A Map for the Missing(68)

He wished such a simple principle was true in his father’s case—that the facts he didn’t know could be as important as the ones he did. The objects of truths he knew about his father were small and uncertain, without shape. What year his father was born, the year he married, that he’d served in the army. That he hated his own father. The list of unknown things was much more numerous. Why his father could become so quiet, why he liked to drink, why he and Yitian’s grandfather never spoke. In topology, cataloging the holes was a way of forming shape from the absences. The world of mathematics made this diminished way of knowing useful. Here, in the real world, Yitian couldn’t even name how much he didn’t know.



* * *



—

    Yitian? Yitian?” he heard her saying. He looked down to see that her fingers were on his elbow, lightly pushing him. “They’re saying your mother called back.” Hanwen gestured with her chin toward the lobby clerk holding out a receiver, an invitation awaiting him.

He leaned against the counter and brought the cool plastic to his ear. He breathed deeply, bracing himself.

“Ma?” he began to tell the story about that morning, but he couldn’t get his words out over his mother’s sudden crying.

“Sorry. I’m so sorry,” she was saying, over and over.

“What are you apologizing about?”

“I should have told you so much earlier, but I just didn’t want you to worry, all the way out there in America. You couldn’t have done anything, and I knew you were working so hard.”

“What? Worry about what, Ma?”

He tried to interrupt her, but her continued apologies refused him any room for interjection. He wanted to reach through the phone and shake her so that she would explain.

He hung up the phone, unable to listen to the repetitive wailing any longer. He pressed his open palm to his chest, waiting for the rapid beat to slow. Then he watched the clock behind the counter until the long hand ticked itself over two minutes before calling her back.

She answered the phone midway through the first ring. “Where did you go? What happened?”

“I can’t understand anything you’re saying, Ma. What are you talking about? What didn’t you tell me?”

“People start to forget things, you know, in their old age. I’m forgetting things, too, now, all the time. So I thought everything with your Ba was normal aging. It didn’t seem a reason to tell you. I didn’t want to worry you over something that happened to everybody.” She took several deep breaths, heavy as if poured directly into the phone’s receiver.

“Ma? Are you still there?”

“Yes.” She inhaled deeply before continuing. “Your father . . . he was starting to forget things. But not normal things. Well, at first they were normal. Where we kept the pickled mustard greens or the winter blankets. And I didn’t want to think too much of it, because it wasn’t hard for me to help him find these things. Here’s the cupboard, you know—that was easy enough to tell him whenever he needed help.”

Yitian had the sensation that he was about to learn something awful. He turned his head, searching out Hanwen, who had remained on the couch. She raised her eyebrows slightly at him, a question in her eyes. She rose and hurried over to him.

“Nothing was that bad until one day when I returned home late,” his mother said.

His hand shook on the receiver. He reached out and grasped Hanwen’s fingers. He was aware of how much cooler her hand was than his. A feeling began to gnaw at him as his mother explained. He saw, vaguely then undeniably, what his mother’s words pointed to—a disease that, unlike her, he was able to give a name to.

His feeling settled into certainty as she described returning home at dusk that day, calling out to his father to apologize for returning so late.

When I was standing in the courtyard, even before I entered the home, I had a feeling that something was wrong. It felt like there was a ghost who had entered the house. I can’t explain where my feeling came from. From the outside, everything looked exactly the same as it always did, but I knew even before I went in.

Because she hadn’t prepared dinner, she expected him to be irritated, but when she went inside, she felt a deep silence like the kind in the middle of the night. He wasn’t in the main room, where he usually would have been at that hour. She checked the two bedrooms, but both were empty. Still, she could sense there was some other presence in the air, that the space was not wholly hers. She walked through the house again. Main room, main bedroom, second bedroom, where Yitian and his grandfather used to sleep. This time she looked more closely. The room was so dark—in her fear, she’d forgotten to light a lamp—that she would not have noticed him if it hadn’t been for the sharp cry, the noise of a desperate child who’d lost his parents in a crowd. A shadow emerged from the corner of the second bedroom, becoming larger and larger. She gasped—it was her husband. What was strange was that his back faced her, rather than the wall. All this time, he’d been standing in the corner and looking into the sharp edge where the walls met, as if that was where the real world was to be found. She hadn’t noticed him earlier because his featureless back had blended into the shadows.

She would deny it to herself later, telling herself that what she saw was only a trick of the darkness, but at the moment she found him, when she looked into his eyes, she saw a bottomless fear. It was an expression she’d never seen him wear before. Where am I? he yelled. As she clutched him to her, telling him that he was in his home, safe, she was surprised to feel a dampness between them. She looked down. He’d soiled his pants.