Now the Boat Must Sail

The following June, I went back to Urk.

I'd wintered in Hangzhou. Walked the wet market with my mother many times; drank many cups of tea with my father; climbed the five flights to my grandfather's many times. When I told Grandpa everything — the real everything — he said nothing for a long while, and then asked exactly one question: "The field. Did you look at it for me?" I said I did. He said: "Good." Then he refilled my water and we talked about other things. Between people who see the road, words are kept to a minimum.

The dreams are still with me. Let me be precise about this: they never left. I am still a mirror. At night I still catch pieces of tomorrow — a rainstorm before the neighbors know, a phone call my mother hasn't made yet. Small days, opening and closing like flowers. But the big dream — the one that ran twenty years and burned holes in my sleep — that one is gone. It completed. Its entire lifetime had exactly one deliverable: a set of coordinates.

Dreams, now, are like a window to me. It stands open; wind comes through; I look out for a moment; then I go on with my today. Grandpa's road and my father's days — it turns out they were never at war. Eyes on the road. Feet in the days. One sentence — and it took two men two entire lifetimes, lived in opposite directions, to assemble it for me.

June in Urk, and the harbor smells exactly the same.

Old Yang was waiting on the dock. The old man is thinner; the shoulders are still a ship's bow. He saw me and nodded — and the exact arc of that nod was my father's. Fathers everywhere apparently source it from the same supplier. We didn't hug; neither of our families holds with that. He just took my bag and said: "Come."

The blue-and-white boat had been refitted. Fresh paint over the old.

"He left it to you," Old Yang said. "Papers are done, I handled it. He said — you get seasick, so I'm to take you out the first few times. For practice." He paused, then added, in his pure Qingdao-broker Mandarin: "That mule. Arranged everything, right down to this."

I laughed. My eyes went hot for a second — and no further. I manage that account very carefully now. Not suppression: genuine lack of need. Once a water level has risen all the way, you know forever how deep the reservoir goes.

Before we sailed, I went out to the field.

In bloom, as good as last year. White petals, yellow hearts, crest of the slope to the waterline. I took my shoes off and walked to the middle of it and stood still. The earth was cool. I closed my eyes and waited for the old jolt — the hand of the familiar clapping my shoulder from behind—

Nothing.

Just wind. Just flowers. Just an ordinary, unreasonably beautiful summer morning. The field isn't a coordinate anymore. It's been decommissioned. Now it is only a place — a place where someone I love lay down, a place I can walk into whenever I choose, sit a while, and walk out of again.

It's mine now.

I sat in the flowers an hour and gave him the update: my mother's blood pressure; the wedding invitation from Vivi and Matteo — her exact words: "Eat in Guangzhou, marry in Tuscany. 正!" — and the thing I've been writing. Yes. Writing. All of it, written down. In Chinese, for the girls on the far side of the Pacific who sit in cubicles having strange dreams — girls exactly like the one I was. I've written all the way to today. All the way to this chapter. And with this chapter, it's done.

In my passport there is a daisy from last year, pressed flat, dried, still holding its color.

Back at the dock, Old Yang had already slipped the lines and stood aboard, waiting. At the gangplank I stopped — for one second. People who get seasick always stop for one second.

And then I heard it. Not from Old Yang. From the wind, from memory, from a voice whose certainty used to drive me crazy, the tail of the sentence lifting like a joke:

Nu moet de boot maar varen.

It's come to this—

"—so let the boat sail," I said, out loud, and jumped aboard.

Old Yang started the engine. The bow swung toward open water and the port shrank slowly behind us — the lighthouse, the red roofs, the church spire, one by one folding into the summer light. Ahead lay the North Sea, grey-blue, his exact color, enormous, no far edge to it anywhere.

No far edge. Perfect.

I turned my face into the wind, and I did not look back.

I used to believe that people who see tomorrow have had their whole lives spoiled in advance.

Now I know: the dream only delivers you to the dock.

Boarding is your own decision. And I boarded.

(The End)