A Map for the Missing(85)

He’d been staring ahead but turned now to examine her. He noticed she was clutching her arms with cold, but when she spoke, there was no sign of shiver in her voice.

“I always wondered if I would see you here,” she said. “My friends and I often come to the dances, just to watch. I thought it might be you tonight, and then when you finally stepped into the streetlight, I was sure.”

She looked at him and laughed aloud suddenly. “Forgive me, you must think me so strange! Sometimes I think that everyone can already understand the thoughts going through my head. I was the one who let you into the dean’s office, in the history department that day.”

He closed his eyes and pictured. Walls narrowing in on him, the speckled linoleum floor, footsteps, and then a low voice. A low voice.

He opened his eyes, looked into her face, searching for it—there. There it was, the large mole in her cupid’s bow. He remembered it clearly now, the way his eyes had focused on it when she’d come up to him in the hallway.

The rest of her face was unique, and he was surprised he’d forgotten it. Striking in its own way. It was wide but tapered into an unlikely narrowness around the chin. Her mouth was large and expressive, the kind that made it easy to both smile and frown, and which would not be able to hide any emotion. In a way that was rare, her face seemed entirely suited to the person, at least as he knew her so far.

“You know,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to find you because I’ve wondered all this time whether you were doing okay. For some reason it stuck with me, how badly you wanted to change your major.”

He thought about his naked display of emotion that day with shame. Even now, the sight of her face made him remember the feeling of his heart dropping at the loss of a dream.

“Are you surprised that I remember after all this time?”

He nodded.

“That was my first week on this job. I was so nervous. My mother had to ask all sorts of people in order to get me this position. In this fancy university, you know.”

So the memorable moments of their lives had intersected.

“But think—I let you into the dean’s office, risked my job for you on my first week, and you don’t even remember me!”

“Did you get in trouble?”

“No, even though I was very scared.” She laughed. “I didn’t know anything back then. Now I know all the tricks. If you ever want to go into the dean’s office to see him now, I can help you.”

“So you still work in the history department.”

“I do.”

“That’s why I’ve never seen you. I never walk by there anymore.”

They’d walked halfway around the lake. She pointed to a cluster of staff dormitories, low buildings with roofs of aluminum sheets. “Here’s me. All the secretaries live here.”

“Well, goodnight then,” he said.

She peered at him expectantly. When he didn’t say anything else, she looked disappointed. He was aware of this, and yet couldn’t say any more. He knew there had to be some uncaging, a release of his heart to allow it to exist in the space outside of his chest. How easy that had been when there hadn’t yet been a closing there.

She said goodbye and walked away.

“Wait, thank you—” he realized he did not know her name.

She turned back.

“What is your name?”

“Ren Mali,” she said.

“Mali,” he repeated. “Like this?” He drew the characters into the air.

She nodded.

“Ren Mali, I just wanted to say thank you. For letting me into that office three years ago. Even if it didn’t work out. I’m fine, actually. Just so you know.”

She smiled, and this time he returned it.

“It’s a nice name,” he said.

“My parents only wanted me to be a good worker. Nimble and fast. Isn’t that funny? The students here all have better names, about writing, or scholarship, or the future of the country. Your parents knew what kinds of people you were going to be.”

“Not me,” he said. “My name isn’t about any of those things. Tang Yitian.”

“Yitian? Like this?” She drew in the air with her index finger, the wrong characters, meaning tranquility.

He shook his head. It was the kind of elegant name a scholar might have.

“Then show me.” She stuck out her palm, motioning for him to write the correct characters on it. Just the thought of such an intimate gesture frightened him, but he didn’t know how to refuse. He placed his index finger on her palm. Her skin was soft against the pad of his finger. He wrote 唐一田.

“Oh, a single field,” she said.

He nodded. The yearning for something simpler.

She closed her hand around his name.

After she left him, he watched and waited until a light came on in a corner of the building, before continuing to walk, alone, around the lake.

The thought that crossed his mind, that she might like him, seemed almost impossible. She was an attractive girl from Beijing, and he was a boy from the countryside with strange habits. The only girl who’d ever liked him had been an aberration, only possible because it happened in a different place, a place that had fooled her. He’d hardly even talked to a girl with love in mind in the years since then. It was not that he never found girls, on campus or in the city, attractive, but rather that it was simpler to limit the ways he thought of them.