The Fountain of Age (22 page)

She left the People’s Internet Building at dusk. Usually she spent several hours online, as long as she could afford, in an orgy of catching up on news, on the academic world, on anything outside the quarantine. She only had the opportunity every six months.

This time, she left as soon as she’d emailed Ben, uploading onto him her bi-annual report, her gratitude, her despair. Unfair, of course, but how could it matter? Ben, in California, had everything; he could add a little despair to his riches. To Haihong nothing mattered any longer, nothing except Cixin, the unruly child who did not love her and for whom she’d given her future. A fruitless sacrifice, since Cixin had no future, either. Everything barren, everything a waste.

She clutched the package in her hand, the precious six-month supply of inhibitor of proteins in the posterior superior parietal lobes. The pills were sewn inside a gift for Cixin, a stuffed toy he was too old for. Ben had not done any further work on the side-effects. Maybe he had no way to measure them, eight thousand miles away from his research subject. Maybe he had lost interest. So Cixin would go on being irritable, restless, underweight, over-stressed. He would—

Outside, Haihong blinked. The sparse and rotting skeleton left of Chengdu seemed to have gone mad! Gongs sounded, sirens blared, people poured out of the dilapidated buildings, more people than she had known were left in the city. They were shouting something, something about the quarantine . . .

Starting forward, she didn’t even see the pedicab speeding around the corner, racing along the nearly trafficless street. The driver, a strong and large man, saw her too late. He yelled and braked, but Haihong had already gone flying. Her tiny and malnourished body struck the ground head first. Bleeding from her mouth, unable to feel any of her body below the neck, her last thought was a wordless prayer for her son.

Five: Cixin

By afternoon Cixin was exhausted from walking away from the village, up into the mountains. His legs ached and his empty stomach moaned. Worse, he was afraid he was lost.

He had been careful to follow the path where Mama used to ride her bicycle, and it had led him to their old picnic place. Cixin had stopped and rested there, but the usual calm had not come over him. Should he try to worship, like Auntie did when she bowed in front of her little shrine? Mama said, in the secret language, that worship was nonsense. But nothing Mama said could be trusted. She was a drunk and a whore.

Cixin swiped a tear from his dusty cheek. It was stupid to cry. And he wasn’t really lost. After the picnic place, the path had become narrower and harder to see, and maybe—
maybe
—he had lost it, but he was still climbing uphill. Tibet was uphill, at the top of the mountains. He was all right.

But so thirsty! If he just had some water . . .

An hour later he came to a stream. It was shallow and muddy, but he lay on his belly and lapped at the water. That helped a little. Cixin staggered up on his aching legs and resumed climbing.

An hour after that, it began to get dark.

Now fear took him. He’d been sure he would reach Tibet before nightfall . . . after all, look how far he’d come! There should be monks coming out to greet him, taking him into a warm place with water and beancurd and congee . . . Nothing was right.

“Stupid monks!” he screamed as loud as he could, but then stopped because what if the monks were on their way to get him and they heard him and turned back? So he yelled, “I didn’t mean it!”

But still no monks came.

Darkness fell swiftly. Cixin huddled at the base of a pine tree, arms wrapped around his body and legs drawn up for warmth. It didn’t help. He didn’t want to race around, not on his hurting legs and not in the dark, and yet it was hard to sit still and do nothing. Every noise terrified him—what if a tiger came? Mama said the tigers were all gone from China but Mama was a drunk and a whore.

Shivering, he eventually slept.

In the morning the sun returned, warming him, but everything else was even worse. His belly ached more than his legs. Somehow his tongue had swollen so that it seemed to fill his entire dry mouth. Should he go back to the place where the water had been? But he didn’t remember how to get there. All the pine trees, all the larches, all the gray boulders, looked the same.

Cixin whimpered and started climbing. Surely Tibet couldn’t be much farther. There’d been a map of China in the village school he’d attended until his inability to sit still made him leave, and on the map Tibet looked very close to Sichuan. He was almost there.

The second nightfall found him no longer able to move. He collapsed beside a boulder, too exhausted even to cry. The picture of the dead dog in the road filled his mind, filled his fitful dreams. When he woke, he was covered with small, stinging bites from something. His cry came out as a hoarse, frustrated whimper. The rising sun filled his eyes, blinding him, and he turned away and tried to sit up.

Then it happened.

Cixin
knew
.

He was lifted out of his body. Thirst and hunger and insect bites vanished. He was not Cixin, and everything—the whole universe—was Cixin. He was woven into the universe, breathed with it, was one with it, and it spoke to him wordlessly and sang to him without music. Everything was him, and he was everything. He was the gray boulder and the yellow sun rising and the rustling pine trees and the hard ground. He was
them
and he felt them, it, all, and the mountains reverberated with surprise and with his name:
Cixin
.

Come
.

Cixin
.

The child sat on the parched ground, expressionless, and was still and calm.

“Cixin!”

A sour, familiar taste melting on his tongue, a big hand in his mouth. Then, after a measureless time that was not time, water forced down his throat.

“Cixin!”

Cixin blinked. Then he cried out and would have toppled over had not the big man—how big he was! How pale!—steadied him. More water touched Cixin’s lips.

“Not too much, buddy, not at first,” the big man said, and he spoke the secret language that only Cixin and Mama knew. How could that be? All at once everything on Cixin hurt, his belly and neck and swollen legs and most of all his head. And the big man had red hair standing up all over his head like an attacking rooster. Cixin started to cry.

The big man lifted him in his arms and put him over his shoulder. Cixin just glimpsed the two other men, one from his village and one a stranger, their faces rigid with something that Cixin didn’t understand. Then he fainted.

When he came to, he lay on his bed at Auntie’s house. The big man was there, and the stranger, but the village man was not. The big man was saying, very slowly, some words in the secret language to the stranger, and he was repeating them in real words to Auntie. Cixin tried to say something—he didn’t even know what—but only a croak came out.

Auntie rushed over to him. She had been crying. Auntie never cried, and fear of this made Cixin wail. Something terrible had happened, and it had happened to Mama. How did Cixin know this? He knew.

And underneath: that other knowing, half memory and half dream, already faded and yet somehow more real even than Auntie’s tears or the big man’s strange red hair:

Cixin. Come. Cixin
.

The big man was Cousin Benjamin Jinkang Molloy. Cixin tasted the ridiculous name on his tongue. Despite the red hair, Cousin Ben sometimes looked Chinese, but mostly he did not. That made no sense, but then neither did anything else.

Auntie didn’t like Cousin Ben. She didn’t say so, but she wouldn’t look at him, didn’t offer him tea, frowned when his back was turned and she wasn’t crying or at her shrine. Ben visited every day, at first with his “translator” and then, when he saw how well Cixin spoke the secret language, alone. He paid money to Xiao’s father to sleep at Xiao’s house. Xiao was not allowed to visit Cixin at his bed.

He said, “Why can you talk Mama’s secret words?”

“It’s English. Where I live, everybody speaks English.”

“Do you live in Tibet?” That would be exciting!

“No. I live in America.”

Cixin considered this. America might be exciting, too—Xiao’s iPod came from there. Sudden tears pricked Cixin’s eyes. He wanted to see Xiao. He wanted Mama, who was as dead as the dog in the road. He wanted an iPod. He wanted to get out of bed and race around but his body hurt and anyway Auntie wouldn’t let him get up.

Ben said carefully, “Cixin, what happened to you up on the mountain?”

“I got lost.”

“I know. I found you, remember? But what happened before that?”

“Nothing.” Cixin closed his lips tight. He didn’t actually remember what had happened on the mountain, only that something had. But whatever it was, he wasn’t going to share it with some strange red-headed cousin who wasn’t even from Tibet. It was
his
. Maybe if Mama hadn’t got dead . . .

The tears came then and Cixin, ashamed, turned his face toward the wall. Gently Ben turned it back.

“I know you miss your mother, buddy. But my time here is short and I need you to pay attention.”

That was just stupid. People needed food and water and clothes and iPods—they didn’t “need” Cixin’s attention. He scowled.

Ben said, “Listen to me. It’s very important that you go on taking the pills your mother was giving you.”

“You mean the once-a-week?”

“Yes. I’m going to show you exactly how much to take, and you must do it
every single week.
”

“I know. Or I will die.”

Ben shut his eyes, then opened them again. “Is that what she told you?”

“Yes.” Something inside him trembled, like a tremor deep in the earth. “Is it true?”

“Yes. It’s true. In a very important way.”

“Okay.” All at once Cixin liked speaking the secret language again. It made Mama seem closer, and it made Cixin special. Suddenly he had a thought that made him jerk upright in bed, rattling his head. “Are you really from America?”

“Yes.”

“And Mama was, too?”

“She lived there for a while, yes.”

“She liked it there?”

“Yes, I think she did.”

“Take me to America with you!”

Ben didn’t look surprised—why not? Cixin himself was surprised by his thought: surprised, delighted, frightened. In America he would be away from the village boys, away from the school that threw him out. In America he could have an iPod. “Please, Cousin Ben, please please please!”

“Cixin, I can’t. Auntie is your closest relative and she—”

“She’s not really my Auntie! She was Mama’s amah, is all! You’re my elder cousin!”

Ben said gently, “She loves you.”

Cixin fell back on his bed, hurting his head even more.
Love
. Mama loved him and she died and left him. Auntie loved him and she was keeping him from going to America. Cousin Ben didn’t love him or he would take him away from this evil village. Love was terrible and ugly. Cixin glared savagely at this horrible cousin. “Then after you go I won’t take my once-a-week and I will die!”