Lost in Translation Page 0,112

beer roll, the uniform’s too tight, he checks your driver’s license, he asks you the questions, you answer correctly because you know what to say and they send you out of the room and through a gate and you have left your country, you are over the border, now it’s Nuevo Laredo. Mexico. Everything looks different. The houses are all these wild colors. The light is strange. It smells primeval. You’re on Mars."

"You are talking about driving?" Lin attempted to clarify.

"About wanderlust," she answered, using the inadequate Chinese phrase, re-ai luxing, and pointing out the windshield. "This is it, the open road."

He stared at her.

"Wo shi yige luxing aihao-zhe, " she tried again: I’m a wanderer. But still he did not click in. Texas—the road—he’d never know. How could he? Yet the strange thing was she had the same feeling right now that she’d had all those years ago, driving out west, to Tonopah. A free feeling. Leaving her old life behind. Becoming herself. Teilhard had done it: Make me more myself, as I dream to make you reaching the best of yourself.

She watched Lin switch on a small light inside the glove box and peer at the back of the photo again.

"You should start watching for a dirt turnoff on the left," he told her.

When they came to it she drove past, but he spotted it and she turned the jeep around. When she caught sight of the track she saw that it was little more than a faint tamped disturbance in the great prairie of loess, but a track it was, definitely, and it wound away from them toward the black foothills. She cut her speed and lurched onto it. The surface was rough. She braked more.

"A few miles, I would guess." His voice was tight, his hands gripped his knees.

Some small marmot-looking animal darted across their path, eyes refracting brilliantly in their headlights, then shot off into the darkness.

"See that?"

He nodded.

She concentrated on the bad road. To either side of them, piles of rock stood sentrylike on the desert floor.

"Soon we’ll be climbing the ridge," he whispered.

Bumps, painful pitching jolts, each threatening to tear off the muffler or bend a tie rod. They bounced and rolled, gaining elevation. Finally in front of them the track curved gracefully to the right and swept through a break in the humped-up hills, and there, in that astonished second before the car dipped nose-down into the deep falling grade, they glimpsed the spreading valley, the sheep pens, the jumble of dwellings and outbuildings. It looked just like the picture, it was the picture. And up behind it, the strangely notched black ridgeline of the Helan Shan.

There were lights on in the house.

She and Lin exchanged glances, triumphant. Lights down below. That meant people. The Mongol family.

15

They turned off the car and stared at the valley below for a long, speechless while, then finally she started it up again, turned it around, and bounced away, back down through the pass. A dog had started barking. If they sat there any longer someone would notice.

"Lin," she said, her voice low with excitement, downshifting into the grade. She glanced over and saw that he was staring at her too. "Think it’s the Mongol family? Can we hope?"

"I don’t hope," he answered, eyes on her. "I never hope. I just live in gratitude for what comes."

It felt strange to be the open object of his gaze. She felt as if everything about her was lit up. She sat as erect and still as she could in the driver’s seat, wishing she were tall and beautiful. He kept watching her while she eased the jeep down the hill and into the long flat stretch, steered through the scattered piles of rock.

"Xiao Mo," he said.

She glanced over. "Eh?"

"Ting che." Stop the car.

"Shenmo?" What? She’d heard him, of course she’d heard him, but it was too shocking, too unforeseen suddenly, and she had to pretend she hadn’t heard. She had to make him say it again.

"Stop the car."

She oversteered on the narrow track, corrected. Okay. Stop. She pressed a long, steady foot on the brake and then rolled off a little ways into the dirt and cut the engine. The craaack of the emergency brake seemed to split the night and the desert in two. In the silence she felt the endless dry air around them, a universe of it, no one for miles. Emptier than Nevada, emptier than Death Valley. Tartary.

Lin climbed out. He took the old