Century #4: Dragon of Seas Read Free Page A

back into the garden. “There’s something else you should know. I didn’t tell you everything, Mom.”
    “Something else I should know, aside from all this nonsense about boxing?”
    Harvey makes a strange smile. He thinks,
Yeah, there’s something else, Mom. In Rome I survived an apartment building collapsing; here in New York a Native American mailman danced with his brothers in Inwood Hill Park to protect my life; in Paris I was kidnapped by a crazy woman who had an aquarium full of carnivorous fish beneath the floor in her office and I escaped aboard a hot-air balloon that crashed into Notre Dame Cathedral. And then I lost everything I had with me before I could even figure out what it was
.
    “Something else you should know, Mom?” he says with his strange smile. “Just one thing: I’m raising a carrier pigeon up in the attic. Would you feed him while I’m gone?”
    “A pigeon? A carrier pigeon?”
    “Thanks!” Harvey says, without waiting to hear her protests. He plants another kiss on her forehead and hurries back to the taxi.
    Then, when the car joins the traffic, he checks to make sure he has everything he needs for the flight. Ticket for Shanghai, passport, entrance visa for China. Once he’s there, at China’s biggest port, he’s meeting up with his father on New York University’s oceanographic ship, on which he has been staying for a couple of months now. It’s been his second home ever since he read the latest findings and grew obsessed with the idea that something anomalous is going on with the sea.
    In his mind, Harvey runs down the list of everything his father asked him to bring: warm clothes, papers and charts from his study, packages addressed to Mr. Miller both from the university and from people Harvey doesn’t know.
    “Don’t open anything and don’t mail me anything,” his father said, concerning the last items. “Bring it all with you.” On the phone, he almost sounded scared.

“S HENG !” HIS MOTHER CALLS OUT THE MOMENT HE WALKS THROUGH their home’s arched gate. “Where have you been? Sheng!” She rushes toward him, the back of her right hand pressed against her forehead in a pose worthy of a movie starlet. “Sheng! That contraption started up again!”
    The boy rests his ever-present backpack on the ground.
    “What contraption?” he asks.
    It could be anything from the fax to the computer to the DVD player to the stereo, or any device that blinks and ticks.
    “I don’t know! It lit up and started making terrible noises!” Sheng’s mother exclaims.
    The boy follows her inside. His house is in the heart of the Old City, Shanghai’s original settlement, which has been torn down and rebuilt many times but still has traditional Chinese
shikumen
architecture: two-story houses that are arranged along alleys and have characteristic stone gates and walled-in front yards used for hanging laundry, reading and relaxing. The last two being practically impossible for Sheng to do there, at least since he got back from Rome. That’s why he goes to read in the park: athome, he would need to build another wall around himself, one that protects him from the intrusiveness of his father, who’s more and more of a full-fledged tourism entrepreneur, and from the anxiousness of his mother, who’s more and more “I-don’t-know-what-you-two-are-doing-but-I-suspect-you’re-going-to-leave-me-all-alone-at-home.” Not to mention that Sheng already has good reason to be worried.
    “Just look at this mess!” his mother groans in the darkness of the house, which she insists on keeping unlit, convinced that electrical energy is a capitalist demon. She stops a few yards away from a gray plastic device spewing out pages and pages of printouts with Chinese characters.
    “It’s just the fax, Mom,” Sheng says, walking past her.
    “It’s a fax of what?”
    The boy checks the printouts: it’s a reservation for a study abroad program his father’s cultural exchange agency has