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“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?
