He went to the bathroom, ripped out the seaweed and shaved his feet, still convinced it was nothing but madness. But when he returned the sand was still in his bed, all over his wife, and in her hair. She was awake now, and very upset, trying in vain to shake it out.
If she could see it, Zheng realized, it had to be real. The sand, the grass—all of it. Which meant he wasn’t crazy after all. Something was happening to him.
Zheng went to see the herbalist, who gave him a foul-smelling poultice to rub all over his body. When that didn’t help he went to a surgeon, who told him there was nothing to be done, aside from amputating his feet and plugging his pores with glue. That was obviously not acceptable, so he went to a monk and they prayed together, but Zheng fell asleep while praying and woke to find he’d leaked sand all over the monk’s cell, and the angry monk kicked him out.
It seemed there was no cure for whatever was wrong with him, and the symptoms were only getting worse. The grass on his feet grew all the time now, not just at night, and the seaweed made him smell like a beach at low tide. His wife began sleeping in a separate bed in another room. He worried that his business associates would hear about his condition and shun him. That he would be ruined. In desperation, he began to entertain the idea of having his feet amputated and his pores plugged with glue—but then, in a sudden flash of memory, the last words his father had spoken to him came ringing in his ears.
Don’t let grass grow under your feet.
Now that mysterious sentiment, which Zheng had wondered about for many years, made perfect sense. It had been a message—a coded message. His father had known this would happen to Zheng. He had known because it had also happened to him! They shared more than a face and a walk and a way of speaking—they shared this strange affliction, too.
Come and find me, he had said. Don’t let grass grow under your feet.
Liu Zhi had not gone off to seek a mythical fortune. He had gone to find a cure. And if Zheng ever hoped to rid himself of this strangeness and live a normal life again, he would have to fulfill his promise to his father.
At dinner that evening, he announced his intentions to the family. “I’m mounting a voyage to find our father,” he said.
They were incredulous. Others had tried and failed to find their father already, they reminded him. Searches had been financed by the emperor, but no trace of the man or his expedition had ever been found. Did he, a merchant who had never sailed anywhere but his safe trading routes, really expect to have better luck than they did?
“I can do it, you’ll see,” said Zheng. “I just have to find the island he went searching for.”
“You would never find it even if you were the world’s best navigator,” said Aunt Xi. “How can you find a place that doesn’t exist?”
Zheng left determined to prove his family wrong. The island did exist, and he knew just how to find it: he would stop taking his sleep medicine and let his dreams guide him. If that didn’t work, he would listen to the whales!
His first mate tried to discourage him, too. Even if the island existed, he said, every mariner who had claimed to see it swore it couldn’t be reached. They said it moved in the night. “How can you land on an island that runs away from you?” the first mate asked.
“By commissioning the fastest ship that’s ever been built,” Zheng replied.
Zheng spent the bulk of his fortune building that ship, which he named Improbable. It nearly bankrupted him, and he had to issue promissory notes to hire the crew.
His wife was livid. “You’ll land us in the poorhouse!” she cried. “I’ll have to take in laundry just to keep from starving!”
“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.