"Well…" Lie. "Yes. My relatives. I must contact the Mongol family that lives here." She pointed to the building behind Teilhard and Lucile. "They are old friends. And I bear a-a message."
"How can it be? Such a coincidence."
"Can you give me directions to this place?"
"The pleasure’s on my side." He turned over the photograph and wrote quick, looping characters across the back, sketched a simple map. "Imagine! I do not usually come out in the night air. In my lungs there is cold. This evening I decided to go out. What if I had not?" He finished writing down the directions and handed her back the picture. "Eh, my regards to them. Now forgive me, I return home. Level road. Peaceful journey."
"Bici, " she said to his dignified, old-man nod, and then to his back as he turned and walked away from her, again, "bici." When he had moved out of her sight around the corner she realized she was clenching the photograph in a trembling, white-knuckled fist.
She knocked softly. Lin’s room was silent.
She knocked again. Of course, she had to wake him up, she had to-her hand darted out and tried the knob.
The door opened.
Inside all was dark.
A moment she stood still, then slowly under a faint cold wash from the slice of moon, all the room’s shapes swam into view. The vinyl chair, the wood desk, the bed. In the bed the long huddled form, still.
She walked softly and knelt beside him. ’’Lin Boshi, " she whispered, allowing her left hand to touch his cheek. Dr. Lin. Where all the rules dissolve into a million knifepoints.
He breathed in with a faint groan. He did not rise up or cry out. He merely said her name, "Xiao Mo," plainly, as if her coming to him in the dark was a foreseeable fact of nature.
His hands came out from the warmth of the bed and took her face between them, exploring it as if to make sure, yes, it was really her, Little Mo. Then the hands fell away. "Shenmo?" he breathed, in the tiniest whisper, What is it?
She bent and whispered she had found someone who knew the photograph.
"Zhen-de ma?" Definitely?
She nodded.
’’Deng yixia, " Wait.
She stood back. He rose and dressed swiftly in the dark, right in front of her, while she held her breath and watched his gracefully moving shadow.
"Zou, " he said, snapping his belt. Let’s go.
They hurried outside, she relating quickly how she had met the old man outside the temple. They huddled under the lit front door of the guesthouse and studied the writing and the sketch on the back of the photo. There was the name of the valley, Purabanduk, and the few words explaining the road to take and where the canyons intersected. "Do you know where this is?"
"I think so," he said. "See here. This is the road we came in on. It’s an ancient road, I heard the driver talking about it, it’s surely the same one. And there’s the pass, and here he seems to mark an opening in the foothills. There was a gap there, in the Great Wall, I remember. Perhaps we should see a dirt track leading off into this valley, Purabanduk."
She stared at the map. "Should we go there, right now?"
"Without the others?"
"Just to see if we can find it. Suppose there is a house? Just like in this picture? We don’t have to approach it. We could all return together, tomorrow."
He smiled down at the photograph.
"But we need a car," she said.
"A car?" He shook his head. "No. What we need is a driver."
She looked at him strangely. "What are you talking about? I can drive."
"You can?" He stared.
"Of course, everybody in America can drive. It’s not like here. We all learn. Driving’s great, it’s-" She stopped herself. The joy of the blacktop, the long desert view, the blood sun-sets, the filling-station map on the seat next to you-he wouldn’t understand. "Look, this might be the Mongol family. Could we take the jeep?"
His smile was wider now. "Why not? It is for our research, isn’t it so?"
"Yes, but the keys…"
"Ah, I know where the driver leaves them. I have seen. He puts them on the right front tire."
She stared at him. "Isn’t he afraid someone will take it?"
"Take it? Take the car? Unlikely. First, not many people can drive. Second, the penalty for stealing a car’s severe. You could go to the laogai. You could be shot. Why between heaven and earth would you do it? How could it be worth the price?"
"I see," she agreed, though what she really saw was that it was crazy: his own wife had gotten herself into the camps for what, a scholarly article? Was that worth the price? It was a kind of commitment, though, Alice knew; one of the time-honored Chinese ways of being a hero. A quality she, Alice, did not have.
"So you will drive to this valley?" He touched the photo.
"Of course."
"Zou-ba, " Then let’s go.
The jeep waited in the hard-dirt yard behind the guesthouse. They went to it, climbed in quietly, and started it up. She checked the gas and water levels, then puttered quickly to the edge of the settlement. In the manner of all outpost towns, civilization-buildings, people, lights-fell away from them with unnerving suddenness when they hit the main road. In an instant it was all empty, the silty sea of desert and black mountains.
They bounced painfully on the first long stretch, a deep-rutted, unforgiving dirt track. But then they hit smooth pavement, and the road settled to silk and looped through the night. They were in the other realm now, in a car with a dark highway in front of them and the Tengger Desert all around.
"Don’t you love it?" She crooked her left arm out in the night wind.
"Driving?" He drew his brows together, confused.
"Sure. I used to drive all the way to Laredo, all the way across Texas. Imagine. It’s so hot you could die. And then Customs, the little linoleum room and the man with the shark-pressed khaki uniform, but fat, beer roll, the uniform’s too tight, he checks your driver’s license, he asks you the questions, you answer correctly because you know what to say and they send you out of the room and through a gate and you have left your country, you are over the border, now it’s Nuevo Laredo. Mexico. Everything looks different. The houses are all these wild colors. The light is strange. It smells primeval. You’re on Mars."
"You are talking about driving?" Lin attempted to clarify.
"About wanderlust," she answered, using the inadequate Chinese phrase, re-ai luxing, and pointing out the windshield. "This is it, the open road."
He stared at her.
"Wo shi yige luxing aihao-zhe, " she tried again: I’m a wanderer. But still he did not click in. Texas-the road-he’d never know. How could he? Yet the strange thing was she had the same feeling right now that she’d had all those years ago, driving out west, to Tonopah. A free feeling. Leaving her old life behind. Becoming herself. Teilhard had done it: Make me more myself, as I dream to make you reaching the best of yourself.
She watched Lin switch on a small light inside the glove box and peer at the back of the photo again.
"You should start watching for a dirt turnoff on the left," he told her.
When they came to it she drove past, but he spotted it and she turned the jeep around. When she caught sight of the track she saw that it was little more than a faint tamped disturbance in the great prairie of loess, but a track it was, definitely, and it wound away from them toward the black foothills. She cut her speed and lurched onto it. The surface was rough. She braked more.
"A few miles, I would guess." His voice was tight, his hands gripped his knees.
Some small marmot-looking animal darted across their path, eyes refracting brilliantly in their headlights, then shot off into the darkness.
"See that?"
He nodded.