The Astonishing Color of After(66)

My mouth formed words that I didn’t even know I was saying. “Well, you’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”





69





Sometime close to dawn, I fall asleep.

The strange thing is that I know that’s what it is. There’s the cool darkness wrapping around me. The pounding in my temples finally subsiding. The blissful nothingness.

And then my eyes are wide open and I’m wrapped in a gray fog, in a twisting storm, and the wind is picking up, and I can hear the chaotic flapping of wings.

It’s a dream it’s a dream it’s a dream.

I know it’s just like the dream from before, and yet I can’t stop it. I can’t wake up.

“Mom?” I call out.

“Leigh!” Her voice frantic. Her flapping erratic.

She shrieks.

“Mom!” I can’t see her, but I reach out all the same.

There’s a flash of red, a puff of feathers bursting into my face. The storm sucks them away.

Flash of lightning. Deafening boom. The thunder strikes just in front of me. Everything lights up in a blinding stab of white, and I see her silhouetted against the clouds.

She screeches. It’s a cold, terrible, animal sound. It slices through me. I can smell her flesh burning. With my next inhale, I swallow a bit of storm cloud.

Dusty ash coats my mouth.





70





The next day my grandmother doesn’t say a thing. Every time her eyes meet mine they’re distant and distracted. Is she thinking about that world where the smoke took us? The memories we saw? I wish I could ask what color her thoughts are.

I go out walking around the city on my own, my every step heavy and ultramarine, hoping to find some sign of the bird. But today there’s nothing. I waste away the day obsessing over what I need to do.

In the back of my head, circling like a vulture, the chant I can’t stop: Forty-four days. Forty-four days.

Images from the dream flicker behind my eyelids with every blink. I can still smell the bird burning; I can taste the ash on my tongue.

Dinner comes earlier than usual, and we eat in silence. Waigong’s gaze swings back and forth between me and my grandmother like a pendulum. He can tell something is off.

“Feng,” I say—masochistically, experimentally, or maybe for no damn reason at all.

Waipo looks up.

I swallow the sigh. It scrapes on the way down.

“Wo… men… qu…” My broken Chinese feels like an insurmountable wall. I finish with “zhao ta,” praying I got the tones right, hoping that the idea gets across.

Let’s go find her.

Because I’m tired of messing everything up. If I hadn’t felt so guilty, I wouldn’t have brought Waipo into the smoke, and if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have destroyed everything.

But maybe this is something I can fix. It’s weird without Feng here—and I’m ashamed to think it, but I desperately need her help. She knows Taipei, and she knows my family—she can help me make a new and better net, and figure out the best way to lure the bird down.

I try saying it again: “Qu zhao ta.”

My grandmother blinks at me; I’m not sure she understands. It takes a lot of coaxing to get her to pull on shoes and follow me out the door.

The sun has already swung around to the crease of the horizon. The air slightly cooler, shadows soft but still out to play. It’s a good thing I held on to that piece of Hello Kitty stationery with Feng’s address spelled out in Pinyin—Google Maps shows it isn’t too bad of a commute.

On the train, Waipo pulls the wooden beads off her wrist and rolls them between soft, cabbage-wrinkled hands. Her gnarled fingers find the head of the bracelet, where the guru bead is tied off by an elaborate looping knot. She closes her eyes and thumbs past each piece, one by one, turning the whole circle until she reaches the head. I wonder if she’s praying for us to find the bird.

A soothing voice announces the name of each stop in four languages. Mandarin and Taiwanese. English. The fourth must be Hakka; I think that’s what Dad said. The voice cycles through the languages like a song. Like a spell. I wait for the right name to charm us off the train. When it finally does, the sky has gone dark. The clouds dragging that nighttime veil over themselves like a blanket. The pinks and oranges diminished to the umber of dusk.

Waipo follows me as I study the map on my phone and walk us toward the pin that marks where Feng lives. We cross wide intersections where mopeds scrape past bearing tired passengers, bags of groceries, some of them with pet dogs perched in the foot wells between the riders’ knees.

Feng’s apartment is in a residential alley, tucked deep inside a tangle of narrow roads. I march us right up to the wide concrete step and double doors of shiny steel, and buzz number 1314.

There’s no answer. Push it again, holding that dusty square button a few beats longer. Still nothing.

I check the address to make sure I’ve got the right apartment. Maybe if we just wait awhile, she’ll come home.

We watch the sky turn to purple turn to black, watch the winds ushering the clouds overhead. I wonder: If you peel away all that darkness, would you find that deep YInMn blue? Maybe that’s where all the other colors are hiding—in a dimension of the world we just can’t see, between our sky and the rest of the universe.