Tales of the Peculiar Read online

  “I’ll fill my pockets with rubies when I find Cocobolo,” Zheng replied. “When I return I’ll be richer than ever. You’ll see!”

  The Improbable set sail. It was rumored Cocobolo lay southwest of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean, but the island had never been spotted in the same place twice. Zheng stopped taking his sleep medicine and awaited prophetic dreams. In the meantime, the Improbable made for Ceylon.

  Along the way they flagged down other vessels, seeking word of Cocobolo. “I saw it on the eastern horizon three weeks ago,” said a fisherman, pointing into the blue. “Toward the Arabian Sea.”

  Zheng’s sleep had been disappointingly dreamless, so they sailed east. In the Arabian Sea they met a ship captain who told them he’d spotted it two weeks prior. “In the west, near Sumatra,” he said.

  By then Zheng had begun dreaming, but the dreams had been meaningless—so they sailed west. At Sumatra, a man shouted down from a sea cliff that Cocobolo had been seen in the southeast, near Thinadhoo. “You just missed it,” he said.

  And so the voyage went for several months. The crew became restless, and there were whispers of mutiny. The first mate urged Zheng to give up.

  “If the island was real, we would have found it by now,” he said.

  Zheng pleaded for more time. He spent that night praying for prophetic dreams, and the next day belowdecks with his ear pressed to the hull wall, straining to hear whale song. Neither songs nor dreams came to him, and Zheng began to despair. If he returned home empty-handed, he’d be flat broke and still without a cure. His wife would surely leave him. His family would shun him. His investors would refuse to back him, and his business would fail.

  He stood at the bow of the ship, discouraged, and gazed down into the churning green water. He felt a sudden, strong urge to go for a swim. This time, he did not suppress it.

  He hit the water with incredible force. The current was strong and shockingly cold, and it pulled him down.

  He did not fight it. He felt himself drowning.

  From out of the darkness emerged a giant eye suspended in a wall of gray flesh. It was a whale, and it was moving toward him rapidly. Before it could collide with him, the whale dove and disappeared from view. Then, just as suddenly, Zheng’s feet connected with something solid. The whale was pushing from below, propelling him upward.

  They broke the surface together. Zheng coughed up a lungful of water. Someone from the ship threw him a rope. He tied it around his waist, and as he was being pulled back on board, he heard the whale singing below him.

  Its song said: follow me.

  As he was pulled onto the deck, Zheng saw the whale swim away. Though he was trembling from cold and struggling for breath, he found the strength to shout, “Follow that whale!”

  The Improbable trimmed its sails and gave chase. They followed the whale all that day and through the night, marking its position by the mist from its blowhole. When the sun rose, there was an island on the horizon—one that did not appear on the map.

  It could only be Cocobolo.

  They sailed toward it as fast as the wind would take them, and throughout the day what had been a mere speck on the horizon grew larger and larger. But night fell before they could reach it, and when the sun rose again the island was but a speck in the distance.

  “It’s just as they said,” Zheng marveled. “It moves.”

  They chased the island for three days. Each day they drew tantalizingly close to it, only for it to slip away each night. Then a strong wind pushed them toward the island faster than ever, and finally the Improbable was able to reach it, anchoring in a sandy cove just as the sun was dipping toward the horizon.

  Zheng had been dreaming of Cocobolo for months, and he’d let his dreams run a bit wild. Reality was nothing like what he’d envisioned: there were no waterfalls of gold pouring into the sea, no mountain slopes glimmering with ruby-laden trees. It was a lumpy collection of unremarkable hills covered with dense greenery, exactly like a thousand islands he’d passed in his travels. Most disappointingly, there was no sign of his father’s expedition. He’d imagined finding his ship half sunk in a cove, and the old man himself, twenty years a castaway, waiting for him on a beach, cure in hand. But there was only a crescent of white sand and a wall of waving palm trees.

  The ship dropped anchor, and Zheng splashed ashore with his first mate and a detachment of armed crewmen. He told himself it was too soon to be disappointed, but after several hours of searching they had found neither Liu Zhi nor any sign of human settlement, and Zheng was more disappointed than ever.

  The light had begun to fade. They were about to make camp when they heard a rustle in the trees. A pair of jaguars burst through the undergrowth and let out a terrifying roar.

  The men scattered. They shot arrows at the jaguars, which only seemed to enrage the cats further. One leaped at Zheng and he ran for his life. He barreled through the jungle until his lungs were burning and his clothes had been shredded by the undergrowth, and then he stopped. Once his breathing had quieted he listened for his men, but heard nothing. He was alone and lost and it was nearly dark.

  He looked for shelter. After a while he came upon a cluster of caves. A hot, humid wind was passing in and out of them at regular intervals. He thought it was as good a place as any to wait out the night, and ducked inside.

  He dug a small pit and made a fire. No sooner had the flames started to rise than the ground convulsed beneath him and a deafening cry echoed up from the depths of the cave.

  “Put it out! Put the fire out!” the voice boomed.

  Terrified, Zheng kicked dirt onto the flames. As the fire died, the ground beneath him stopped shaking.

  “Why do you hurt me?” said the powerful voice. “What did I ever do to you?”

  Zheng didn’t know to whom he was speaking, only that he’d better reply. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone!” he said. “I only wanted to cook some food.”

  “Well, how would you like it if I dug a hole in your skin and lit a fire?”

  Zheng’s gaze fell upon the extinguished fire pit, which he saw was quickly filling with liquid gold.

  “Who are you?” the voice demanded.

  “My name is Zheng. I hail from the port city of Tianjin.”

  There was a long silence, and then a gale of hearty laughter rolled up from the cave. “You’ve come at last!” the voice said. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you, dear boy!”

  “I don’t understand,” said Zheng. “Who are you?”

  “Why, don’t you recognize your father’s voice?”

  “My father!” Zheng cried, turning to look behind him. “Where?”

  There was another peal of laughter from the cave. “All around you!” said the voice, and then a lump of earth rose up beside him and wrapped him in a sandy embrace. “How terribly I’ve missed you, Zheng!”

  With a shock, Zheng realized that he was not talking to some giant hiding inside the cave, but to the cave itself. “You’re not my father!” he cried, squirming out of its grasp. “My father is a man—a human!”

  “I was a human,” said the voice. “I’ve changed quite a bit, as you can see. But I’ll always be your father.”

  “You’re trying to trick me. Your name is Cocobolo—you move in the night and liquid gold puddles in your holes. That’s what the legends say.”

  “The same things are true of any man who becomes an island.”

  “There are others like you?”

  “Here and there.13 Cocobolo isn’t just one island, you see. We are all Cocobolo. But I am your father.”

  “I’ll believe you if you can prove it,” said Zheng. “What were the last words you said to me?”

  “Come and find me,” said the voice. “And don’t let grass grow under your feet.”

  Zheng fell to his knees and wept. It was true: his father was the island, an
d the island was his father. The caves were his nose and mouth, the earth his skin, the grass his hair. The gold filling the pit Zheng had dug was his blood. If his father had come here seeking a cure, he’d failed to find one—and so had Zheng. He felt desperate and hopeless. Is this what he was doomed to become?

  “Oh, Father, it’s awful, it’s awful!”

  “It isn’t awful,” his father replied, sounding a bit injured. “I like being an island.”

  “You do?”

  “It took a bit of getting used to, of course, but it’s infinitely better than the alternative.”

  “And what’s so bad about being human?” It was Zheng’s turn to feel insulted.

  “Nothing at all,” his father said, “if human is what you’re meant to be. I myself was not meant to be human forever, though for many years I couldn’t accept it. I fought hard against the changes that were overtaking me—and which are also overtaking you. I solicited the help of doctors, and when they proved useless I sought out distant cultures and consulted their sorcerers and witch doctors, but no one could make it stop. I was unutterably miserable. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I left home, found a distant patch of ocean in which to live, and allowed my sand to spread and my grass to grow—and heavens, it was such a relief.”

  “And you’re really happy like this?” said Zheng. “A smudge of jaguar-infested jungle in the middle of the sea?”

  “I am,” his father replied. “Though I admit being an island is lonely sometimes. The only other Cocobolo in this part of the world is a tiresome old crank, and the only humans who visit me want to drain my blood. But if my son were here alongside me—ah, I’d want for nothing!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Zheng, “but that isn’t why I’ve come. I don’t want to be an island. I want to be normal!”

  “But you and I aren’t normal,” said his father.

  “You gave up too soon, that’s all. There must be a cure!”

  “No, son,” said the island, letting out a sigh of such force that it blew Zheng’s hair back. “There is no cure. This is our natural form.”

  To Zheng this news was worse than a death sentence. Overwhelmed by hopelessness and anger, he raged and wept. His father tried to console him. He raised a bed of soft grass for Zheng to lie on. When it began to rain, he bent the palms so that they sheltered him. After Zheng exhausted himself and fell asleep, his father kept the jungle cats at bay with frightening rumbles.

  When Zheng woke in the morning, he had moved past hopelessness. There was an iron will inside him, and it refused to accept the loss of his humanity. He would fight for it, cure or no cure, and if need be he would fight to the death. As for his father, just thinking about him made Zheng unbearably sad—so he resolved never to think of him again.

  He gathered himself up and started to walk away.

  “Wait!” his father said. “Please stay and join me. We’ll be islands together, you and me—a little archipelago!—and we’ll always have each other’s company. It’s fate, son!”

  “It’s not fate,” Zheng said bitterly. “You made a choice.” And he marched off into the jungle.

  His father didn’t try and stop him, though he easily could have. A sorrowful moan rose up from his cave mouth, along with waves of hot breath that swept across the island. As he wept, the boughs of trees shivered and shook, releasing a soft rain of rubies from their branches. Zheng, pausing here and there to scoop them up, filled his pockets, and by the time he’d reached the cove and rejoined his ship, he’d collected enough of his father’s tears to pay all his men’s salaries and fill his empty coffers back home.

  His men cheered when they saw him, having thought him killed by jaguars, and on his order they reeled up their anchor and set sail for Tianjin.

  “What about your father?” his first mate asked, taking Zheng aside to speak privately.

  “I’m satisfied that he’s dead,” Zheng replied tersely, and the mate nodded and asked no more about it.

  Even as Cocobolo receded into the distance behind them, Zheng could still hear his father weeping. Fighting a powerful swell of regret, he stood at the bow and refused to look back.

  For a day and a night, a pod of minke whales rode the Improbable’s wake, singing to him.

  Don’t go.

  Don’t go.

  You are Cocobolo’s son.

  He plugged his ears and did his best to ignore them.

  During the long voyage home, Zheng became obsessed with suppressing the transformation that was happening to him. He shaved his feet and trimmed the seaweed growing from his armpits. His skin was nearly always dusted with the fine, powdery sand that his pores exuded, so he took to wearing high collars and long sleeves, and bathed every morning in seawater.

  The day he arrived home, even before going to see his wife, Zheng went to his surgeon. He instructed the man to do anything necessary to halt his transformation. The surgeon gave Zheng a powerful sleeping draught, and when Zheng awoke he found that his armpits had been filled with sticky tar, his skin covered in glue to stop up his pores, and his feet amputated and replaced with wooden ones. Zheng regarded himself in a mirror and was filled with revulsion. He looked bizarre. Still, he was grimly optimistic that the sacrifice he’d made had saved his humanity, and he paid the doctor and hobbled home on his new wooden feet.

  When his wife saw him, she nearly fainted. “What have you done to yourself?” she cried.

  He invented a lie about being injured while saving a man’s life at sea, and to explain the gluey skin, something about a bad reaction to the tropical sun. He repeated the same lies to his family and his business associates, along with another about finding his father’s body on Cocobolo.14 Liu Zhi, he told them, was dead. They were more interested in the rubies he’d brought back.

  For a time, life was good. His bizarre growths had stopped. Hobbling about on wooden feet, he had traded a freakish affliction for a relatively mundane one, and he could live with that. The rubies had brought him fame not only as a rich man but also as an explorer: he had discovered Cocobolo and returned to tell the story. There were banquets and parties in his honor.

  Zheng tried to convince himself he was happy. In the hopes it might strangle the small voice of regret that mewled inside him now and then, he tried to convince himself that his father really was dead. It was all in your mind, he told himself. That island could not really have been your father.

  But sometimes, when his business took him down by the harbor, he thought he could still hear the song of the whales, calling him back to Cocobolo. Sometimes, while looking at the ocean through a spyglass, he swore he could see a familiar smudge on the horizon that was not a ship, and where no island was mapped. Gradually, over the course of weeks, he felt a strange pressure building inside him. He felt it most severely when he was near water: it seemed to remind his body of what it wanted to become. If he stood at the end of a dock and filled his gaze with the ocean, he could feel the grass and sand and seaweed he’d locked inside himself straining to get out.

  He stopped going near the water. He vowed never to set foot on board a ship again. He bought a house far inland, where he would never have to glimpse the ocean. But even that was not enough: he felt the pressure every time he bathed or washed his face or got caught in the rain. So he stopped bathing and washing his face, and he never went outside if there was even a single dark cloud in the sky. He would not even drink a cup of water, for fear it might ignite in him desires he couldn’t control. When he absolutely needed to, he sucked on a wet cloth.

  “Not a drop,” he told his wife. “I won’t allow a single drop in this house.”

  And so it went. Many years passed without Zheng touching water. Old and dry as dust, Zheng came to resemble a very large raisin, but neither his growths nor his desires returned. He and his wife never had children, in part because Zheng was glued shut from top to bottom, but also becaus
e he feared passing his affliction on to another generation.

  One day, in order to make out a will, Zheng was sorting through his personal effects. In the bottom of a drawer he came upon a small silk bag, and when he upended it, a ruby fell into his palm. He’d sold the rest long ago and had thought this one lost, and yet here it was, cool and heavy in his hand. Before that moment, he had not thought of his father in half a lifetime.

  His hands began to tremble. He hid the ruby out of sight and turned to other business, but he could not seem to stop what was welling up inside him.

  Where the moisture was coming from he could not imagine. He had not even sucked on a rag in three days, but his vision began to blur and his eyes to well, as if some secret reserve inside him were being tapped.

  “No!” he shouted, slamming his fists down on the table. “No, no, no!”

  He looked desperately around the room for something to distract his mind. He counted backward from twenty. He sang a nonsensical song. But nothing would stop it.

  When it finally happened, the event was so anticlimactic he wondered if he hadn’t made too much of it. A tear tracked down his cheek, rolled off his chin, and fell to the floor. He stood frozen, staring at the dark splotch it made on the wood.

  For a long moment, all was still and quiet. Then, the thing Zheng feared most happened. It began with that old, terrible pressure within him, which in a matter of moments became unbearable. It felt as if his body were having an earthquake.

  The glue that covered him cracked and fell away. Sand began to pour from his skin. The tar that had stopped up his armpits disintegrated, and ropes of seaweed shot out of him at an incredible rate. In less than a minute, it had nearly filled the room he was in, and he knew he had to get out of his house or it would be destroyed. He ran outside—and into a driving rainstorm.

  He fell down in the middle of the street, sand and seaweed gushing out of him. People who saw him ran away screaming. His wooden feet blew off, and from their stumps rushed endless lengths of grass. His body began to grow, the rain and the grass mixing with the sand to form earth, layers and layers of which wrapped around him like skin upon skin. Soon he was as wide as the street and as tall as his house.