They were dumbfounded. This was the first time someone had not told them the person is dead, or the records are lost, or no one knows. Here there was actually someone who knew. And he was coming back in a few days.
Alice wondered as they bounced back to Eren Obo, Lin next to her, their legs pressed together, if she should let herself believe it was possible. That they might find Peking Man. That she might trade in all her shame, let it go, forget it, and only worship her new ancestors, Meng Shaowen and Lucile Swan. She stole a look at the tall Chinese man next to her. That this might be real.
She lay in his arms. The bed was as narrow as a cot in a monastic cell, but to them it was as wide and joyous as any sumptuous bower. They were alone, safe and undisturbed. She moved against him, closer. "Did you ever think this would happen?"
"Before I met you? How could I dream it?"
"After, I mean."
"I hoped so." His hands moved over her, memorizing. No matter how much he touched her and grasped her and kneaded her, the different feel of her skin remained something he could barely comprehend. The tiny network of pores and freckles, the down on her arms and legs, her clean dusky smell.
"I thought you said you never hoped."
He laughed. Of course he had said that, but it had not been the truth. Sometimes, he hoped. He had hoped on the way out here, to the Northwest, that they might learn what happened to Peking Man. And he had hoped to find Meiyan. He had looked, he had asked people, had even made "gifts" to a few local district administrators to lubricate his casual-seeming inquiries. But nothing.
Had he done enough? Perhaps he should have found a way to leave the group for a couple of days, make his way somehow to Camp Fourteen, or at least the site of Camp Fourteen, for everyone said that it had been closed down in the late seventies. All the inmates, those still living, reassigned.
Reassigned. Her housing registration could be anywhere. Yet he knew that usually local authorities made the choices that were convenient. That meant assignment to nearby towns and villages. And now he was back at the beginning of the circle. For nowhere, anywhere he had gone, had he located a person who had heard of Zhang Meiyan.
And yet a foreign woman lay in his arms now, wide open to him, her legs twined through his-a creature more fascinating than any he had dreamed of since his wife vanished. This is now. He smiled down at her. "No, I don’t hope," he teased her. "But do you remember what else I said? I do practice gratitude."
"For what?" she said immediately. Ah, he knew, looking into her green gaze, that she wanted him to say it was for her. And was it not? He was thankful-thankful that she risked all this with him. That she was shi yu yuan wei so physically direct. That unlike a Chinese woman, whenever she laughed it was true and unconstrained, it rose right up out of her the same way her high tide did during sex. And so this erupting, rolling laugh of hers, at any time, even-especially-when they were fully dressed, in public, pretending to be no more than colleagues, seemed to excite him in a way that connected him to the base of life itself.
"Grateful for what?" she pressed again.
"For you, of course. Foreign female! You don’t know how to wait for anything, do you? Eh?" He smiled. "I’m going to have to teach you."
"No you’re not."
"What? Why not?"
"Because I’m a foreigner, that’s why."
"You don’t seem like a foreigner. In fact, you talk like someone from my home province. Do you realize you speak with a nanfang accent?"
She grinned. "No, no. It’s just right now, because I’m talking to you, and that’s your accent. I can’t help but repeat it back to you."
"Ah, so you mirror me. And where is the real you?"
"Behind the mirror." It was a flip answer, but she longed for him to come in after her.
He pulled back in play exasperation, though he kept a tight hold on the lower half of her body with his legs. "Behind the mirror, eh? Your talk is too clever. You should have been a high official. Perhaps a professor of philosophy! Or maybe-"
"An interpreter. I’m an interpreter, Shiyang."
He studied her face. He had wondered about this. She was so intelligent, so perceptive. Why had she not aimed higher? She could have attained any degree she wanted. She could have been a zhuanmenjia-An expert. "Did you always wish to be a translator?" he asked softly.
"Not really. It just happened that way." She looked away from him, knowing that at thirty-six she was little more than a go-between. She’d done nothing she could call her own. It was her fault. She had let herself drift here in China, allowed herself to be fascinated by the surfaces, the stereotypes of Chinese life. She had let sex carry her to the center of things.
"It’s all right," he told her. "It’s a good job."
"No, it’s not."
He tightened his arms around her, then reminded her of that basic rule of Chinese life. "Boundless is the bitter sea."
"Wo zhidao, " she whispered, I know.
Adam Spencer sat in his room, looking at his son’s photograph. Tyler James Spencer, ruffled blond hair, suspicious of the camera. Roaring down the street on his bicycle one minute, climbing up his father’s leg the next. Adam had gone to California, to Stockton where Ellen and Tyler now lived, just before leaving the United States. It was Tyler’s birthday and he took the boy for the weekend. He’d had high hopes, big plans, but after a desultory tour of the town sights they’d ended up in Adam’s motel room, eating grocery-store cake and watching cable TV. Adam had felt awful. He knew that he should have handled it better somehow, made it magical. Found a swimming pool or miniature golf, something. As it was he only lay late into the night holding the sleeping child, his heart pounding. He saw no way to get back into his son’s life. All he could do was go to China. He could recover the original ancestor, find it, and leave the Spencer name on it. He could do that for Tyler.
Spencer wondered what the boy was doing, at this very moment, on the other side of the world. He might be sailing ships in the bath, reading Batman comics in the dusty crook under the stairs, or perhaps standing at quiveringly brave attention, bat in hand, on home plate.
Adam’s eyes drifted from the photo to the pile of Teilhard books on his desk. There were editions of letters; biographies; and then Teilhard’s own books of spirituality, geology, and archaeology. There was a lifetime’s thought, painstakingly worked out, copiously set down. Thousands of pages, opining the unity of all things.
Spencer walked across the room and propped his child’s picture atop the pile of books. Now the trail was warm once again. In two days they’d drive back out to the Mongol homestead and meet the old man. There was a chance, still a chance, they might recover Peking Man.
But what if they failed? He considered the question, gazing at Tyler’s simple smile. Yo, Dad! he could almost hear his son say. Catch! I’m such an idiot, he thought suddenly. Tyler could care less.
It was even better between Alice and Lin that night. They had been together a few times, and by now felt free enough to adjust each other’s bodies with their hands and mouths. To try things.
He held her back from coming. When she was close he pulled out and lay over her, whispering in her ear in gentle, Yangtze-accented Chinese while she squirmed beneath him, alternately laughing and begging.
"All around us right now the Tengger is full of microliths," he told her. "Arrowheads, the tips of spears-men were whittling them out there ten thousand years ago. Twenty thousand. Carving stone, shells, animal bones."
"Are you trying to distract me?" she whispered, trying to maneuver her hips under him.