A dank, fusty odor hits my nose and panic rises in my throat. I look around for signs of decay. I’ve smelled this same stench before. But where? When? It feels overwhelmingly familiar, an olfactory version of déjà vu—déjà senti. Or perhaps it’s instinctive, like the way animals know that smoke comes from fire and fire leads to danger. The odor is trapped in my brain as visceral memory, emotional residue of stomach-cramping fear and sadness, but without the reason that caused it.
I hurry past another stack of rocks. But my shoulder catches a jutting edge, and I scream as the entire load collapses. I stare at the rubble. Whose magic did I just destroy? I have the uneasy feeling I have broken a spell and these metamorphisms will soon begin to sway and march. Where is the archway? Now there seem to be more rock mounds—have they multiplied?—and I must weave through this maze, my legs going one direction, my mind arguing that I should go another. What would Simon do? Whenever I’ve become uncertain about accomplishing a physical feat, he’s been the reasoning voice, assuring me I can run another half-mile, or hike to the next hill, or swim to the dock. And there were times in the past when I believed him, and was grateful that he believed in me.
I imagine Simon urging me on now. “Come on, Girl Scout, move your ass.” I look for the stone wall and archway to orient myself. But nothing is distinct. I see only gradations of flat-light shadows. Then I remember those times I became angry with Simon because I listened to him and failed. When I yelled at him after I tried rollerblading and fell on my butt. When I cried because my backpack was too heavy.
I sit on the ground in exasperation, whimpering. Fuck this, I’m calling a taxi. Look how dopey I’ve become. Do I really believe I can stick my hand up, hail a taxi, and get out of this mess? Is that all that I’ve managed to store in the emergency section of my inner resources—my willingness to pay cab fare? Why not a limo? I must be losing my mind!
“Simon! Kwan!” Hearing the panic in my voice, I grow even more panicked. I try to move more quickly but my body feels heavy, pulled to the earth’s core. I bump into one of the statues. A rock topples, grazes my shoulder. And just like that, all the terror I’ve been holding in bubbles out of my mouth and I begin to cry like an infant. I can’t walk. I can’t think. I sink to the ground and clutch myself. I’m lost! They’re lost! All three of us are trapped in this terrible land. We’ll die here, rot and slough, then petrify and become other faceless statues! Shrill voices accompany my screams. The caves are singing, songs of sorrow, songs of regret.
I cover my ears, close my eyes, to shut out the craziness of the world, my mind, both. You can make it stop, I tell myself. I’m straining hard to believe this; I can feel a cord in my brain stretching taut, and then it rips and I’m soaring, free of my body and its mortal fears, growing light and giddy. So this is how people become psychotic, they simply let go. I can see myself in a boring Swedish movie, slow to react to painfully obvious ironies. I howl like a madwoman at how ridiculous I look, how stupid it is to die in a place like this. And Simon will never know how
nervous
I became. He’s right. I’m hysterical!
A pair of hands grabs my shoulders, and I yell.
It’s Kwan, her face full of worry. “What happen? Who you talking to?”
“Oh God!” I jump up. “I’m lost. I thought you were too.” I’m sniffling and babbling between staccato breaths. “I mean, are we? Are we lost?”
“No-no-no,” she says. I notice then that she has a wooden box tucked under one arm and balanced on her hip. It looks like an old chest for silverware.
“What’s that?”
“Box.” With her free hand, Kwan helps me onto my rubbery legs.
“I
know
it’s a box.”
“This way.” She guides me by the elbow. She says nothing about Simon. She is strangely solemn, unusually taciturn. And fearing that she might have bad news to tell me, I feel my chest tighten.
“Did you see—” She cuts me off by shaking her head. I’m relieved, then disappointed. I no longer know how I should feel from moment to moment. We’re edging our way past the strange statues. “Where’d you get that box?”
“Found it.”
I am beyond being frustrated. “Really!” I snap. “I thought you bought it at Macy’s.”
“This my box I hide long time ago. Already tell you this. This box always want show you.”
“Sorry. I’m just frazzled. What’s inside?”
“We go up there, open and see.”
We walk quietly. As my fear ebbs, the landscape begins to look more benign. The wind pushes against my face. I was perspiring earlier, and now I’m growing chilled. The path is still uneven and tricky, but I no longer sense any strange gravitational pull. I berate myself: Girl, the only thing haywire in this place is your mind. I went through nothing more dangerous than a panic attack. Rocks, I was scared of rocks.
“Kwan, what are these things?”
She stops and turns around. “What thing?”
I gesture to one of the piles.
“Rocks.” She starts walking again.
“I
know
they’re rocks. I mean, how did they get here, what are they supposed to be? Do they mean something?”
She stops once more, casts her eye over the gully. “This secret.”
The hair rises on the back of my neck. I put some casual bluff in my voice. “Come on, Kwan. Are they like gravestones? Are we walking across a cemetery or something? You can tell me.”
She opens her mouth, about to answer. But then a stubborn look crosses her face. “I tell you later. Not now.”
“Kwan!”
“After we back.” She points to the sky. “Dark soon. See? Don’t waste time talk.” And then she adds softly: “Maybe Simon already come back.”
My chest swoops with hope. She knows something I don’t, I’m sure of it. I concentrate on this belief as we thread our way up and around several boulders, down a gully, then past a high-walled crevasse. Soon we are at the small trail leading to the top. I can see the wall and the archway.
I scramble ahead of Kwan, heart pounding. I’m convinced Simon is there. I believe that the forces of chaos and uncertainty will allow me another chance to make amends. At the top, my lungs are nearly bursting. I’m dizzy with joy, crying with relief, because I feel the clarity of peace, the simplicity of trust, the purity of love.
And there!—the day pack, the stove, the damp jacket, everything as we left it, nothing more or less. Fear nicks my heart, but I cling to the absolute strength of faith and love. I walk to the other end of the tunnel, knowing that Simon will be there, he
has
to be.
The ledge is empty, nothing out there but the wind, its slap. I lean against the tunnel wall and slump to the ground, hugging my knees. I look up. Kwan’s there. “I’m not leaving,” I tell her. “Not until I find him.”
“I know this.” She sits on top of the wooden chest, opens the day pack, and takes out a glass jar of cold tea and two tins. One contains roasted peanuts, the other fried fava beans. She cracks open a peanut and offers it to me.
I shake my head. “You don’t need to stay. I know you have to get ready for Big Ma’s funeral tomorrow. I’ll be okay. He’ll probably show up soon.”
“I stay with you. Big Ma already tell me, delay funeral two three day, still okay. Anyway, more time cook food.”
An idea hits me. “Kwan! Let’s ask Big Ma where Simon is.” As soon as I say this, I realize how desperate I’ve become. This is how parents of dying children react, turning to psychics and New Age healers, anything as long as there is a thread of possibility somewhere in this universe or the next.
Kwan gives me a look so tender I know I have hoped for too much. “Big Ma doesn’t know,” she says quietly in Chinese. She pulls off the cup that covers the camping stove, and lights the burner. Blue flames shoot through tiny slots with a steady hiss. “Yin people,” she now says in English, “not know everything, not like you thinking. Sometimes they lost themself, don’t know where should go. That’s why some yin people come back so often. Always looking, asking, ‘Where I lose myself? Where I go?’ ”
I’m glad Kwan can’t see how dejected I feel. The camp stove throws only enough light to outline us as shadows. “You want,” she says softly, “I ask Big Ma help us go look. We make like FBI search party. Okay, Libby-ah?”
I’m touched by her eagerness to help me. That’s all that makes sense out here.
“Anyway, no funeral tomorrow. Big Ma have nothing else can do.” Kwan pours cold tea into the metal stove cup and sets this on the burner. “Of course, I can’t ask her tonight,” she says in Chinese. “It’s already dark—ghosts, they scare her to death, even though she’s a ghost herself. . . .”
I absently watch blue and orange flame tips licking at the bottom of the metal cup.
Kwan holds her palms toward the stove. “Once a person has the bad habit of being scared of ghosts, it’s hard to break. Me, I’m lucky, I never started this habit. When I see them, we just talk like friends. . . .”
At that moment, a dreadful possibility grips me. “Kwan, if you saw Simon, I mean, as a yin person, you would tell me, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t pretend—”
“I don’t see him,” she answers right away. She strokes my arm. “Really, I’m telling the truth.”
I allow myself to believe her, to believe that she wouldn’t lie and he isn’t dead. I bury my head in the nest of my arms. What should we do next, what rational, efficient plan should we use in the morning? And later, say by noon, if we still haven’t found him, then what? Should one of us call the police? But then I remember there are no phones, no car. Maybe I could hitchhike and go directly to the American consulate. Is there a branch in Guilin? How about an American Express office? If there is, I’ll lie and tell them I’m a Platinum Card member, charge me for whatever is needed, search and rescue, emergency airlift.
I hear scraping sounds and raise my head. Kwan is poking the Swiss Army knife into the keyhole on the front of the chest. “What are you doing?”
“Lost key.” She holds up the knife, searching among its tools for a better implement. She chooses the plastic toothpick. “Long time ago, I put many thing inside here.” She inserts the toothpick into the hole. “Libby-ah, flashlight in bag, you get for me, okay?”
With the light, I can see that the box is made of a dark reddish wood and trimmed in tarnished brass. On the lid is a bas-relief carving of thick trees, a Bavarian-looking hunter, a small dead deer slung over his shoulders, and a dog leaping in front of him.
“What’s in there?”
There’s a click and Kwan sits up. She smiles, gestures toward the box. “You open, see youself.”
I grasp a small brass latch and slowly pull up the lid. Tinkling sounds burst out. Startled, I let the lid drop. Silence. It’s a music box.
Kwan titters. “Hnh, what you thinking—ghost in there?”
I lift the lid again, and the plucked sounds of a silvery tune fill our small tunnel, sounding jarringly cheerful, a jaunty military march for prancing horses and people in bright costumes. Kwan hums along, obviously familiar with the melody. I aim the light toward the interior of the box. In one corner, under a panel of glass, is the apparatus that makes the music, a metal comb brushing against the pins of a rolling cylinder. “It doesn’t sound very Chinese,” I tell Kwan.
“Not Chinese. German-made. You like music?”
“Very pleasant.” So this is the source of her music box story. I’m relieved to know there’s at least some basis for her delusions. I too hum along with the tune.
“Ah, you know song?”
I shake my head.
“I once give you music box, wedding present. Remember?”
Abruptly, the music stops; the tune hangs in the air a few seconds before it fades away. There is only the awful hissing of the stove, a reminder of rain and cold, of Simon’s being in danger. Kwan slides open a wooden panel in the box. She takes out a key, inserts it into a slot, and begins cranking. The music resumes, and I’m grateful for its artificial comfort. I glance at the section of the box that is now exposed. It’s a knickknack drawer, a catchall for loose buttons, a frayed ribbon, an empty vial—things once treasured but eventually forgotten, things meant to be repaired, then put aside for too long.
When the music stops again, I wind the box myself. Kwan is examining a kidskin glove, its fingers permanently squeezed into a brittle bunch. She puts it to her nose and sniffs.
I pick up a small book with deckled edges.
A Visit to India, China, and Japan
by Bayard Taylor. Inserted between two pages is a bookmark of sorts, the torn flap of an envelope. A phrase on one of the pages is underlined: “Their crooked eyes are typical of their crooked moral vision.” What bigot owned this book? I turn over the envelope flap. Written in brown ink is a return address: Russell and Company, Acropolis Road, Route 2, Cold Spring, New York. “Did this box belong to someone named Russell?” I ask.
“Ah!” Kwan’s eyes grow big. “Russo. You remember!”
“No.” I point the flashlight at the envelope flap. “It says here ‘Russell and Company.’ See?”
Kwan seems disappointed. “At that time, I didn’t know English,” she says in Chinese. “I couldn’t read it.”
“So this box belonged to Mr. Russell?”
“Bu-bu.”
She takes the envelope flap and stares at it. “Ah! Russell. I thought it was ‘Russo’ or ‘Russia.’ The father worked for a company named Russell. His name was . . .” Kwan looks me in the eye. “Banner,” she says.
I laugh. “Oh, right. Like Miss Banner. Of course. Her father was a merchant seaman or something.”
“Opium boat.”
“Yeah, I remember now. . . .” And then the oddity of this strikes me, that we’re no longer talking about a bedtime story of ghosts. Here is the music box, here are the things that supposedly belonged to them. I can barely speak. “This was Miss Banner’s music box?”
Kwan nods. “Her first name—ai-ya!—now it’s run out of my head.” She reaches into the knickknack drawer and removes a small tin. “Tst! Her name,” she keeps saying to herself, “how can I forget her name?” From the tin, she removes a small black brick. I think it is an inkstone, until she pinches off a piece and adds it to the tea, now boiling on the stove.