and far away.
For the past few days, she’d craved a sense of separation just like this, to close herself off from the world. Everyone around her had wanted to ask How are you doing? Are you all right?, as if they did not already know the answer to that question, as if they could create a false reality from their concern. She’d started and thrown away piles of letters to her mother, making trivial waste out of the paper that she’d once been so careful to preserve. Her mother would certainly have guessed at the outcome by now.
She peered down the dark hole of the air chamber. She felt the beginnings of a headache in her right temple and stopped momentarily to apply pressure there with her fingers. There was the brief relief of nothing, but when she removed her hand, the dull ache returned, this time with an increased pounding that threatened to bloom outward and spread.
Her breath went out the fabric and she inhaled it back in, so that she felt like a person on a loop. Her head was pounding now. When she reached up to scratch her scalp, she accidentally undid the bandana in the process. The smell of the pesticide rose up to meet her, as if lying in wait all this time. She counted deep gulps of air, hoping to clear her head, but she only coughed and inhaled more pesticide.
One . . . two . . .
Her hand loosened upon the nozzle and she was dimly aware of it falling to the ground.
Three . . . four . . .
Her body gave out. She heard the sounds of the world from far away. There was shouting—had the sound come from her, or from someone else? Hanwen . . . I’ve been trying to find you . . . a voice was saying. She reached out to grasp the source with both arms but found only air. In the corner, at the desk where they’d studied, she saw Yitian sitting with his head bent. Was she asleep or awake, or something else entirely? She saw things that had happened in her life as if through the window of a speeding bus. There was so much she wanted to hold on to: the day she tested into the best high school in Shanghai, her mother’s fortieth birthday, the first time she’d spoken with Yitian. She rushed toward the bus door. Wait, wait! she said to the bus operator, please let me off here! She couldn’t breathe. Somewhere beyond her sight, magpies shrieked a crying alarm. Are they calling for me? And then he was on the hilltop with her, the spiky shells of a chestnut splayed open across his pale hand.
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She didn’t speak for days, neither in the truck to the county hospital nor on the train back to Shanghai. Words caught, large and looming, in her throat. She slouched against the window all throughout the daylong train journey, without the strength to lift her body up. Other passengers took pity on her and fed her hot water through their own thermoses. She moved from sleep to wakefulness and back, her neck in the same, cramped position. Each time she awoke, she saw the passing countryside outside the window as if she were traveling in reverse through the long, monotonous fields, erasing all the life of the past few years. She imagined herself arriving back at the platform at Shanghai station, sixteen again, skin still untanned, mind a blank.
Then she fell back asleep. She felt someone’s hand on her forehead, a calloused palm, gently rubbing her. She wanted to call out his name, but knew the touch belonged to someone else. Someone who shuffled quietly to her bed, laid more blankets on her, then removed them, layering down her care.
Her mouth finally parted. She was back in her mother’s apartment.