The Fountain of Age (24 page)

“I don’t want jargon, Ben. I want explanations.”

“I’m trying to give them to you. I’m doing the best I can to—”

“Then do better! Six months we’ve been together and you never mention that you’re adopting a child . . . what is the
effect
of the extra transporters on those parts of the brain?”

“Without the inhibiting drug I designed for him, near-total catatonia.”

“That doesn’t make sense! Nobody would deliberately design genes to do that!”

“They didn’t.” Suddenly tired, he sat on the edge of the bed. His flight to Shanghai left in six hours. “Those brain areas orient the body in space and differentiate between self and others. The research company was trying to develop heightened awareness, perception of others’ movements, and reactions to muscular shifting.”

She got it. “Better fighting machines.”

“Yes.”

“Then why—”

“They were rogue geneticists, Renata. They didn’t have access to all the most recent research. They screwed up. They’re all in jail now.”

“And the Neuroscience Institute—”

His patience gave way. “Of course the Institute wasn’t involved! I told you—we helped shut the whole thing down.”

“Except for your little part in supplying this kid with homemade inhibitors. His other problems you mentioned, the restlessness and aggression—”

“Most likely side-effects of the inhibitor,” Ben said wearily. “You can’t alter the ratio of neurotransmitters in the brain without a lot of side effects. Cixin’s body is under huge stress and his behavior is consistent with fluctuating neurotransmitters and high concentrations of cortisol and other stress hormones.”

She said nothing.

“Renata, I promise you—”

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen what your words are worth.” She got up from the green chair and walked around him, toward the door. He knew better than to try to stop her. “If you’d told me about Cixin from the beginning—even only that he was coming here to live with you—that would be one thing. I could have accepted it. I mean—that poor kid. It’s not his fault, and I understand family ties as well as you Chinese, or part-Chinese, or whatever you’re calling yourself now. But, Ben, I
asked
you. I said after our first week or so, ‘Do you see yourself ever wanting children in your life?’ And you said no. And now you tell me—” She broke off.

All this time he’d been holding the socks. Carefully, as if they were made of glass, he laid them into his suitcase. A small part of his chaotic mind registered that, like most socks nowadays, they had probably been exported from China. He said, “Will you still be here when I get back?”

“I don’t know.”

They looked at each other.

“I don’t know, Ben,” she repeated. “I don’t know who you really are.”

It was the rainy season in Sichuan and over ninety degrees. Ben’s clothing stuck to his body as he waited in the bus station in Chengdu; Cixin’s village still had no maglev service. The station looked cleaner and more prosperous than when he’d come to China two years ago. Children in blue-and-white school uniforms marched past, carrying pictures of giant pandas. Ben had emailed Cixin to ask Auntie to bring him to Chengdu, but Cixin got off the bus alone.

He hadn’t grown much. At eleven—almost twelve—he was a small, weedy boy with suspicious dark eyes, thin cheeks, and an unruly shock of black hair falling over his forehead. A large greenish bruise on one cheek. He carried a small backpack, nothing else. He didn’t smile.

Ben locked his knees against a tide of conflicting emotions. Apprehension. Pity. Resentment. Longing for Renata. But he tried. He said, “Hey, buddy” and put a hand on Cixin’s shoulder. Cixin flinched and Ben removed the hand.

He tried again. “Hello, Cixin. It’s good to see you. Now let’s go to America.”

Seven: Cixin

He didn’t know who he really was.

Not now, in these strange and bewildering places. Cixin had never been out of his village. He’d assumed the videos on his laptop had been made-up lies, like Mama telling him about Tibet. But here was Chengdu, full of cars and pedicabs and scooters and huge buildings like mountains and buildings partly fallen down and signs that sprang up from the ground but dissolved when you walked through them and flashing lights and millions of people and men with big guns. . . . Cixin, who just last week had beaten up three village boys at once and thought of himself secretly as “The Tiger,” clutched Ben’s hand and didn’t know what this world was, what he himself was anymore.

“It’s all right, buddy,” Ben said and Cixin glared at him and dropped the hand, angry because Ben wasn’t afraid.

They sat together in the back of the plane to Shanghai. For a while Cixin was content to stare out the window as the ground fell away and they rose into clouds—up into
clouds
! But eventually he couldn’t stay still.

“I’m getting up,” he told Ben.

“Toilet’s just behind us,” Ben said.

Cixin didn’t need a toilet, he needed to run. Space between the rows of seat was narrow but he barreled down it, waving his arms. A boy a few years older walked in the opposite direction—on Cixin’s aisle! The boy didn’t step aside. Cixin shoved him away and kept running. The boy staggered up and started after Cixin but was stopped by a shout in Chinese from a man seated nearby. Cixin ran the length of the aisle, cut across the plane, ran back down a different aisle, where Ben grabbed him by the arm.

“Sit, Cixin.
Sit
. You can’t run in here.”

“Why? Will they throw me off?” This was funny—they were on a plane!—and Cixin laughed. Once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop. A man in a blue uniform moved purposefully toward them. Cixin stopped laughing—what if it was a soldier with a hidden gun? He cowered into his seat and tried to make himself very small.

The maybe-soldier and Cousin Ben talked softly. Ben sat down and shook a yellow pill from a plastic bottle. “Take this with your bottled water.”

“That’s not my once-a-week!” The once-a-week, for reasons Cixin didn’t understand, had to be left behind at Auntie’s.
Too risky for Customs
, Ben said,
especially for me
. Which made no sense because Ben didn’t take the once-a-week, only Cixin did.

“No, it’s not your once-a-week,” Ben said, “but take it anyway. Now!”

Cixin recognized anger. Ben might have a gun, too. In the videos, all Americans had guns. He took the pill, tapped on the window, kicked the back of the seat until the woman in it turned around and said something sharply in Chinese.

Cixin wasn’t clear on what it was. A slow languor had fallen over the plane. Then sleep slid into him as softly as the fog by the river, as calmly as something . . . something right at the edge of memory . . . a pine tree and a gray boulder and . . .

He slept.

Another airport. Stumbling through it half awake. Shouting, people surging, a wait in a locked room . . . maybe it was a dream. Ben’s face tired and white as old snow. Then another plane, or maybe not . . . yes. Another plane. More sleep. When he woke truly and for real, he lay in a small room with blue walls and red cloth at the windows, four stacked houses up into the sky, in San Diego, America.

Cixin ran. Waves pounded the shore, the wind whistled hard—whoosh! whoosh!—and sand blew against his bare legs, his pumping arms, his face. He laughed and swallowed sand. He ran.

Ben waited where the deserted beach met the parking lot, the hood of his jacket pulled up, his face red and angry. “Cixin! Get in the car!”

Cixin, exhausted and dripping and happy—as happy as he ever got here—climbed into the front seat of Ben’s Saab. Rain pounded the windshield. Ben shouted, “You ran away from your tutor again!”

Cixin nodded. His tutor was stupid. The man had been telling him that rainstorms like this were rare and due to the Earth getting hotter. But with his own body Cixin had experienced many rainstorms, every summer of his life, and they all were hot. So he ran away from the stupid tutor, and from the even stupider girl who was supposed to come take care of him after the tutor left and before Ben came home from work. He ran the seven streets from Ben’s house-in-the-sky to the beach because the beach was the only place in America that he liked. And because he wanted to run in the rain.

“You can’t just leave the condo by yourself,” Ben said. “And I pay that tutor to bring you up to speed before school starts in September, even though—you can’t just go down to the beach during a typhoon! And I had to leave the lab in the middle of—”

There was more, but Cixin didn’t listen. He’d only been in America ten days but already he knew that Ben wouldn’t beat him. Still, Ben was very angry, and Ben was good to him, and Ben had showed him the wonderful beach in the first place. So Cixin hung his head and studied the sand stuck to his knees, but he didn’t actually listen. That much was not necessary.

“—adjust your dosage,” Ben finished. Cixin said nothing, respectfully. Ben sighed and started the car, his silly red hair stuck to his head.

When they were nearly back at the houses-stacked-in-the-sky, Cixin said, “You look sick, Cousin Ben.”

“I’m fine,” Ben said shortly.

“You don’t eat.”

“I eat enough. But, Cixin, you’re driving me crazy.”

“Yes.” It seemed polite to agree. “But you don’t eat and you look sick and sad. Are you sad?”

Ben glanced over, rain dripping off his collar. “You surprise me sometimes, buddy.”

That was
not
a polite answer. Cixin scowled and stared out the window at the “typhoon” and tapped his sandy sneaker on the sodden floor of the car. He wanted to run again.

And Ben was too sad.

In the “condo,” instead of the stupid tutor, a woman sat on the sofa. How did she get in? A robber! Cixin rushed to the phone, shouting, “911! 911!” Ben had taught him that. Robbers—how exciting!

But Ben called, “It’s all right, Cixin.” His voice sounded so strange that Cixin stopped his mad dash and, curious, looked at him.

“Renata,” Ben said thickly.

“I couldn’t stay away after all,” the woman said, and then they were hugging. Cixin turned away, embarrassed. Chinese people did not behave like that. And the woman was ugly, too tall and too pale, like a slug. Not pretty like Xiao. The way Ben was holding her . . . Cixin hated the woman already. She was evil. She was not necessary.

He rushed into his room and slammed the door.

But at dinnertime the woman was still there. She tried to talk to Cixin, who refused to talk back.

“Answer Renata,” Ben said, his voice dangerously quiet.

“What did you say?” Cixin made his voice high and silly, to insult her.

“I asked if you found any sand dollars on the beach.”

He looked at her then. “Dollars made of sand?”

“No. They’re the shells of ocean creatures. Here.” She put something on the table beside his plate. “I found this one last week. I’ll bet you can’t find one bigger than this.”

“Yes! I can!” Cixin shouted. “I’m going now!”

“No, you’re not,” Ben said, pulling him back into his chair. But Ben was smiling. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’ll all go.”

“And if we go in the evening and if the clouds have lifted, there should be something interesting to see in the sky,” Renata said. “But I won’t tell you what, Cixin. It’s a surprise.”

Cixin couldn’t wait until Saturday evening. He woke very early. Ben and Renata were still asleep in Ben’s bed—she must be a whore even if she wasn’t as ugly as he thought at first—and here it was
morning.
A little morning, pale gray in a corner of the sky. The rainstorm was all gone.

He dressed, slipped out of the house-in-the-sky, and ran to the beach. No one was there. The air was calm now and the water had stopped pounding and something strange was happening to the sky over the water. Ribbons of color—green, white, green—waved in the sky like ghosts. Maybe they were ghosts! Frightened, Cixin turned his back, facing the part of the sky where the sun would come up and chase the ghosts away. But then he couldn’t see the water. He turned back and ran and ran along the cool sand. To his left, in San Diego, sirens started to sound. Cixin ignored them.

Finally, exhausted, he plopped down. The sun was up now and the sky ghosts gone. Nobody else came out on the beach. Cixin watched the nearest tiny waves kissing the sand.

Something happened.

A soft, calm feeling stole through him, calm as the water. He didn’t even want to run anymore. He sat cross-legged, half hidden by a sand drift, dreamily watching the ocean, and all at once he
was
the ocean. Was the sand, was the sky, was the whole universe and they were him.

Cixin. Come. Cixin
.

Voices, everywhere and nowhere, but Cixin didn’t have to answer because they already knew the answer. They were him and he was them.

Peace. Belonging. Everything. Time and no time.

And then Ben was forcing open his mouth, putting in something that melted on his tongue, and it all went away.