☆☆☆
Mountain
His wife didn’t sleep well last night. He knows.
Yesterday afternoon. The doctor turned the monitor toward him. He leans in. Irregular tissue. The doctor says a few things. He hears himself say, “Oh.”
Breakfast is porridge, an egg, some greens, pickles.
He reassures his wife, tells her to go to the office as usual. “Maybe help me figure out my savings and my properties.”
He used to drink a lot. Ate a lot of cured meats.
That was probably why. But there’s no point thinking about it now.
He fills a water bottle. Two buns, some mints, an orange.
A mountain breeze. Sunlight slips through the leaves, scattering over the stone steps. Almost too bright.
He finds himself in the mountains of Datun.
Roaming slowly, wandering at ease. That is how Liu Zongyuan wrote in his notes on the hills.
Liu Zongyuan also loved drinking, and often hiked. Perhaps he even fished often. He only lived to forty-seven.
And he has already reached this age. Not a loss.
On the trail, he meets three young Western girls. They say they’re from Paris.
“Paris?” he says. “I was there. Had an old classmate teaching at university.”
Girls are delighted — finally someone to talk to. They chatter all the way, asking questions.
He smiles, answers them. Something is on his mind, but he doesn’t say it:
That old classmate, François — he’s been gone for years.
Paris. The basement. Hanging.
On the way home, he drives along Balaka Highway. The sky darkens.
Lately, François often shows up in his dreams.
A Dead Friend
“Am I dead too?” he asks François, standing before him.
“Why ask that?” “Because you’re dead,” he says.
“Is that so…?” François looks pale, distracted.
“Your wife and kids took your ashes back to Taiwan. I even went to your hometown in Miaoli to burn incense for you.”
“Oh…” François nods, as if remembering something. “Has it been many years?”
“Long enough.”
“Long enough…” He knows François is just going along with him.
“So what have you been doing, after dying?” he asks, just to make conversation.
“Just dead. Nothing else.”
“That’s it? Nothing at all?”
“No. Nothing,” François says.
He looks at his old friend. He had meant to ask more —
Do people feel anything after death? Heaven? Hell? Judgment?
Back on campus, they argued about these things every day.
But he doesn’t ask. François says nothing either.
The sound of wheels — from far away, bit by bit, slowly — reaches his ears.
He opens his eyes.
The hospital ceiling slides past, grid after grid. He’s being wheeled into the operating room.
Stage III.
Crossing
A gray emptiness.
A boat comes alongside.
A figure stands on it. Face unseen.
“Get on.”
“To where?”
“Across. Get on.”
“What’s over there?”
“Nothing. Get on.”
“Then why get on?”
“Do you have anywhere else to go? Get on.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Then… drink this.”
“What for?” “
No worries anymore.”
“I am not.”
The boat moves off.
He stays.
Xiaolan
A pressure. He can’t breathe.
Still the ceiling.
But now it’s still — neatly fixed in square panels, unlike at home.
François stands there again, pale as ever.
“Sit,” he says.
“I’ll stand.” François doesn’t move.
“So this time, I really died?”
“What do you think?”
He moves his hands, his feet. All there, but very weak. He can’t sit up.
He tries to recall the past days.
He was sick. What illness? Did he have surgery?
“Is dying frightening?” he asks.
During those days, at the stone table by Drunken Moon Lake, they drank, argued about such things still far away.
“It depends.”
“You? Were you afraid?”
“Afraid?” François rolls his eyes at him. “I hanged myself, remember?”
“So you know you can scare people,” he smiles faintly.
“I saw Xiaolan,” François says after a pause. “At night. Wandering over the lake.”
“Her…?”
“Didn’t go closer.”
“I only remember her with braids.”
“She still looks the same.”
“By the way, that summer…”
He doesn’t finish. He sees François’s lips move — as if about to say something, or maybe just a smile.
Neither of them speaks.
Before long, François fades, bit by bit, like a photograph losing its color.
Outside the window, no rain, but not sunny either.
He closes his eyes.
A seam of light — he can’t tell if it’s dawn or dusk — settles quietly on his eyelids. And strangely, it has weight, like a feather.
He feels he could just be here, quietly, for a while.
