Going Home

On the sixteenth day of the eighth lunar month, Lao Luo said to his son, “Time to go.”

Xiao Luo said, “Let’s go, then.”

They filled the Toyota Hilux’s fuel tank, strapped four fifty-five-gallon drums into the truck bed, and poured a hundred and fifty gallons of clean water into a homemade tank. The remaining food just filled the Thule cargo box on the roof. Lao Luo tossed the last can of peaches into the cab, then turned his head and asked, “Any chili oil left?”

Xiao Luo answered, “Nope.”

Lao Luo curled his lip. “Forget it, then.”

He lashed a rain tarp over the truck bed with No. 4 steel wire, grabbed the hunting rifle, and jumped into the driver’s seat. The back seat was piled with Trader Joe’s paper bags full of toilet paper, bullets, cigarettes, cured meat, motor oil, and Xiao Luo’s superhero figures. Under the seats were a shovel, a washbasin, a thermos, an electric kettle, a tent, and bedding.

Looking at his phone, Xiao Luo gave directions. “Same way as always. Go to the edge of the gully and make a turn.”

Lao Luo started the truck. “All right. Keep your eyes on the map, eh. Don’t fall asleep.”

The Toyota pulled onto the street. Lao Luo looked back at the house. Run-down as it was, they had patched it up and lived in it for two years, and he couldn’t help feeling a little attached. When they first came to Kansas, Xiao Luo had picked out this house at a glance. Quite a few houses in the town of Fairfield were still standing, but Xiao Luo had a special fondness for the white walls and the round attic window.

“Laohan, go right. Maybe we can bag a rabbit.” Xiao Luo didn’t look back even once. He was in high spirits, as if they were going on a spring outing.

Translator’s note: Laohan (老汉) is Sichuan dialect for “Dad.” Father and son both speak broad Sichuanese the whole way.

The wheels rolled over a patch of yellow roses in full bloom. Most of the roads in the northeast part of town had been wrecked and turned into natural flower beds. Seven months ago, they had shot a wild deer here, then caught rabbits several times in a row. Lao Luo found some cypress branches, put up a shed in the backyard, and smoked whatever meat they couldn’t finish in a meal or two into cured meat.

Cook up some rice, steam the cured meat, and turn it out over the rice, grease and all. Xiao Luo said it was the best thing he had ever eaten in his life. Lao Luo thought this kid really hadn’t seen anything of the world, and then thought that the world he himself had seen, Xiao Luo might never get to see. It made him feel awful. He wanted to hunt more game for them to eat, but after that, they never came across any prey again.

Three years after the world ended, they had gotten used to it.

At first, they would occasionally run into people. Lao Luo talked to them in halting English and offered them a cup of Zhuyeqing tea. He told them he was a cook at a Chinese restaurant in Vegas. The restaurant had closed for the Lunar New Year, so he took his son to Colorado to climb Mount Sunflower. During the climb, he saw a news story: some kind of flying ship, or rock, or something, had arrived at the Pacific and stopped there, not moving. When they reached the summit, the heavens suddenly collapsed and the earth split apart. Mountains rose and fell, the sea surged and receded, wind blew and rain poured, lightning flashed and thunder roared. When they came down the mountain a few days later, they found that everything was finished, and to this day, he didn’t know what had happened.

Those people said they didn’t know what had happened either. Some had fled inland from Washington and New York. Some wanted to try their luck in Florida. All of them wore frightened faces and were completely in the dark, yet carried the excitement and fierceness of the lone survivor. They finished their tea, shouldered their packs, and went on their way. Lao Luo didn’t feel like moving. He just stayed in Fairfield, finding things to eat, chopping firewood, boiling water, cooking rice, simmering soup, and keeping Xiao Luo fed.

The weather had gone to the devil. Sometimes it rained, sometimes it snowed. Once, a gale tore off half the roof, and the next day hail came clattering down. Back in China, Lao Luo had repaired cars and worked on construction sites, so he counted as a handy man. Scrounging this and that, patching and mending, he protected Xiao Luo as the boy grew from six to nine.

Later, they met fewer and fewer people. Since the start of this year, they hadn’t seen a single living person, and he had no idea where everyone had gone. Every day, Lao Luo dragged Xiao Luo over to chat for a while and play a game of Chinese chess, and he could see the loneliness in his son’s eyes. Xiao Luo had nearly finished watching the hundreds of discs Lao Luo had dug up from a DVD shop. He was sick of the games Lao Luo brought back, too. When Lao Luo tinkered with the diesel generator, the boy no longer liked to stand beside him and watch. Lao Luo knew that if this went on, never mind Xiao Luo, even he himself would go mad one day.

One day, Lao Luo pried open the door of a Chinese supermarket and found a calendar from several years back. Looking at the Chinese characters on it, he suddenly shivered. The moment he got back, he said to Xiao Luo, “Xiao Luo, let’s go home.”

Holding his game console, Xiao Luo said, “Laohan, you’re being dumb. We’re already home.”

Lao Luo laid the calendar over the console. “Look at this red circle.”

“New Year?”

“New Year.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Doesn’t mean anything. We’re going back to the old home for New Year.”

Once the idea came up, it burned in his heart like a stove fire, hot and painful.

Lao Luo’s old home was in Hainan Township, Xichang, Sichuan, a town beside Qionghai Lake. At sixteen, he left home to work in Chengdu. At twenty, he married a woman from Guizhou. At thirty, he divorced and took his child abroad by a roundabout path. After being away so long, the scenery of his hometown had faded, and he rarely thought of his old parents by Qionghai Lake. Only after he fled for his life to Kansas and had lived in the white house for a week did he suddenly remember his parents, and late one night, he had a hard cry.

Going back home for New Year. The idea felt very strange. Xiao Luo had gone back to the old home once at age two, and he likely had no memory of it. Lao Luo himself occasionally recalled the old house by the lake and could smell huangtong fish stewed with garlic, but the scene was behind a layer of gauze, blurry and unclear.

Yet three years after the world ended, the thought of going home for New Year swelled and swelled in his heart, roasting Lao Luo until he couldn’t sit still. He had to do something.

Xiao Luo asked, “Where’s the old home?”

Lao Luo answered, “Qionghai, Xichang.”

“Where’s that?”

“China.”

“How far?”

“Pretty far.”

“Can we get there?”

“Definitely.”

“Oh. Let’s go, then.”

A week later, on the sixteenth day of the eighth lunar month, they set off on the road home in the Toyota.

There was no GPS signal. Xiao Luo fiddled with the map on his phone and a compass, guiding Lao Luo to the edge of town, and they headed east along the deep trench that had swallowed a good chunk of the town. In three years, they had never once left Fairfield. Lao Luo felt a little hollow inside, and yet also filled to the brim with something, just like when he first came to America.

The grass-covered road wound ahead and vanished at the edge of a cliff. The trench grew deeper and deeper until it became a canyon. The truck bounced over plants and rocks. Afraid the roads would be bad, Lao Luo had specially raised the suspension and put on twenty-two-inch off-road tires before they set out, and now they came in handy.

“This direction. Keep going straight.” Xiao Luo’s excitement quickly ran out, and he covered his mouth and started yawning.

“Xiao Luo, what if we can’t make it to the old home, and can’t get back to America either? Are you scared?”

“Scared, my hammer.”

“Not even a little?”

“Laozi’s sleepy. Gonna catch some shut-eye.”

Translator’s note: Chuizi (锤子, “hammer”) is a very Sichuan swear word, used the way English uses “my ass,” and laozi (老子, “your old man”) is how tough guys refer to themselves. Coming from a nine-year-old, both are extra cheeky.

The nine-year-old leaned back against the leather seat and was soon snoring softly. Lao Luo drove, focused on dodging rocks and bushes. The odds and ends in the back seat rattled and clanked, and he worried the fuel drums in the truck bed might tip over, so he kept glancing back. He didn’t know how long he had been driving when the canyon began to close in. The ground ahead was smashed to pieces, like a salt-and-pepper cracker someone had stepped on, and Lao Luo had to swing south in a loop to get around it.

Right as he started feeling hungry, he drove onto a highway that was mostly intact. A rusty road sign pointed toward St. Louis. The name didn’t mean much to him. After another hour and a half, a collapsed overpass blocked the road completely. Lao Luo drove down off the roadbed, through a half-dead pine forest, and saw the outline of a city.

St. Louis was a low expanse of gray-white ruins. It looked like it had burned more than once. Lao Luo honked the horn a few times and got no response.

Xiao Luo asked sleepily, “Are we at the old home?”

Lao Luo answered, “Almost.”

They didn’t meet a single person all day. Toward evening, the road surface got really bad. The land was wrinkled and piled up like an egg pancake, and there was hardly anywhere the truck could get through. Lao Luo tried to climb over one fold. Even crawling forward in low-range four-wheel drive, he still banged the engine skid plate hard. Luckily, the oil pan wasn’t damaged.

Xiao Luo said, “Laohan, Chicago’s up ahead.”

Lao Luo tried to make out a few lights against the blue-green sky, but found nothing. He swung the truck north and drove until he was completely worn out. He parked by the road, filled up the tank, and pitched the tent, and he and Xiao Luo split a can of luncheon meat, a bottle of sports drink, and two pancakes with fried eggs folded inside.

After playing his game for a while, Xiao Luo asked, “How come we don’t see anybody?”

Lao Luo didn’t know how to answer. By the time he thought of one, Xiao Luo was already curled up asleep in the tent.

“Because everyone’s on the road home,” Lao Luo said softly.

The next day, a rainstorm came down. Outside the windshield was a sheet of white, and they spent the whole morning covering only thirty miles. At two in the afternoon, the sky suddenly cleared, and the sun baked the mud covering the hills and plains as the Toyota kept running northeast. Driving ten hours a day on average, Lao Luo felt his body could still hold up. Xiao Luo seemed a bit worn out and was always dozing. Luckily, the truck’s stereo could connect to the phone. They had heard every song in Xiao Luo’s player dozens of times, but ever since the internet disappeared and iTunes could no longer connect, those songs had become something important.

When the truck crossed the US–Canada border, Lao Luo was humming along to Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” even though, compared with American songs he only half understood, he liked Dao Lang and Phoenix Legend better.

Xiao Luo pointed at the long trail of dust the wheels kicked up and said, “Laohan, there’s a little sign back there. Says we’ve reached the border.”

They had set out from Detroit on this leg. According to the map, they should have seen Lake Erie and Lake Ontario of the Great Lakes along the way, but there was only loose soil and dust the whole time, hardly any plants, let alone open water.

Lao Luo said, “Can’t take this. The farther we go, the more scared I get. Nothing’s right.”

Xiao Luo said, “Scared of what? Laozi isn’t scared.”

As the Toyota drove on to the northeast, the temperature dropped too. Father and son dug out their thick clothes and put them on. Lao Luo got his son properly bundled up, the undershirt tucked into the long johns and the long johns tucked into the socks. On the fifteenth day, they crossed Quebec and reached Nutak, the edge of the North American continent. The temperature here was around five degrees Celsius, and the ground hadn’t frozen yet. Scour marks ran across the land in streaks, and the tires easily sank into the soft, sandy soil.

According to the map, ahead should have been the Davis Strait, two hundred and fifty miles wide. Lao Luo had read in the road atlas that the strait froze over in winter, and he meant to cross the ice and keep going. But outside the windshield there was only endless gray-green sandy soil, and no telling where the sea was.

“Did we go the wrong way?” Lao Luo frowned.

Chewing on beef jerky, Xiao Luo answered, “Impossible. I just saw signs saying Nutak and Aolaqiweike.”

Lao Luo put it in gear and set off, going down a long, gentle slope and heading east through the swirling dust. One hour, two hours, and still the sea didn’t appear. Finally, he couldn’t help turning south. After forty miles, a line of blue appeared on the horizon. They had reached the sea. According to the map, they were now in the middle of the Davis Strait, on top of waters two thousand meters deep.

Father and son studied the map for a long time. Xiao Luo drew two lines with a ballpoint pen, connecting the North American continent with Greenland across the strait. “I don’t think we went the wrong way. A road grew out of here.”

“Telling tall tales, are you? Roads can grow?” Lao Luo said.

Even so, he listened to his son and drove east, and sure enough, they reached Greenland without any trouble at all.

The little town called Godthåb was unrecognizable. Only the foundations of its buildings were left. Lao Luo grew more and more muddled, unable to figure out what had happened to the world, but Xiao Luo didn’t dwell on it and kept urging him to go on.

They crossed Greenland from its southern end. The days were unbearably long, and the nights were only a short while. Lao Luo drove day and night without rest. Right when they should have reached Greenland’s eastern edge, he again saw the land stretching on, dropping away like a flight of stairs, without a single drop of seawater in sight.

He carefully went down the steep slope, letting the wheels slip and spin in the heaps of sand. The bottom of the slope was fairly flat. He wound his way around strangely shaped white rocks, and the next day started climbing again. Once they reached the top, he found the summit very flat. A broken road led them into a city, and in those deserted ruins, Lao Luo discovered he was standing in the middle of Reykjavík: they had reached Iceland.

“The fucking sea… where’d it go?” Lao Luo couldn’t help asking himself.

Xiao Luo said, “Fucking.”

Lao Luo said, “No swearing.”

After crossing Iceland, they saw the sea. The water was a little strangely blue, though he couldn’t say exactly what was strange about it. A wide land bridge still stretched forward from Iceland’s eastern side. Lao Luo drove down a gentle slope, threading between reefs, lumps of salt, and puddles, when Xiao Luo suddenly shouted, “Laohan, look!”

The truck was passing a snow-white mountain with a lot of sharp points. Both of them squinted at the broken sunlight reflecting off its peaks. Only after the Toyota had driven another ten miles did Lao Luo suddenly realize it was the skeleton of a whale.

He said to Xiao Luo, “The sea’s still here. There’s just a few dozen meters less water, a few hundred meters.”

The boy answered, “Then where’d all the people go?”

Lao Luo thought about it and decided to pretend he hadn’t heard the question.

After two days of driving, they ran into a very steep ridge and had to detour to the edge of the land bridge, barely managing to climb over at the gentlest spot. The truck scraped its undercarriage again and again, and one tire blew. Lao Luo had only two spares. Changing the tire left him exhausted and heartsore. He was salty from head to toe, and the whole world was a glaring, deathly white.

After two more days on the road, they climbed a gentle slope while listening to Eminem and reached Norway.

Oslo counted as a city that hadn’t been too badly damaged. They found a supermarket outside the city and rested up a little. Lao Luo didn’t find any food or water, but he got a hundred gallons of gasoline out of abandoned cars. They didn’t go into the city. The next day, they kept going east and reached Stockholm by evening.

Xiao Luo saw a wild deer run past in front of the headlights, grabbed the Remington hunting rifle, and fired three shots. He didn’t hit the deer, but he blew a piece of sheet metal off the fender. Furious, Lao Luo held the steering wheel with his left hand and smacked him hard twice with his right. Just then, gunshots suddenly came from the direction of the city, as if someone were answering. At first, Lao Luo was pleasantly surprised, but after thinking it over, he drove around Bromma Airport and left the Swedish capital anyway.

They went on like this, driving and stopping, still without meeting anyone or exchanging a word. Not long after they entered Russia, the truck finally broke down. Lao Luo crawled underneath and fiddled around for ages, then held up his frozen hands, opened his oil-smeared mouth, and said, “It’s busted for good.”

Xiao Luo answered, “Find another car, then.”

They switched to a Russian car of some make they didn’t recognize and got back on the road. Most of its paint had flaked off, the rear windshield was smashed, and there was a big hole in the passenger seat. Lao Luo plugged the window with cardboard, padded the seat flat with a cotton-padded coat, and stuffed the fuel drums into the back seat. He popped the hood, took off the carburetor and filter to have a look, filled it up with gasoline and engine oil, hooked up a battery, and got it started on the first try.

It grew colder and colder, and the road came and went. Russia seemed to have been hit by fairly severe earthquakes. Intact buildings were hard to come by, and there was less and less food to be found. Luckily, after it snowed, Lao Luo no longer had to worry about drinking water. Shovel up a basin of snow, chop some wood, melt it down, and there was water. A mouthful of hot water warmed the body, too.

Near the border between Russia and Kazakhstan, Lao Luo had a crash. He fell asleep at the wheel, and the car hit a tree. Father and son both got big lumps on their heads. The car wasn’t badly hurt, just a little leak in the radiator hose, and Lao Luo, holding his head, sealed it up tight with tape and a plastic bag.

After that, he drove even more carefully. They slowly crossed Kazakhstan and followed the Xinjiang–Tibet Highway east, still not seeing anyone along the way. They climbed onto the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau and drove the Sichuan–Tibet route for two days until the road was washed out and they couldn’t get through anymore. Lao Luo decided to take Xiao Luo forward on foot.

Wrapped in their thickest clothes, carrying their luggage, they walked hand in hand over Zongla Mountain. Xiao Luo asked, “Where did the people go, really? We’re alive, so lots of other people are alive too, right?”

Lao Luo answered, “There must be lots of people alive. But this world’s too big. Everybody’s probably just living their own lives.”

It took them twenty days to walk to Litang. They took the S215 toward Jiulong County. Lao Luo counted the days. New Year was almost here, but he really couldn’t walk anymore, so he said, “Up ahead we’ll soon reach the Daliang Mountains. Once we reach the Daliang Mountains, we’re at Xichang. Once we’re at Xichang, we’re at Qionghai. Then we’re home.”

Xiao Luo said, “When we go home for New Year, we can set off firecrackers.”

Lao Luo laughed. “You don’t know a hammer about firecrackers.”

They climbed a mountain.

Lao Luo said, “Over this mountain, we’ll see the town at the foot of it, and then we’re home.”

Xiao Luo said, “When we go home for New Year, we can eat tuotuo meat.”

Translator’s note: Tuotuo meat is big chunks of boiled meat, a Yi dish from the Liangshan area around Xichang.

Lao Luo laughed. “You don’t know a hammer about tuotuo meat.”

They reached the top of the mountain.

Xiao Luo asked, “Are we at the old home?”

Lao Luo didn’t say anything.

They stood on the summit, looking at the sea below. Bright blue water lay shrouded in mist, with the occasional pale white mountaintop poking through. Clouds and smoke drifted in the distance, so they couldn’t tell how wide the sea was, but Lao Luo knew their old home was right there under that water.

Xiao Luo asked, “Is this Qionghai?”

With a thump, the pack slid off Lao Luo’s back. He said, “We’re not walking anymore. Let’s eat.”

He lit the alcohol stove, grabbed a handful of snow to wipe the washbasin clean, shoveled up another basinful of snow, melted it over the fire, rinsed the rice, and cooked it. Meanwhile, he dug out the last piece of cured meat, cut it slice by slice with a small knife, and laid the slices over the rice. Then he opened all the remaining cans, pickled mustard tuber, and fermented tofu in the pack in one go, warmed them by the stove, and served each in a little empty can. Once the rice was done and the aroma drifted out, it didn’t feel so cold anymore. His nose running, Xiao Luo shouted, “Smells good!”

Father and son each had a bowl of cured-meat rice and shoveled it noisily into their mouths.

Beads of sweat on the tip of his nose, Xiao Luo said, “New Year’s so great!”

Lao Luo set down his bowl and looked at the sea below. So all the seawater missing along the way had run off here and drowned half of Sichuan.

This water must be dozens of meters deep, hundreds of meters deep. The old home was under dozens of meters, hundreds of meters of water. He would never see it again in this lifetime.

His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he slowly swallowed a mouthful of fragrant, piping-hot cured-meat rice. “Ai, that’s right. This is Qionghai.”

Xiao Luo asked, “Then what about the old home?”

Lao Luo didn’t answer that. He said, “Happy New Year.”

Xiao Luo said, “Happy New Year!”

The seawater lapped against the mountain rocks, the sound of the waves the same as it had always been.

News: …The unidentified flying object is aimed at the ocean east of the Sea of Japan. It has an enormous mass, its hovering attitude completely defies the known laws of physics, and its mass per unit volume exceeds that of every high-density material known to humankind. A cone of seawater visible to the naked eye is rising, and the level of the Pacific is climbing rapidly under its gravity. On this day as the new year arrives, we deeply regret to inform you: what the unidentified flying object has brought is disaster. Tsunamis, earthquakes, and ecological mass extinction. The face of the Earth is about to be resculpted. Why? What will happen? What should we do? None of these questions can be answered… Dear viewers, Happy New Year.