When his wife saw him, she nearly fainted. “What have you done to yourself?” she cried.

He invented a lie about being injured while saving a man’s life at sea, and to explain the gluey skin, something about a bad reaction to the tropical sun. He repeated the same lies to his family and his business associates, along with another about finding his father’s body on Cocobolo.14 Liu Zhi, he told them, was dead. They were more interested in the rubies he’d brought back.

For a time, life was good. His bizarre growths had stopped. Hobbling about on wooden feet, he had traded a freakish affliction for a relatively mundane one, and he could live with that. The rubies had brought him fame not only as a rich man but also as an explorer: he had discovered Cocobolo and returned to tell the story. There were banquets and parties in his honor.

Zheng tried to convince himself he was happy. In the hopes it might strangle the small voice of regret that mewled inside him now and then, he tried to convince himself that his father really was dead. It was all in your mind, he told himself. That island could not really have been your father.

But sometimes, when his business took him down by the harbor, he thought he could still hear the song of the whales, calling him back to Cocobolo. Sometimes, while looking at the ocean through a spyglass, he swore he could see a familiar smudge on the horizon that was not a ship, and where no island was mapped. Gradually, over the course of weeks, he felt a strange pressure building inside him. He felt it most severely when he was near water: it seemed to remind his body of what it wanted to become. If he stood at the end of a dock and filled his gaze with the ocean, he could feel the grass and sand and seaweed he’d locked inside himself straining to get out.

He stopped going near the water. He vowed never to set foot on board a ship again. He bought a house far inland, where he would never have to glimpse the ocean. But even that was not enough: he felt the pressure every time he bathed or washed his face or got caught in the rain. So he stopped bathing and washing his face, and he never went outside if there was even a single dark cloud in the sky. He would not even drink a cup of water, for fear it might ignite in him desires he couldn’t control. When he absolutely needed to, he sucked on a wet cloth.

“Not a drop,” he told his wife. “I won’t allow a single drop in this house.”

And so it went. Many years passed without Zheng touching water. Old and dry as dust, Zheng came to resemble a very large raisin, but neither his growths nor his desires returned. He and his wife never had children, in part because Zheng was glued shut from top to bottom, but also because he feared passing his affliction on to another generation.