It was hard to tell if he had a limp or if it was just the coach swaying. I settled back to try to sleep, but the image of the riverbed stared from the edge of consciousness. Rivulets of stone fed pebbled ponds; great rivers of rock flowed to a bouldered ocean that never knew the moon. A man was walking along the gravel shore. As he passed he glanced at me, and his sallow face became a sallow sky; the image was unnerving, and worse, it would not go away. I sat up again and looked around, but the man who had been staring at me was nowhere in sight. He had been wearing a brown cloth cap, a workman’s cap, though he didn’t carry himself like a workman. There was something self-assured about him; his smile never broke even when our eyes met. I had felt off guard for an instant, but he didn’t waver; it was as if he had been waiting for me to turn to around, to measure my reaction at being observed.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the idle smile on the man’s lips reminded me of a boyhood friend who wore a similar look when listening to the wind in the line of trees that marked the edge of our village. Often I had watched from a distance, wondering why he was smiling. Then one day I realized it wasn’t happiness but despair, a vacant smile attached to nothing, leading nowhere.

My friend, let’s call him Chung, was a year older than I, a head taller, with long legs that gave him a gait I could match only by taking a small hop every few steps. He ran faster, jumped higher, than anyone else in the village. We were neighbors, his house close to my grandfather’s. Chung’s father had been killed in the war, somewhere in the mountains on the east coast in the brutal winter of 1950. His mother never remarried. She was small and maybe a little crazy, a woman who kept to herself and rarely talked to other people except to worry aloud about her son’s health. She need not have bothered; he was never sick.