ingly. The twenty-seven babies were medical refuse, he declared, and the hospital had done nothing wrong: trash has to be dumped, after all.
A directive came down from above, and the newspaper pulled the report that the two journalists had filed. But they wouldn’t take this lying down: they posted the story and the photos on the Internet. Public opinion was outraged, and on social media criticism hailed down on our city authorities like a spray of bullets. Only now did the hospital admit it had made a mistake, conceding that it had not done a good job of disposing of medical refuse and saying it had already punished those responsible. For the hospital to repeatedly refer to the dead babies as “medical refuse” enraged the netizens, and in the face of even more virulent commentary the media spokesperson for the city government issued a statement that the twenty-seven medical-refuse objects would be disposed of appropriately. They would be treated as human and cremated, and their ashes would then be buried.
I went to the morgue to pay my respects to Li Yuezhen. The reception room was lined on all sides with wreaths of flowers, a white ribbon inscribed “In deep mourning for Liu Xincheng” pinned to each wreath. I didn’t know who Liu Xincheng was, but with so many people dropping off wreaths, this person clearly had to be either of great wealth or of high rank. I did not see Li Yuezhen, and the rows of wreaths somehow made the reception room look bare and empty. I began to wonder if I had come to the wrong place.
At this point I noticed a small chamber off to one side. When I entered its doorway, I found that a large white cloth had been laid on the floor, and the uneven contours of the cloth made me suspect there was a body underneath. I squatted down and pulled the cloth aside: there was Li Yuezhen. She lay in a white dress with a crowd of dead babies around her, as though she were their mother.
Tears streamed down my face. This woman who had mothered me during my formative years lay there peacefully, her face still maintaining its familiar air. I gazed forlornly at her now-frozen expression and inwardly cried “Mom!” as I wiped away my tears.
Late that night, a sinkhole suddenly opened up. Hospital staff on duty at the time, along with some patients and local residents, heard an almighty roar, and people rushed out in panic, thinking there had been an earthquake, to discover that the morgue had been sucked down a huge hole. The sudden appearance of this gaping pit inspired widespread panic. Fearful of being trapped indoors, patients and local residents crowded onto the streets; only those critically ill remained in their sickbeds, leaving their fate to the hand of providence.
The evacuees, though still shaken, began to feel grateful to Old Man Heaven, saying he had a good eye, letting the morgue collapse but sparing the taller buildings nearby — if that sinkhole had moved a few hundred feet to one side or the other, a big building would have collapsed and the death toll would surely be horrendous. “Oh, thank you, Lord!” people mumbled, and one tearful old man added, “What could collapse did, and what couldn’t collapse didn’t. Old Man Heaven is really on our side.”
Panic, after spreading the whole night through, began to recede with the light of day. The city government attributed the sinkhole — measured as a hundred feet wide and fifty feet deep — to excessive pumping of groundwater. Five inspectors were lowered into the hole by ropes, and an hour later they emerged to report that the interior of the morgue was still intact, but the walls and ceiling had developed cracks.
Spectators arrived in throngs. They stood next to where the morgue had once been and admired the hole. “It’s practically a perfect circle,” they marveled, “as though drawn in advance with a compass! Even old wells are not this round.”
It was a couple of days before people remembered that Li Yuezhen and the twenty-seven babies had been laid out in the morgue, but the inspectors said they had not found a single corpse. Li Yuezhen and the dead babies had mysteriously disappeared.
A reporter interviewed the hospital staff member responsible for cleaning the morgue, and he said that when he left work that afternoon they were all still lying in that chamber. Had they been cremated? the reporter asked. The staff member said no, that the funeral parlor did not operate in the evening and no cremations would have been done. The reporter then went to the hospital office, and the people there could not explain how Li Yuezhen and the babies had vanished. It’s just too peculiar, they said: surely corpses can’t climb out of a hole and slip away by themselves.
Hao Xia, just off the plane and in the throes both of grief and jet lag, came with her father to the hospital, hoping for a last glimpse of her mother, but the staff had to tell her they did not know where she was.
News of the mysterious disappearance of Li Yuezhen and the twenty-seven babies spread throughout the city and appeared on the front pages of several websites. As interest grew, rumors flew, and on the Internet people freely speculated that there must be some awful secret lying behind all this. Although the local media kept silent, having been ordered to refrain from any reporting, media outlets based elsewhere were eager to make the most of this story, sending their reporters in by plane and train and car, and getting all set to provide saturation coverage.
At a hastily arranged news conference, an official from the civil administration bureau announced that Li and the babies had been sent to the funeral parlor for cremation on the afternoon before the collapse.
“Were the relatives informed?” a reporter asked.
It had been impossible to contact the babies’ relatives, the official said.
“What about Li Yuezhen’s relatives? Couldn’t you contact them?” the reporter asked.
The official was lost for an answer. “Thank you, everyone,” he said. The news conference was over.
Late that afternoon the civil administration official and a hospital representative delivered an urn to the Hao family, saying that they had made the decision to cremate because the weather was hot and Li Yuezhen’s remains could not be easily preserved. Hao Xia, though she had not slept for over thirty hours, still had her wits about her. “It’s only spring now!” she cried furiously.
The morgue attendant then changed his story, claiming that Li Yuezhen and the babies had indeed been sent to the funeral parlor for cremation, and he himself had helped load them into the hearse. Soon, someone who said he worked for a bank put up a post on the Internet, disclosing that five thousand yuan had been deposited in the attendant’s personal account that day — hush money, he suspected.
So as to calm such rumors, the city government asked the journalists to come to the funeral parlor to inspect a line of twenty-seven tiny urns, explaining that all the babies had been cremated and would shortly be buried. But with this matter apparently settled, a further wrinkle emerged, for somebody soon reported that the urns of Li Yuezhen and the babies were actually filled with the ashes of other people cremated on that same day. When the relatives of those cremated that day got wind of this, they rushed to open their urns and soon became convinced that a lot of ash was missing, even though they weren’t sure just how much ash was normal. One reporter made a point of going to the funeral parlor, hoping that someone there would be brave enough to stand up and admit that the ashes had been tampered with. But all the workers denied this categorically and their leaders dismissed it as Internet rumor. One joke making the rounds in cyberspace was that the funeral parlor workers were definitely going to get a jumbo-sized bonus this month.
I disentangled myself from memories that were now growing tight and thick, as though threading my way out of a forest dense with vegetation. Weary thoughts lay down and rested, but my body continued to move through a boundless void, an empty silence. In the air no birds circled and in the water no fish swam and on the earth nothing grew.