Lin and Kong said the box should be left overnight in Spencer’s room, but Spencer made a barring gesture. "Don’t bring that thing near me!"
So Dr. Kong shrugged and carried it upstairs. Spencer followed. It was just Lin and her. He started to say good-night, then stopped. "Do you remember when we sat on the bridge in the middle of the night in Yinchuan?" he asked.
"Of course," she said quietly.
"You asked me-do you remember or not-had I ever wished my life could be different?"
"Yes," she said, mesmerized.
"I did not tell you the truth. The truth is, I wish it." He looked miserable. "I wish we had found the bones today. I wish we could have brought our ancient ancestor back. I wish I either had my wife or else I-I knew her fate."
She felt numb when she heard the last sentence, so full of yearning. "I know it’s hard for you."
"Yes." He sighed. She felt his eyes moving over her. "You’re a good woman, Mo Ai-li. I’m not sure if you understand how it is with me, with my commitments. I wouldn’t want to hurt you."
Maybe you wouldn’t have to hurt me, she thought.
He turned resolutely and walked up the stairs.
"Peaceful night," she called softly, but he did not hear.
Alice awoke. For a moment she clung to the void, and then remembered. Crash. Peking Man stolen from the cave. Who did it? When? How many decades?
And another thing.
What if she let herself fall in love with Lin Shiyang?
If they kept going like this, they were going to sleep together. She closed her eyes, imagining how it would be to let herself go with him, to have him inside her and wrapped around her and to come: the high tide, the Chinese called it, the flooding instant without a mind or heart. To come with him. Oh, God. What if she let it happen?
Then again he might not let it happen, because of Meiyan. Or he might let it happen only partway. Keep free of myself, ifpossible, Lucile, in having me.
Yet Lucile had taken the chance, hadn’t she? She had loved Pierre Teilhard de Chardin anyway.
And what had she gotten for it, actually? Too little. In the end she grew old alone. Alice’s eyes strayed to the little altar she had half hidden behind a stack of Teilhard’s books. She should do more for her ancestors, she thought guiltily. Lucile would probably help her if Alice served her better in the world of ghosts. It came to Alice that she should go out and get some ritual objects. Things like incense, fruit. Well-omened characters on silk ribbons. Paper money.
There was a store in the town that sold such objects, Alice recalled suddenly, feeling almost inspired. This was the thing to do. She got up and washed quickly, climbed into her jeans, dug around for her wallet, and went out.
Several miles from the town, in the clutch of loess-brick administrative buildings he used as his headquarters to command both Yinchuan and the area around Eren Obo, Lieutenant Shan called his subordinates together.
"Listen, you whores. The west-ocean outsiders have failed. They found the box in which Peking Man was hidden, but some clever fornicating person had already stolen it. Huh! And sold it profitably, I’m sure. Anyway, it’s obvious now the foreigners will not find the ape-man. They may keep trying, but all they’ll do is squat in the outhouse-squat and produce nothing." He chuckled and lit a cigarette, drew in deeply.
"Moreover," he continued. "I’ve received word from Beijing. They have no further interest. So-do your mothers. As of now the surveillance is canceled." Smoke drifted from his mouth. "I don’t have any more time to waste on these foreigners anyway." He looked around the room. "Go on, out."
Lin Shiyang spent a long time by his window that morning, watching the dark ridgeline change along the mountain crest. First dawn, the sun screaming from behind the mountains. Then the brilliant blue bowl of midday. He stared unhappily at the world’s transformation.
What was more brutal than the loss of hope? Now they would not restore Peking Man to China after all. Would not attract the money to excavate new sites, even to finally sort and catalog and properly store the appalling disarray of Homo erectusfossils which still remained from the Zhoukoudian site. Would not clean up the mess which had begun when most of the Peking Man bones disappeared in 1941 and whirled out of control when the Cultural Revolution came, and the students seized what bones were left and poured them out on the floor and ground them under their feet-if only, now, they could have borne back the original Peking Man. That would have reversed things.
They had started in such hope. He recalled as if it had just occurred the electrically charged scene three weeks before in Zhengzhou, when the department head had given them this assignment. How shocked he had been when the man mentioned Yinchuan, and Inner Mongolia! How he had gaped at his director-the stocky little man with the receding chin and the bottle-thick glasses and the perpetual stacks of files on his desk-who’d had no idea that Lin’s wife had vanished in this remote place twenty-two years before.
But she did, and she’s gone.
Then admit that she’s dead.
Meiyan dead.
Lin couldn’t bear this thought, this black door. Inside was a pain so sharp, so barbed with guilt, he could not go near it. So he thought: Out! Must go out. Paralyzing, these four walls. He hurried down to the street, then up the hill and to the intersection. The monochromatic labyrinth of buildings, the dark wall of mountain-somehow it comforted him. It couldn’t really be said that she was dead, he reassured himself. No. Her fate was simply unknown. He could approach Mo Ai-li.
Then what of the promise you made?
He twisted uncomfortably into a faster walk. "You don’t have to wait for me," Meiyan had told him. "But I will," he’d replied, even as he sensed the far-off foreboding of doom. How could he have said otherwise? She was, of the two of them, the superior being. The better Chinese. Where she had upheld the truth, he had swayed with the wind. So since she’d been taken he waited, which seemed the least he could do. His liaisons with women allowed the yang part of him to flower once in a while, but they never disturbed his true self. His true self rested intact.
Yet now he’d looked for Meiyan and found nothing. It was if his wife had never been here.
And now the line was drawn and the stage was set with an outside woman, an aware woman, a woman who could hear one thing yet grasp ten others. It was a kind of intellect and soul the Chinese prized. He walked harder, picturing the small freckled face and the blunt-bottomed red hair. The way she sat right down out in the desert, sat shockingly the way a Westerner does, her ass in the dirt, her blue jean legs crossed. The way she talked directly into his face.
All of him, his mind, his heart, his yang, could not stop dwelling on it.
He paused in front of a small brick store that sold death-ritual objects. Its huge, brilliantly colored displays of paper flowers held his gaze. Silk ribbons of every color ran from the standing wreaths like tears. Poles, tented with tasseled white paper, hung down their curtains of white streamers. This was lamaistic, Mongolian. It was different from the stores in Shanghai he remembered his mother going into when he was a child. That had been another world, the twilight of another time. Now he would never enter such a store. He was not some tu, backward peasant, but a modern man.
So he felt it as a shocking drop in his midsection when he heard the female voice that had been enthralling his imagination, flattened by its American accent, call out to him sharply from within the store:
"Eh, Lin Boshi!"
It was Alice, running out, taking his hand impulsively and then dropping it. "See who I’ve walked into-Ssanang, the Leader’s daughter."