A Map for the Missing(69)

Yitian could already picture it all as his mother spoke. There’d been villagers who behaved the way she described. Some of their families claimed these people were over a hundred years old. They rarely left their beds and could only eat porridge, fed to them by the younger members of their families, something thin enough that the soupy mixture could easily slip through their toothless gums. He’d seen them before, resting in storage sheds, skin like dried fruit peels hanging from their arms and legs, faces that were only a topography of jutting bones and the sunken spaces between. They couldn’t speak, could only make choking noises that sounded like wind being forced through an old pipe. Mouths as bottomless as black holes, puckered at the edges.

These old people had no memory. They couldn’t remember the names of their family members who fed them, couldn’t even remember the names of their own fathers and sons. Their existences were worse even than a ghost’s, who at least could know why it was haunting a place. Yitian sometimes saw them wandering around the village with a glassy look in their eyes, shuffling directionless on their weak feet. Back then, everyone knew where others belonged, so the job of whoever encountered them was to lead the lost old person back home.

The disease was one of old age, doomed to happen to anyone who lived long enough, but there were some for whom the symptoms appeared much earlier. As with so many other things, he’d been in college when he’d first heard it named formally, and then in America he learned the English name for the disease. Alzheimer’s. In those years, many of the illnesses they’d once found mystical turned out to be curable once they were named. The infections, the fevers, sometimes even the cancers—all these needed were an identification, and then poof, the miracle of medicine could do its work. This disease was one of the few that had resisted the solution of categorization. The mystery of memory, still irreparable by any type of science.

All along, Yitian had the sense of circling around some deep hole of non-knowing. Now, with his mother’s story, these fragmented pieces connected into an explanation he could make sense of.

“If—if we know what memory he had when he left this time, then we’d know what he was thinking, and we can figure out where he went.”

“Yitian—he ran into someone on the way out of the village. He told them he was going to Hefei to look for you.”

Yitian’s throat closed in upon him. So this was the thing she’d been most afraid to tell him.

“I know I should have told you earlier, but I didn’t want you to think he was still angry at you.”

“But was he? Is that why he left?”

Beside him, Hanwen looked sharply up at the sudden change in his tone.

“I don’t know,” his mother said.

“Weren’t you with him all this time? How could you not know?” He’d never spoken to his mother this way before, rarely spoke to anyone like this at all. His mother had kept the truth from him. For years, he had no evidence that his father even thought of him.

“This person who saw him in the village, why didn’t they stop him from leaving?”

“She was one of the teenagers who grew up in the township, so she wasn’t familiar with everyone. She didn’t know who you or your father were—she just thought he was telling the truth about where he was going.”

After a pause, his mother added, “I wanted to tell you sooner, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know if it would be right. Please don’t be mad at me.”

But he did feel mad. The lies she’d told weren’t harmless. She’d allowed him to spend all these days after the disappearance, the most crucial ones, looking for his father without telling him the full story. Because of her lie. For the past three days, he’d been in the exact place that his father said he was going. He could have been scouring the city, instead of sitting in his hotel room or going to the zoo or sleeplessly reviewing old math problems. All the while, his father has been out there, lost and helpless.

He felt a fantasy unraveling itself. He’d imagined finding his father, telling him about the life he’d made in America. He would show him that Yishou’s death had not been useless. Nothing his father warned him about had come to pass, after all. But his father had gone to Hefei, where Yishou had gotten sick that year. The things that’d happened in this city were still the essential and defining event of his father’s memory, even in its reduced state.

After he hung up the phone, he became aware of Hanwen’s hand upon his. The cold marble of the counter. The clerk’s alarmed stare. He wondered how loud his voice had become on the phone.

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” she asked. “Your room?” When she took her hand away from his, the very outline of him shook.

He said yes because momentum carried him, because his heart still rang from his mother’s news, and he couldn’t imagine going back to that empty and shabby room alone. Because he couldn’t call his mother back, couldn’t call Mali. Hanwen was the only person from his past life whom he could speak to, the only one who would understand.





Twenty-seven



He was sure he could read what the clerk was thinking as they headed together to the back of the lobby. Another couple, surreptitiously using a hotel together this late in the evening, displacing their needs onto a place not their home.

He entered the elevator first and pressed himself against the back wall. Turning his head, he was shocked to see his doubled reflection in the mirrors. How tired he looked, how depleted. He shifted his glance forward toward her. The unwavering outline of her face brought a calm over him. He could see in that outline her solidity and practicality; she was someone who could help him stand.