Several days passed with complete radio silence from both Bo and Vivian.
Something about the offhanded way that Bo had asked me to recruit others to steal IP deeply unsettled me. I’d uprooted myself and come to Beijing partially because Bo had seen great potential in me. If he really thought I was so capable, wouldn’t he want me in the trenches helping fix the roadblocks, not waiting on the sidelines? After agonizing for several days, I decided to pitch the idea of letting me join the company early, so I called Bo’s cell phone several times, but he never answered. Every time, it went straight to voicemail. Finally, I resorted to calling his office and spoke to his assistant, who didn’t know who I was and told me she couldn’t put me through because Bo was stuck in important meetings. I found that confusing—if Bo’s assistant didn’t know I was joining Naveon, then who did?
Three days after our meeting, I went back through my Samarkand DMs to Vivian’s original message from January and discovered that her account had been deactivated one day ago. This new information greatly alarmed me. Samarkand accounts didn’t automatically delete themselves, no matter the period of inactivity. Further, the platform is obscure enough that even if Vivian had been abducted, it’s very unlikely her captors would have known about it. I had to confront the overwhelming likelihood that she herself, for one reason or another, had chosen to deactivate her account without notifying me.
By day three, the flowers I’d fetched were starting to wilt in their vase. I’d shut myself in the apartment so completely I could almost watch it happen in real time. Flies were starting to multiply, attracted by the growing pile of takeout boxes from the delivery meals I’d ordered on Meituan.
Paranoia set in. I knew Bo and Vivian were connected—could her sudden disappearance have something to do with the situation at Naveon? Maybe Bo was hiding her from me and the key to her release was me delivering something valuable to the project. What if, on the other hand, they were somehow conspiring together against me?
On day five, I had an idea: what if Vivian had left a clue for me somewhere? I combed through my memory of places she’d mentioned. And then it came to me: X Wood, the name of the gallery in 798 Art Zone she’d worked during the summer she turned seventeen. I typed the name into Google and found the place immediately.
X Wood—798 Art Zone D-06
No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang, Beijing
Founded in 1996 by visionary curator Miss Liuwen, X Wood has been a fixture of Beijing’s modern establishment for nearly three decades. The gallery is known for exhibiting works of utopian avant-garde as well as cynical realism. Appointments required.
I slammed my laptop shut and called a car immediately.
After twenty minutes, I reached the border of the 798 Art Zone. The Zone was constituted by an array of decommissioned military structures from the Soviet Union–People’s Republic of China industrial cooperation in the 1950s. The vast structures, gray and austere, made you think of cathedrals and bomb shelters at the same time.
The car stopped in front of X Wood, a diminutive, cerulean building tucked away on one of the side streets. It was a Tuesday afternoon and the place was almost empty. There was one attendant there, and I asked her where I could find Miss Liuwen. She asked me if I had an appointment.
“I’m very sorry. Unfortunately, it’s really urgent; this has to do with a missing person case involving someone who worked for Miss Liuwen several years ago. I’ll be happy to wait as long as necessary.”
“Oh,” she said, a look of unwelcome surprise falling across her soft features. “In that case… I suppose you can take a seat.”
I waited on a small plastic stool in front of the gallery’s entrance for an hour and a half. Finally, a door on the other side of the gallery opened and the attendant gestured for me to enter. When I walked in, I found Miss Liuwen sitting at her desk writing something down in her notebook. She was an elegant woman in her late fifties who wore thick, black-rimmed glasses. She glanced up at me and gestured for me to take a seat in the armchair across from her desk.
“Michael, please. Have a seat. Jingyi tells me you have a problem you think I can help with. She says it’s quite urgent.”
“Yes, sorry to bother you. I’m looking for my friend Vivian, who has gone missing. She’s an art collector and worked as your assistant for a summer eight or nine years ago. I wonder if she’s been in touch with you lately or if you have any other information that might help me find her.”
“My assistant? Vivian, Vivian… that doesn’t ring a bell. Did she go by any other name?”
“No,” I said, even though I didn’t even know that Vivian was her real name.
“Okay. Why don’t you show me a picture of her?”
“Actually, I don’t have a picture.”
Miss Liuwen looked at me skeptically. “You don’t have a photo of the missing friend you’re looking for?”
“That’s correct,” I said. Then I described Vivian in as much detail as possible, emphasizing the scar on her chin. Miss Liuwen shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Michael. Except for the scar, the woman you described resembles a lot of young girls in Beijing. But I don’t remember anyone with that name or that scar. Seven or eight years ago, let’s see… ah yes, back then I had an assistant named Jennifer who was with me for several years.” She showed me a picture from her phone of a girl who looked nothing like Vivian. “I don’t suppose this is the person you’re looking for?”
“No, that’s not her…” I said, my voice trailing off. An awkward pause entered our conversation. Then I had another idea. “Actually, this would have been the summer you were exhibiting a Chinese painter named Vincent Lim, who was studying at Beijing University. Does that ring a bell?”
Miss Liuwen blinked slowly and gave me a strange look. “It’s very odd you say that. We did exhibit a painter named Vincent Lim many years ago. He’s quite obscure, and to be honest I’m very surprised you’ve heard his name. But Vincent Lim was definitely not enrolled in Beijing University that summer. My exhibition was a retrospective—Vincent worked in the 1950s and died young of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in 1959.”
The vertigo I first felt at the Hugo Gallery came lurching back. I started sweating profusely. “I—I see. Thank you for your time,” I said.
“Best of luck,” she said with a slightly pitying expression on her face.
Within a few hours, the longing and restlessness I’d endured since my arrival in Beijing metastasized into anger. This was irrefutable evidence that Vivian had lied to me. If the story she’d told me about her summer in Beijing was made up, what else had she been lying about? Shaken with grief, I threw away the extra toothbrush, towels, and house slippers that I had prepared for her. For the next few days, I shut myself in the apartment, unable to sleep and completely paralyzed with dread. I called Bo’s office five separate times, but each time his assistant said that he was unreachable due to work travel. I started experiencing panic attacks and felt I was losing my grip over reality.
Who knows how much longer I would have stayed in this purgatory. But on the eighth day, I got an email from my mother that pulled me out.
My Michael,
Where are you? I tried calling you so many times but it goes straight to voicemail.
You know I don’t like to bother you. This time I have no choice. My hands started to shake just like your grandfather’s. Now I can feel my leg getting limp too. I always knew this would happen one day, but I thought I had more time. Maybe it’s punishment for leaving your grandfather alone back home.
I’m not sure what I should do. What do you think I should do?
Love,
Mom