Tales of the Peculiar (illustrated)

Cocobolo

s a boy, Zheng worshipped his father. This was during the reign of Kublai Khan in ancient China, long before Europe ruled the seas, and his father, Liu Zhi, was a famous ocean explorer. People said there was seawater in his blood. By the time he was forty, he’d achieved more than any mariner before him: he had mapped the whole eastern coast of Africa, made contact with unknown tribes in the heart of New Guinea and Borneo, and staked claim to extensive new territories for the empire. Along the way he had fought pirates and brigands, quelled a mutiny, and twice survived being shipwrecked. A great iron statue of him stood at Tianjin’s harbor, gazing longingly at the sea. The statue was all Zheng had of his father, because the man himself disappeared when Zheng was just ten.

Liu Zhi’s final expedition had been to discover the island of Cocobolo, long thought legendary, where it was said rubies grew on trees and liquid gold pooled in vast lakes. Before leaving, he told Zheng: “If I should never return, promise you’ll come looking for me one day. Don’t let grass grow under your feet!”

Zheng duly promised, thinking even the wild ocean could never best a man like his father—but Liu Zhi never came home. After a year with no word, the emperor held a lavish funeral in his honor. Zheng was inconsolable, and for days he wept at the feet of his father’s statue. As he grew older, though, Zheng learned things about Liu Zhi that he had been too young to understand while the man was alive, and his opinion of his father slowly changed. Liu Zhi had been a strange man, and he’d grown even stranger near the end of his life. There were rumors he’d gone mad.

“He would go swimming in the sea for hours every day, even in winter,” said Zheng’s eldest brother. “He could hardly stand being on land.”

“He thought he could talk to whales,” said Zheng’s uncle Ai, laughing. “Once I even heard him trying to speak their language!”

“He wanted us to go and live on an island in the middle of nowhere,” said Zheng’s mother. “I said to him, ‘We banquet at the palace! We entertain dukes and viscounts! Why should we give up this life to live like savages in a sandpit?’ He hardly spoke to me after that.”

Liu Zhi had accomplished a great deal early in his life, people said, but then he’d begun chasing fantasies. He led a voyage to discover a land of talking dogs. He spoke of a place in the northernmost reaches of the Roman Empire where there lived shape-shifting women who could stop time.^{12} He was shunned by polite society, and eventually the nobles stopped funding his expeditions—so he began funding them himself. When he’d exhausted his personal fortune, leaving his wife and children near bankruptcy, he dreamed up a mission to find Cocobolo in order to harvest its riches.

Zheng saw how his father’s eccentricities had led to his downfall and, as he entered manhood, he was careful not to repeat Liu Zhi’s mistakes. There was seawater in Zheng’s blood, too, and like his father he became a mariner—but of a very different sort. He led no expeditions of discovery, no pioneering voyages to claim new lands for the empire. He was a thoroughly practical man, a merchant, and he oversaw a fleet of trading ships. He took no risks. He avoided routes favored by pirates and never strayed from familiar waters. And he was very successful.

His life on land was equally conventional. He banqueted at the palace and maintained friendships with all the right people. He never uttered a shocking word or held a controversial opinion. He was rewarded with social position and an advantageous marriage to the emperor’s pampered grandniece, which put him within a hairbreadth of the nobility class.

To protect all he’d accumulated, he took pains to disassociate himself from his father. He never mentioned Liu Zhi. He changed his surname and pretended they weren’t related. But the older Zheng got, the harder it became to push away his father’s memory. Elderly relatives often made comments about how similar Zheng’s mannerisms were to Liu Zhi’s.

“The way you walk, the way you hold yourself,” said his aunt Xi Pen. “Even the words you choose—it’s as if he’s standing before me!”

So Zheng attempted to change himself. He copied the loping gait of his older brother, Deng, whom no one ever compared to their father. Before he spoke, he paused to rearrange the words in his head and choose different ones that meant the same thing. He couldn’t change his face, though, and every time he walked past the harbor, the giant statue of his father reminded Zheng just how much they resembled each other. So one night he snuck out to the harbor with a rope and a winch and, with a great deal of effort, he pulled the thing down.

On his thirtieth birthday, the dreams began. He was plagued by nighttime visions of the old man—starved and leathery, white beard to his knees, no longer resembling Zheng at all—waving desperately from the desert shore of some sunbaked island. Zheng would startle awake in the wee hours, sweat beading his brow, tormented by guilt. He’d made a promise to his father, one he’d never even attempted to fulfill.

Come and find me.

His herbalist prepared him a draught of strong medicine, which he took each night before bed, and it kept him sound asleep and dreamless until morning.

Shut out of his dreams, Zheng’s father found other ways to haunt him.

Zheng found himself lingering by the docks one day, entertaining a mysterious impulse to jump into the ocean and go for a swim—in the middle of winter. He choked back the urge, and for weeks did not allow himself to even look at the sea.

A short time later he was captaining a voyage to Shanghai when, belowdecks, he heard the song of a whale. He put his ear to the hull and listened. For a moment he thought he could understand what the whale, in its long, unearthly vowels, was saying.

Co . . . co . . . bo . . . lo!

He plugged his ears with cotton, ran upstairs, and refused to go belowdecks again. He began to worry that he was losing his mind, just as his father had.

Back home on land, he had a new dream, one even his nightly draught of medicine could not suppress. In it, Zheng was bushwhacking through an island’s tropical interior as rubies rained softly from the trees. The muggy air seemed to breathe his name—Zheng, Zheng—and though he could feel his father’s presence all around him, he saw no one. Exhausted, he lay down in a patch of grass, and then suddenly it grew up around him, the sod peeling away from the earth to wrap him in a suffocating embrace.

He startled awake with his feet itching like mad. Throwing back the covers, he was alarmed to discover that they were covered in grass. He tried to brush it off, but every blade was connected to his feet. They were sprouting from his soles.

Terrified his wife would notice, Zheng leaped from the bed, ran to the bathroom, and shaved.

What on earth is happening to me? he thought to himself. The answer was clear enough: he was losing his mind, just as his father had.

The next morning, he awoke to find that not only had his feet sprouted grass again, but long ropes of seaweed had grown from his armpits. He raced into the bathroom, tore the seaweed out—it was very painful—and shaved his feet a second time.

The following day he awoke with the usual growths from his feet and armpits, as well as a new wrinkle: his bedsheets were full of sand. It had oozed from his pores in the night.

He went to the bathroom, ripped out the seaweed and shaved his feet, still convinced it was nothing but madness. But when he returned the sand was still in his bed, all over his wife, and in her hair. She was awake now, and very upset, trying in vain to shake it out.

If she could see it, Zheng realized, it had to be real. The sand, the grass—all of it. Which meant he wasn’t crazy after all. Something was happening to him.

Zheng went to see the herbalist, who gave him a foul-smelling poultice to rub all over his body. When that didn’t help he went to a surgeon, who told him there was nothing to be done, aside from amputating his feet and plugging his pores with glue. That was obviously not acceptable, so he went to a monk and they prayed together, but Zheng fell asleep while praying and woke to find he’d leaked sand all over the monk’s cell, and the angry monk kicked him out.

It seemed there was no cure for whatever was wrong with him, and the symptoms were only getting worse. The grass on his feet grew all the time now, not just at night, and the seaweed made him smell like a beach at low tide. His wife began sleeping in a separate bed in another room. He worried that his business associates would hear about his condition and shun him. That he would be ruined. In desperation, he began to entertain the idea of having his feet amputated and his pores plugged with glue—but then, in a sudden flash of memory, the last words his father had spoken to him came ringing in his ears.

Don’t let grass grow under your feet.

Now that mysterious sentiment, which Zheng had wondered about for many years, made perfect sense. It had been a message—a coded message. His father had known this would happen to Zheng. He had known because it had also happened to him! They shared more than a face and a walk and a way of speaking—they shared this strange affliction, too.

Come and find me, he had said. Don’t let grass grow under your feet.

Liu Zhi had not gone off to seek a mythical fortune. He had gone to find a cure. And if Zheng ever hoped to rid himself of this strangeness and live a normal life again, he would have to fulfill his promise to his father.

At dinner that evening, he announced his intentions to the family. “I’m mounting a voyage to find our father,” he said.

They were incredulous. Others had tried and failed to find their father already, they reminded him. Searches had been financed by the emperor, but no trace of the man or his expedition had ever been found. Did he, a merchant who had never sailed anywhere but his safe trading routes, really expect to have better luck than they did?

“I can do it, you’ll see,” said Zheng. “I just have to find the island he went searching for.”

“You would never find it even if you were the world’s best navigator,” said Aunt Xi. “How can you find a place that doesn’t exist?”

Zheng left determined to prove his family wrong. The island did exist, and he knew just how to find it: he would stop taking his sleep medicine and let his dreams guide him. If that didn’t work, he would listen to the whales!

His first mate tried to discourage him, too. Even if the island existed, he said, every mariner who had claimed to see it swore it couldn’t be reached. They said it moved in the night. “How can you land on an island that runs away from you?” the first mate asked.

“By commissioning the fastest ship that’s ever been built,” Zheng replied.

Zheng spent the bulk of his fortune building that ship, which he named Improbable. It nearly bankrupted him, and he had to issue promissory notes to hire the crew.

His wife was livid. “You’ll land us in the poorhouse!” she cried. “I’ll have to take in laundry just to keep from starving!”

“I’ll fill my pockets with rubies when I find Cocobolo,” Zheng replied. “When I return I’ll be richer than ever. You’ll see!”

The Improbable set sail. It was rumored Cocobolo lay southwest of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean, but the island had never been spotted in the same place twice. Zheng stopped taking his sleep medicine and awaited prophetic dreams. In the meantime, the Improbable made for Ceylon.

Along the way they flagged down other vessels, seeking word of Cocobolo. “I saw it on the eastern horizon three weeks ago,” said a fisherman, pointing into the blue. “Toward the Arabian Sea.”

Zheng’s sleep had been disappointingly dreamless, so they sailed east. In the Arabian Sea they met a ship captain who told them he’d spotted it two weeks prior. “In the west, near Sumatra,” he said.

By then Zheng had begun dreaming, but the dreams had been meaningless—so they sailed west. At Sumatra, a man shouted down from a sea cliff that Cocobolo had been seen in the southeast, near Thinadhoo. “You just missed it,” he said.

And so the voyage went for several months. The crew became restless, and there were whispers of mutiny. The first mate urged Zheng to give up.

“If the island was real, we would have found it by now,” he said.

Zheng pleaded for more time. He spent that night praying for prophetic dreams, and the next day belowdecks with his ear pressed to the hull wall, straining to hear whale song. Neither songs nor dreams came to him, and Zheng began to despair. If he returned home empty-handed, he’d be flat broke and still without a cure. His wife would surely leave him. His family would shun him. His investors would refuse to back him, and his business would fail.

He stood at the bow of the ship, discouraged, and gazed down into the churning green water. He felt a sudden, strong urge to go for a swim. This time, he did not suppress it.

He hit the water with incredible force. The current was strong and shockingly cold, and it pulled him down.

He did not fight it. He felt himself drowning.

From out of the darkness emerged a giant eye suspended in a wall of gray flesh. It was a whale, and it was moving toward him rapidly. Before it could collide with him, the whale dove and disappeared from view. Then, just as suddenly, Zheng’s feet connected with something solid. The whale was pushing from below, propelling him upward.

They broke the surface together. Zheng coughed up a lungful of water. Someone from the ship threw him a rope. He tied it around his waist, and as he was being pulled back on board, he heard the whale singing below him.

Its song said: follow me.

As he was pulled onto the deck, Zheng saw the whale swim away. Though he was trembling from cold and struggling for breath, he found the strength to shout, “Follow that whale!”

The Improbable trimmed its sails and gave chase. They followed the whale all that day and through the night, marking its position by the mist from its blowhole. When the sun rose, there was an island on the horizon—one that did not appear on the map.

It could only be Cocobolo.

They sailed toward it as fast as the wind would take them, and throughout the day what had been a mere speck on the horizon grew larger and larger. But night fell before they could reach it, and when the sun rose again the island was but a speck in the distance.

“It’s just as they said,” Zheng marveled. “It moves.”

They chased the island for three days. Each day they drew tantalizingly close to it, only for it to slip away each night. Then a strong wind pushed them toward the island faster than ever, and finally the Improbable was able to reach it, anchoring in a sandy cove just as the sun was dipping toward the horizon.

Zheng had been dreaming of Cocobolo for months, and he’d let his dreams run a bit wild. Reality was nothing like what he’d envisioned: there were no waterfalls of gold pouring into the sea, no mountain slopes glimmering with ruby-laden trees. It was a lumpy collection of unremarkable hills covered with dense greenery, exactly like a thousand islands he’d passed in his travels. Most disappointingly, there was no sign of his father’s expedition. He’d imagined finding his ship half sunk in a cove, and the old man himself, twenty years a castaway, waiting for him on a beach, cure in hand. But there was only a crescent of white sand and a wall of waving palm trees.

The ship dropped anchor, and Zheng splashed ashore with his first mate and a detachment of armed crewmen. He told himself it was too soon to be disappointed, but after several hours of searching they had found neither Liu Zhi nor any sign of human settlement, and Zheng was more disappointed than ever.

The light had begun to fade. They were about to make camp when they heard a rustle in the trees. A pair of jaguars burst through the undergrowth and let out a terrifying roar.

The men scattered. They shot arrows at the jaguars, which only seemed to enrage the cats further. One leaped at Zheng and he ran for his life. He barreled through the jungle until his lungs were burning and his clothes had been shredded by the undergrowth, and then he stopped. Once his breathing had quieted he listened for his men, but heard nothing. He was alone and lost and it was nearly dark.

He looked for shelter. After a while he came upon a cluster of caves. A hot, humid wind was passing in and out of them at regular intervals. He thought it was as good a place as any to wait out the night, and ducked inside.

He dug a small pit and made a fire. No sooner had the flames started to rise than the ground convulsed beneath him and a deafening cry echoed up from the depths of the cave.

“Put it out! Put the fire out!” the voice boomed.

Terrified, Zheng kicked dirt onto the flames. As the fire died, the ground beneath him stopped shaking.

“Why do you hurt me?” said the powerful voice. “What did I ever do to you?”

Zheng didn’t know to whom he was speaking, only that he’d better reply. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone!” he said. “I only wanted to cook some food.”

“Well, how would you like it if I dug a hole in your skin and lit a fire?”

Zheng’s gaze fell upon the extinguished fire pit, which he saw was quickly filling with liquid gold.

“Who are you?” the voice demanded.

“My name is Zheng. I hail from the port city of Tianjin.”

There was a long silence, and then a gale of hearty laughter rolled up from the cave. “You’ve come at last!” the voice said. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you, dear boy!”

“I don’t understand,” said Zheng. “Who are you?”

“Why, don’t you recognize your father’s voice?”

“My father!” Zheng cried, turning to look behind him. “Where?”

There was another peal of laughter from the cave. “All around you!” said the voice, and then a lump of earth rose up beside him and wrapped him in a sandy embrace. “How terribly I’ve missed you, Zheng!”

With a shock, Zheng realized that he was not talking to some giant hiding inside the cave, but to the cave itself. “You’re not my father!” he cried, squirming out of its grasp. “My father is a man—a human!”

“I was a human,” said the voice. “I’ve changed quite a bit, as you can see. But I’ll always be your father.”

“You’re trying to trick me. Your name is Cocobolo—you move in the night and liquid gold puddles in your holes. That’s what the legends say.”

“The same things are true of any man who becomes an island.”

“There are others like you?”

“Here and there.^{13} Cocobolo isn’t just one island, you see. We are all Cocobolo. But I am your father.”

“I’ll believe you if you can prove it,” said Zheng. “What were the last words you said to me?”

“Come and find me,” said the voice. “And don’t let grass grow under your feet.”

Zheng fell to his knees and wept. It was true: his father was the island, and the island was his father. The caves were his nose and mouth, the earth his skin, the grass his hair. The gold filling the pit Zheng had dug was his blood. If his father had come here seeking a cure, he’d failed to find one—and so had Zheng. He felt desperate and hopeless. Is this what he was doomed to become?

“Oh, Father, it’s awful, it’s awful!”

“It isn’t awful,” his father replied, sounding a bit injured. “I like being an island.”

“You do?”

“It took a bit of getting used to, of course, but it’s infinitely better than the alternative.”

“And what’s so bad about being human?” It was Zheng’s turn to feel insulted.

“Nothing at all,” his father said, “if human is what you’re meant to be. I myself was not meant to be human forever, though for many years I couldn’t accept it. I fought hard against the changes that were overtaking me—and which are also overtaking you. I solicited the help of doctors, and when they proved useless I sought out distant cultures and consulted their sorcerers and witch doctors, but no one could make it stop. I was unutterably miserable. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I left home, found a distant patch of ocean in which to live, and allowed my sand to spread and my grass to grow—and heavens, it was such a relief.”

“And you’re really happy like this?” said Zheng. “A smudge of jaguar-infested jungle in the middle of the sea?”

“I am,” his father replied. “Though I admit being an island is lonely sometimes. The only other Cocobolo in this part of the world is a tiresome old crank, and the only humans who visit me want to drain my blood. But if my son were here alongside me—ah, I’d want for nothing!”

“I’m sorry,” said Zheng, “but that isn’t why I’ve come. I don’t want to be an island. I want to be normal!”

“But you and I aren’t normal,” said his father.

“You gave up too soon, that’s all. There must be a cure!”

“No, son,” said the island, letting out a sigh of such force that it blew Zheng’s hair back. “There is no cure. This is our natural form.”

To Zheng this news was worse than a death sentence. Overwhelmed by hopelessness and anger, he raged and wept. His father tried to console him. He raised a bed of soft grass for Zheng to lie on. When it began to rain, he bent the palms so that they sheltered him. After Zheng exhausted himself and fell asleep, his father kept the jungle cats at bay with frightening rumbles.

When Zheng woke in the morning, he had moved past hopelessness. There was an iron will inside him, and it refused to accept the loss of his humanity. He would fight for it, cure or no cure, and if need be he would fight to the death. As for his father, just thinking about him made Zheng unbearably sad—so he resolved never to think of him again.

He gathered himself up and started to walk away.

“Wait!” his father said. “Please stay and join me. We’ll be islands together, you and me—a little archipelago!—and we’ll always have each other’s company. It’s fate, son!”

“It’s not fate,” Zheng said bitterly. “You made a choice.” And he marched off into the jungle.

His father didn’t try and stop him, though he easily could have. A sorrowful moan rose up from his cave mouth, along with waves of hot breath that swept across the island. As he wept, the boughs of trees shivered and shook, releasing a soft rain of rubies from their branches. Zheng, pausing here and there to scoop them up, filled his pockets, and by the time he’d reached the cove and rejoined his ship, he’d collected enough of his father’s tears to pay all his men’s salaries and fill his empty coffers back home.

His men cheered when they saw him, having thought him killed by jaguars, and on his order they reeled up their anchor and set sail for Tianjin.

“What about your father?” his first mate asked, taking Zheng aside to speak privately.

“I’m satisfied that he’s dead,” Zheng replied tersely, and the mate nodded and asked no more about it.

Even as Cocobolo receded into the distance behind them, Zheng could still hear his father weeping. Fighting a powerful swell of regret, he stood at the bow and refused to look back.

For a day and a night, a pod of minke whales rode the Improbable’s wake, singing to him.

Don’t go.

Don’t go.

You are Cocobolo’s son.

He plugged his ears and did his best to ignore them.

During the long voyage home, Zheng became obsessed with suppressing the transformation that was happening to him. He shaved his feet and trimmed the seaweed growing from his armpits. His skin was nearly always dusted with the fine, powdery sand that his pores exuded, so he took to wearing high collars and long sleeves, and bathed every morning in seawater.

The day he arrived home, even before going to see his wife, Zheng went to his surgeon. He instructed the man to do anything necessary to halt his transformation. The surgeon gave Zheng a powerful sleeping draught, and when Zheng awoke he found that his armpits had been filled with sticky tar, his skin covered in glue to stop up his pores, and his feet amputated and replaced with wooden ones. Zheng regarded himself in a mirror and was filled with revulsion. He looked bizarre. Still, he was grimly optimistic that the sacrifice he’d made had saved his humanity, and he paid the doctor and hobbled home on his new wooden feet.

When his wife saw him, she nearly fainted. “What have you done to yourself?” she cried.

He invented a lie about being injured while saving a man’s life at sea, and to explain the gluey skin, something about a bad reaction to the tropical sun. He repeated the same lies to his family and his business associates, along with another about finding his father’s body on Cocobolo.^{14} Liu Zhi, he told them, was dead. They were more interested in the rubies he’d brought back.

For a time, life was good. His bizarre growths had stopped. Hobbling about on wooden feet, he had traded a freakish affliction for a relatively mundane one, and he could live with that. The rubies had brought him fame not only as a rich man but also as an explorer: he had discovered Cocobolo and returned to tell the story. There were banquets and parties in his honor.

Zheng tried to convince himself he was happy. In the hopes it might strangle the small voice of regret that mewled inside him now and then, he tried to convince himself that his father really was dead. It was all in your mind, he told himself. That island could not really have been your father.

But sometimes, when his business took him down by the harbor, he thought he could still hear the song of the whales, calling him back to Cocobolo. Sometimes, while looking at the ocean through a spyglass, he swore he could see a familiar smudge on the horizon that was not a ship, and where no island was mapped. Gradually, over the course of weeks, he felt a strange pressure building inside him. He felt it most severely when he was near water: it seemed to remind his body of what it wanted to become. If he stood at the end of a dock and filled his gaze with the ocean, he could feel the grass and sand and seaweed he’d locked inside himself straining to get out.

He stopped going near the water. He vowed never to set foot on board a ship again. He bought a house far inland, where he would never have to glimpse the ocean. But even that was not enough: he felt the pressure every time he bathed or washed his face or got caught in the rain. So he stopped bathing and washing his face, and he never went outside if there was even a single dark cloud in the sky. He would not even drink a cup of water, for fear it might ignite in him desires he couldn’t control. When he absolutely needed to, he sucked on a wet cloth.

“Not a drop,” he told his wife. “I won’t allow a single drop in this house.”

And so it went. Many years passed without Zheng touching water. Old and dry as dust, Zheng came to resemble a very large raisin, but neither his growths nor his desires returned. He and his wife never had children, in part because Zheng was glued shut from top to bottom, but also because he feared passing his affliction on to another generation.

One day, in order to make out a will, Zheng was sorting through his personal effects. In the bottom of a drawer he came upon a small silk bag, and when he upended it, a ruby fell into his palm. He’d sold the rest long ago and had thought this one lost, and yet here it was, cool and heavy in his hand. Before that moment, he had not thought of his father in half a lifetime.

His hands began to tremble. He hid the ruby out of sight and turned to other business, but he could not seem to stop what was welling up inside him.

Where the moisture was coming from he could not imagine. He had not even sucked on a rag in three days, but his vision began to blur and his eyes to well, as if some secret reserve inside him were being tapped.

“No!” he shouted, slamming his fists down on the table. “No, no, no!”

He looked desperately around the room for something to distract his mind. He counted backward from twenty. He sang a nonsensical song. But nothing would stop it.

When it finally happened, the event was so anticlimactic he wondered if he hadn’t made too much of it. A tear tracked down his cheek, rolled off his chin, and fell to the floor. He stood frozen, staring at the dark splotch it made on the wood.

For a long moment, all was still and quiet. Then, the thing Zheng feared most happened. It began with that old, terrible pressure within him, which in a matter of moments became unbearable. It felt as if his body were having an earthquake.

The glue that covered him cracked and fell away. Sand began to pour from his skin. The tar that had stopped up his armpits disintegrated, and ropes of seaweed shot out of him at an incredible rate. In less than a minute, it had nearly filled the room he was in, and he knew he had to get out of his house or it would be destroyed. He ran outside—and into a driving rainstorm.

He fell down in the middle of the street, sand and seaweed gushing out of him. People who saw him ran away screaming. His wooden feet blew off, and from their stumps rushed endless lengths of grass. His body began to grow, the rain and the grass mixing with the sand to form earth, layers and layers of which wrapped around him like skin upon skin. Soon he was as wide as the street and as tall as his house.

A mob formed and attacked him. Zheng struggled to stand on his grassy stumps and then to run. He fell, crushing a house under his weight. He stood again and lumbered on, laboring up a hill with thundering steps that punched holes in the street.

The mob chased him, joined by soldiers who fired arrows at his back. From his wounds gushed liquid gold, which only encouraged more people to join the attack. All the while, Zheng was steadily growing, and soon he was twice the width of his street and three times the height of his house. His form was fast becoming inhuman, his arms and legs disappearing within the giant, earthen ball that was his midsection.

He made it to the top of the street on tiny, waddling stumps. A moment later they were swallowed up, and with nothing left to steady him, his round form began to roll down the other side—slowly at first, then faster and faster. He became unstoppable, flattening houses and wagons and people as he went, growing larger all the while.

He careened into the harbor, hurtled down a splintering dock, and then splashed into the sea, making a wave so big that all the boats around him swamped. Submerged and drifting, he began to grow faster than ever, his grass and earth and sand and seaweed spreading over the water to form a small island. The transformation was so all-consuming that he did not notice the approach of several of the emperor’s warships. He felt it, though, when they began to fire their cannons into him.

The pain was incredible. His blood made the sea shine golden in the sun. He thought his life was about to end—until he heard a familiar voice.

It was his father, calling his name.

Cocobolo plowed into their midst with a great rumble. The wake he made knocked over the emperor’s warships like they were toys. Zheng felt something link with him beneath the surface of the water, and then his father was pulling him out to sea. Once they were away from danger and all was quiet, his father used bent coconut palms to catapult earth into the holes that had been shot through Zheng.

“Thank you,” Zheng said, his voice a loud rumble that came from he knew not where. “I don’t deserve your kindness.”

“Of course you do,” replied his father.

“You were keeping watch,” said Zheng.

“Yes,” said his father.

“For all these years?”

“Yes,” he said again. “I had a feeling you’d need my help one day.”

“But I was so cruel to you.”

His father was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “You’re my son.”

Zheng’s bleeding had stopped, but now he felt a worse pain: incredible shame. Zheng was well acquainted with shame, but this type was new. He was ashamed by the kindness he’d been shown. He was ashamed at how he’d treated his poor father. But he was ashamed, most of all, of how ashamed he’d been of himself, and of what he’d let that turn him into.

“I’m sorry, Father.” Zheng wept. “I’m so very sorry.”

Even as he cried, Zheng could feel himself growing, his sand and grass and earth creeping outward, his seaweed thickening into a forest of submarine kelp. The coral reef that encircled his father linked itself to the one beginning to form around Zheng, and with a gentle tug, the elder Cocobolo led the younger still farther out to sea.

“There’s a wonderful spot near Madagascar where we can relax in safety,” said the elder. “I believe you need a nice, long nap.”

Zheng let himself be pulled along and, as the days passed, he began to feel something wonderful and entirely new.

He felt like himself.