The Fountain of Age (20 page)

With the last of her strength, Haihong transferred three grains of powder to her fingertip and touched the baby’s tongue. The grains dissolved. The baby went on wailing and all at once Haihong was sick of him, sick of the chance she had taken and the sacrifice she had made, sick of it all, necessary as it had been. She said, “Take him,” and Auntie greedily grabbed the baby from her arms. Haihong tried to shut her ears against his crying. She wanted nothing now but sleep. Sleep, and the drink that, surrounded as they were by vineyards, would be possible soon, today, tomorrow, all the days left in her utterly ruined life.

Two: Cixin

Deng Cixin was in love with the mountains. Unlike anything else, they made him feel calm inside, like still water.

“Sit still,
bow bei’r
,” Auntie said many times each day. “Be calm!” But Cixin could not sit still. He raced out the door, scattering the chickens, through the neat rows of grapes tied to their stakes, into the village. He scooped up handfuls of pebbles and hurled them at the other children, provoking cries of, “
Fen noon an hi!
”
Angry boy
. He was always angry, never knowing at what, always running, always wanting to be someplace else. Except when he was in the mountains.

His mother took him there once every week. She put him into his seat on her bicycle, sometimes pedaling hard with sweat coming out in interesting little globes on the back of her neck, and sometimes walking the bicycle. They covered several miles. After he turned four, Cixin walked part of the way. He liked to run in circles around his mother until he got too tired and she scooped him back onto the bicycle seat. The ride back down was thrilling, too: a headlong dash like the wind. Cixin urged her on:
Faster! Faster!
If he could just go fast enough, they might leave the ground forever and he would never have to go back to the village.

The best part, however, was in the mountains. Mama brought a picnic—that was a word from the secret language, the one he and his mother always used when not even Auntie was around. Nobody else knew about the secret language. It was for the two of them alone. The picnic had all the things Cixin liked best: congee with chicken and sweetened bean curd and orange juice. Although the orange juice was only for him; Mama had wine or beer.

As they ascended higher and higher, Cixin would feel his shoulders and knees and stomach loosen. He didn’t run around up here; he didn’t
have
to run around. The air grew sharp and clean. The mountains stood, firm and tall and strong—and how long they stood there! Millions of years, Mama said. Cixin liked thinking about that. You couldn’t be angry at something so strong and old. You could rest in it.

“Tell me again,” Cixin would say, sitting on the edge of Mama’s blanket. “Where do the mountains go?”

“All the way to Tibet,
bow bei’r
.”

“And Tibet is the highest place in the world.”

“The very highest.”

After a while Mama would fall asleep, thin and pale on her blanket, her short dark hair flopping sideways. Even then Cixin didn’t feel the need to run around. He sat and looked at the mountains, and his mind seemed to drift among the clouds, until sometimes he couldn’t tell which was clouds and which was himself. Sometimes a small animal or bird would sit on the ground only meters away, and Cixin would let it rest, too.

When Mama awoke, it was time for the
once-a-week
. That was a word from the secret language, too.

The once-a-week was tiny little green specks that Mama counted carefully. They melted on Cixin’s tongue and tasted faintly sour. Mama always said the same words, every time, and he had to answer the same words, every time.

“You must swallow the once-a-week, Cixin.”

“I must swallow the once-a-week.”

“
Every
week.”

“Every week.”

“If you do not swallow it, you will die.”

“I will die.” Dead birds, dead rats, a mangy dog dead in the road. Cixin could picture himself like that. The picture terrified him.

“And you must not tell anyone except Auntie about the once-a-week. Ever.”

“I must not tell anyone except Auntie about the once-a-week ever.”

“Promise me,
bow bei’r
.”

“I promise.” And then, for the first time, “Where does the once-a-week come from?”

“Ah.” Mama looked sad. “From very far away.”

“From Tibet?”

“No. Not Tibet.”

“Where?” He had a sudden idea, fueled by the stories Auntie told him of dragons and ghost warriors. “From a land of magic?”

“There is no magic.” Mama’s voice sounded even sadder. “Only science.”

“Is science a kind of magic?”

She laughed, but it was not a happy sound. “Yes, I suppose it is. Black magic, sometimes. Now fold the blanket; we must go back.”

Cixin forgot about science and magic and the once-a-week at the exciting thought of the wild bicycle dash down the mountain.

Twice a year Mama took the bus to Chengdu, another far away land of black magic. For days before she left, Auntie spent extra time kneeling at the household shrine. Cixin, five, eight, nine years old, raced around even more than usual. Mama snapped at him.

“Sit still!”

“Ah, he’s wild today, that one,” Auntie said, but unlike Mama, she was smiling. Auntie was very old. She didn’t work in the vineyards any more, but Mama did. Some nights Mama didn’t come home. Some nights she came home very late, falling down and either giggling or crying. Then she and Auntie argued when they thought Cixin could not hear.

“I said sit still!” Mama slapped him.

Cixin raced out the door, tried to kick the neighbor’s dog, did not connect. He kept running in circles until he was exhausted and his heart was too tired to hurt so much and he saw Xiao sitting by the irrigation ditch with her ancient iPod. Cixin, panting, dropped down beside her.

“Let me see, Xiao.”

She handed over the iPod. A year younger than Cixin and the daughter of the vineyard foreman, Xiao had possessions that the other village children could only dream of. Sweet-natured and docile, she always shared.

Cixin put the iPod to his ear but was too restless to listen to the music. But instead of hurling it into the ditch, as he might have done with anybody else, he handed it carefully back to Xiao. With her, he always tried to be careful.

“My mother is going to a magic land. To Chengdu.”

Xiao laughed. She was the only person that Cixin allowed to laugh at him. Her laugh reminded him of flowers. She said, “Chengdu isn’t a magic land. It’s a city. I went there.”

“You
went
there? When?”

“Last year. My father took me on the bus. Look, there’s your mother waiting for the bus. She—” Xiao dropped her eyes.

Cixin spat. “She’s drunk.”

“I know.” Xiao was always truthful.

“I don’t care!” Cixin shouted. He wanted to leap up and race around again, he wanted to sit beside Xiao and ask about Chengdu, he didn’t know what he wanted. The bus stopped and Mama lurched on. “I hope she never comes back!”

“You don’t mean that,” Xiao said. She took his hand. Cixin jerked his whole body to face her.

“Kiss me!”

“No!” Shocked, she dropped his hand and got to her feet.

He jumped up. “Don’t go, Xiao! You don’t have to kiss me!” Just saying the words desolated him. “You don’t ever have to kiss me. Nobody ever has to kiss me.”

She studied him from her beautiful dark eyes. “You’re very strange, Cixin.”

“I am not.” But he knew he was.

A band of boys emerged from between the rows of grapes. When they saw Cixin, they began to yell. “
Fen noon an hi! Ben dan!
”

Cixin knew he was an angry boy but not a stupid one. He grabbed a rock from the irrigation ditch and hurled it at the boys. It fell short but they swarmed around him, careful not to touch Xiao.

Cixin broke free and raced off. They shouted after him: “Half breed! Son of a whore!” He was faster than all of them, even among the trees that began on the other side of the village, even when the ground began to slope upward toward the mountains. He and his mother never went there anymore. So now Cixin would go by himself. He would run higher and higher, all the way to Tibet, and maybe he would go live with the monks and maybe he would die on the way and it didn’t matter which. No one would care. His mother was a drunk and a whore, his Auntie was old and would die soon anyway, Xiao was so rich and she had an iPod and she would never ever kiss him.

He leaned against a tree until his breath was strong again. Then he again started up the mountain, walking to Tibet.

Three: Ben

Ben Malloy brought his coffee to the farthest booth of the San Diego cybershop and closed the door. The booth smelled of urine and semen. Public booths, used only by the desperately poor or desperately criminal or deeply paranoid, were always unsavory. He shouldn’t have brought coffee but he’d been up all night, working when the lab was quiet and deserted, and he needed the caffeine.

He accessed the untraceable account, encrypted through remixers in Finland and God-knew-where-else, and her email was there.

B—

Your package arrived. Thank you. Still no breakthrough. Symptoms unchanged. I suspect elevated CRF and cortisol, serotonin fluctuations, maybe neuron damage. Akathesia, short REM latency. Sichuan quarantine may lift soon—rumors.

H

I cannot do this anymore. I just cannot.

Akathesia. Short REM latency. Ben had taught her those terms, so far from her own field. Haihong had always been a quick study.

He closed his eyes and let the guilt wash over him. She’d made the choices—both of them—so why was the guilt his? All he’d done was break several laws and risk his professional future to try to save her.

The guilt was because he’d failed.

Also because he’d misunderstood so much. He had thought of Haihong as an American. Taking her California Ph.D. in English literature, going out for hamburgers at Burger King and dancing to pellet rock and loving strappy high-heeled shoes. A girl with more brains than sense, to whom he’d attributed American attitudes and expediencies. And he’d been wrong. Underneath the California-casual-cum-grad-student-intensity-cum-sexually-liberated woman, Haihong had been foreign to him in ways he had not understood. Ben Jinkang Molloy’s grandmother and father had both married Americans; his father and Ben himself had been born here. He didn’t even speak Chinese.

His father had called him, all those years ago, from Florida. “Ben, your second cousin is coming from China to study in San Diego.”

“My second cousin? What second cousin?”

“Her name is Deng Haihong. She’s my cousin Deng Song’s daughter, from near Chengdu. You need to look out for her.”

Ben, busy with his first post-doc, had been faintly irritated with this intrusion into his life. “Does she even speak English?”

“Well, I should hope so. She’s studying for a doctorate in English literature. Listen, buddy, she’s an orphan. Both parents were casualties of that stupid savagery in Sichuan. She has nobody.”