The walk to town took the better part of a day, first on foot and then, luckily, in the back of a neighbor's battered bakkie that rattled over a dirt track until the dirt gave way to graded gravel and then, with startling suddenness, to tar. Ayaan spent most of the ride turning over the new, uncomfortable furniture of his own certainty, testing it the way you test a joint that's just been reset, pressing on it a little to see how much weight it would bear.
The town, when it arrived, was not much of one — a strip of low buildings, a fuel station, a general dealer's with a faded Coca-Cola sign, a church with a corrugated roof painted the blue of a robin's egg — but after five weeks of firelight it hit his eyes like a city, and for the first time since he'd arrived here he found himself looking at the ordinary machinery of the place — the phone signal bars climbing back onto a borrowed handset, the satellite dish bolted crooked to the general dealer's roof — not as comfort, but as a kind of instrument. Somewhere within reach of these things was the rest of the world he half-remembered. He did not know yet whether he wanted to find it or was only steeling himself to.
He did Naledi's shopping first, salt and thread and a tin of paraffin, with the careful pride of a man determined not to embarrass himself with basic arithmetic in front of strangers. It was only once the bags were bought and the bakkie's return trip was still an hour off that he let himself drift toward the television mounted above the counter, playing to no one in particular while the shopkeeper dozed through the slow hour.
He knew, somehow, before he'd properly focused on the screen, that he was going to see something meant for him.
It was a young man in a modest studio, visibly nervous, delivering a line to camera with the flat, committed sincerity of someone who has decided the only way through a stunt is headlong. The feed was subtitled in a scrolling band of English for some export package, the clip already worn smooth with the particular over-shared sheen of something that had done its rounds online long enough to stop being news and start being furniture.
*"Oxygen is actually highly toxic,"* the subtitle read. *"Would you believe that? You could live longer if you simply stopped breathing."*
Ayaan did not laugh. Two men behind the counter, distracted by their own phones, didn't look up, and a boy near the door laughed once, the short bright laugh of someone who'd decided something was a joke and was pleased with himself for getting it, and Ayaan understood, distantly, that he was watching from the wrong side of a joke that everyone else in the room was allowed to have and he was not.
He knew that face. Not from memory of a real man — he had never seen this face before in his life — but from the specific, sickening recognition of watching a description become a photograph. *Ye Zhen,* he thought, and the name arrived this time without any of the hedging uncertainty from three nights before; something about actually seeing him, moving, blinking, visibly frightened under the studio lights in a way no page of prose had ever quite conveyed, closed the last gap between half-remembered novel and undeniable person. This was not a character. This was a man having, by the anxious set of his shoulders, what looked like one of the more nerve-wracking days of his life, saying a stupid line into a camera because someone above him had told him to, with no idea at all that he was standing at the very beginning of something that would eventually make continents answer to him.
It was a strange, almost vertiginous thing to feel sorry for someone you already knew you were going to end up opposing.
The clip cut to a scroll of reaction comments in three or four scripts Ayaan couldn't read, and then moved on, the way these things always did, to something about a cat, and the ordinary noise of the shop closed back over the moment like water over a dropped stone. Nobody else in the room had any idea anything had just happened. To them it was a foreign clip about a foreign man saying something foreign and silly, one more scrap of the enormous, indifferent flood of content that passes through a screen and is gone.
Ayaan stood there a moment longer than the clip warranted, working through what he actually felt, because he had learned by now not to trust the first label his mind reached for. It was not hatred — he had nothing yet to hate, only a memory of disliking a fictional character's fictional arrogance, which was a thin, secondhand thing next to the live discomfort of watching an actual frightened man on his actual first day. It was not quite pity either, not cleanly. What it mostly was, he decided on the ride home with the bags of salt and thread settled against his knees and the sun going down orange over grass that had somewhere in these past weeks stopped looking to him like anywhere else's grass and started looking simply like where he lived, was a kind of grim, steadying clarity.
He was not going to spend his life chasing this man. He had said as much to himself three nights ago and he repeated it now, deliberately, the way you repeat a rule you suspect you'll be tempted to break later. His own path — whatever it turned out to be, however far the doors he was finding kept opening — was not going to be organized around one nervous television host on the other side of a continent he hadn't even reached yet. But he understood now, in a way he hadn't quite let himself understand three nights before, that the road that man was walking and the road Ayaan had started walking were, sooner or later, on the same map, and that a day was coming — not soon, not yet, but coming — when the two of them would stop being a stranger and a rumor to each other and start being simply two men with two different answers to the same enormous question.
For now, though, it was only a shop television, and a joke half the room was allowed to have, and a long ride home through grass gone gold in the last of the light, and Ayaan found, turning the whole thing over one last time before letting it go, that he was in no hurry to rush toward whatever came next. There would be time enough for that. There always was, until suddenly there wasn't, and he intended to spend what he had of it well.