The Seventh Day

THE FIFTH DAY

I was searching for my father among the throngs of skeletal people. I had the uplifting sensation that he had left traces here, even if those traces were as faint as the distant call of a departing goose. Surely I would discern the marks he had left, just as one feels the movement of a breeze as it ruffles one’s hair. I knew that I might not be able to recognize my father even if he was standing in front of me, but he would be able to recognize me at a glance. I would make my way toward the skeletal people — sometimes a large crowd, sometimes a small clump — and stand before them as though on display, hoping that one among them would call me by my name.

I knew that such a voice would sound foreign to my ears, just as Li Qing’s greeting had sounded unfamiliar. But I would be able to distinguish my father’s call just from his tone. In the world that had left me, there had always been an intimate note to my father’s greeting, and in this new world that should remain unchanged.

Here there roamed everywhere the figures of those who had no graves. Denied a place of rest, these figures were like trees in motion — sometimes scattered, disconnected trees, sometimes dense stands of timber. When I walked among them, it was as though I were wending my way through a well-managed forest. I was looking forward to hearing the sound of my father’s voice, ahead of me or behind me, to the left or the right. I was looking forward to that call of “Yang Fei!”

Often I would run into people wearing black armbands. With the black gauze fastened in place, their sleeves seemed empty. The absence of skin and flesh told me these people must have been here a long time. They would look at me and smile — a smile conveyed not by facial expression but through their vacant eyes. It was a smile of understanding, because we were all in the same boat. In the other world no one would wear a black armband on our behalf — we were all grieving for ourselves.

One such self-mourner noticed my searching look. He stood in front of me and I gazed at his bony face. There was a little hole in his forehead. He greeted me in a friendly fashion.

“Are you looking for someone?” he asked. “Or for several people?”

“Just one,” I said. “My father. He may be here.”

“Your father?”

“Yang Jinbiao is his name.”

“Names don’t mean anything here.”

“He was in his sixties—”

“It’s impossible to tell people’s ages here.”

I looked at the skeletons walking in the distance and close by, and it was true that one couldn’t tell how old they were. My eyes could distinguish only tall and short, wide and narrow, and my ears could differentiate only male and female, old and young.

Recalling how debilitated my father had become in his final days, I added further details: “He’s five foot seven, very thin—”

“Everyone here is thin.”

Looking at these people who were all so thin that only their bones were left, I didn’t know how further to describe my father.

“Do you remember what he was wearing when he came over?” he asked.

“A railroad uniform,” I told him. “A brand-new railroad uniform.”

“How long ago was it that he came over?”

“It’s been over a year now.”

“I’ve seen people in other kinds of uniform, but nobody wearing a railroad uniform.”

“Maybe somebody else has noticed him.”

“I’ve been here a long time. If I haven’t seen him, nobody else will have, either.”

“Maybe he changed his clothes.”

“A lot of people do change before coming here, it’s true.”

“I feel he must be here somewhere.”

“If you can’t find him, he may have gone to the burial ground.”

“He has no grave.”

“If he has no grave, then he should be here.”

As I wandered here and there in search of my father, I found myself once more approaching the two avid chess players. They sat cross-legged on the grass, as concentrated as two statues. Their bodies were completely motionless, and it was just their hands that continually gestured, as though making moves. I saw neither board nor chess pieces, just their hands moving forward and back or side to side, and I couldn’t tell whether the game they were playing was Chinese chess or Go.

One skeleton’s hand had just put down a piece, only to raise it again immediately. Two skeletal hands immediately clasped that skeletal hand, and their owner shouted, “You can’t retract your move!”

The owner of the single hand cried out, “But you just retracted a move yourself.”

“I retracted that move because you did that before.”

“I did that because you retracted your previous move.”

“I retracted that previous move because yesterday you retracted moves.”

“Yesterday it was you who retracted a move first — that was why I did it.”

“The day before yesterday it was you who started it.”

“Well, who started it the day before that?”

The two of them kept up an endless wrangle, accusing each other of retracting moves and tracing their adversary’s history of such misdeeds farther and farther back into the past, from days to months and from months to years.

“I can’t let you take back that move,” the owner of two of the hands cried. “I’m about to win.”

“No, I’m taking back that move,” the owner of the one hand cried.

“I’m not playing with you anymore.”

“I’m not playing with you, either.”

“I’m never going to play with you again.”

“I’ve been wanting to stop playing with you for ages.”

“Let me tell you something: I’m leaving. I’m going to get cremated tomorrow and then go off to my burial ground.”

“I’ve been meaning to get cremated for ages now — can’t wait to get to my burial ground!”

I interrupted their bickering. “I know your story.”

“Everyone here knows our story,” one of them said.

“Newcomers maybe don’t,” the other said.

“Even if they don’t, our story is still kicking ass.”

“Or, to put it more delicately, our story is the talk of the town.”

“I know about your friendship too,” I said.

“Friendship?”

The two of them chortled.

“What’s friendship?” one asked the other.

“Haven’t a clue,” the other said.

Laughing away, they raised their heads, and two pairs of cavernous eyes looked at me. “You’re a newbie, are you?” one of them asked.

“He came with that cute girl,” the other said, before I had time to reply.

The two skeletons lowered their heads and with a titter resumed their game. It was as though they had never been arguing, as though neither of them had ever taken back a move.

After playing for a little while, one of them raised his head. “Do you know what board game we’re playing?”

I glanced at the movements of their hands. “Chinese chess.”

“Wrong. It’s Go.”

Soon the other one turned to me. “Now you know what we’re playing, right?”

“Of course,” I said. “You’re playing Go.”

“Wrong! It’s Chinese chess.”

They then asked me the following question at the same time: “Now what are we playing?”

“If it’s not Go, it’s got to be Chinese chess.”

“Wrong again!” they said. “Now we’re playing Five in a Row.”

They heaved with laughter, each of them making exactly the same gestures, pressing one hand against his own midriff and the other hand on the other’s shoulder. The two skeletons shook with laughter, like withered trees whose intersecting branches tremble together in the wind.

Afterward the two skeletons continued their game, but before long they were in an argument once more, because of yet another retracted move. It seemed to me that they were playing these games just in order to be able to argue, with each of them taking his turn to denounce the other’s record of retracting moves. I stood there listening to the history of their happy chess playing and the history of their happy arguments. Gleefully each fulminated against the other’s vile record of retracted moves, and when their respective surveys of past offenses finally went back as far as seven years earlier, I lost patience, knowing there were another seven or eight years of retracted moves still to be accounted for.

“Which of you is Zhang Gang?” I asked. I hesitated a moment, realizing suddenly the inappropriateness of referring to the other man as “the male surnamed Li,” as the newspapers at the time put it. “And which of you is Mr. Li?”

“Mr. Li?”

They looked at each other, then burst into gales of laughter.

“Why don’t you guess?” they both said.

I studied them carefully, and to me the two skeletons looked exactly alike. “I’ve no idea,” I told them. “You could be twins, as far as I can tell.”

“Twins?” Again they burst into laughter. Then, once more, they resumed their game in the most cordial of moods. The tempestuous argument of a moment earlier had vanished into thin air after my interruption.

Soon they were back to their old tricks, asking me, “Do you know what game we’re playing?”

“Chinese chess, Go, Five in a Row.” I recited all the possibilities.

“Wrong!” they chortled. “We’re playing Chinese checkers.”

Once again they burst out laughing and again I saw each of them gripping his midriff with one hand and clapping the other hand on his adversary’s shoulder. The two skeletons shook with a tidy rhythm.

I laughed too. More than ten years ago, the two of them had come here, six months apart. The grudge between them had not crossed the frontier between life and death. Enmity had been sealed off in that departed world.

My search continued endlessly, like the hands on a clock that go round and round but can never leave the dial. My father was nowhere to be found.

Several times I ran into a crowd of skeletons, dozens of them. They were not like the other skeletons that sometimes gathered together and sometimes separated — this crowd stayed consistently together as they walked, a little like the moon’s reflection on water, which keeps floating in a discrete shape no matter how the waves tug.

The fourth time I ran into this bunch, I came to a halt and so did they. We sized each other up. Their hands were linked and their bodies leaned on each other, and they grouped together like a flourishing tree whose branches spread high and low. I knew that among them there were men and women, old and young. I smiled and greeted them.

“Hello!” they responded in unison, a chorus of male and female voices, hoarse old voices and tender young voices, and I saw a cheerful outlook in their empty eyes.

“How many of you are there?” I asked.

“Thirty-eight,” they answered.

“Why are you always together?”

“We arrived at the same time,” a man’s voice answered.

“We’re all one family,” a woman’s voice added.

Then I heard a boy’s voice. “Why are you on your own?”

“I’m not entirely on my own.” I looked down at the black armband on my left arm. “I’m looking for my father. He’s wearing a railroad uniform.”

Another voice piped up from among the skeletons in front of me. “We haven’t seen anyone in a railroad uniform.”

“He may have changed his clothes before coming here,” I said.

The crisp voice of a little girl rang out. “Daddy, is he new here?”

“Yes,” the male voices said.

“Mom, is he new here?”

“That’s right,” the female voices said.

“Are they all your moms and dads?” I asked the little girl.

“That’s right,” she said. “In the past I just had one mom and one dad, but now I’ve got lots of moms and lots of dads.”

“How did you get here?” the boy who’d addressed me earlier asked.

“I think it was a fire,” I said.

“How come he’s not burned?” he asked the skeletons next to him.

I could feel their silent, rapt gaze. “After I saw the fire,” I told them, “I heard an explosion and the building must have collapsed.”

“Were you crushed to death?” the little girl asked.

“I think that’s maybe what happened, yes.”

“His face has been altered,” the little boy said.

“You’re right.”

“Are we pretty?” the little girl asked.

I looked awkwardly at the thirty-eight skeletons arrayed in front of me, unsure how to respond to the girl’s blunt inquiry.

“Everyone here says I keep getting prettier,” the little girl said.

“That’s true,” the boy said. “They say everyone who comes here just gets uglier, and we’re the only ones who get prettier.”

I hesitated for a moment. “I wouldn’t know,” I answered in the end.

The voice of an elderly person sounded among them. “We were so charred in the fire that when we got here we were like thirty-eight knots of charcoal. Later, the burned bits peeled off, leaving us as we are now. That’s why people say this.”

He recounted their story as the other thirty-seven listened silently. Now I knew their history, how, on the day of my father’s disappearance, that department store half a mile from my little shop caught on fire and was reduced to a pile of blackened ruins. The city government had reported that seven had died and twenty-one were injured, of whom two were in critical condition. On the Internet some said over fifty had perished, and some even claimed the death toll topped one hundred. I looked at the thirty-eight skeletons in front of me: they were the deleted dead. But what about their relatives?

“Why did your families not make a fuss?”

“They received threats, and they accepted hush money as well,” the old one answered. “We’re already dead, and just so long as our relatives can go on living an undisturbed life, we’ll be content.”

“But the children? Won’t their parents—”

“We’re the kids’ parents now,” the old man interrupted me.

Holding hands, one next to the other, they silently slipped past me and went on their way. They moved on in a tight throng, and even the strongest wind could not have blown them apart.

In the far distance I spotted a couple, still fully fleshed, emerging from a lush stand of mulberry trees. They were dressed very skimpily, in garments that looked more like simple coverings than real apparel. As they came nearer, I realized that the woman was dressed in only a black bra and panties and the man in blue underpants. The woman wore a shocked expression and walked with a slight crouch, her hands folded across her thighs as if to screen them from view. The man bent down and put his arm around her protectively.

As they arrived in front of me, they scanned me carefully, as though searching for a familiar face. Disappointment gradually registered on their features, for they had decided they did not recognize me.

“Are you a new arrival?” the man asked.

I nodded. “And you are, too? Husband and wife, I take it?”

They nodded simultaneously.

“Did you see our daughter?” the woman asked pathetically.

I shook my head. “There’s such a multitude of people over there,” I said, “I don’t know which of them is your daughter.”

The woman bowed her head in distress. The man patted her on the shoulder. “There will be other new arrivals,” he comforted her.

“Yes, but there’s such a multitude of people over there,” the woman answered, repeating what I’d just said.

“There’s bound to be someone who has seen Xiaomin,” the man said.

Xiaomin? I seemed to have heard this name before. “How did you come to be here?” I asked.

A wisp of fear crossed their faces as the shadow of their ordeal in that departed world projected into this one. Their eyes evaded my glance — or perhaps it was their tears that made them appear to do so.

Then the man began to recount their terrifying experience that morning on Amity Street. The city had been determined to demolish the three apartment buildings, but the residents had refused to move out, resisting all pressure for a good three months, until forcible demolition was authorized. The couple came home early one morning after getting off the night shift, woke up their daughter, and prepared breakfast for her. She went off to school, her satchel on her back, while they went to bed and fell asleep. In their dreams they heard a loudspeaker outside delivering one warning after another, but they were just too tired to wake up properly. In the past they had heard other such warnings and seen bulldozers lined up in combat readiness, but after the confrontation with the residents, the loudspeakers and bulldozers had retreated. So they thought this was simply another round of intimidation and went on sleeping. They were shaken awake only when the building began to sway violently amid a clamorous din. The man jumped out of bed, tugging his wife by the hand, and ran toward the door. Just as he opened it, she ran over to the sofa to collect her jacket. He dashed back to pull her away — and the building collapsed with a crash.

His account came to an abrupt halt, and she began to weep.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t say that.”

“I shouldn’t have tried to get my jacket—”

“We didn’t have enough time anyway. Even if you hadn’t gone back, we wouldn’t have had time to escape.”

“If I hadn’t tried to pick up the jacket, you would have got out alive.”

“Even if I’d got out, where would that have left you?”

“Well, at least Xiaomin would have a father.”

I realized now who their daughter was — the little girl in the red down jacket who sat amid the chaos of steel and concrete, doing her homework in the cold wind as she waited for her parents to come home.

“I’ve seen your daughter,” I told them. “Her name is Zheng Xiaomin.”

“Yes!” they cried together. “That’s her name.”

“She’s in fourth grade.”

“That’s right. How do you know?” they asked.

“We’ve talked on the phone,” I told the man. “I’m the one who promised to do the tutoring.”

“You’re Teacher Yang?”

“Yes, I’m Yang Fei.”

The man turned to the woman. “This is Teacher Yang. I told him we didn’t make much money and he immediately lowered his fee to thirty yuan an hour.”

“That was kind of you,” the woman said.

To hear thanks in this context made me smile wanly.

“How is it you’re here too?” the man asked.

“I was sitting in a restaurant when the kitchen caught fire, and then there was an explosion. I arrived on the same day as you, just a few hours later. I called you from the restaurant, but you didn’t pick up.”

“I didn’t hear the phone ring.”

“You were buried in the ruins then.”

“You’re right.” The man looked at his wife. “The phone was probably crushed.”

“How was Xiaomin?” she asked impatiently.

“We had arranged that I would come to your apartment at four p.m. When I got there, the three buildings were no longer standing….”

I hesitated for a moment, and decided not to tell them how their deaths had been hushed up. A story would be concocted about how the two of them had died. Their daughter would receive an urn in which other people’s ashes had been placed, and would grow up believing in a beautiful lie.

“How is Xiaomin?” the woman asked again.

“She’s well,” I said. “She’s the most levelheaded girl I’ve ever met. You don’t need to worry about her. She knows how to take care of herself.”

“She’s only eleven,” the girl’s mother moaned. “Every time she leaves the house to go to school, she’ll stop after a few yards and call, ‘Dad,’ and ‘Mom,’ and wait for us to respond. Then she’ll say, ‘I’m off now,’ and head off to school.”

“What did she tell you?” the father asked.

I remembered how she told me she was cold and how I suggested she do her homework in the KFC nearby and how she shook her head, saying that her mom and dad wouldn’t know where she was when they came home.

After hesitating once more, I decided I should tell these things to her parents, adding, “She was sitting right above you.”

Tears flowed silently down their faces, and I knew that theirs was a wellspring of grief that would never dry. My eyes misted up too as I went on my way. After I had gone some distance, the wailing behind me pursued me like a tidal surge. Just the two of them wept as much as a whole crowd might. In my mind’s eye the tide carried the girl in the red down jacket and tossed her onto a beach, and when the waters retreated she was left all alone, there in the human world.

I saw what a feast was like here. In a land of scented grasses and babbling streams, there were thriving vegetables and trees laden with fruit. The dead sat around in circles on the grass, as though seated around the multiple tables of a banquet hall. Their movements were infinitely varied: some ate rapidly and with great determination, some savored things slowly, some chatted away, some smoked and drank, some raised glasses in a toast, some rubbed their bellies when full….I saw several people with flesh and others just with bones shuttling back and forth, and they were making the motions of carrying dishes and pouring wine, so I knew these were serving staff.

When I approached, a skeleton greeted me. “Welcome to the Tan Family Eatery.”

This name, rendered in a young woman’s dulcet tones, gave me a start. Then I heard an unfamiliar voice call my name: “Yang Fei.”

I turned my head and there was Tan Jiaxin making his way toward me with a limp. His right hand looked as though a plate rested on top of it. I saw a happy expression on his face, an expression I had never seen in that departed world, where his smile had always been forced.

He came up to me. “Yang Fei, when did you get here?”

“Yesterday.”

“We’ve been here four days.”

As he spoke, he held up his right hand as though carrying a dish. He turned around and called his wife and daughter, and then his son-in-law, conveying his happiness to them. “Yang Fei’s here!”

Soon the rest of the family came over, all holding plates and carrying bottles. Tan Jiaxin hailed them as they approached. “Yang Fei made it for the opening.”

They came to me and looked me up and down, beaming and chuckling. “You look thinner,” Tan Jiaxin’s wife said.

“We’re thinner, too,” Tan said cheerfully. “Everyone who comes here is bound to lose some weight. Everyone here has a fine figure.”

“How come you’re here too?” his daughter asked.

“I have no burial plot. How about you?”

Tan’s face darkened. “Our relatives are all in Guangdong,” he said. “They maybe don’t know what happened to us.”

“But the four of us are all here,” Tan’s wife pointed out.

A happy expression returned to Tan’s face. “That’s right,” he said. “Our family’s all together.”

“You broke your leg?” I asked.

“With a broken leg I can walk all the more quickly.” He gave a ringing laugh.

A cry rose up from one of the groups of diners. “Hey, what about our dishes? And our drinks?”

Tan turned and responded with a shout. “Be right there!”

He moved off quickly, limping heavily, his right hand appearing to hold a plate. His wife, daughter, and son-in-law rushed off to attend to the diners, looking as though they were holding plates and carrying bottles of spirits.

Tan Jiaxin looked back over his shoulder. “What will you have?”

“The usual bowl of noodles,” I said.

“You got it.”

I found a place, and when I sat down on the grass I felt as though I were sitting on a chair. Opposite me sat a skeleton, and his only gesture was that of putting a glass to his lips, with no effort to pick up food with chopsticks and put things in his mouth. His vacant eyes gazed at the black armband on my arm.

His outfit looked strange to me. His black clothes hung very loosely, but they lacked sleeves, revealing the skeleton’s arms and shoulders, and their dark color seemed to indicate they had undergone months and years of exposure to the elements. There was a raw edge where the shoulders of his garment would have met the arms; it looked as though the sleeves had been torn off.

We looked at each other. He was the first to speak. “What day did you come over?”

“It’s my fifth day,” I said. “I got here yesterday.”

He raised his glass and gulped down the contents. Then he set his glass on the ground and went through the motions of refilling it. “All on your own, I see.” He sighed.

I bowed my head in acknowledgment, glancing at the black gauze on my arm.

“At least you knew to wear an armband for yourself,” he said. “Some lonely madcaps arrive here without any armband, and they get so envious when they see others with them that they come and hassle me to tear off a piece of sleeve.”

I looked at the skeletal arm and shoulder that were exposed to view and couldn’t help but smile.

He made a gesture of raising his glass, downing the shot, and setting the glass back on the ground. “The sleeves were very long originally, reaching below my fingers. But now look at them — both shoulders are exposed.” He used his hands to make his point.

“What about you?” I asked. “You don’t need an armband?”

“I’ve got family over there,” he said. “But they’ve maybe forgotten me.”

He went through the motions of picking up the bottle and refilling his glass, indicating through the movement that it was his last glass, and once more he made the gesture of swallowing the contents in one draft.

“That’s good stuff,” he said.

“What are you drinking?” I asked.

“Rice wine.”

“What brand?”

“I don’t know.”

I smiled. “How long have you been here?”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“It has to be a long time, then.”

“Too long.”

“You must have seen a lot during your time here, so there’s something I’d like to ask you.” I shared with him a thought that had suddenly occurred to me. “How do I get the feeling that after death there’s actually eternal life?”

He looked at me with his empty eyes but said nothing.

“Why is it that after death one needs to go to the place of rest?”

He seemed to smile. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t understand why you need to bake yourself into a little box of ashes.”

“That’s the custom,” he said.

“If you have a grave, you have a resting place, and if you don’t have a grave, you gain eternal life — which do you think is better?”

“I don’t know,” he said once more.

Then he turned his head and called, “Waitress, the check.”

A skeleton waitress walked over. “Fifty yuan.”

He made a gesture of placing fifty yuan on the table, then got to his feet, nodding to me. “Young fellow, don’t think so much,” he murmured as he left.

I looked at his loose black clothes and his skeletal arms, and couldn’t help but think of a beetle. His silhouette gradually got smaller until it disappeared among the other skeletons.

Tan Jiaxin’s son-in-law came over, making the motion of holding a bowl of noodles in both hands, followed by the motion of giving it to me, and my hands made the gestures of accepting it from him.

When I made the gesture of placing the bowl of noodles on the ground, it felt as though I were placing it on a table. Then my left hand made the gesture of holding the bowl and my right hand made the gesture of holding chopsticks. I completed the motion of taking a mouthful of noodles and my mouth began the motion of tasting them. To me they tasted the same as noodles in the departed world.

I became aware that all around me was laughter and good cheer, as people tucked into their meals and exchanged toasts, at the same time gleefully mocking those defective food items so pervasive in the departed world: tainted rice, tainted milk formula, tainted buns, fake eggs, leather milk, plaster noodles, chemical hot pot, fecal tofu, ersatz chili powder, recycled cooking oil.

Amid hoots of laughter, they sang the praises of the dishes here, and I heard words such as “fresh,” “delicious,” and “healthy” being bandied about.

“There are only two places we know where food is safe,” someone said.

“Which two places?”

“Here is one.”

“What about the other?”

“The state banquets over there.”

“Well said,” someone chuckled. “We’re enjoying the same treatment as those top leaders.”

As I smiled I noticed that I was no longer making the motion of eating noodles and realized that I had finished.

“Check, please!” someone next to me called.

A skeletal waitress came over. “Eighty-seven yuan,” she said.

“Here’s a hundred.”

“Thirteen yuan change,” the waitress said.

“Thanks,” the diner said.

Paying the bill was simply an exchange of words, with no action involved. At this point Tan Jiaxin came limping over, making the gesture of holding a dish in his palm. I knew he was giving me a fruit plate, so I made the gesture of taking it from him. He sat down opposite me. “Fresh fruit, just picked,” he said.

I began the motion of eating fruit and tasted sweet, delicious flavors. “The Tan Family Eatery didn’t need long to get going,” I said.

“There’s no public security bureau, fire department, or sanitation, commerce, or tax department here,” he said. “To open a restaurant over there, the fire department will hold things back for a year or two, claiming that your restaurant poses a fire risk, and the sanitation department will delay things for a year or two on the grounds that your sanitation level is not up to standard. You have to give them money and gifts before they will grant you a permit.”

An uneasy look then crossed his face. “You’re not angry with us, are you?”

“Why would I be angry?”

“You were stuck in the room.”

I recalled the last scene in that world, of Tan Jiaxin gazing at me through the smoke and shouting to me.

“You seemed to be shouting,” I said.

“I was telling you to run.” He sighed. “We didn’t manage to hold anybody back, only you.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t that you held me back — I just didn’t leave.”

I didn’t tell him about the newspaper and the report on Li Qing’s suicide, for that would be too long a story. Maybe on some other occasion I would take him through it all, slowly.

Tan Jiaxin was still struggling with an uneasy conscience. He explained why, after the kitchen fire began, they had to block the front door and try to have the customers pay before leaving. The restaurant had been operating in the red for three years in a row.

“I must have been crazy,” he said. “I ruined myself, I ruined my family, and I ruined you.”

“Coming here is not so bad,” I said. “My dad’s here too.”

“Your dad’s here?” Tan Jiaxin was pleased. “Why didn’t you come together?”

“I haven’t found him yet,” I said. “But I have the feeling he’s not far away.”

“Once you find him, be sure to bring him here,” Tan Jiaxin said.

“I’ll be sure to do that,” I said.

Tan Jiaxin sat down opposite me, no longer with a frown on his face but wreathed in smiles. As he got up to leave, he urged me once more to bring my father to taste their dishes.

Then I settled my bill. A skeletal girl came over — a new hire, I assumed. “The noodles are eleven yuan,” she said. “The fruit is complimentary.”

“Here’s twenty,” I said.

“Here’s your change,” she said.

Again, an exchange of words was all that was involved. As I turned to leave, this skeletal girl called to me warmly, “Good to see you! Please come again!”

In front of a verdant bamboo grove, a skeleton wearing a black armband came over to me. I noticed a little hole in his forehead and realized that I’d seen him before. I smiled at him and he smiled too. His smile was not a mobile expression of feeling as much as a light breeze wafting from his vacant eyes and empty mouth.

“There’s a bonfire over there,” he said. “See, over there.”

I looked into the far distance, in the direction of his outstretched finger. A broad meadow spread almost as far as the eye could see, and where the meadow ended there was something bright and glistening, like a silk sash — it looked to me like a river. A green fire was blazing far off in the distance, like the little flame that burns when one flicks on a cigarette lighter. Skeletal people were coming down the hillside and out of the woods, and I could see a number of little groups heading toward the fire.

“How about we go over and join them?” he suggested.

“What’s going on there?” I asked.

“There’s a bonfire by the river,” he said.

“Do they often go there?”

“Not often, but every now and then.”

“Everyone here goes?”

“No.” He glanced at my armband and pointed at his own. “Just people like us.”

I understood now. Over there was where self-mourners would congregate. I nodded and followed him toward the bonfire and the silk-sash river. The grass whispered as we wended our way.

I looked at his black armband. “How do you come to be here?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s a long story,” he said.

A note of remembrance appeared in his voice. “I’d been married a couple of years then. My wife had a mental illness, but I didn’t realize that before we married, because I had met her only three times. I did sense something a bit odd about her smile, and it made me feel a little uneasy. But my parents weren’t at all concerned, and her family circumstances were good, with a large dowry and twenty thousand yuan in the bank. The village where I’m from is very poor, and it’s parents who make decisions when it comes to choosing a marriage partner. With that kind of money you can build a two-story house. So my parents went ahead with the match, and it was only later that it became clear she was mentally disturbed.

“She wasn’t that terrible — she didn’t hit me or make a fuss — but she’d spend the whole day laughing at this and that and got absolutely nothing done. My parents regretted their decision and felt they’d let me down, but they wouldn’t let me get a divorce, saying that the house had already been built and it wouldn’t do to dump her after profiting from her wealth. I hadn’t been thinking of divorce, either, and preferred just to carry on as we were doing. She was gentle and quiet as mental cases go, sleeping peacefully at night like any normal person.

“One summer day she went off by herself — I don’t think she had any idea where she was going. I went out to look for her, and so did my parents and my brother and sister-in-law. We looked all over the place and made inquiries everywhere, but could find no trace of her. After three days of futile searching, we went to tell her family. They jumped to the conclusion that I must have murdered her, and they went to the local public security bureau to report their suspicions.

“Five days after she left home, a woman’s body floated to the surface of a pond a mile from our village. It being the height of summer, the corpse was already decomposed and unrecognizable. The police called me and my wife’s relatives in to try to make an identification, but none of us could be sure, at most simply noting a similarity in heights. The police said the drowning happened on the day she left home, and to me this suggested strongly that it must be my wife, and her family felt the same. She must have stumbled carelessly into the pond, I thought, for she wouldn’t have realized the danger of drowning. It upset me, for whatever else you say about it, we had been husband and wife for over two years.

“A couple of days later, the policemen came back to ask what I was doing the day my wife left. I’d gone into town that morning and it was evening when I got home and discovered she was gone. The police asked if anyone could testify that I had gone into town. I thought that over and said no. They took notes and left. Her family was convinced I had killed her and the police thought so too, so they arrested me.

“At the outset, my parents and my brother and his wife didn’t believe I killed her, but later, when I admitted I had, they were finally convinced. They were very upset and hated me for shaming them so much — they couldn’t raise their heads. That’s what our village is like: if there’s a murderer in the family, nobody dares to venture out of the house. When the court sentenced me to death not one of them was in attendance, and it was only her family who came. I don’t bear them any grudge. After I was arrested, they wanted to visit me but the police wouldn’t let them. They’re all honest, simple people, and they had no idea I was unjustly accused.

“I had no choice but to say I’d done it. The police strung me up and beat me, insisting I confess, beating me till I was shitting and pissing in my pants. My hands were tied tightly for two whole days and four of my fingers went black — I’d never be able to use them again, I was told. Later, they strung me up by my feet instead, with my head pointing down. When you get beaten that way, it’s not your body that hurts most, but your eyes. Tears are salty, and they can be as painful as a needle stabbing you in the eyes. I thought I’d be better off dead, so I admitted the crime.”

He paused for a moment. “You know why we have eyebrows?”

“Why?”

“To block sweat.”

I heard him chuckle as he smiled to himself.

He pointed at the back of his head, then at the round hole in his forehead. “The bullet came in the back, and this is where it came out.”

He looked down at his black armband. “When I got here, I noticed that some people were wearing armbands for themselves, and I wanted to do the same. I felt nobody back there would wear an armband for me — certainly nobody in my family. I saw someone with a long, loose black jacket. I asked him if he would mind tearing off a piece of sleeve for me. He understood what I had in mind, and complied. With a black armband I feel at ease.

“Someone who came over later filled me in on what happened subsequently. Six months after I was shot, my wife suddenly returned home. Her clothes were ragged and torn, and her face was so filthy nobody could recognize her. She stood outside the front door cackling happily away, and eventually someone put two and two together.

“Everyone finally realized that I had been wrongly convicted. My parents and my brother and sister-in-law all wept for two days straight, so upset were they. The government gave them compensation to the tune of five hundred thousand yuan, and they bought a fine grave for me—”

“You have a burial site?” I asked. “Why are you still here?”

“At first, when I heard the news, I took off my armband and tossed it under a tree, preparing to head there straightaway. But before I’d gone ten yards, I felt I couldn’t bear to leave here, so I went back and put the armband on again. Now I don’t feel like going.”

“You don’t want to go to the place of rest?”

“No, I do,” he said. “My thought at the time was that I have a burial spot all lined up, so there’s no big hurry — I can go there whenever I feel like it.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Eight years now.”

“Is the burial plot still there?”

“Yes, it always has been.”

“When do you plan to go?”

“Sometime in the future.”

We walked to the gathering place of the self-mourners. Before my eyes there stretched a broad river — the gleaming scene had also broadened. A green bonfire was blazing vigorously on the riverbank, and the leaping sparks looked like dancing glowworms.

Already there were many skeletons wearing armbands sitting around the bonfire. I followed my companion into the throng, looking for a spot to sit. Some of those seated adjusted their positions, opening up several vacant spots. I stood there in a quandary, until I saw my new friend sitting down in a nearby spot; I sat down next to him. When I raised my head, I saw others approaching, some along the grassy hills, some along the riverbank; they were blending together the way quiet little streams spill into a wider flow.

The skeleton next to me gave a friendly greeting. “Hi there!”

“Hi there!” seemed to form a little soundwave, veering off, making a circuit around the bonfire, then returning to me before it subsided completely.

“Are they greeting me?” I whispered.

“That’s right,” he said. “You’re a new arrival.”

I felt that I was a tree transplanted back to its native forest, a drop of water returning to the river, a mote of dust returning to the earth.

One by one the armband-wearing self-mourners sat down, and voices gradually reverted to quiescence. We sat around the bonfire, and in the spacious silence there quietly surged a thousand words and ten thousand comments — the sound of many humble lives presenting an account of themselves. Every one of the self-mourners had bitter memories, too painful to recall, of that departed world; every one was a lonely orphan there. Mourning ourselves, we gathered here, but when we sat in a circle around the green bonfire, we were no longer lonely and abandoned.

There was no talking, no movement, just silent, understanding smiles. We sat in the silence, not with any goal in mind, just for the sensation that we were united, instead of being isolated individuals.

In the quiet circle of sitters I heard the dancing of the fire, the tapping of the water, the swaying of the grass, the soughing of the trees, the rustling of the breeze, the floating of the clouds.

These sounds seemed to be pouring out their woes, as though they too had suffered many reverses, ordeals too painful to recall. Then I heard snatches of a song reaching me, a song like that of the nightingale. I would hear a little burst of song, and then a pause, and then another burst of song….

I heard a sound like a whisper in my ear. “So, you’re here.”

When I walked toward this unfamiliar voice, it was like raindrops dripping from the eaves onto a windowsill, clear and light. I could tell that it was a woman’s voice, one that after enduring hardship and heartache had been reduced to twilight’s dim glow, but still retained a distinct rhythm, like a knock on the door — one, two, three. “So, you’re here.”

I was a bit confused. Was this greeting really directed at me? But there was a faraway intimacy — the kind of intimacy you find in the depths of memory — that made me feel this greeting was for me. It was followed by a song like that of the nightingale, rippling toward me, and then that tender greeting reached my ears once more.

I walked toward the warbling song, toward the call of “So, you’re here.”

I entered a copse of trees, and it seemed to me that the nightingale-like song was gliding down from the trees in front of me. As I came closer, I noticed that the tree leaves were getting bigger and bigger, and then I saw a line of tiny skeletal babies settled in the cradles formed by the spreading, swaying leaves, and the babies were rocking back and forth and singing a song that tugged at the heartstrings. I stretched out my fingers and counted them one by one, until I reached twenty-seven. This number made my heart quiver, and my memory at once caught up with that lost world, and I thought of those twenty-seven dead babies labeled “medical refuse” that were washed up on the riverbank.

“So, you’re here.”

I saw a skeleton dressed in bright white clothing sitting in the tall grass between the trees. She stood up slowly, gave a sigh, and said to me, “Son, how did you come to be here so soon?”

I knew who she was. “Mom,” I called softly.

Li Yuezhen walked up to me. Her empty eyes gazed at me and her voice sounded uncertain. “You look to be in your fifties, but you’re only forty-one.”

“You still remember my age,” I said.

“You’re the same age as Hao Xia,” she said.

By this time Hao Xia and Hao Qiangsheng were in America, in that other world, while Li Yuezhen and I were here in this one. When they left, I saw them off at the airport; they were flying to Shanghai and then taking a connecting flight from there. I asked Hao Qiangsheng to let me carry the urn of ashes, so that I could accompany this spiritual mother of mine for a small portion of her final journey.

“I saw you carrying the urn to the airport.” Li Yuezhen shook her head. “But they weren’t my ashes, they were someone else’s.”

Those ashes, I realized, must now be resting under her name, somewhere in America. “Hao Xia told she has already found a resting place for you,” I started to say, “and her dad will join you there in the future.”

I didn’t go on, because I realized now that when Hao Qiangsheng was buried his remains would not be interred with those of Li Yuezhen, but with those of one or more strangers.

Tears streamed from Li Yuezhen’s empty eyes, for this thought had occurred to her too. Tears flowed down her stonelike cheeks and fell onto the blades of grass below. Then her empty eyes lit up with a happier expression, and she raised her head to look at the warbling babies. “I used to have twenty-seven children. Now that you’re here, I’ve got twenty-eight.”

Her fingers, reduced simply to bones, began to stroke the black armband on my left arm. She knew that I was grieving for myself. “My poor boy,” she said.

In my ice-bound heart there appeared a warming glow. One of the infants, overreaching, tumbled down off a leaf and, sobbing pitifully, crawled over Li Yuezhen. She took the infant into her arms and gently rocked him back and forth, then set him back on top of another broad leaf, where he happily rejoined the warbling chorus.

“How did you get here?” Li Yuezhen asked.

I told her about my final moments, and also mentioned how Li Qing had come from so far away to say goodbye.

She gave a sigh. “Li Qing should never have left you.”

Perhaps she was right, I thought. If Li Qing had not left me at that point, we might still be living a peaceful life in that other world and our child would be in primary school — or maybe even middle school.

I recalled the disappearance of Li Yuezhen and the dead babies and how the funeral parlor had claimed that it had already cremated them all, though it was said that their ashes had actually been taken from the urns of other people altogether.

“I know about that,” she said. “People who came after me told me.”

I looked up at the babies singing away on the broad tree leaves. “Did you carry them all here?”

“No, I didn’t carry them,” she said. “I walked in front and they crawled along behind.”

Li Yuezhen said that late that night she did not hear the roar of the subsidence. She had been sleeping heavily, and at one stage she saw a vast chaos in which heaven and earth were inextricably mixed. A gleam of light appeared in the far distance, like a line on the horizon, and then light came rolling in like a tide. Heaven and earth separated, morning and night were uncoupled. Later, in her dreams she felt air whirling around rapidly and shuttling back and forth, and in the final stage of sleep she saw water spreading from the ground and rising inexorably until it was like an ocean.

Then she woke, to find she seemed to be falling vertically off a cliff. She slowly pushed aside the white cloth, the way she might sweep away snow in front of her door. Her feet began to move, taking her out of the morgue that now lay at the bottom of the sinkhole, bathed in a desolate moonlight. Her feet stepped on a broken wall as jagged as scattered dogs’ teeth, and she propelled herself out of the pit.

She walked into a city flooded with light, where pedestrians and cars jostled. Everything was the same as it had always been, but departure into another realm put her beyond the reach of this familiar world.

Out of habit she walked to the building where she used to live, as though returning home, but she could not enter it as she would have been able to before. No matter how she moved her legs, it was impossible to get closer. Three days after her departure from the human world, she saw a female figure appear briefly at a sixth-floor window and her heart skipped a beat, for it was Hao Xia — her daughter had returned.

In the two days and nights that followed, she never ceased in her efforts to approach the building, but she just seemed to move farther away. Hao Qiangsheng never appeared in that window and neither did I, and Hao Xia appeared just that once. She saw people moving tables and chairs and chests out of the building, then coffee tables and sofas and beds, until she knew that the furniture she had lived with for decades had been sold off and the apartment itself too, for her husband and daughter were about to fly to America.

Finally, one afternoon, she saw all three of us. Hao Qiangsheng, holding an urn in both hands, emerged from the building; he was supported by Hao Xia, who held in her right hand a large duffel bag, while I followed behind carrying a large suitcase in each hand. The three of us stood by the side of the road and a taxi pulled over. The driver and I together put the bag and suitcases into the trunk of the car. She saw me say a few words to Hao Qiangsheng, and he passed the urn to me. Holding it carefully in both hands, I sat down in the passenger seat, while Hao Xia and her father sat in the back. The taxi drove off.

She knew that this was a final parting, for her husband and daughter were leaving for far-off America. Tears came to her eyes and she dashed forward to deliver a greeting, but running simply put more distance between her and us. She came to a halt and watched as the the taxi disappeared in the flow of traffic.

She started sobbing then, and after much grieving she heard behind her a murmur, a murmur a bit like a sob, and when she turned around she saw the twenty-seven babies crawling along the ground in a line. At first they appeared to be just as upset as she was, but when her crying stopped, their susurrant sobs ceased too. She had not realized that they’d followed her out of the sinkhole and crawled all the way here. She gazed at the city that was gradually fading into the distance, then looked back at the twenty-seven babies, and realized what she had lost and what she had gained.

“Let’s go,” she said softly to the babies.

Li Yuezhen, dressed in white, walked forward slowly and the twenty-seven babies crawled after her all in a line. The sunlight was a grubby yellow as they threaded their way through the noisy city and entered a quiet space where they were greeted by silvery moonlight. They penetrated deeper and deeper into the silence.

After crossing the frontier between life and death, Li Yuezhen stepped onto a stretch of fragrant grass. The green grass rubbed the necks of the twenty-seven babies crawling along behind, and the ticklish sensation made them giggle. Where the grass ended, a gleaming river flowed. Li Yuezhen waded into the river, which slowly rose to the level of her chest, then slowly fell until it lay beneath her feet, as she arrived at the other bank. The babies paddled on the surface of the water, spluttering as they made the crossing, the sound of their little coughs carrying to her until they reached the bank. As they entered a forest, Li Yuezhen began to sing a song, and the babies behind sang along with her. She stopped, but they did not, and their nightingale-like refrain continued to waft among the trees.

“Your father was here,” Li Yuezhen said to me. “Yang Jinbiao was here.”

I looked at her in wonder.

“He had to travel a long road to get here, so he was very tired,” she said. “He lay down here for several days, thinking of you the whole time.”

“Where did he go after leaving me?”

“He got on the train and went to the place where he once abandoned you.”

That last evening’s conversation with my father had always been imprinted on my mind. We squeezed onto the narrow little bed in the room behind the shop, and the streetlights outside seemed ready to drift off to sleep as the night breeze caressed our window. It was the first time my father had wept in front of me. He told me how, for a young woman’s sake, he had abandoned me on a rock in an unfamiliar town. He described the rough texture of the rock face and the smoothness of its upper surface. It was on that terrace that he had put me, although subsequently he would reproach himself for his heartlessness, over and over again. When my father left me after that conversation more than a year ago, it never crossed my mind that this was where he would go.

My father had put on his brand-new railroad uniform, the newest set of clothes in his possession, which he’d never been able to bring himself to wear before. Dragging a weak and failing body, he boarded the train and squeezed his way to his seat. No sooner had he sat down than the train started to move. Watching the platform slowly recede into the distance, he suddenly became aware that he did not have much time left and did not know if he would ever be able to see me again.

My father told Li Yuezhen that he had not slept a wink that last night we were together, but instead listened continuously to my rhythmic breathing and occasional snoring. In the middle of the night there was a spell when I made no sound at all and he got worried, so he stretched out a hand and patted my face and neck, waking me. I propped myself up and looked at him, and he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He said that in the darkness I patted him and carefully put his arm inside the quilt.

I shook my head. “I don’t remember any of that,” I told Li Yuezhen.

Li Yuezhen pointed at the grassy patch under the trees. “He was lying just there as he told me all this.”

My father had a fairly clear idea of where to go, but it wasn’t easy to find the copse of trees and the dark rock, and he never found the stone-slab bridge and the dry riverbed. He remembered that on the opposite side of the bridge there ought to be a building, a building with the sound of children singing, but he found neither the building nor the singing. Everything had changed, he told Li Yuezhen, even the train. The train that he and I took that year had pulled out of the platform at dawn and did not arrive at the town until midday. Now the train that he alone took still left at dawn, but reached that same place just over an hour later.

“Did you still remember the location?” Li Yuezhen asked him.

“I did,” he said. “Riverside Street.”

He left the train station in the morning sunlight, among travelers who carried bags over their shoulders or pulled suitcases behind them in such a rush it was as though their lives depended on it. He was carrying neither bag nor suitcase, but his laboring body felt heavier than any piece of luggage. As he plodded slowly toward the station exit, his two hands lacked the energy to swing loose and hung almost motionless by his side.

He stood in the square in front of the station and in a feeble voice asked directions from the healthy bodies rushing past him. Of the first twenty people he approached, only four said they were locals. He asked them how to get to Riverside Street. The three younger people had no idea where Riverside Street was. But the fourth, an old man, recognized the name and said my father needed to take a No. 3 bus. My father wearily boarded the bus, and in a town where he knew no one he went looking for the site of my abandonment.

“Why did you want to go there?” Li Yuezhen asked him.

“I just wanted to sit on that rock for a bit,” he replied.

It was afternoon by the time he found the spot. He was well-nigh exhausted by the trip on crowded public transport. After he got off the first bus, he had sat down by the side of the road for a good long time before he could summon the strength to board the second. The third bus dropped him off three hundred yards from Riverside Street. To him, that walk was so arduous, it could just as well have been three thousand yards. He could move forward only with difficulty, his steps ponderous, his feet as heavy and clumsy as two rocks. After walking five or six yards, he had to lean against a tree to rest for a little. He noticed a snack shop by the side of the road and felt he ought to eat something, so he sat down on one of the stools placed on the sidewalk outside the shop, propping himself up by putting both hands on the table. He ordered a bowl of dumpling soup, but after three mouthfuls he had to throw up — into a plastic bag he had brought along for the purpose. The people sitting next to him hurriedly carried their bowls into the shop, and he apologized to them in a weak voice, then went on eating, continuing to vomit at intervals. When he finished eating, he felt he’d eaten more than he’d vomited and his body now had some strength, so he lurched to his feet and tottered the rest of the way to Riverside Street.

“It was all tall buildings there,” he told Li Yuezhen.

The stream and the stone-slab bridge of yesteryear were no more. He did hear children, but they were no longer singing. They were yelling with excitement on a playground slide, as their watchful grandparents chatted. The area was now a housing complex, and the pathways between the high-rise buildings were like narrow cracks through which vehicles and people had to squeeze. He inquired as to the whereabouts of the river and the bridge, but the residents had all moved here from somewhere else, and according to them there was no river and no bridge, and there never had been. “Is this Riverside Street?” he asked, and they said it was. “Was that always its name?” he asked, and they said they thought it was.

“So it was called Riverside Street, even if there was no river?” Li Yuezhen asked.

“The place name hadn’t changed, but everything else had,” he replied.

In a feeble voice my father continued to ask about the little copse and the dark rock among the grasses. One person told him that there was no copse but there were grasses, in the park next to the housing development, and there were rocks among the grasses. My father asked how far it was to the park and the man said it was close by — just two hundred yards away — but those two hundred yards were for my father another strenuous journey.

It was dusk by the time he reached the park. The lingering rays of the setting sun illuminated a grassy lawn, and several rocks scattered across the lawn and jutting out of it caught the warm colors of the setting sun. He searched among these rocks for the one he carried in his memory and felt that the dark rock among them looked a lot like the one that I had sat on so many years earlier. He slowly walked over to it and wanted to sit on it, but his body would not obey instructions and kept slipping off, so he could only sit down on the grass and lean his back against the rock. At that moment he realized he lacked the strength to stand up again. His head flopped against the rock and he watched in a powerless daze as a vagrant wearing shabby old clothes rummaged around in a nearby garbage can. The man pulled out a Coke bottle, twisted off the cap, and emptied the remaining drops of soda into his mouth. The vagrant shook the bottle a few more times before tossing it back into the garbage can. Then he turned around and stared at my father like a hawk. My father turned his head away, and when he looked up he found the vagrant was sitting on a bench by the garbage can, his eyes still fixed on him — fixed on his brand-new railway uniform.

“I saw Yang Fei,” he told Li Yuezhen, “on that very rock.”

He was in his final moments now, and he sank into the darkness as though sinking into a well, with silence all around. The lights in the tall buildings were extinguished and the stars and moon in the sky were extinguished too. Then, all of a sudden, it was as though the scene of my abandonment appeared in a brilliant shaft of light. He saw me, the four-year-old, sitting on the rock in a blue-and-white sailor suit, the one he had bought for me when he decided to give me away. A little sailor boy sat on the dark rock; he was happily waving his legs. “I’m going to get you something to eat,” my father said to me sadly. “Dad, be sure to get plenty,” I said to him happily.

But this radiant picture vanished in the twinkling of an eye, as a pair of coarse hands forcibly removed his uniform, briefly calling him back from the brink of death. His body was feeling numb, but remaining shreds of consciousness enabled him to realize what the vagrant was doing. The vagrant stripped off the tattered blue clothes he was wearing and put on my father’s brand-new uniform.

“Please,” my father said weakly. The vagrant bent his head to hear more clearly. “Two hundred yuan,” he heard my father murmur. The vagrant groped around in my father’s shirt pocket and pulled out two hundred-yuan notes. He transferred them to the breast pocket of the railroad uniform that had been my father’s.

“Please,” my father said once more. The vagrant stood looking at him for a moment, then squatted down and put the tattered blue jacket on him.

The vagrant heard his last words:

“Thank you.”

The darkness was endless. My father sank into a nothingness in which everything was erased, in which he himself was erased. Then it was as though he heard someone calling “Yang Fei!” and his body stood up, and when he stood up he discovered he was walking on an empty and desolate plain, and the person calling “Yang Fei!” was himself. He went on walking and went on calling, “Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei, Yang Fei…” It was just that the sound of his voice got smaller and smaller. He walked a long way across the plain and didn’t know if he had walked for a day or for several days, but his endless calling of my name brought him back to his own city, and his call of “Yang Fei!” seemed to lead him like a road sign to our little shop. He stood on the street outside for a long, long time — two days or two weeks, he could not tell. The doors and windows of the shop remained closed throughout, and I never appeared.

As he stood there, the commonplace sights around him gradually took on an unfamiliar cast, the pedestrians and traffic circulating in the street grew indistinct, and he became aware that the place where he stood was becoming vague and dim. But the shop itself remained clearly recognizable and he continued to stand outside, looking forward to the door opening and me emerging from inside. Finally the door did open, but it was a woman who came out; she turned around and exchanged words with a man inside — a man who was clearly not me. My father bowed his head in disappointment and shuffled off.

“Yang Fei sold the shop and went to look for you,” Li Yuezhen told him.

He nodded. “When I saw someone else come out, I knew Yang Fei must have sold the place.”

Later, he kept on walking, kept on getting lost, and it was as he puzzled over his location that he heard a nightingale-like song. As he headed toward the source of the music, he saw skeletal people walking this way and that, and as he shuttled among them he entered a wood where the leaves grew bigger and bigger, where swaying babies lay on the broad tree leaves. The nightingale song was emanating from them. A woman in white approached — he recognized her as Li Yuezhen. She recognized him too, for at this point their looks were unaltered. They stood among the babies that were crooning like nightingales and exchanged accounts of their last moments in that departed world. He asked Li Yuezhen for news of me, and she told him of my visit to his old village — that was all she knew.

Very tired, he lay for several days in the grass beneath the trees, amid the warblings of the twenty-seven babies. Then he stood up, telling Li Yuezhen that he missed me and longed to see my face — even just a glimpse of me in the distance would content him. He resumed his endless journey, continually getting lost on unfamiliar roads, but this time he was unable to return to the city, because he had left that world for too long a time. He could only get as far as the funeral parlor, the interface between the two worlds.

Like me on my first visit there, he entered the waiting room and listened to the crematees as they discussed their burial clothes, cinerary urns, and burial sites, and he watched as one by one they entered the oven room. He stood rather than sat, and soon he came to feel that the waiting room should have a staff member in attendance, for he was someone who loved to work. When a late-arriving crematee entered, he instinctively went to usher him in and get him a number, then led him to a seat. This made him feel a lot like a regular assistant, and he went on walking back and forth in the central aisle. One day he found a pair of old white gloves in the pocket of the tattered blue jacket the vagrant had given him, and after putting them on he felt all the more like a full-time usher. Day after day he showed the utmost courtesy to those awaiting cremation, and day after day he felt an exquisite anticipation, knowing that so long as he kept on doing this, then eventually — in thirty or forty or fifty years — he would be able to see me.

Li Yuezhen paused at this point. I knew now where my father was — he was the man with the blue jacket and the white gloves in the waiting room of the funeral parlor, the man whose face had no flesh but only bone, the man with the weary and grieving voice.

My father had made a point of coming back from the funeral parlor to tell her about his new job, Li Yuezhen added. But he’d left as soon he’d shared this news with her, left in a great hurry, as though he never really should have taken a break.

The sound of Li Yuezhen’s voice was like a trickle of water, every word a little water droplet falling to the ground.