“He would go swimming in the sea for hours every day, even in winter,” said Zheng’s eldest brother. “He could hardly stand being on land.”
“He thought he could talk to whales,” said Zheng’s uncle Ai, laughing. “Once I even heard him trying to speak their language!”
“He wanted us to go and live on an island in the middle of nowhere,” said Zheng’s mother. “I said to him, ‘We banquet at the palace! We entertain dukes and viscounts! Why should we give up this life to live like savages in a sandpit?’ He hardly spoke to me after that.”
Liu Zhi had accomplished a great deal early in his life, people said, but then he’d begun chasing fantasies. He led a voyage to discover a land of talking dogs. He spoke of a place in the northernmost reaches of the Roman Empire where there lived shape-shifting women who could stop time.12 He was shunned by polite society, and eventually the nobles stopped funding his expeditions—so he began funding them himself. When he’d exhausted his personal fortune, leaving his wife and children near bankruptcy, he dreamed up a mission to find Cocobolo in order to harvest its riches.
Zheng saw how his father’s eccentricities had led to his downfall and, as he entered manhood, he was careful not to repeat Liu Zhi’s mistakes. There was seawater in Zheng’s blood, too, and like his father he became a mariner—but of a very different sort. He led no expeditions of discovery, no pioneering voyages to claim new lands for the empire. He was a thoroughly practical man, a merchant, and he oversaw a fleet of trading ships. He took no risks. He avoided routes favored by pirates and never strayed from familiar waters. And he was very successful.
His life on land was equally conventional. He banqueted at the palace and maintained friendships with all the right people. He never uttered a shocking word or held a controversial opinion. He was rewarded with social position and an advantageous marriage to the emperor’s pampered grandniece, which put him within a hairbreadth of the nobility class.
To protect all he’d accumulated, he took pains to disassociate himself from his father. He never mentioned Liu Zhi. He changed his surname and pretended they weren’t related. But the older Zheng got, the harder it became to push away his father’s memory. Elderly relatives often made comments about how similar Zheng’s mannerisms were to Liu Zhi’s.
“The way you walk, the way you hold yourself,” said his aunt Xi Pen. “Even the words you choose—it’s as if he’s standing before me!”
So Zheng attempted to change himself. He copied the loping gait of his older brother, Deng, whom no one ever compared to their father. Before he spoke, he paused to rearrange the words in his head and choose different ones that meant the same thing. He couldn’t change his face, though, and every time he walked past the harbor, the giant statue of his father reminded Zheng just how much they resembled each other. So one night he snuck out to the harbor with a rope and a winch and, with a great deal of effort, he pulled the thing down.
On his thirtieth birthday, the dreams began. He was plagued by nighttime visions of the old man—starved and leathery, white beard to his knees, no longer resembling Zheng at all—waving desperately from the desert shore of some sunbaked island. Zheng would startle awake in the wee hours, sweat beading his brow, tormented by guilt. He’d made a promise to his father, one he’d never even attempted to fulfill.
Come and find me.
His herbalist prepared him a draught of strong medicine, which he took each night before bed, and it kept him sound asleep and dreamless until morning.
Shut out of his dreams, Zheng’s father found other ways to haunt him.
Zheng found himself lingering by the docks one day, entertaining a mysterious impulse to jump into the ocean and go for a swim—in the middle of winter. He choked back the urge, and for weeks did not allow himself to even look at the sea.
A short time later he was captaining a voyage to Shanghai when, belowdecks, he heard the song of a whale. He put his ear to the hull and listened. For a moment he thought he could understand what the whale, in its long, unearthly vowels, was saying.
Co . . . co . . . bo . . . lo!
He plugged his ears with cotton, ran upstairs, and refused to go belowdecks again. He began to worry that he was losing his mind, just as his father had.
Back home on land, he had a new dream, one even his nightly draught of medicine could not suppress. In it, Zheng was bushwhacking through an island’s tropical interior as rubies rained softly from the trees. The muggy air seemed to breathe his name—Zheng, Zheng—and though he could feel his father’s presence all around him, he saw no one. Exhausted, he lay down in a patch of grass, and then suddenly it grew up around him, the sod peeling away from the earth to wrap him in a suffocating embrace.
He startled awake with his feet itching like mad. Throwing back the covers, he was alarmed to discover that they were covered in grass. He tried to brush it off, but every blade was connected to his feet. They were sprouting from his soles.
Terrified his wife would notice, Zheng leaped from the bed, ran to the bathroom, and shaved.
What on earth is happening to me? he thought to himself. The answer was clear enough: he was losing his mind, just as his father had.
The next morning, he awoke to find that not only had his feet sprouted grass again, but long ropes of seaweed had grown from his armpits. He raced into the bathroom, tore the seaweed out—it was very painful—and shaved his feet a second time.
The following day he awoke with the usual growths from his feet and armpits, as well as a new wrinkle: his bedsheets were full of sand. It had oozed from his pores in the night.