Yet none of this happens. Baseball cap pulled down, sunglasses on, he rides the T to the station. The cops on the platform, talking football, don’t even give him a second glance. Instead of approaching the ticket window, he heads for the machine: cash in, ticket out, no questions asked. At the bus terminal, no one looks around; everyone here seems to be focused on the ground, avoiding eye contact, and it occurs to him that maybe they, too, are hoping not to be seen. A pact between strangers, all of them agreeing tacitly to ignore one another, to mind their own business, for once. As one fear after another fails to materialize, Bird grows increasingly, absurdly confident. It’s as if the universe is signaling he’s on the right path, that he’s doing exactly what he’s meant to be. When his bus pulls in, he takes a seat by the window toward the back. He’s made it. He’s on his way.
After his mother left, for months he would lie in bed at night, certain that if he could stay awake long enough, she would return. He was convinced, for reasons he could never explain, that his mother came back in the night and disappeared by morning. By sleeping, he missed her each time. Perhaps it was a test—to see how badly he wanted to see her. Could he stay awake? He imagined his mother, each night, standing over his bed, shaking her head. Again he was asleep! Again he had failed the test.
It made perfect sense to him then; it still does. In all the stories his mother had told him, there was an ordeal the hero had to endure: Climb down this well and fetch the tinderbox. Lie beneath this waterfall and let it drum you to pieces. He was sure if he could stay awake his mother would be there. The fact that the test was so arbitrary did not bother him; the tests they had in school were arbitrary, too: circle the nouns and underline the verbs; combine these two random numbers into a third. Tests were always arbitrary; it was part of their nature and, in fact, what made them a test. Separate the peas and the lentils from the ashes before morning’s light. Journey beneath the sea and bring back the pearl that shines by night.
He’d pinched his own arm, bruising black and blue down the forearms, trying to stay awake. Night after night he would catch a sliver of flesh between finger-pad and thumbnail, squeezing until white flashes flecked the corners of his vision. In the morning, his mother was still gone and a half-moon of purple blotted his forearm, and his father asked if the other boys at school were bullying him. They were, but not in the way his father meant. It’s fine, Dad, he said, and all day his eyelids drooped and sagged, and that evening, he would try, and fail, to stay awake again. It was around then that he stopped believing in stories.
Now, after all this time, he is on his way to find her. Like someone in those very stories she’d told him all those years ago. He will journey to where his mother is waiting patiently for him. As soon as she sees him, whatever spell has kept her away all this time will be broken. In the fairy tales, it happens at once, like a switch flipped: At once she recognized him. At once she knew her true self. He is certain this is how it will happen for his mother, too. She will see him and at once she will be his again and they will all live happily ever after.
The interstate scrolls by as the motor settles into the steady thrum of high gear. The farther they go, the easier Bird begins to breathe. He falls asleep and wakes only when the bus downshifts and merges left, jostling him against the glass. By the roadside: a navy-blue SUV has pulled over to the shoulder, a police cruiser parked behind it, lights flashing. An officer, navy suited, emerges from the driver’s seat. Stay away from policemen, his father says in his mind, and Bird tugs the visor of his hat a bit lower, shading his face, as they whip by. He should be scared, but to his surprise, he isn’t. Everything beyond the window feels far away, walled off behind glass, and his heart beats with the same slow, steady thump of the wheels beneath them. Outside the bus, trees and scrubby fields blur on and on.
* * *
? ? ?
The bus drops him in Chinatown in the midst of a fine drizzle. A different world: more people than he’s ever seen, more bustle, more noise. Despite the clamor and commotion, he feels oddly at home, and it takes him a moment to understand why: all around him, suddenly, are people with faces like hers. And a bit like his. He has never been in a place like this, where no one gives him a second glance. If his father was here, he’d be the one standing out, not Bird, and Bird laughs. For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.
Before he left he’d studied the map, the librarian nudging it wordlessly toward him. A grid, his father would say, calm and patient. Just count your way up and over. He does the math: Bowery will turn into Third; eighty-seven blocks up, then two blocks west. Just over five miles. All he has to do is walk in a straight line.
He begins.
He begins to notice things.
That on all the signs here in Chinatown, something has been painted out or taped over or, in some cases, pried away. He can still see the perforations where something was once nailed on, still make out shapes embossed beneath silvery-gray duct tape. He notices that the street signs have been painted over, too: a fat swath of black runs under the feet of neat white letters spelling mulberry and canal, like a shadow at high noon, like a dark ring beneath the white of an eye. Only when he spots one where the paint has begun to wear away, revealing a thicket of characters beneath, does he understand. He remembers his father’s finger, inscribing characters like these in the dust: once, all these signs bore two languages. Someone—everyone—has tried to make the Chinese disappear.
He begins to notice other things.
How the people he passes speak either in English, or not at all, casting quick glances at one another but saying nothing. Only when they duck into a shop can he sometimes catch the low murmur of another language—Cantonese, he guesses. His father would know; his father might even understand. Everyone here seems cautious and edgy, scanning the sidewalks and the street, checking over their shoulders. Poised to run. He notices how many, many American flags there are—on nearly every storefront, on the lapels of nearly every person he sees. In the corner of each store hang the same kinds of posters from home: god bless every loyal american. All the way through Chinatown, not a single store is without one. Some sport other signs, too, garish in red, white, and blue: american owned and run. 100% american. Only when he’s left Chinatown, and the faces around him become Black and white instead of Asian, do the flags become more sporadic, the people here apparently more confident that their loyalty will be assumed.
He walks.
He passes storefronts shielded by graffitied metal grates. New and Used. Bought and Sold. For Lease. A concrete median dividing patched concrete streets. Mystifying names: Max Sun. Chair Table Booth. On the curbside, broken pallets splay like desert-bleached bones. No grass, no trees, nothing green, only street lamps the same gray as the sidewalk, the roads, the dirt that streaks its way up the sides of the buildings from the ground. Everything grit-colored, as if trying to escape notice. The people who pass carry heavy plastic bags, roll shopping carts, avoid each other’s eyes. They do not linger. Sometimes the crosswalks under their feet are simply spray-painted on, the lines wobbling and uncertain; in other places there are no crosswalks at all. More than a decade after the Crisis ended, so many things still haven’t been repaired.