Lost in Translation

18

The world should have stopped. Everything ought to have gone dark and shrunk into some permanent nuclear winter. But the routine morning light appeared anyway and advanced across the plain stones of the lobby floor as if this were just another cruel quotidian turn of the wheel. She walked across the lobby, dead. She was dimly aware of Spencer, bent over some papers in the side sitting room.

"You all right, Alice?" he asked.

She stopped and stood motionless, her eyes closed.

"You don’t have to answer." He sighed. "I just wanted to say, you know, I’m sorry." He resettled the papers on his lap and went on with what he was writing.

She nodded and walked on. She needed to go out. To walk. Even if everything else was a stinging piano wire of pain, she could still move her body. It was a thing that sometimes got her through.

So she walked Eren Obo for a long, uncounted time, until the sun was far and hot across the sky. The desert light, in which she had once taken pleasure, now seemed to beat on her relentlessly.

Horace was going to die. He was going to leave her.

And Lin didn’t want her after all.

She trudged up the meandering creek through the scattered houses, past the temple complex. She ignored her thirst until it was a screaming need, and then she walked back to the center of town and bought an orange soda, loosely bottled, of extremely dubious hygiene. She drank it frantically. I’m Alice Mannegan, not Mo Ai-li, she thought. An American obsessed with China. Is that why I loved Lin, because he is China? No. Because he is Lin, a man. Not that it matters now. He’s gone. And I’m alone again.

At the edge of Eren Obo, where the town dissolved into bare desert that rolled gently to the edge of the mountains, Dr. Kong Zhen was walking too. He kept his eyes moving in a practiced sweep over the ground. He knew how to spot the microliths, the flakes and detritus and the tools themselves, the scrapers and hammers and points. So like plain rocks to the ordinary eye. To him, relics beyond price.

He stopped suddenly, at the edge of a crudely dug hole. He studied the hole, about a meter deep, and three or four meters long-a trench, actually. There was a creek not far away. Probably, he thought, the ditch had been started as an irrigation sluice. Begun-when? Ten years ago? Fifty?-partly dug, then abandoned.

Dr. Kong dropped into the hole and examined it. A dark horizontal streak, four inches thick-could it be? His pulse picked up. Stay calm, he told himself, running his fingers over the darkened earth. Was it ash? When one excavated cross-sections of primitive huts they looked like this, from the years and years of fires inside. Trembling he turned to the trench wall, to the pebbles and rocks studding it. With practiced care, despite the anticipation roaring in his brain, he removed these objects from the ash layer one by one and examined them. Each breath caught in his throat. A flake. Another flake. A cobble. Had this been a hunter-gatherer dwelling? Oh, yes. Yes it had. He stuffed the artifacts in his pocket, scrambled out of the trench, and hurried back to find Spencer.

She went to the bank and begged the manager to let her call her father’s office. On the other side of the world, in Washington, the secretary recognized her voice and called Roger to the phone at once.

"How bad is it? Tell me."

"Bad, Alice."

"So he’s having surgery? Chemotherapy? What?"

A tiny but perceptible pause. "Neither of those is indicated right now. They’re mainly trying to make him comfortable-"

"What?" She heard her voice rising. "Why aren’t they doing anything?"

"Alice,…" Roger sighed. His voice was flat, exhausted. "Look, he’s desperate to speak to you himself. He’ll be back here in four or five hours. Can you call again then?"

She looked frantically around. "No, the bank’ll be closed then. This is the only phone in the town."

"I see." Roger sounded deflated.

"I’ll keep trying, though. I will. And I’ll come right home, of course."

"Good. He’s stepping down from Congress on Friday, Alice. We’ll make the public announcement then."

"Friday! Are you kidding?"

"Can you be here by then?"

"I don’t know-I’ll try…" She calculated quickly. It was Monday. They were supposed to drive back to Yinchuan tomorrow. The next flight from Yinchuan to Beijing wasn’t until Tuesday night anyway. If she could get on that flight, it might be possible. She knew enough people in Beijing to get a quick ticket from Beijing to Hong Kong or Tokyo. Once she got to Hong Kong or Tokyo, it’d be a clear shot. "I’ll try," she repeated. "If not Friday, I can definitely get there before the weekend’s out."

"Good."

"Roger? How long does he have? A month? Six months?"

Silence again. "I’d rather he talked to you himself, Alice, so when you call back-"

"Roger, please. You know how hard it’s going to be for me to get him on the phone. Just tell me. How long."

She heard a long, defeated exhalation. "Alice," Roger said at last, "just get here as quickly as you can."

When Kong Zhen found Adam Spencer, he had no language to tell him what he had just found. So he made a quick sketch of the landscape, the canyon mouth, the alluvial fan, and then drew the trench. Speaking rapidly in Chinese even though he knew the American couldn’t understand, he colored in the ash layer and tapped the pen against it for emphasis.

"An ash layer?" Spencer said. "Are you kidding?" He stared at the page.

Kong pulled double handfuls of microliths from his pockets and scattered them on the table between them. He pointed to the microliths and then the ash layer.

"You found these in the ash? Oh, my God."

"Zou-ba, " Kong said, indicating the door.

"I’m with you," Spencer agreed, looking around for his hat. "Let’s go take a look."

"Thank you, elder brother," Lin said, climbing down from the truck.

"Will you be all right?" the Mongol asked him, hands on the steering wheel.

"Yes. I have water, some food. So this was the place they called Camp Fourteen?"

"Across that ridge." The Mongol pointed up the winding dirt track that led away from them and disappeared over the boulder-strewn hills. "But I believe there’s nothing left now-"

"I know," Lin cut him off heavily. "It’s all right. I know."

The Mongol raised a hand and drove away.

Lin trudged up the path to the top of the ridge and then used the map Guo Wenxiang had drawn, walking over the pass, along an ancient landslide of jumbled rocks, and through a cleft which showed him, in a depressing sun-battered sweep, the valley down below where the camp had been. Although Lin could see the remains of a road, and the broken-down huddle of mud buildings, he did not descend into the valley. Instead he followed the face of the dirt mountain around to his left, as he’d been instructed, and came to a small, jutting butte, protected behind by piles of rock.

Guo had said this was where they were buried.

Yes. Lin narrowed his eyes against the sun. He could see the row of shallow, regular swellings in the earth. He started at the right, as Guo had told him to do, and counted back seven.

Then he stood a long time in the beating blue glare, looking down at it.

This is my Meiyan at last, he thought in a clutch of misery. He unhooked the water bottle from his belt, set it on the ground, and lay down in the dust beside her, curled into a ball, his knees pressed up to his chest.

Alice stood in her room by the curtain, staring dully out the window. The courtyard behind the guesthouse was empty, shimmering in the oven of midday. The hot sage fragrance of the brush along the base of the building rose to her.

All she felt was emptiness. There was an ache in her chest where love had been. It had been love, hadn’t it? The real thing. Sometimes one didn’t know until after. Now she knew.

It was gone, though. All in the past.

"I can’t get a line to Beijing now," the Yinchuan operator told her. "Perhaps you should try later."

"It’s so important," Alice pleaded. "I really have to get this call through to Washington-"

"I’m sorry. There are no lines now."

"What’s the problem?" the bank manager said. He was at an adjacent desk, checking through some papers. It had been kind of him to let her use the phone again. But she could feel him wanting her to be finished and gone.

"Dabutong-le, " she answered desperately, trying to keep the tears out of her voice, I can’t get through.

The manager moved his shoulders in sympathetic resignation.

"I’m sorry." She swallowed, replacing the receiver. "I’ll come back later."

"I hope your father will be better," the manager said.

But he won’t, she thought, walking out of the bank into the harsh sunlight. I’m losing him. Losing Horace. Is that really who he is to me, Horace? The man in the Capitol, the man on TV, the champion of hate? But he’s my father, my family. My ancestor. I love you, sweetheart-she could hear his voice, the softness in it, the constancy.

Horace had made her what she was. She was his daughter through and through. From him she got her intelligence, and her pluck. Also the pale skin on her legs, her small knotty hands, her slight body and forest-colored eyes. She pushed through the crowd of young Mongol men loitering outside the bank and stepped into the dirt-packed street.

Yes. It was Horace who’d endowed her with intuition and sensitivity and then-cruelly-put her on national display. Ihave a little girl named Alice. She winced at the memory of his voice, the words caught in countless recordings and documentaries and now distilled in the minds of people everywhere. Because of this she’d lived all her life inversely: always the foreigner, the other, forever pretending to be something apart from what she truly was. Unloved and unloving. It all went back to Horace.

Suddenly everything around her jolted into sharper focus. How could she have ever expected to be a part of Asia? She saw how people moving in the road stepped carefully around her, avoiding her, turning their faces and their eyes away from her. She was the redheaded outsider. She always would be.

Of course, Horace hadn’t intended to do all this. Renzi jiang-si qi yen ye san. Before a man dies you must forgive him. That was what Lin said.

Forgive him. Forgive him. The word was a drumbeat of agony in her head. Impossible. It was all too big, too crushing, too many years of shame that never should have been hers in the first place. Anger made more sense than forgiveness. Didn’t it? Rage, thundering fury-to these feelings she had every right. Ke bu shi ma? Yes. Anyone would say so.

Yet at the same moment, under this current of emotion, she knew that neither vengeance nor absolution would work. She had to find some middle way to acknowledge the past and free up the future. Some way to choose her own life, for herself.

And meanwhile he’s going to die, she thought. Whatever else I do-whether I succeed or fail-I have to travel to him and say good-bye.

She walked quickly away down the street, conscious of the crowd’s awareness of her, conscious of the tears seeping from her eyes. The saving breath of his love, the death grip of his power. When he passed on it was all going to drain away from her at once.

She pushed through the front door of the guesthouse and saw Spencer and Kong bent over a pile of flakes, cobbles, and hammerstones in the lobby sitting-room. "Alice!" Spencer cried. "Just the person! Come and help us!"

"With what?" she whispered.

"You won’t believe what Dr. Kong has found! Look at this!" He held up a piece of incised bone.

Alice walked over, took it, tried to focus her swollen eyes on the etched design of an animal face surrounded by streaming sun-rays. "Is it-"

"It’s the monkey sun god!"

"But where-"

"Kong dug it out of the ash layer! In an irrigation trench he found!"

"But it’s what-a tool? A piece of a tool? What does it mean?"

"Don’t you see?" He stared at her. "It means we’ve found the monkey sun god people! We can excavate the site, we can get a firm date on their culture-this is bone, you see, it’s been buried all this time and not exposed to the air, so we can carbon-date it-Alice! A whole world of research just opened up here-articles-books-conferences-"

"Dicheng yidian ye mei dajiao-ne," Kong put in excitedly.

"And the site is totally undisturbed," Alice translated. Spencer laughed. "Amazing, isn’t it? People walk away from their homesteads twenty thousand years ago. The climate keeps everything perfect. Nobody disturbs it, nobody knows it’s there-hell, nobody even passes by it for all these centuries except a couple of shepherds and to them, it’s nothing but some rocks!" He looked radiantly at the small prize in front of him, then turned to Alice. "Will you help us?"

"With what?"

"Well, we’ve got at least one monkey sun god site here and I’m sure there’re dozens more. We’ll be the first to survey and the first to identify and date the culture. Kong and I. We’re going to do it together." He pointed to Kong.

The Chinese scientist nodded.

"These notes here-we’re starting to frame out a grant for NSF. I am sure they’ll go for this. It’s airtight. We have a few hours left before we leave for Yinchuan. Will you help us, Alice? Translate some of Kong’s ideas while I’m drafting it? I mean"-he colored again-"hey. You’ve given me more than I had a right to ask for already. I know that. I just mean, if you’re here and you’re feeling, well, you know, terrible, and maybe focusing on something else might help you-" He broke off. "God, Alice. You look awful. Listen. I’m sorry about the thing with Lin. I’d really like it if things went well for you. You know-as a friend-if there’s anything I can do-" He stopped, nodding wordlessly at the papers in front of him. "You know."

"Yeah," she said. "I know. But something else has happened."

"What?" He looked at her.

"My father’s sick."

"How sick?"

"Dying sick."

"What! Horace Mannegan? What’s wrong?"

"Prostate cancer."

"Oh, God-" His eyes filled with feeling. "Alice-what are you going to do?"

"I’m going straight back to Beijing, as soon as we get to Yinchuan. Fly to Washington."

Spencer reached out and gripped her hand. He didn’t know what to say.

Neither did she. "Thanks," she managed.

Kong had sat while they spoke English, seeing that their exchange was emotional, but not understanding, thinking her unhappiness was all over Lin, waiting to say something in Mandarin. "Interpreter Mo," he put in kindly. "I am sorry for your sadness. I hope your happiness returns. Now come, see the marvelous quality of this hammerstone from the trench. The monkey sun god people made it! Hold it in the palm of your hand!" He extended a perfectly, lovingly worn stone tool.

She closed her hand around it. He was right, it had such a comforting weight. Like the heaviness of wool blankets on a cold night. Like the lead apron in the dentist’s office. She closed her eyes. Thousands of years ago, long before she had lived this life and felt this pain, this stone had pounded grain. "Meizhile, " she said softly, the Beijing street slang for incredible, marvelous, and handed it back to him.

Kong laughed at her unexpected colloquialism and then turned serious. "You know," he said, "the French priest was right. There is a treasure here. The Helan Shan is close to heaven!"

"I guess it is," she agreed. There was death inside her, death all around, but maybe it would feel better to work. "Okay," she said. She sat down. "Tell me what you want in the grant proposal, Dr. Kong. I’ll translate it for Dr. Spencer."

"What are you saying?" Hope danced in Spencer’s face.

She switched into English. "I’ll interpret." She sighed.

And the American man broke into a smile.

When Lin woke up it was nearing sunset. He was cold, stiff, curled up in the dirt next to Meiyan’s grave.

How had he fallen asleep? He rolled to his back and sat up. He rotated his head slowly from one side to another. The light was lengthening. The boulders all around him had dropped their growing shadows onto the hard ground.

Was she here? Was she next to him? Though he’d slept he hadn’t dreamed of her. He tried to imagine her now, Meiyan, his wife, his airen, but all he could see in his mind was the way she’d looked when she was young. She wouldn’t be young now. Impossible. He looked down at his hand, the worn skin pulling tight, no longer marble-smooth and poreless the way it had once been. He, his friends, everyone he knew, had grown older. None of them was young anymore.

Yet Meiyan was frozen young. By death.

He touched the slight swelling in the ground next to him.

And then in a rush of warmth he saw the redheaded west-ocean woman in his mind. He remembered her arms and legs around him. Why had she used him? Why had she not treated him as a man-a man with a heart-

Because I have no heart, he thought suddenly, staring at the shallow grave. I lost it a long time ago. He could feel his face burn as the truth came clear.

Somehow he understood that he still wanted Mo Ai-li. He wanted her here, wanted her to sit beside him staring at the desert, wanted to shed a thousand tears into her neck. He wanted to describe to her the cruel twisted road of his life, the walls, the beams and girders hammered in around him. And he wanted to see her face exalted again by the high tide, her sea-colored eyes open to him, transported. He couldn’t simply forget her. Her shadow was still on him.

He climbed awkwardly to his feet and brushed some of the dirt from his clothes. Evening would be here soon. He had to walk back to the road and get a ride to Eren Obo.

At the end of the day, when they’d finished roughing out the NSF proposal, she realized she had not eaten since the night before. She forced herself to go down for dinner. Only Kong was there.

He smiled at her with great kindness. "Eat, girl child," he said, and placed tidbits of his choosing on her plate.

She looked at him and her eyes brimmed with tears.

"Ah, come, Interpreter Mo! Do not cry! I cannot face you in such sorrow. Eh. Come, eat. The river of life flows on."

He picked up his own chopsticks.

"I don’t deserve your kindness," she said numbly, automatically reverting to the old manners.

"Don’t talk polite." Kong sighed. "It’s so tiresome. No one does that anymore. Look." He dug in his pocket and produced the hammerstone she had held earlier. "I saw how you took to this. It’s so, isn’t it? You liked this relic. It’s all right! It’s well and good! I want you to have it."

He pressed it into her hand.

Alice stared.

"Take it. Such a thing few modern humans own! A tool from twenty thousand years ago, eh, it’s a wonder." He turned, embarrassed, back to his plate.

"Oh, Dr. Kong." She sighed. "I’d love to have this thing. You are right, it’s a wonder. But I cannot remove this from China. It is wei-fa," against the law.

"Eh, of course. You are right."

She placed it carefully back on the table in front of him.

"I could send it to you-"

"Thank you. No. I would not want to break the law in any form."

"Eh," he assented, expressing the requisite disappointment in her refusal and yet revealing, in the Chinese manner, his relief at her graceful withdrawal. "Eat," he commanded her.

She took a few bites. Strange, she didn’t feel like eating. The hunger that had dogged her for years now seemed absent.

"Where will you go now?" he asked. "Do you have another interpreting job?"

She shook her head. "I must return home as quickly as possible. To America. My father-you see-I’ve just learned my father is very sick. To speak frankly he is dying."

"Bitter and deep is the sea!" Kong said, shocked. "Interpreter Mo, I am so sorry."

She nodded, almost overwhelmed by his empathy.

"Level road," he told her with feeling. "Peaceful journey."

On her way out of the dining room she was surprised by Guo Wenxiang.

"I thought you’d left," she said, her distaste plain.

"Leaving soon. I wanted to say good-bye."

"That’s hardly necessary."

"Still, between friends-Ah!" He snapped his fingers in a shallow, calculated parody of having just remembered something. "Mo Ai-li!"

"What?" she said tiredly.

"There is something I must give you! Something for Lin Shiyang. Blame me, for I almost forgot!" He reached inside his shirt collar and withdrew a black silk cord, then pulled it off over his head. Hanging from it was an ancient, human-looking tooth.

"What is it?" She stared.

"Dr. Lin will know." Guo handed it to her. "One of the women untied it from his wife after she went away. When I told her I was working for the husband"-Guo shot Alice a wry smile; this was not true, of course, but it was close enough -"she gave it to me. She had kept it all this time in case he ever came."

"Why didn’t you give it to him before, when you told him his wife was dead?" she asked suspiciously. "Why did you say nothing about it then?"

He looked away from her. "I suppose I forgot."

"You forgot! You were keeping it to sell. Right?"

"Come, Miss Mo, why stand on this unpleasant point? What does it matter? I am giving it to you now, am I not?"

"You should have told Dr. Lin about it before."

"Look." He made his voice small, intense, almost honest. "I know what you think of me. But I’m outside the system. I have no iron rice bowl. I have to deal any way I can. And people like me are the future in this country: remember that. Now good-bye, Mo Ai-li. Level road." He turned and walked away from her.

She glanced down at the tiny, yellow-cracked bit of bone in her hand-a tooth, of course, it was a tooth-and wondered if it was as old as it appeared to be. When she looked up again, questions on her lips, he was out the door and stepping into a waiting car.

Finally, at the bank, she got through to him.

"Horace, I know," she blurted. "Roger told me."

"Sweetheart, are you coming home now?"

"Yes." She took a long, deep breath. "I’m on my way."

"I’m sorry, darling. I know you’re on a job-"

"Don’t worry about that," she hushed him. "It’s not important. Anyway, it’s finished, the job."

"Well, Alice, he began, and then paused, looking for words. "I guess I’m coming to the end too. You know that, right?"

"Yes." She tried to keep tears out of her voice, for his sake. "I know that."

"I’ve been thinking." She heard his breathing, a heavy, labored sound. "I feel bad about-I was wrong about that boyfriend of yours. What was his name?"

She closed her eyes. "Jian."

"Right. Jian. I thought you’d find somebody else easily-"

"Horace, please. You don’t have to-"

"No, I want to say this. I never meant for you to be alone."

"I know that. I know you didn’t." Everything she had thought about, all the fury and forgiveness, swirled to a hurricane inside her. With an effort she mastered herself, made her voice gentle. "Anyway," she told her father, "it was a long time ago."

He was silent for a moment. Only the sound of his breathing.

"Horace?"

"So you’ll come as soon as you can, Alice?"

"Yes. Of course. I told you-I’m on my way." She twisted the phone cord around and around her finger, feeling she was about to break. She wanted so badly to get there in time, to be near him, at least, for the end. Then she would deal with the rest.

"Alice?"

"Horace," she said softly, "hang on."

When she got back to her room Lin was there. His face was scraped, his hair matted, his clothes streaked with dirt. "Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you!" His voice was urgent. "I know why you are leaving-your father. Kong told me. Ah, Mo Ai-li, it’s a sadness."

"Yes," she managed. Why had he come back? Out of sympathy? He’d already made it clear he didn’t want her anymore.

"I hope your father will be all right," Lin said quietly, trying to pin her with his eyes.

"He won’t." She looked away. "He’s going to die."

His face softened. "I’m so sorry. You are going back right away?"

"As soon as we get to Yinchuan."

"Xiao Mo," he said, his voice gentle but insistent. "Datingyixia. I’m sorry for the things I said when you told me you were leaving. If I had known…"

"Of course," she said, looking into his face, tearing apart inside. "I know that. But there were other things you said, Dr. Lin. Remember?" Her chin trembled slightly as she reverted to the old, distant form of address they’d used at first.

"Yes, I remember. Please. Don’t call me that."

"But you did say those things, Lin. Come on. You had a right to say them. Though on some of them you were wrong." Her voice grew hard. "So there is a point I’d like to make. Just one. If I may."

"Ai-li."

"No, please. Let me. About following convenience. Yes, I led a free life. But the past is the past. And I meant what I said about the future. If you and I had taken our road together I would have been true to you. I’d never have been unfaithful. I don’t know if you heard me when I told you, or if you even care anymore, but I meant it, it’s true, with all my heart I tell you it’s true, I loved you."

His mouth fell slack at those words, which carried so much weight in Chinese. Love. He felt it, too, he knew he did. It hadn’t happened to him in so long. "Why do you use the past tense?" he whispered. "Why do you say ’loved’? Is it finished for you? You don’t feel it anymore?"

She hesitated. "It’s not that. It’s that I have to go back. I have to say good-bye to my father. And there are so many things I have to sort out. Then maybe I can really know love."

He studied her hard. "Maybe?"

"Oh, Shiyang, I-I wish it, of course, the same way I’ve always wished it. But I see now that it’s not something I can simply reach out and take." She looked up at him and held his gaze. "It’s true for you, too, Shiyang. You know it is. Otherwise you wouldn’t still be searching for traces of your wife."

"But I’ve found her now," he said heavily. "She’s gone."

"Ah. I have something for you." Alice opened her suitcase, packed and ready for the drive back to Yinchuan, and removed a small square of padded green silk. "Guo Wenxiang gave it to me. He claimed he had forgotten about it before. Of course he was probably just planning to keep it, and sell it. But at the last moment he changed his mind." With the greatest respect, using both hands, she extended it.

In silence he took it. And unwrapped it.

The look on his face, the gasp that trembled through him when he saw the tooth, told her he knew it very well. He stared at it, eyes glistening.

"It was hers, yes?" She zipped the suitcase shut.

He nodded, unable to speak.

"Shiyang," she whispered. "You’re a man of great commitment. I admire that. Perhaps I was wrong to think I could take you away from your memories."

He stared at her, everything battling inside him, then looked down at the million-year-old tooth in his brown, hollow palm. He raised his eyes back to hers. These things she kept saying, these equivocations-"Are you letting me go?" he asked her bluntly. "Are you telling me you want the rest of your life without me?"

Hurt flared. Isn’t that what you told me? she thought. Yet at the same moment she saw him standing in front of her, a man, shimmering with feeling. Half of her wanted only to step into his arms. "It’s not that I want my life without you," she said in a rough whisper. "It’s just that I can’t see anything, right now, except what I have to do. I have to go back. Beyond that"-she looked up at him, blinked back pain-"I just don’t know."

After he left she took the Teilhard books off her desk, leafed through them, then closed them firmly and buried them in her suitcase. She still had a little time remaining.

So she walked out of Eren Obo into the sudden, all-powerful desert, and climbed high enough to gain a good, unfettered view of the alluvial plain and the town. Its grid of loess buildings glinted in the sun. This was a place my life changed, she thought.

She found a good spot marked by a little jumble of boulders, just off the path. Everything behind her, all of her past, seemed dead. Lucile was dead. Meng Shaowen. Teilhard de Chardin. And soon her father would die, too, Horace Mannegan. She’d be alone again. Always alone.

It was time to leave the ling-pai behind.

And the stomach-protector too.

She knelt and, using a stone from beside the path just as a Paleolithic woman would once have done, she dug a hole several inches deep.

In it she placed the ling-pai.

She dug the antique red silk stomach-protector out of her pocket and threw it into the hole on top of the ling-pai. She never wanted to see it again.

Staring at the two mismatched objects in the hole, she felt a weird kind of clarity. She should say a prayer. What had the Chinese words been, when she had said the jiao-hun, the calling of the soul that night on the street corner in Yinchuan?

She sighed. She couldn’t remember. "Ashes to ashes," she said in English into the empty desert air, "dust to dust." She swept the loose dirt back into the hole and patted it down. Good-bye, Mother Meng. I loved you. Good-bye, Lucile.

She slowly raised herself and walked back down the path.

The first thing she did when they arrived in Yinchuan was call her father again. "Horace? I was just calling to-"

"You’re still coming home, aren’t you?" His voice sounded weak.

"Yes! I have a flight to Beijing tonight. From there it’ll take about twenty-four hours."

"Thank you, sweetheart. Thank you." He sounded so tired, so far away.

"Get some rest," she said, not knowing what else to say. "I’ll be there soon." She hung up.

In Yinchuan, in his room, Lin sat on his bed holding the tooth. In the next building Mo Ai-li was preparing to leave. She would leave and she might never come back.

Pain sliced through him at the thought.

He pushed the tooth in his pocket and walked quickly out of the room, down the hall, picking up speed, footsteps clattering, down the stairs, out of Building Two and across the courtyard.

He found her in her room, sitting beside her suitcase. "Can I do anything for you?"

"No," she said in an empty voice. "Nothing."

"Have you talked to your father again?"

She nodded.

"How is he?"

"Bad," she said, and now her voice was uneven, on the point of breaking. She dropped her head forward, stared at her hands in her blue-jeaned lap.

"When’s your flight?"

"Eight o’clock tonight," she said, not moving.

"Ai-li," he said.

She looked up.

"Listen to me. I can’t call back all the words that were said, but I can say this. Are you listening?"

She nodded.

"Go on. Go to your father and do what must be done. I came back to tell you I’ll wait for you. Do you hear me? I will wait in Zhengzhou. I won’t wait forever, but I’ll wait."

She reached for his hand and brought it to her face.

Realizing there could be no promise now, that their future was unknown, she whispered the one thing she did know: "Wokongpa wode xin yi jiao gei le ni." I’m afraid my heart’s been given to you.

Gently he pressed her cheek in reply.

That afternoon, late, Alice Mannegan and Adam Spencer stood on the corner of Erqi Lu and Huimin Lu in Yinchuan.

"You really don’t have to do this," Spencer repeated, peering over her shoulder at the small paper she held with its lines of Chinese and Mongolian writing.

"We’ve come all this way. Let’s just put this thing to rest."

"I’ve already put it to rest," he reminded her. "I’m on to something else."

She faced east, down the clattery cobbled side street. "Should be this way."

He followed her, sidestepping a red-cheeked Mongol girl with a toddler and an impossibly large cloth bundle, and then a group of white-capped Muslim men hurrying, laughing, up the alley the opposite way.

"And I am going to pay you," he said. "When I get my NSF grant for the monkey sun god project, I’ll send you the money."

"I don’t care about it," she said.

"You going to stay in America awhile?"

"Awhile, yes. Then after that-I’m not sure where I’m going to end up, but I think it’s time to settle down somewhere. Stop traveling all the time."

"Aha." He looked at her, smiling.

"We’re here," she said softly. She had come to an abrupt stop and was gazing into a dark store-window, checking and rechecking the ancient number scratched into the stone. The door, secured with a rusted padlock, appeared not to have been opened for many years. Above their heads a hanging wooden sign creaked faintly. On it were carved age-darkened Chinese characters.

"This is it? You’re sure?"

She nodded.

"But what kind of place was it?" He looked up at the sign.

"It was an apothecary." Her voice was small and final.

"What? Why would they sell the remains to-"

"Adam. Don’t you see? It’s an old Chinese belief. Men would pay a lot of money for potions made from ground-up fossils, or dragon bones, they called them. It was supposed to give you-you know, power. Potency."

His soft face lost all its color. "You don’t mean they ground up the bones and they-they-"

She stopped and listened to the teeming sounds of the city all around. "Let’s just say Peking Man has been-reabsorbed into the population."

He stared at the ground, mouth open, breathing strangely. She thought he might be sick, but after a time he slowly straightened up.

"Ready?" she said.

He closed his eyes and nodded.

They turned together to walk back. She had just enough time to make her flight to Beijing.