Some days ago, the fortuneteller told Jin that he’d see his little daughter again, while aboard a city bus. He understood she was only giving him what he asked for, a vision of hope. But Jin knew that the fortuneteller’s vision and his reality resided in completely different worlds, worlds that only our feeble words may move between. But now that the prophesied day is come, he realizes he’d dwelt partly inside the soothsayer’s vision all along, even having gone so far as to plan for the foretold day.

But now that the prophesied day is come, he realizes he’d dwelt partly inside the soothsayer’s vision all along, even having gone so far as to plan for the foretold day.

His wife, a university biochemistry lab manager who defected from her parents’ Buddhist traditions as soon as she educated her way out from under their roof, continues to express her frustration that Jin keeps seeing this mystic healer. “People like her,” she says, “they once played a role — witch-doctors and priestesses of the scary invisible world out there, full of monsters and demons. She can’t heal what happened to us. Don’t you think I’ve prayed, too? It can’t change anything.”

Jin reminds her that two years of counseling and psychotherapy have not changed the situation either, and that seeing this fortuneteller, someone connected to his, to their family’s beliefs, can’t hurt. “I’m not crazy, Margaret. I’m not.”

He knows his plan will upset his wife, so before leaving he tells her he needs to fill in at a dinner meeting for one of the bank’s other executives. “It’s a Japanese account,” he lies. “Frankie came down with something, so they need the only other Asian guy to play chummy with the CEO in front of the foreigners. It makes the deals go smoother. Hey, I promise — no geishas.” He smiles and kisses his wife’s forehead.

Once inside his car, he sighs. He knows what he has embarked on is, in all likelihood, a wild goose chase, a frantic scrambling after shadows. He does not believe in magic — so how can he believe in a white-robed fortuneteller in a cluttered, dimly lit room in the back of a medicine shop in Chinatown? But it’s too late: his assistant has cleared his calendar for the day. Like he tells Margaret: it can’t hurt.

In Chinatown, leathery men unload produce and wares from double-parked trucks. The elderly huddle in doorways, statue-like, the men smoking the day’s first pipe in silence as small children are ushered into school buses by their mothers.

Jin finds a parking spot on a residential street. He considers this auspicious, since in the past he has circled the area for over twenty minutes before finally giving in and parking in a pay ramp. It’s a good start.

He parks and steps out of the car. A nearby school bus pulls away from the corner, and he regards with a familiar heaviness of heart the little pale faces seen through dirty bus windows. At the rear window, a boy waves to him until the distance swallows the little white palm, as though it has closed into a fist. But then the little hand opens up again, and the bus rolls in reverse until it’s no longer a bus but Margaret’s gray station wagon with Lacy Hensley’s painting easel in the back, resting on top of the seat — the easel that Margaret meant to return to her friend after her failed attempt at watercolors. And the afternoon is still blue and sunny, though an angular rain is now sweeping in from the west where storm clouds have gathered, and Amara twists around inside her seatbelt in the car seat behind Margaret, eyeing the clouds with wonderment until she sees Jin waving and pushes her right hand upward to wave back, but the seatbelt constricts her movement, and the station wagon rounds the curve, leaving Jin to wait out the rain before going for his Sunday morning run.

Jin realizes he is standing with his car door open. He shuts the door, which seems heavier than usual, its thud cleaner and more final. This is where it must start, then. He clicks the car alarm on and heads toward the fortuneteller’s. There is a bus stop near the medicine shop; he will wait there for whatever bus comes. He pats his suit jacket’s inner pocket for the roll of quarters. His chest is constricted, as though a vice has gripped his heart, forcing it to beat harder, faster, to make up for lost volume. He takes a deep breath and reminds himself, It can’t hurt.

It’s a bright, warm spring morning. And here, he muses, is Jin the well-dressed junior executive, Jin with a strong angular face and matching close-cropped haircut, come from his redoubt in Glen Meadows, avoiding brown puddles, weaving through the bric-a-brac of sweaty, plastic, smoky Chinatown on a Tuesday morning — Jin the sad clown come to chase a mime’s song. Six blocks later, he is beneath the red neon lights of what he assumes is the Chinese character for “medicine shop.” The morning has warmed up faster than he’d expected; perspiration collects at his lower back and between his shoulder blades.

He loosens his silk tie and has the sudden urge to smoke a cigarette, a habit he and Margaret gave up a year or so before Amara was born. The sudden recollection of that time — his having just received his MBA, Margaret applying for doctoral programs — leads to the realization that there was a time when Amara didn’t exist. Nothing so special about this realization, he thinks, except that for himself, her father, Amara’s entire existence — her life from her first breath in the hospital to the last morning she walked out of the house, before her abduction — is thrown into doubt, held in abeyance.

He does not want to return to when Amara did not exist, and so lets his desire for a pack of smokes pass through him. The medicine storefront is in the shade; condensation still clings to its front display window, where Jin’s reflection is partial, disintegrative, like a ghost’s.

Sitting at one end of the bus stop bench is a slight young woman with a backpack caged between her legs in pink-and-black-polka-dot tights. Large headphones cover her ears; she nods along to her music. A college student, Jin surmises. At the other end of the bench sits an older man, not elderly but worn, with a face that wears the blows it has taken. Or perhaps, like a potato, he was simply made that way. In either case, his is the kind of face that does not seem to really belong anywhere. The man’s shoulders are slumped, his limbs alarmingly spare. He looks as if the college student’s sartorial energies have frightened him, for a portion of his buttocks rests suspended over the sidewalk, just beyond the bench’s far edge. Jin imagines that fourteen or so years in the future could hold a similar scene, with the young woman Amara and the old man himself — yet with the exception of their relative ages, everything about the picture is wrong: the two are mere shadows, arbitrarily adjacent.

As if cast back to him from some alternate future, this odd pair on the bench reminds Jin of a clipping from one of the weekly advertising mailings of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which he’d carried during the roughest six months in his wallet, right behind the family photo in the clear plastic sleeve. The clipping contained the Center’s slogan: Have you seen me? It included a picture of Amara, age-progressed to six from the photo of her taken on her third birthday party, snapped just a month before she was abducted. The age-progressed picture was all wrong: the ears are folded too far back; the nose widened too much, casting shadows that were never there; the teeth taking over the mouth.

Have I seen you? Only every other night, when I close my eyes, and I’m sinking, but before I sink there’s a scrap of your voice, a giggle, a strand of hair snot-glued to your pink lips, and the odd phrase you used to tell me I was being silly, “Dadsum, you’re no mommy!” because mommies are serious. And the sweat courses down my neck in the three- or four-in-the-morning silence when I jump awake, paralyzed for a few minutes before walking to the kitchen and pouring a glass of liquor, drinking it by starlight at the kitchen table, waiting for the sun to show me this face of mine that no one should ever see.

The bus comes and they board.

It was Jin’s aunt who told him about the fortuneteller. “There are fake ones, I know, but this woman is not. She is Chinese, but she also speaks Korean.” At the time, Jin didn’t care about fake or real, right or wrong — only that it was a new thing to try.

At the first meeting, Jin was struck by the fortuneteller’s lack of hair: bald, no eyebrows, not even eyelashes. They’d sat on large pillows on the floor with some lit candles between them as their sole source of light, the room being windowless. She had a soft, kind voice, like that of a contented grandmother. But something in her overall disposition remained aloof, humble and humbling, like an element of nature.

After a long pause in their conversation, she’d brought out a small black box and opened it, taking out two rods of wood about four inches long. She looked up at Jin.

“So, your daughter.”

“I just need to know what you can tell me about where she is. Please.”

She placed the rods of wood on the floor and set the empty box aside. Returning to her spot, she sighed.

“Hold out your hands,” she said.

Jin complied.

“No, with the palms up.”

She lowered his hands toward the floor, where the lighting was better, and closely examined his palms. Like a person unraveling a riddle, her face was all concentration. Then she picked up the two rods of wood and clapped them against each other. From their hollow cores, the rods rang musically. She placed them in Jin’s open palms.

“I can only tell you what is in your spirit,” she said.

Jin nodded.

Leaving the wooden rods in Jin’s open palms, the fortuneteller adjusted herself until she was sitting cross-legged, her back straight and her hands folded into her lap. She hummed. The sound came from deep inside her throat. To Jin it appeared she was humming some sort of chant, but she kept her mouth closed, so there was no way to make out the shape of the sounds.

There were no details, no useful information, just the stuff of baseless dreams, tricks for the broken heart.

After a minute the fortuneteller began to speak, but not in her own voice. For a moment her eyes opened, showing only their whites, then closed again. She was in a trance, speaking in a low voice, the words coming out harsh and deliberate; a voice wholly unsuited, Jin thought, to a person like her. She told him of the many grandchildren his daughter would bring into the world, the large house they would all live in together, the beautiful garden they would walk through, and other things Jin did not fix in his memory, since the crazed edge of the fortuneteller’s voice distracted and frightened him. Then it was over.

Afterward, Jin decided that the fortuneteller’s vague predictions were based on cold readings of his situation. There were no details, no useful information, just the stuff of baseless dreams, tricks for the broken heart. He told Margaret about it, laughing at himself sadly; she laughed, too, mockingly, and then also sadly. But something about the woman’s voice followed Jin throughout the next few days. It seemed to come from somewhere timeless and formless, ensconced in possibilities. No matter how frightening the voice was to him, he needed to hear it again.

After a few visits, they skipped the small talk and went directly into the palm-reading and fortune-telling. Jin scarcely listened to the voice’s words any longer, focusing instead on the tones that issued forth like ocean swells. Each session, he tried to dive deeper into those tones, yet each session ended in frustration, not with the fortuneteller but with himself. If only he could listen more closely, more deeply…

Jin quickly surveys the bus. Save for an infant in a stroller at the front, there is not one small child aboard. He takes a seat in the very back.

Recalling the little white hand waving to him from the back of the school bus, he realizes that most children are at school by now. He knows that Amara would be — is — six-and-a-half, so would be in the first grade. He still holds to the likely motive for the abduction: that she was sold to a human trafficking network that eventually placed her with an adoption agency, which in turn placed her with a nice family, since Asian children, especially girls, are so popular in that market. He holds to the idea that the people now raising his daughter believe her parents are dead. So when Amara cries for her mommy, for her daddy, it is because the very young have yet to make death’s acquaintance and so demand that those they love be returned to them.

He remembers how, after many months had passed and the detectives and FBI had pulled up no solid leads, Jin’s friends and family had hinted that they move on and try again, have another child, rebuild the family. He recalls how horrified he and Margaret were. Replacing Amara with another child seemed tantamount to giving up on her, a betrayal. Of course they both knew it meant no such thing, but when they tried, it felt wrong. Perhaps, he thinks, their real fear was the possibility that it could happen all over again.

He tries to console himself with the thought that Amara is loved and cared for, even if by duped strangers. Then he wonders, if he finds her, whether her new parents would feel similar to the way he felt when the child they consider their daughter is taken from them. Would they also find it impossible to replace the irreplaceable? But replacing — birth and death, mortality and genetic repetition — is this not the most fundamental of natural laws? And with replacing, there is forgetting. Would Amara even remember her first three years? Would she simply fill in the time, the sensations, with what she’d come to know — her new parents, new reality set like plaster masks atop the old ones, until the masks are no longer masks but beloved faces that, with time, would fill her entire being?

After a few more stops, the bus is stuffed up with people, all adults. By the time they leave the Chinatown area, it is standing-room only. This makes it difficult for Jin to keep an eye on the front door. Even if he were to give up his seat and stand, some of those standing are taller than he is, so it would be nearly impossible to survey the entire length of the bus.

He learns from the man sitting in front of him that the bus goes downtown, terminating at City Hall before starting on its next loop. This may place him near his office; he fears the possibility of bumping into one of his co-workers. He pulls the cord above his head. When the bus stops, he gets off. Already he feels exhausted, his mind running in every direction, playing out every possibility. It is hard to imagine getting on another bus and going through the same ordeal again. Yet he doesn’t want to give up on the day.

But replacing — birth and death, mortality and genetic repetition — is this not the most fundamental of natural laws? And with replacing, there is forgetting.

It can’t hurt, he tells himself. The damage is undeniable, though. Down to the center of each cell in his body, he can feel it.

He boards another bus, sitting this time in the front. With rush hour over, the bus is only a third or so full, so in the end it doesn’t matter where he sits. He surveys the passengers: no little girls, only adults with somewhere to go. A flash of anger comes over him: Why could I not have been given a sign, at least?

The bus stops in front of a strip mall; the remaining passengers exit. The driver turns to Jin: “End of the line, sir!”

Jin nods and gets off the bus. It is lunchtime; he is famished. The thought of remaining stationary for a while appeals to him. In a small café, he works on a ham sandwich without really tasting it. His thoughts turn to a word in the back of his head. On Saturday afternoons, he and Margaret go for a walk around a nearby lake. Three-quarters of the way around the lake, they fall into a walking rhythm and walk side by side in silence. One Saturday, unexpectedly, Margaret bursts into tears, and murmurs, “It’s not normal, it’s not normal…”

Jin understands that the word “normal” has not described their lives for some time. Jin also understands that Margaret’s meaning of the word excludes his devotion to the fortuneteller’s strange truth.

The sky is purple, the crowd on the bus thinning out as the evening rush hour winds down. Jin has not been keeping track of what number bus he gets on, he has been all over the city. People enter, shuffle past, then eventually disappear, often while he is not looking.

The bus he’s now on is headed back toward Chinatown. Perhaps it’s the same bus he started the day on. If he wants to, he can get off and walk to another stop to catch a different bus. But the strange logic of it all exhausts him.

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.