The Seventh Day (22 page)

“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 acknowledg
ment, 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.”