When he woke up again, a nurse was gently squeezing his arm.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Your mother died a few minutes ago. We were out in the hall, at our station.”
He pushed the button that released his bodysuit to movement, stood at her side. There she lay in the hospital bed, looking as she had while sleeping, or indeed as she had for the past decade or more. Maybe more calm, more pale. He kissed her forehead, stood upright, left the room.
After all the arrangements at the hospital had been made, he walked the ten or twelve blocks to her apartment. There was nowhere else to go; he had lent his apartment to one of his show’s assistants while he was gone.
At his mom’s, everything was just as it had been during his last several visits. Twenty years and more she had lived in this crowded little pair of rooms. Now they were empty, and yet all her furniture and things vibrated silently around him, as if speaking for her. It was as if she were in the tiny bathroom and would call to him at any moment. Ta Shu? He could hear exactly how she always said it, the timbre of her voice, the rising intonation, the question that she put into his name every time she said it. Ta Shu?
Then it suddenly seemed he actually did hear it, right out loud in the air. He shuddered in the bodysuit. In fact the room was quiet. He thought about what it would be like if he really did hear her voice calling him from the next room, how it would feel to hear a ghost speak; suddenly he was scared to be alone there in her place with her gone. Then that wave of fear passed, and he knew he was truly alone there, that there was nothing to fear. There was only sadness.
He was going to have to empty the place. Give away the furniture, the clothing, the kitchen implements. Give things away or throw them away. She had kept such a lot of junk. But there were always people who needed such things. These things would live on in other lives. They lived longer than people.
Then there was a meow at his feet, and he groaned. Was this cat hers? Was it a neighborhood stray that she fed scraps to? He would have to find out.
He sat on her bed. The cat rubbed against his ankles. He got up and found some cat food to put in a bowl for it, and it ate hungrily, making a crunching noise that filled the apartment. He looked down at it. He was exhausted and wanted to sleep, but felt reluctant to get in her bed. He lay down on top of it in his bodysuit, napped until he got cold. Then he got up, went to the bathroom, started cleaning up. First himself, then the place. As he knocked around he thought of an old poem that had always impressed him, first of all because of its title, “The Rain Cleared and the Breeze and Sunshine Are Superb as I Stroll Outside the Gate.” By Lu Yu, Song dynasty:
He found as he went through her desk and bedside table that she had kept little notebooks to write in. None of them were dated, and he couldn’t tell when she had written what. Some contained day poems, like the brief Buddhist things that widows had written in their old age for centuries. Most were filled with lists and brief notes to herself. Occasionally for a month or three she had written down brief accounts of her days, then she had appeared to tire of that and give up. One sequence of these diary notes had lasted longer than most, and by their content he saw that they came from the time right after his father had died. One line stuck him like a thorn:
Alone in the house. Must get used to it.
He stared at her crabbed handwriting. He saw how it must have been, and sat down in the nearest chair. A spasm of sorrow passed through him, followed after a while by a wash of relief, as he realized that his mom was now finally freed of the intense burden of staying happy after his father was gone. Twenty years of driven, relentless effort.
He sat there in the chair and thought about what a human life turned out to be. In the old days, women were said to go through stages—men too of course, but for women it was structured very particularly: milk teeth, hair pinned up, marriage, children, rice and salt, widowhood. Most of those stages were so social, so busy, every moment all entangled with people and work and talk; and then at the end suddenly there you were alone in a room, like a prisoner serving time in solitary. Just because of the passage of time, in the ordinary course of things. It was strange. He should have come home more often.
The old outskirts of Beijing were long gone, buried under the remorseless spread of the city in all directions. To the east the endless high-rises of Jing-Jin-Ji had replaced the mountains of trash where Ta Shu had once upon a time taken things to acquaintances he liked among the junk dealers who lived in the landfills they mined. Those people had built their shacks out of discarded materials, then as the landfills filled they had moved with them and rebuilt in the new sites. Now Jing-Jin-Ji filled all the gaps, making a supercity bigger than Luxembourg, bigger than New England. An early manifestation of the urbanization that was threatening to pave all China, then the entirety of planet Earth.
Now stuff like his mom’s had to be taken south to the Fuxing Garbage Station, where a big yard was home to giant sorting containers and compactors. So after first dividing his mother’s things into categories, Ta Shu did that.
The sorting itself was hard. First came things that could still be used by her neighbors and friends; that was a lot of it, thankfully. Someone volunteered to take the cat, which was a relief. But there was still so much that could not be given away, much less sold, not that he was in the mood to sell anything. The neighbors came in and took all the furniture, shabby though it was; also much of her clothing. A group of women friends came in and packed her underclothes in boxes to throw away, so that he wouldn’t have to. This was what happened when you didn’t have daughters. The little clothing that remained he gave to a local charity shop. Same with kitchen utensils and implements, although she had saved everything she had ever owned, it seemed, and there were cabinets filled with boxes containing broken dishes, woks, pots and pans, glasses and so on. These were dangerous boxes to fish around in, but he carefully removed everything of any value, and then was left with a few boxes of useless stuff. All junk, all trash; she had saved even her trash.
When everything was sorted into its proper category, he used his wristpad to rent a bike and trailer from a local line of them locked in a row, then tied the boxes of trash onto the trailer. When all was ready he headed south through the crowded streets toward Fuxing Road.
This slow pedal through the heavy gravity of his grief quickly took on the nature of a penance or a funeral march. Almost always when sadness came to him he felt it as an emptying out, a going away. Occasional stabs of sorrow struck, but mostly he was gone and did not feel things; that emptiness was his sadness. It always made him want to feel something, anything, because anything would be less sad than the emptiness. So sometimes he would inflict things on himself in times like this, do hard things like this bike ride through the insane traffic of Beijing, risking his life with every turn of the handlebars. It would have been obviously crazy if there weren’t so many other people doing it. Traffic on the smaller streets was still quite heavy, and small trucks and cars predominated everywhere. Often in the crush of gridlocked cars, people threading their way forward on bikes made better time. The vehicles on the streets were all electric now, which was good for the air but bad for safety; they made almost no sound, just a kind of singing hum that the government had ordered added to them, a hum that did not clearly Doppler its approach and departure as the old rumbling gas engines had. A very dangerous world, therefore, these streets. But that was just what he wanted, so it was perfect for his mood. Dangerous, dolorous, finicky, frustrating. Weave through the traffic jams, avoid being crushed like a bug under the big singing lorries, all carrying their goods and people around the infinite city. Ah Mother! He really should have come back more often. All his life he had been a wanderer, seldom going home; his dad hadn’t cared and so he hadn’t cared. But his mom had cared, and now here he was pedaling her sad old junk to the trash heap. Sad, sad, sad. Maybe he was feeling it this time.