A Paper Son (39 page)

“Bullshit,” the leader said. “I locked it myself. Everybody out, right now.”

“Someone must have opened it after you came through,” Lucy said. “Besides, we aren't hurting anything.”

“So how'd you get in the building?” someone asked. “Are you going to tell me that door down there was open, too?”

Their leader held up a hand to silence his men. “Who gives a shit what she tells anyone?” he said. “In case I haven't made myself clear, you're trespassing. Get out, now, or we get you out.”

“We're only going to be a few more minutes,” Lucy said, her voice still calm. She pointed at Eva. “We're trying to find out what happened to her uncle, and she's going to be in her grave before you guys get this place open. Tell me what harm we're doing.”

“Christ Almighty,” another of the men said. “That's a hell of a way to talk about your grandmother.”

Annabel was no longer reading aloud—she had stepped back from the wall, and her eyes had lost their focus, as if she were seeing through the wood and paint to something far away. Lucy and the men argued on, but Annabel seemed not to hear any of it. I had a sudden vision of her sitting in her chair in the room on the third floor of her house, her face empty, waiting on the edge of the sea for all those lost ships, shining like a beacon through the darkness.

A radio hissed to life. “Truck's on its way,” said a crackling voice.

“Time to go, sweetheart,” the leader said. “Everybody out.” He took a menacing step toward Lucy.

She stepped toward him and pointed a finger at his face. “You lay a hand on anybody in this room and you will be carving your own fucking poetry into your own cell wall somewhere,” she snarled. “I'm pretty sure your construction job doesn't give you the authority to use physical force.”

There was a snort from somewhere behind him. A couple of the men were smiling, stifling laughter.

“Contractor,” the leader said. “I'm a contractor.”

“So contract something,” Lucy said.

“That's not what it means,” he said.

“What are you guys looking for, anyway?” another of the men asked, genuine interest in his voice.

“Shut up, Paul,” the leader said.

“I don't work for you, Lars,” Paul said. “Or did you forget again?” He smiled at Lucy. “You were saying?”

“We're looking for evidence about what happened to my great-uncle,” Lucy said, turning to her new benefactor. “He's missing.”

“She's looking for a pair of handcuffs,” Lars said, glowering, “and she's going to find them.”

“The room seems sort of dark, all of a sudden,” Eva said.

“Is she okay?” Paul said. “Does she need something?”

Annabel was looking over a column of characters, murmuring again. She seemed to be reading and rereading it, her words unintelligible. I leaned in closer. “What? What are you saying?” I asked. She didn't respond.

“We realize it's a long shot,” Lucy explained to Paul, with a sad smile and a tilt of her head, “but we've tried everything else we could think of.”

Outside a truck pulled up. The door opened and closed and another set of footsteps began up the stairway. The radio crackled again.

Annabel clapped her hands. “‘I think of my little boat, and long to be on my way!'” she cried, pointing at the wall. “The poem, the mazes, the book!”

I stood alongside her, studying the characters. I recognized them now, all of them—the same ones that were hanging along the top windows of my now-abandoned classroom. I thought again of my young self, sitting beneath my mother's table with my papers and pens. Who was that boy? Who was I now? The footsteps were nearly upon us.

“That must be it,” Eva said, making her voice sound paper-thin. “That's what we were looking for.”

A tired-looking park ranger walked into the room, talking into the radio fixed to his shoulder. He looked at the workmen, and then at us. “Eva!” he said. “What are you up to this time? Jesus, you look terrible!”

“It's nice to see you, Pete,” she said.

He ran across the room, arriving at her side just in time to catch her as she collapsed.

A bottle of water and half of the turkey sandwich Pete had packed for dinner helped Eva recover from the stresses of the day and her drop in blood sugar, and by the time we reached park headquarters, back at the ferry dock, she was invigorated.

“Different tactics this time around, hmm?” Pete asked her as he parked his truck, trying to sound reproachful but unable to hide his fondness for her.

“You know how it goes, Pete,” she said.

He nodded. “I have to ask you to come in with me to do a little bit of paperwork,” he said, as we climbed out of the car. “I'll try not to hold you up too long.”

His small, cluttered desk sat in the middle of a small, cluttered office where nothing looked newer than twenty-five years old. There was just enough room for our four chairs, and even then my knees pressed into the corner of his gray metal desk. He moved a dirty beige keyboard aside, laid out some papers, and began asking Eva questions.

As she spoke, I listened to the line of poetry looping over and over through my mind: little boat, on my way; little boat, on my way. What was it about this sentence, this poem? It had permeated our whole search—had preceded it, even, in those mazes. On my way where? Home? Somewhere else? Mentally I parsed the line, rewrote it with synonyms, wondered about the translation, the etymologies, even recited it backward. I replayed what I remembered of the rest of the poem—something about a poetry contest, wine, wits growing sharp as swords. There had been a moon involved, too, maybe.

Then it was my turn. The ranger produced a fresh set of forms and looked over my driver's license. “Peregrine Long,” he said. “I know that name.” He tapped his pen on the desk. His mustache twitched. He snapped his fingers. “You're that guy from the news, who jumped into the flooded classroom!”

“That's me,” I said.

He pointed to a dust-covered television set. “Every reporter in the Bay Area is going berserk trying to find you.”

I shrugged. “I've been a little hard to track down the last few days.”

“And here you are.”

I nodded. “At your mercy,” I said.

“That was my classroom,” Annabel said, putting a hand on my arm.

He looked at her and then back at me, and then set his pen down. “You know, my supervisor has better things to do than read my sloppy handwriting,” he said. He glanced at a clock on the wall. “I wouldn't want you to miss the last ferry back.”

***

We stood at the railing and watched the blue-green water churn beneath us. The fan of our wake spread out behind us, flattening as it widened. The rumble of the ferry's engines carried up through our leg bones and into our skulls. The island shrunk and rotated as we curled around its northern edge, heading for the mouth of the strait and the open bay. Pieces of the mystery shifted and jostled in my head, trying to fit themselves together. Images, faces, fragments of conversation, realizations, and memories all collided, in turns receding and advancing, sliding over one another like a tangle of snakes.

I was leaning against the railing and felt the mahjong tile again pressing into my thigh. I pulled it out, held it in my closed fist, and thought about its message. West. Where was west? To a Californian—a San Franciscan, especially—the word had little meaning. It was something out of the past: saloons and deserts, plains and buffalo. It was Dodge City, fifteen hundred miles to the east. And what lay to the actual west? Only more east—the Far East. We lived on a precipice, along a coastline that marked not only the boundary of a nation and a continent, but also the endpoint of the modern migratory experience. It was the edge of the map, that point in the loop just before the course turns in on itself and begins again. From here there was nowhere left to go but the sky, or back into the sea.

In front of us the island turned. Trees swallowed the barracks; the room and its poem were dutifully taking their places among that now-vast company of unresolved questions that threatened to haunt the rest of my days. Furthermore, our trail of clues had gone cold. We'd found Eva and Rose, and the violinist, and Lucy's phantom. We'd found the book, translated the poems. The
Gypsy
had returned; the
Barbary
's pages were blank. There was nowhere else for us to go. We were at the end of our own map, with nothing before us but sky and sea.

Unless there was something else here, something we'd missed. There had to be—too many signposts had brought us to this island, at this moment, and if we let the ferry get too far away it would all be gone. I started pacing the length of the railing, searching the shoreline and the flanks of the island, trying to think. The ferry's engines rose, their vibrations reaching new strength. I ran to the opposite deck where Tiburon was sliding past, saw nothing, ran back.

“What is it?” Annabel asked.

“I don't know,” I said. I looked back down into the water and heard its music, saw the schools of penciled letters that migrated through its currents. And then something seized me. It took over as it had that day alongside the pool at the Y and I grabbed the railing, planted one foot, another foot, and then I was arcing away from the boat. The beginning of a scream followed me down, and then the water reached up and pulled me in, blocking out the sky, the island, all else. The cold pierced clean through me. I kept my hands clapped over my face, struggling to hold on to that last bit of warmth. My momentum carried me downward, downward, and then let go of me. I surrendered my face to the cold water, bent forward, and struck lower still, fighting through my heavy clothes.

The water grew warm. I opened my eyes. Far beneath me flowed a river, lined with waving green trees whose leaves turned and flashed in the sun, revealing the passage of a lazy breeze. Flooded rice paddies stretched from either bank to the ridged horizons, a blue and empty sky reflected in their surfaces. I took a deep breath that tasted like earth and springtime. As I sank the feeling drained out of my limbs, and then out of my torso and my face until I felt I was a part of the sea. I continued downward, softly, pulled as if by a gentle current, toward the river's surface where a little brown square was drifting easily downstream.

Henry was by himself on the raft, lying on his back, gazing up at the sky as though waiting for me. A sense of familiarity flooded through me, a recognition so strong that by the time I took my seat next to him I felt I'd been there, with him, for years.

“You found me,” he said, sitting up. He was about nine years old, with smiling eyes and an easy look on his face.

I nodded. “It wasn't easy.”

He laughed. “You were going to find your way here, one way or another,” he said.

The river was noiseless, the raft's motion soothing and effortless. I was tempted to shut my eyes and lie down, but I knew my time was short. “Did you drown, Henry?” I asked him. “Did you die in the water?”

He nodded—not in response to my question, but to himself, as if he'd known I'd ask. “Didn't you?” he said to me.

“That's what I'm told,” I said.

He clapped, once. His face was bright, his eyes full of light. “So we're the same, then!”

We drifted nearer to the riverbank, where willow branches reached down to the water. Their tips left tiny wakes in the river's moving surface.

“Is that how I know about you? Is that how your story found me?” I asked him.

Henry smiled, but didn't answer. He leaned down onto one elbow, lowered a hand into the river, and traced serpentine paths across its surface, weaving among the hanging branches whose wet tips left shining strips across his bare arm. “People are made mostly of water,” he said. “Did you know that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And salt,” he said. “Your blood has the same amount of salt in it as seawater,” he said. “Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

We emerged from the willow's canopy and drifted back out into open fields.

“Do you like it here?” he asked.

“It's beautiful,” I said. “Is it China?”

“No, it's not China,” he said. He pulled his hand from the water and sat back up. “It's a sort of in-between place, I think.”

“What is it between?”

He shrugged. “Where you've been and where you're going, I guess,” he said.

A flock of small birds, starlings, perhaps, swooped overhead, changed direction, changed again, darted away. I would have to follow them now. He seemed to guess what I was thinking, and he climbed to his feet. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

A sense of loss came over me, surprising in its strength. I saw how I would miss him. He reached out for my hand, the color already draining from his face, from the raft, from the river and paddies and the trees. By the time I closed his little hand in mine he had become a million points of phosphorescent light. The points held together for an instant and then the sea rushed in, washing them out of my grasp, scattering them. Sensation flashed back through me; cold water seized me. I fought for the surface with fires burning in my lungs, my face numb, explosions bursting on the insides of my clenched eyelids. Just when I was about to inhale seawater I broke through the surface and took a great gasp of cold air. My eyes were open but the explosions continued to flower against the sky. My pulse hammered in my ears as I gulped in breath after breath. Over its sound came the deep shake of the ferry's engines. My vision began to clear and I saw the shape of the boat, churning backward, coming back to me, perhaps a hundred yards out still. I battled my heavy clothes to stay on the surface, and just when they were about to pull me back under, a life preserver splashed down next to me.

I was hauled on board by three stoic crewmen, two of whom left to find me clothes and blankets. The third, a burly guy with a thin mustache and a black-watch cap and pale blue eyes, stayed with me—perhaps to monitor my breathing as I lay gasping on my back, perhaps to make sure I didn't try to jump off again. I looked around for my companions.