Here. He stepped over a half-rotted wooden sill, into the Pavilion for Listening to Cicadas. He stepped up on the porch of the southeast room and peered through the dirt-streaked glass. It was impossible to see anything. Were those piles of boxes? He tried the door. It opened.
It was dark. Dust powdered up in his mouth and nose. He lit a small military-style oil lamp. The yellow glow jumped on the cluttered objects that filled the room and threw strange shadows against the high walls. It was cold. The ash on the little charcoal brazier had gone greasy with time.
Guangyu clapped his hands together for warmth. Boxes were stacked up of every size, from the smallest, to hold a miniature carving or an exquisite little inkstone, up to boxes half a meter high that might hold bronzes or urns. Some of the boxes were covered in brocade, but most were the indigo cloth favored by antiquarians, museums, and merchants. The whole heap was dusted with Peking’s yellow silt.
He turned to the pile nearest him, positioned the oil lamp, and opened the first one. He looked in. Time stopped. On its side, in a custom-crafted nest of snowy white, lay a moon flask in underglaze blue. Around its globe-swollen base a dragon swam, its yellow eyes blazing amid the lotuses. From the reign of Yongle, he thought. Or maybe Xuande. He tipped it over to look. Yongle.
He put the flask in its box and laid out his writing things. His best boat-shaped ink stick. It had a poem by Du Fu stamped on it and a most graceful swirl of clouds. It dissolved into water to make wonderful ink, with a pigment that made his characters flow like yifan fengxu, a boat in good wind. He wetted it and ground it in his inkstone.
He pressed back his journal book and began to write: Inventory of the Pavilion for Listening to Cicadas, southeast room. A blue-and-white moon flask, the dragon swimming through the lotus. Made in the reign of Yongle. Then he stopped, and cut a narrow strip of yellow silk ribbon, and glued it on a bottom corner of the box. Done, recorded, marked.
Lia sat in the big room at the villa, amid the crates, holding the Yongle moon flask in underglaze blue on white. The dragon was so delicately delineated. The jar a perfect sphere in her hands, closing to an impossibly narrow and elegant neck. It was a full moon of articulate form, lovely and lovely forever.
Now she knew it had been in the Palace as of 1924. It had been in the inventory done during that year. She was closer. A little closer, anyway. Here in the modern world, the real world, she held the same box marked with a faded strip of yellow silk in her hands.
Doyle was on his way to the Haidian District of Beijing with his friend and colleague An Xing to pick up a child’s baby tooth. The mother had called this morning. Her daughter’s tooth had come out the night before.
They always went out to the homes together. An did the talking in Chinese, and Doyle provided the conservative, calming presence. With his thin, straight, almost colorless hair falling forward in his eyes and his burly, benign physicality, he looked more respectable than An, who kept his long graying hair in a ponytail and on this day wore an African National Congress T-shirt.
All the children in the study had been measured at birth by their cord blood. All of them were worse than that baseline now, according to their shed teeth, every one; this was clear even though the measures for lead in blood and in the solid tissue of a tooth were not directly compatible. A few years before, Beijing had stopped the worst of the air pollution by changing to unleaded gas and closing down some coal power plants, all to win the Olympics. Whatever it took, was Doyle’s opinion. He and An hoped that soon they were going to see the rates of lead toxicity level off.
“Dr. Yang, thank you, thank you,” Michael said politely, and An translated to the woman, dressed and faintly impatient to leave for work. She handed him the tooth wrapped in a bit of paper. She was a university professor, he had noted from the file. Doctorate in meteorology. Seeing the families, meeting them, was a thing that remained hard for him. Sometimes it threw him off track all day. “Tell her we’ll send her a letter in three weeks with the child’s current levels,” he told An.
An translated, and even Michael understood her response.
“Fine,” she said.
The two men briefly locked eyes and bit back other things that might have been discussed, for the mother didn’t want to hear. This was the part Michael Doyle couldn’t really get. If it were his child he would be all over the researcher wanting to know what it meant and what he could do. But it was not his world. Not his child.
Yet there were a few children in the study he had come to care for. Gong Ping, the daughter of another hospital co-worker, and Little Chen, who had developed leukemia and been back to the hospital often. He kept them in a special spot in his mind. But with the others he couldn’t care, he had to release them to their fates-like Xiaoli, the little girl who lived here. He could follow them. He could document. Someone else had to do the rest.
Outside the apartment he pressed his bulky body lightly against the edge of the hall window frame and watched through the glass as Dr. Yang stepped out of the building down below and walked away up the street, her steps snapping against the sidewalk. She was small, compact, professionally dressed. Then An came out with the tiny tooth in a glassine envelope, labeled, in its box. “Zou-ba,” he said, sliding it into his pocket, Let’s go.
Doyle woke up the next morning on his back, not sure where he was for a second, in his old low-slung fifties house in Mar Vista maybe, where the light had poured in through the glass walls over the banana plants, the birds of paradise, the spreading ficus. He had lived there with Daphne, his wife, small and round-shouldered and curly-headed, the opposite of this American woman he’d just met.
Daphne was a lawyer. They’d been satisfied by each other, by who they were and their positions in the world-that was part of their magic. They had the gratification of the well-placed partner. Their love brought that kind of happiness.
But her feeling for him was burned out by the long storm of loving him through his illness. She crawled with him all the way to the wet edge of dying. It was beyond intimacy and fear. He felt she’d give anything to make him live. At times that was what kept him breathing. Much later he realized she was saying good-bye. Maybe both were true. He did survive. And she left, because things never worked between them again.
But now he was a world away, in China. He had a different life. He knew its boundaries. And he knew every inch of himself now too. He put his hands on his abdomen, pressing it, circling the mysterious float of forms and functions inside him, feeling for the grain, the pea, the tiny pebble that did not belong. The tumors could easily come back. The chance of it happening again was high. And so he checked, he felt, he knew his body as well and as far down inside as a man possibly could using his own hands against his skin. He did this to comfort himself. Each time he did it he felt as if he had bought himself another day. He could go forward. And forget what he would never have. Just forget it.