Lost in Translation Page 0,24

future from his essays." He paused, perhaps wondering whether to say more. "Sometimes in the bad years I would come here to this house and stand in the priest’s room. Do you know why I did this? Because here he formulated his ideas. Here he wrote at night—while by day he sifted the dirt at Zhoukoudian. Eh, foreign miss, you cannot imagine the excitement in those days at Zhoukoudian. After the ape-man was discovered."

"I think I can," she said in a low voice, glancing over at Adam Spencer, who walked beside her, his eyes round and wide with anticipation, his hands clutching his book and pen. "Here," she told Adam when the old man stopped and pointed to a half-open door. "Teilhard’s room."

She stood back and let Spencer push his way inside. He flipped on a dim yellow bulb. "There’s nothing here," he said, voice strangled with disappointment.

The room was bare. No furniture, no cupboards, nothing.

"It was an office for thirty or forty years after the Jesuits left," Mr. Zhang explained. "Since then it has not been used."

"Did Teilhard leave anything?" Spencer asked. "Papers, books?"

Alice translated and Mr. Zhang shook his head. "Nothing. But I tell you, if you stand just so"—he turned his frail, graceful body toward the windows—"you can still sense the essence of the man! Go on," he urged Alice. "Translate. Tell the foreign scientist to try."

Alice looked dubiously at Adam Spencer, who was pacing the room like a frustrated animal, holding his notebook, scanning the bare walls continuously as if they might suddenly yield something if he looked at them long enough.

"Sorry, Mr. Zhang. I don’t think the American scientist is interested in Teilhard’s essence. You’re sure there are no records, pictures, anything?"

"None."

"Nothing remains," she translated for Spencer, inside thinking: But everything is here, isn’t it? Because this is where his vision was born. Dimly she knew there was something important in all this for her. "Sorry, Adam," she said.

"It’s okay," he sighed. "Let’s go."

Adam Spencer lay on his bed, studying the direct-dial instruction card, in eight languages, which had been placed on his nightstand. Outside line, international operator, country code ... His eyes moved down to the rate listing and he swallowed uncomfortably. Expensive.

But he had to call. His longing for his son had grown so overwhelming that it seemed, these last few days, he was almost choking on it. It was a longing fraught with dread and apprehension, one that had started the day he and Ellen had told Tyler they were separating. He still remembered the child’s frozen, color-drained face, looking up from his handheld electronic game. And then the long horrible moment in which Tyler, his heart split apart, did not know whose arms to rush into. Adam and Ellen swore they wouldn’t make the boy choose between them. But they had, almost immediately, because she moved back to California. And Tyler had gone with her.

Adam swallowed hard, picked up the phone, and jabbed out the code for collect, then pressed a 510 area code, the San Francisco area, the East Bay. He listened to it ring.

Ellen answered, and the operator asked her in sawing Asian English if she would accept charges. She paused—and then she agreed. "Adam, my God, did you have to call collect?"

"Yes." He swallowed. "Sorry. I’ll pay you back when I get home. Is Tyler there?" He rushed on, wanting to avoid her.

"Yes. Wait—" She covered the phone, muffled talking.

His precious boy came on. "Hi, Dad."

Adam’s chest soared. He felt himself smiling. "Hi, guy."

"Where are you?"

"China."

"Weird."

"How’s school?" Adam said.

"Fine."

"What’d you do today?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"I forget."

"Hmm. Tyler, guess what? Daddy’s going to find these bones of an ancient hominid, ancestor of man, you know? They used to be in sort of a museum but they’ve been missing for a long time."

"Missing? Did somebody take them?"

"Yeah. But Daddy’s going to find them. You’ll see. It’ll—"

"Dad? Sorry. I have to go. Mom says homework."

Adam opened his mouth to protest but there was nothing he could say. After all, he’d called collect. "I love you, Tyler," he got out, the words like cotton in his mouth.

"I love you too."

There was the far-off click, the deadening of the sound, and then his son was gone. Gone, gone. Adam held the receiver in front of him, looking at it, the heat pressing behind his eyes, and then put it back on its cradle.

"We’re in luck," Alice told him in the lobby after breakfast. "While we were eating Vice Director Han called. He left word that he’d