by Simon Han
At last, he returned to where he began. He slipped into their village under cover of night. No one was home, so he investigated the backyard furnace, where his father and the other villagers were pulling an overnight shift, feeding the kilns with what appeared to be pots and pans from the communal kitchen. When he called for his wife, the other villagers cursed at him. What a scoundrel for running off, they said, and while she was in so vulnerable a state!
A realization came to him then, and he dashed away to the barn, which was strangely emptied of horses. He climbed up to the hayloft. There, a baby lay swaddled at the edge of a makeshift straw bed, under a horse-size opening in the roof. He hurried to unwrap the baby, thinking it was choking. In his arms, the baby looked like a rooster with all its feathers plucked. It was a boy. His face, wide and enigmatic, was the spitting image of his father’s.
Hugging Liang to his chest, his father felt a pulse. A softness. He held in his arms a fragile thing. He felt a fragile fear. It was then that he spotted, buried in a nearby pile of hay, the two vials of elixir he’d left with Liang’s mother. Opened and emptied—both. He peered out the roof, following the path of light. Standing before Mao’s advisers, he had taken care to look down at his feet. Yet now he saw her: Liang’s mother suspended in the sky, drifting toward the clouds.
What kind of healing was this? What kind of strength? He had hoped only for her to smile again, to be able to shoulder the carrying pole, to work. “What have you done?” he yelled. His cries scared Liang into silence. They tore the villagers from their work and summoned Liang’s grandfather to the barn. From her great height, Liang’s mother could not hear them. She could not see them. She had taken the light for herself. Clouds draped over her body, and like a plume of smoke she mounted the air until she was no longer of this earth.
In his room, Liang’s father turned away. He held Liang’s mother’s flute to his chest. Maybe that was why he slept so much, Liang thought. The man needed to rest, to prepare for the day when he would see his beloved again. Without more elixir, he would have to resort to yellow wine until he was strong enough to fly up there as well. The furniture was broken, the walls molding, but his father could not be bothered when he was waiting for something better.
Liang waited for his father to fall asleep. Heat sat on the man’s eyelids. Liang took off his shirt and slipped into the sliver of space behind him on the bed. His grandfather had probably fallen asleep in their room next door, because he did not call for Liang. He spotted a mole at the base of his father’s neck, and he wondered if he had that mole, too. Maybe if he fell asleep with his father, he could dream his father’s dreams.
When his father woke up later that night, Liang woke, too. He could feel the hot air from his father’s mouth, still pungent with wine. His father inspected Liang. He took his chin in his hand. “Where is she?” his father said. Liang looked outside, at the full moon: soon it would be the Mid-Autumn Festival. His father looked on with his head tilted, which made Liang wonder if his own head was the one tilted. “Why can’t I see her?” his father cried. “Why don’t you look like her?”
When Liang tried to edge away, his father grabbed his mother’s flute and, without warning, smashed it against the windowsill. Liang gasped and tried to save the flute, but his father held it out of reach. He pointed the broken end toward the window. “She’s gone. You’ve got none of her in you.” Then he hunched over and became quiet.
Liang had to lean in to make sure he was breathing. It was as if he had one foot in a dream and another outside of it. The man in front of him did not seem real, and yet if Liang touched him, he would be. If Liang’s mother really lived on the moon, he thought, he would snatch her from the sky. He would take the moon, too. Ships would crash into bluffs, owls would flop out of trees, and the sun would never rise again. That would be fine.
He leaned closer to his father. He told him not to worry. One day, he would grow bigger than his father. He would travel the world and beyond. He would find his mother, no matter how far she was, and bring her home. By this point Liang saw him through a haze. He felt a little brave. To reassure his father the way a mother might, he bent down and kissed the rim of his ear. The man’s breath caught. He opened up and gathered Liang in his arms, cradling him as if a head or leg might topple to the ground.
His arms brought Liang closer. Something was wrong: he was too close. “You know why she left?” he said, his breath hot and sticky above Liang. Pressed against his father’s chest, there was no room for Liang to shake his head. The flute had caught between the two of them, the cracked end scraping against Liang’s side. He preferred his father when he was in a story. “She left because of you,” he said.
The splinters from the flute bit into Liang’s skin. His father’s body muffled his voice. When Liang squirmed, his father held on tighter. Years later, in those moments when Liang’s heart would beat out of his skin and he would reach for the nearest object to hold and crush, he would remember the force with which his father had held him. How he needed Liang to buoy him, to guide him back to shore. How Liang had begged him to let go. Bà. I can’t breathe. Bà.
His mother had left. She had chosen to leave. She had gone so far she had forgotten her son below. Soon the moon she lived on would shrink to the size of a fingernail. Oceans would roil with her beckoning. Mountains would peak in a failed attempt to reach her. But whether Liang tried to fall asleep on his father’s pillow, stuffed with old clothes; in Tianjin in a studio he shared with four other men; or in Plano, Texas, on a mattress engineered to remember the weight and shape of the bodies it held, he could reach toward a window and coax his mother onto his palm. He could convince her that his hands had come from hers. Stay here awhile, he could say. Everyone else would soon be gone.
* * *
• • •
Tonight the moon was missing. As Liang stumbled home from a game of poker at Jerry Huang’s house, he searched the sky. That was what all the photography books written by New Yorkers ever mentioned about the state: That big, gorgeous, mythic Texas sky. He had never understood the concept of a Texas sky, never bought into its vastness. Was it any bigger than the sky in California, or New York? It had seemed much smaller than the skies he remembered in China, even the ones punctured by the skyscrapers of Tianjin.
But tonight the moon was missing, and the sky had never seemed so big. Big and blank and interrupted by roofs and satellite dishes and crosses. Starless and full of folds, blue-black hiding spots. Liang’s shirt clung to him with sweat. He imagined the wind ferrying warmth from the Panhandle, swirling with the evaporated salt spray of the Gulf. How long it had been since he’d breathed the air with conviction. There was no such thing as a Texas sky; there was only sky. What made a sky a Texas sky were the things on the ground, which he ignored in order to look up. There, the new lawn of an overeager neighbor, with gridlines separating square patches of fresh, breathing sod. There, an American flag in a backyard, too heavy to sail even with the breeze. Jerry’s neighborhood sported houses with advantages over Liang’s that were apparent only to those who lived in either community: barely wider driveways, more numerous balconies, a suggestion of larger space between houses. The obvious difference was the Christmas lights. It was not yet Thanksgiving, but here they already webbed the streets, a grand show of participation. Liang’s eyes were only now getting used to them.
Maybe the moon had moved. Maybe it realized it wasn’t needed anymore, with all these other lights. The sidewalk squares of the Huangs’ community vibrated with their shadows. Rainbows reflected in puddles. How many sidewalk squares would it take to get back home? Patty would know. She’d have the foresight to estimate the average number of sidewalk squares in one square mile of residential Plano. Liang didn’t even know how many miles away he lived from Jerry’s house, only that it had taken ten minutes to drive there.
Now to walk home, in a place like this. None of his photography books had mentioned the un
used, Christmas-light-lit sidewalks of Plano, Texas. A suburb of sidewalks leading away from low-stakes, in-home poker games. Liang’s group had met at Jerry’s house two hours ago, playing behind open blinds on tables where the scent of household cleaner lingered. None of them had smoked since China. The beer cost more than the buy-in. Poker was less motivating than the idea of having something to be motivated by. On their children’s Thanksgiving break, they huddled over beers and pistachios.
Liang had not even wanted to go to poker night. He’d skipped the last one for Patty, and this time it had been Patty who’d convinced him to go, to show up. Get out of the house. Do something. What was the point? In a few days, his poker group would be at Patty and Liang’s house for a Thanksgiving potluck, guests at a party neither Liang nor Patty wanted to host anymore, yet they continued to plan for it, out of a different kind of obligation, for to cancel a party was to announce to your guests that something was wrong.
Of course, nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong, Liang had reminded himself, growing restless during the poker game. At some point, he’d wandered back from Jerry’s kitchen, his seventh or eighth beer in hand, to the sight of four slumped bodies and heads around the low-lying lamp, and he’d wondered if in his absence they’d magically departed from the house, only to forget to bring their bodies.
Then Michael Wang, a Taiwanese acupuncturist, picked up a few chips and placed them, in his slow and deliberate fashion, in the middle of the table. Dechao glanced off in the distance before inspecting his hand again. Zhuping, with the shortest stack after Liang’s, shuffled his remaining chips until one of them rolled off the table. Jerry folded his cards and kept them in his hands, his eyes glazed in the direction of the front door, probably wondering if his daughter, who was living at home again, would be coming back at a reasonable hour. Liang had heard about Jerry’s daughter dropping out of college from Dechao, the stocky owner of a battery company, who jawed with the surliest of Chinese businessmen overseas but whose two teenagers lectured him in public on his English. Liang and Zhuping had shared a laugh once about Dechao’s nasty children, though Zhuping had them beat, with a son whose medical condition compelled him to go on pornography websites at other people’s houses without even trying to be discreet. Liang had no idea what condition that might be, only that it was Michael who’d told him—Michael, who was unable to get his wife pregnant, though she desperately wanted to be, his wife had admitted to Patty, in a separate moment of indiscretion. (The Wangs were going to therapy, Liang had heard from Jerry, whose own wife, Helen, was holed up somewhere upstairs, or not in the house at all.)
Maybe something was wrong, Liang thought. These men had bodies like storm-battered palm trees. They were wobbly men who made sturdy moves in the game, only to go home and become wobbly all over again, snoring into their wives’ turned backs, waking up their children for hugs they did not wish to give. And Liang had become one of them. Or worse: Liang had always been one of them. What was it Patty had accused him of doing the other day? Hiding. Not from anything in particular, just . . . hiding. The kind of father who would rather endure his daughter’s suffering in private than fix what troubled her in daylight. Will you do something now? she’d demanded of him again last Friday, after Annabel reported that Elsie had invited her for a playdate over the break. What kind of bully invites over his prey? he’d asked. Could a five-year-old be so nefarious?
You don’t know, Patty had said, why we cling to the people we do.
Some days, Liang would stare at Annabel and wonder what she was capable of. Plano Star Care talked of activating each child’s unique zones of potential, but would it not be better if there were nothing in Annabel to switch on? No surprises as he watched her grow day by day, year by year? Yes, better his daughter be capable of nothing, not even dying. Better to be a bag of shiny rocks. Liang had believed the teachers when they’d assured him that nothing was going on between her and Elsie, that the girls stuck to each other like flies on honey (neither of them were flies, they were both honey, they hastened to clarify). The teachers’ assertions seemed more palatable than the possibility that Liang could have come so far only to raise a child who, like him, continued to live in the shadow of danger. Impossible. That was why he and Patty had moved here, was it not? To be in a place where such dangers were impossible, could not even be conceived of . . .
Then there was Annabel, too, a small human with an outsize imagination. There was no reining hers in, so Liang did what he could to direct it. Better to convince the girl of her own superhuman strength, her ability to make it in a world that she liked to pretend was treacherous. Be scarier, she always told him. Stab me harder! There was a benefit to playing the monster in their father-daughter games: the more Annabel believed she was in danger, the more she would also believe in her ability to survive it. In the end she always won, the monster sentenced to prison in the pantry, or withering into dust on the carpet. Lesson learned. To convince a child that she was invincible: what more could a parent want?
Patty had been right about one thing, though. Liang was hiding. When he returned to Jerry’s poker game with the beer, all this became clear, even as the numbers and shapes on his cards were starting to grow blurry. He was hiding here in his big wobbly body costume, wasting away with four other wobbly men instead of going home and doing what needed to be done. No more sending his wife embarrassing, emasculating emails. He would confront her directly: the problem wasn’t some little girl they didn’t know. The problem was that the people he did know, the people he loved, were all going to leave him one day. Convincing his wife to sleep with him and arguing with himself about what to do and not to do about his daughter were half measures. His father had liked to talk but never got out of bed. If Liang wanted to keep his family, he would have to be invincible himself. Do something, as Patty had said.
What was Liang supposed to do? For starters, finish this beer and get out of this house. With a three and seven in his hand, he went all in. When he showed his cards, the other players looked at him as if he were joking. Instead of sliding his last stack across the table to Zhuping, Liang made them topple over into a mess of colors. Luànqi bāzāo. The other men offered to let him buy back in—only ten dollars, just for fun anyway—but he staggered to the living room and tore his jacket from between the sofa cushions. His friends trailed behind him, taking turns meekly offering him a ride. Liang waved them off as he tried to find the openings in his shoes. You’re not driving, are you? they kept asking. It was too far to walk, someone mentioned, but no one repeated the offer of a ride. Pathetic as they had become to him, he could not help but feel a little disappointed that no one had been more adamant.
Outside, the air was finally cool enough to soothe his face. He followed the path of Jerry’s tulips, lit up in red and green. The lights made him squint. In December, there would be fifty-dollar horse-drawn carriage rides and a slow file of vehicles from other neighborhoods weaving in and out of the streets and cul-de-sacs. The exteriors of these houses would be turned over to visitors, while the families themselves disappeared behind the brick-and-stone veneers. The rides at Montmartre had become a Cheng Christmas tradition.
From the sidewalk, Liang looked at the men. None had crossed the garlanded frame of the door. He said, “Annabel always asks us to set up lights.”
Were they nodding? He couldn’t see their faces.
He said, “I should actually set up lights this year.”
He wasn’t sure they’d heard across the lawn. “I should!” he shouted. “I should! I should . . .” but as he spoke he forgot what it was that he should be doing. Why was he leaving poker night so early again? Where was he supposed to go now? Propped up against the doorway, his friends might as well have been dead men. Jerry looked especially corpselike, the way his head bent sideways and stayed there. They still looked wobbly, but not in a pathetic way. He imagined taking their pictures like that, four bodies slumped together by the door. They had one anot
her at least. He hoped they would come to his Thanksgiving party.
Before Liang could speak, Jerry raised a hand. The rest of the men waved, too. Liang glanced back toward the street, wondering if the men were waving past him, toward the house that faced Jerry’s. A house that resembled Jerry’s, which in turn resembled Liang’s, except the neighbors here had set up a Nativity scene on their front lawn.
The plastic stable swayed in the wind. It felt nice, the wind. Above the sodium streetlight, another light winked across the sky in a straight line. An airplane? Where were the stars? Where was the moon? Liang turned back to the men to say something about flimsy baby Jesus being scared of the dark, to lighten the mood before inviting himself back in, but then the door had closed, leaving the silhouette of a wreath.
* * *
• • •
When the moon used to go missing, Liang would suspect his grandfather. “Where have you taken Māma?” he’d ask. “Give her back—I’ll call the authorities!” He would have been Annabel’s age then, a small, loose-limbed dǎodànguǐ. His father was gone, too—mining coal in the Qinling Mountains, his lungs already hardening into two black, iron weights. It would be years before Liang would see him again, shrinking on a hospital cot at the base of the mountains in his last, angry days, his voice too hoarse to tell any more stories.