Work Text:
“I’m looking for someone.”
I take out my phone and show the woman at the reception desk a low-resolution photo.
“This was taken in 2013.”
She says she can check the staff records for me—though first, she wants to confirm what kind of relationship I had with the man in the picture, X.
“He used to be my mentor,” I lie.
It’s an offhand lie, really. I don’t even know if X ever worked at an educational institution. But NASA wouldn’t know where their former employees ended up, would they?
Half an hour later—forty-two years after my first contact with X—I finally learn his real name.
“Are you in engineering as well?” the man seeing me off asks politely.
“No.” I pull out a shrink-wrapped new book and hand it to him. “I’m a novelist.”
When I write fiction, I’m very pragmatic about it.
The story sitting on the passenger seat beside me—the one I used as my calling card for a publisher—is a science fiction tale about humanity suddenly turning to stone.
I chose that premise because “a story that starts with the collapse of civilization is instantly captivating.”
The real focus, though, is on how simple, fascinating scientific principles can express human willpower. That’s why the protagonist must be placed in an environment where he can fully demonstrate it.
If his mission were to buy an ocean-view house in California, I’d have to write Breaking Bad instead.
Anyway, he wakes up in a broken world. He may be a fragile reed, but he’s a reed armed with scientific knowledge.
He builds, he reconstructs—and eventually, after crossing the ocean, he encounters the mentor who once led him down the path of science.
They fight the grandest battle of their lives.
They argue. They clash with words sharp enough to draw blood, each striking at the other’s ideals.
In the end, exhausted, they reconcile for a shared goal.
Of course, nothing like that ever happened in my own life.
I never happened to meet him at NASA. Humanity was never destroyed by a sudden petrifying light.
If any of that had truly happened and I wrote it down, it would be almost autobiographical, wouldn’t it? That wouldn’t even count as creation.
Sure, I could replace my real name with something more dramatic, more fitting for a protagonist, and maybe some editors would accept it as “fiction.”
But I believe most perceptive editors can detect the flesh in such so-called novels.
By flesh, I mean the raw, unfiltered texture that comes from transplanting one’s own experiences directly into a story without transformation—the sense of exposure.
Some say that kind of writing is unethical; others say it’s an act of self-healing.
Anyway, I digress.
We did, in fact, meet online.
Back then, I was just a kid fascinated by aerospace engineering.
He truly gave me everything he could.
And yes, we did fight.
Even though it was only over email, in my memory it felt like an earth-shattering argument.
I used words far too lofty for a sixteen-year-old, and he, in turn, picked them apart with surgical precision, mocking me in reply.
But that was the only time.
Afterward, X reverted to his usual adult reserve. Even when he disagreed, he never corrected me again. He treated me with the distant politeness of someone firmly anchored in the grown-up world.
We became like two skew lines in space—never intersecting, drifting ever further apart.
That same year, when I was sixteen, I visited Houston.
Officially, it was to see my father.
But children love to imagine dramatic coincidences—like running into someone whose name contains an X.
I asked my father, “Do you have any colleagues with strange names?”
He said no.
I managed to look through that year’s staff directory somehow.
No one with an unusual or conspicuous X in their name.
In the Houston of my sixteenth year, nothing happened at all.
Recently, my editor reached out to say they wanted to translate my novel into English—to try for the overseas market.
“Your English is great,” he said. “Why not review the translation yourself? Maybe even come to the U.S. and pitch it to publishers?”
He suggested I add a timeline at the end of the English edition—listing major events in order of the protagonist’s age.
“If it’s too long, we could make it a fold-out chart in the back of the hardcover.”
Looking over the completed chart, I let out a long sigh of relief.
Thank goodness it’s fiction.
If it were a film, they’d need heavy makeup or CGI to show the years passing across their faces.
Because I haven’t seen him since I was sixteen.
In my mind, he remains exactly as in that photograph.
It’s hard enough to remember the faces of people from another race—what they call cross-racial face blindness.
If I went to Texas now, even if he brushed past me on the street, I doubt I’d recognize him.
White people age quickly, after all.
At the nursing home reception, I explain that I’m looking for someone.
The administrator makes an internal call, and a caretaker goes to fetch him.
He appears in a wheelchair, a blanket over his knees.
His hair is snow-white; his body frail.
His eyes are nothing like I had imagined.
Still, I hand him the book I wrote.