To Chinatown, then. To the place where days ago, the monstrous voice of the fortuneteller enveloped him.

Jin finds himself in tears. As if in a trance of his own, in the windowless room of his mind, a stream of near-meaningless words pour out from inside him somewhere, but does not escape his body — as are the remaining passengers on the bus, he is silent. Inside that interior room, Jin composes himself and stands up, stomping his right foot as he demands, “For once, tell me something specific about my daughter!” Something enters him: anger, an emotion he is used to controlling. In the silence, the shape of the darkness in the room does not change. Then the fortuneteller — no, the voice — speaks: “In twelve days, on a city bus, once more you will see her.” The voice leaves the room, the darkness lifts, and Jin is left with his anger.

In Chinatown, the street lights come on. Old men smoke their pipes on the sidewalk, seemingly in the same spots as when the day started. He recognizes the street; it is the one he started on this morning.

As if in a trance of his own, in the windowless room of his mind, a stream of near-meaningless words pour out from inside him somewhere, but does not escape his body…

He gets off in front of the medicine shop, where the fortuneteller is. He feels hollow from having spent the entire day passing along so many unfamiliar roads amongst so many strangers. Inside the shop, at the register, is a young woman he has never seen before — probably a relative of the owner.

He asks to see the fortuneteller. The young woman goes into the back and returns a minute later with her. It takes a moment for the fortuneteller to recognize Jin; her eyes are half-open. From napping, he thinks.

“Do you need another reading?” she finally says.

In Korean, he says to her, “No, I just wanted to say that I understand now what you said about me seeing my daughter on a city bus. I spent all day riding city buses —” and here the fortuneteller gives a sorrowful smile — “and it was not your fault. I did it because I wanted to, because… because it was something I could do. I just wanted to thank you, and to say goodbye.”

Outside the medicine shop, people mill about, window shopping; cars and SUVs roll slowly by, hunting for parking in the pre-dinner rush. The scents of fried duck and raw vegetable waste in the street gutters crisscross the light breeze, braided with smoke from the motionless men’s pipes. Jin trudges, leaden, up the sidewalk toward his car. At the corner, he slips his remaining quarters into a beggar’s cup. He crosses the street, cutting through a packed parking lot and up a hill into the residential area, to his car. Because Margaret is not expecting him home until late, he drives aimlessly around the city, into the suburbs, then back into the city. He starts to recognize patterns, landmarks; he drives and drives.

The sky turns overcast. It is now past dinner-time, and though he hasn’t eaten, Jin is not hungry. To his surprise, he drives himself once more to Chinatown, to the storefront of the medicine shop. Half of the parking spaces on the street are vacant. Jin pulls into one not far from the shop.

He keeps going in circles, he knows, but no new paths open, the future is an illusion, only the past is real, and barely so at that.

The station wagon came back empty. Margaret rode in the tow truck with the driver. She’d crashed it, was too emotional to be driving. She didn’t call him because she’d lost her cell phone, lost her mind. She’d been upstairs, working out, while Amara played with the other children in the supervised daycare at the expensive private gym where they were members. The driver’s-side headlight of her car was hanging from black and red wires; the passenger side-view mirror was gone. The car was empty. Jin was mowing the lawn, but the car was empty so he couldn’t hear anything Margaret was saying, only that the car was empty, the lawnmower running behind him, the sun out again as it had been for hours, while the car was empty for hours and hours, maybe forever.

As the sky darkens, the sidewalk thins of pedestrians. Getting out of his car, Jin looks up at the gathering clouds. He walks to the bus bench where the day started, and sits down. At the sound of thunder, people rush to their cars. The pigeons Jin notices for the first time coo and then scatter, flapping away. His suit jacket darkens.

Across the street, a bus pulls up to the stop, empty of passengers. When it pulls away, he sees her standing on the sidewalk, her backpack held up over her head, her legs in pink-and-black-polka-dot tights. She looks over at Jin for a moment, then another. She shakes her head a little, as if to dispel a mist. Jin knows that she doesn’t, that she truly can’t, recognize him, if simply because, to her, he is, in this world, a stranger.