The Seventh Day (25 page)

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.

A
fter many hesitant twists and turns, a young man made his way here, bringing to Mouse Girl news of her boyfriend in that other world.

Looking in dazed confusion at the green grass and the dense trees and the people walking about—many skeletal, some still fleshed—he said to himself, “How did I end up here?”

“It seems like five days now,” he went on. “I have been walking around all this time, and I don’t know how I ended up here.”

A voice piped up. “Some come here just a day after they die, but some take several days.”

“I died?” he said perplexedly.

“You didn’t go to the funeral parlor?” that same voice asked.

“The funeral parlor?” he asked. “Why would I go there?”

“Everyone has to go to the funeral parlor for cremation after they die.”

“You’ve all been cremated?” He looked at us in wonder. “You don’t look like ashes to me.”

“We haven’t been cremated.”

“Did you not go to the funeral parlor, then?”

“No, we’ve been there.”

“If you went, why weren’t you cremated?”

“We have no burial grounds.”

“I have no burial ground, either,” he muttered to himself. “How could I have died?”

“The people who come over after you will tell you,” another voice broke in.

He shook his head. “Just now I ran into someone who said he had just got here. He didn’t know me and didn’t know how I got here, and didn’t know how
he
got here, either.”

I was about to go over to the cremation waiting room to see my father, but the arrival of this young man made me stop in my tracks. His body looked somehow flattened, with an odd stain on the breast of his jacket. After studying it carefully, I detected the marks left by a car tire.

“Can you remember the final scene?” I asked.

“What final scene?”

“Think about it,” I said. “What happened at the end?”

From his expression I could tell he was trying hard to remember. “All I recall was very thick fog as I waited in the street for a bus—I don’t remember anything else,” he said eventually.

I thought back to that scene in the thick fog when I left my rental room on the first day—how as I passed a bus stop I heard the roar of cars colliding and how one car sped out of the thick fog and then there was a clamor of screams.

“Were you standing next to a bus stop?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “That’s right, I was.”

“Did the sign list the 203 bus?”

He nodded. “Yes, it did. The 203 bus was the one I was waiting for.”

“It was a car accident that brought you here,” I told him. “There’s the mark of a car tire on your jacket.”

“I died in a car crash?” He lowered his head to look down at his chest and seemed to understand. “I do seem to remember something knocking me down and running over me.”

He looked at me and then at the skeletons close by. “You’re different from them,” he said.

“I just arrived a few days ago,” I said. “They’ve been here a long time.”

“Soon you’ll be just like us,” one skeleton said.

“Once spring is over—and the summer too,” I said. “We’ll be just like them.”

An uneasy expression appeared on his face. “Does it hurt a lot?” he asked.

“Not at all,” the skeleton said. “It’s just like tree leaves falling one by one in the autumn wind.”

“But a tree will always sprout more leaves,” he said.

“We’re not going to sprout again,” the skeleton said.

He nodded thoughtfully. “I understand.”

At this point a woman’s voice could be heard. “Xiao Qing!”

“I think someone is calling me,” he said.

“Xiao Qing!” the voice called again.

“That’s strange. There’s someone here who knows me.” He looked about in puzzlement.

“Xiao Qing, I’m here.”

Mouse Girl was approaching, dressed in a pair of pants so long she was treading on their cuffs. This young man looked at her in astonishment. He had heard her before he saw her.

“Hi, Xiao Qing! I’m Mouse Girl.”

“You don’t sound like her, but you do look like her.”

“I really am Mouse Girl.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Mouse Girl came up to us. “How come you’re here too?” she asked Xiao Qing.

He pointed at his chest. “Car accident.”

Mouse Girl looked at the mark on his jacket. “What’s that?”

“A car ran me over,” Xiao Qing said.

“Did it hurt a lot?” Mouse Girl asked.

Xiao Qing thought this over. “I don’t remember. I may have cried out.”

Mouse Girl nodded. “Have you seen Wu Chao?” she asked.

“Yes, I have,” he said.

“When was that?”

“The day before I came here.”

Mouse Girl turned around and told us that in the world over there Xiao Qing had been another member of the mouse tribe. She and her boyfriend, Wu Chao, had known Xiao Qing for over a year. They were below-ground neighbors.

“Does Wu Chao know what happened to me?”

“Yes, he does,” Xiao Qing said. “He bought a burial plot for you.”

“He bought a burial plot for me?”

“Yes. He gave me the money and asked me to buy you a burial plot.”

“Where did he get the money?”

When Mouse Girl fell to her death, Wu Chao was back home with his father. Later, the old man’s condition stabilized, but it was late at night when Wu Chao made it back to the underground rental in the city. He didn’t see Mouse Girl and he softly called her name a few times, but there was no answer. Their neighbors were all asleep, so he made his way along the narrow passageway, listening for the sound of human voices, thinking that Mouse Girl perhaps was chatting with someone behind a curtain. He heard nothing but snores and dreamy murmurs and the occasional baby wailing. It occurred to him that Mouse Girl might be in an Internet bar chatting with someone online. As he headed toward the bomb shelter exit he ran into Xiao Qing, just returning from his night shift. Xiao Qing told him of Mouse Girl’s death three days earlier.

Wu Chao at first did not seem to react when he heard that Mouse Girl had thrown herself off the Pengfei Tower, but a moment later his whole body started trembling and he kept shaking his head. “That’s impossible! Impossible!” he cried, and he dashed toward the exit.

Wu Chao ran into the Internet bar that was closest to the shelter, sat down in front of a computer, and read Mouse Girl’s log on QQ space. He also read a news report about her suicide. Now he knew for sure that Mouse Girl had left him forever.

Frozen in shock, he sat in front of the glaring monitor for many minutes, until the screen went black; only then did he get up and leave the Internet bar. When a stranger walked past in the late-night silence, Wu Chao turned to him and said, in a shaky voice, “Mouse Girl is dead.”

The stranger gave a start, as though he had run into a lunatic, and quickly crossed to the other side of the street, looking back at him warily.

Wu Chao roamed like a wraith through the night-bound city, in a piercing cold wind. He walked aimlessly, impervious to how far he had gone or where he was, and even when passing the Pengfei Tower he did not raise his head to look. As day broke he still had not emerged from his daze. Among the crowds of jostling people on their way to work, he kept saying over and over again, “Mouse Girl is dead.”

His words were greeted with indifference. Only one pedestrian took note of his emotional state and asked him curiously, “Who is Mouse Girl?”

He thought about this blankly for a moment before answering, “Liu Mei.” The man shook his head and said he didn’t know her, then disappeared around a corner. “She’s my girlfriend,” Wu Chao muttered.

It was not until the end of the day that Wu Chao returned to his underground home. He lay down distractedly on the bed that he and Mouse Girl used to share. Eventually he fell asleep, but he kept waking up, tears in his eyes.

The next day he neither wept nor sobbed but simply lay in bed, unable to sleep and with no appetite for meals, listening blankly to the sounds of his neighbors stir-frying and chatting and the noise of children running around and shouting. He didn’t know what they were doing or what they were saying, and was conscious only of their ebb and flow.

He sank into a deep crevasse of memory, haunted by sudden visions of Mouse Girl, sometimes buoyant, sometimes fretful. Eventually he came to the realization that his most pressing task now was to ensure that she could enjoy proper rest. During her short life she had had many dreams, but practically none of these had he enabled her to fulfill. She had often griped about that, but just as often she had forgotten to gripe, looking forward instead to new prospects. He now felt sure that having a grave of her own must have been her final wish, but this was yet another area in which he seemed likely to fail her.

At this point, amid all the background din, somebody’s words carried to him clearly. The man was talking about an acquaintance who had made over thirty thousand yuan from selling a kidney.

Wu Chao sat up in bed, thinking that with that kind of money he could buy a burial plot for Mouse Girl.

He left the bomb shelter and entered the Internet bar. He searched online until he found a phone number. He borrowed a pen and wrote the number on the palm of his hand, then went out to a pay phone and called the number. The person who picked up the phone peppered him with questions until he was sure that Wu Chao was serious, then set up an appointment for them to meet at the Pengfei Tower. Wu Chao couldn’t help giving a shiver when he heard the name.

He arrived at the appointed spot to find the street filled with a clamor of cars and people; he and his shadow huddled together at the foot of the Pengfei Tower. One car after another drove into or emerged from the underground parking lot next to him. Several times he looked up at the piercing sunlight reflected from the tower’s glass windows, but he had no idea where Mouse Girl had stood that day.

A man in a black down jacket came up to him. “You’re Wu Chao?” he muttered.

Wu Chao nodded.

“Follow me,” the man said quietly.

They boarded a crowded bus. A few stops later they disembarked, then boarded another bus. After taking six different buses, they seemed to have reached the outskirts of town. Wu Chao accompanied the man to the entrance gate of a housing development. The man told Wu Chao to go on inside, while he stood by the gate and placed a call on his cell phone. As Wu Chao entered this drab development, he noticed a man emerging from a building not far away. The man tossed his cigarette on the ground and stamped it out as Wu Chao approached. “Selling a kidney?” he asked.