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 because 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.
A mob formed and attacked him. Zheng struggled to stand on his grassy stumps and then to run. He fell, crushing a house under his weight. He stood again and lumbered on, laboring up a hill with thundering steps that punched holes in the street.
The mob chased him, joined by soldiers who fired arrows at his back. From his wounds gushed liquid gold, which only encouraged more people to join the attack. All the while, Zheng was steadily growing, and soon he was twice the width of his street and three times the height of his house. His form was fast becoming inhuman, his arms and legs disappearing within the giant, earthen ball that was his midsection.
He made it to the top of the street on tiny, waddling stumps. A moment later they were swallowed up, and with nothing left to steady him, his round form began to roll down the other side—slowly at first, then faster and faster. He became unstoppable, flattening houses and wagons and people as he went, growing larger all the while.