Some people bought sunglasses and put them on right away, so they could focus more intently on the tiny figure high up on the Pengfei Tower. I heard them say that they could see a policeman sticking his head out of a window next to the girl. He must be trying to talk her out of it, they said. A minute later, the spectators wearing the ten-yuan sunglasses began to shout: “The policeman is sticking his arm out!” “And the girl is sticking hers out, too!” “She must have changed her mind.” But almost immediately there was a uniform chorus of “Ah!” and then a sudden hush, and moments later I heard a heavy thump as the girl’s body hit the ground.
The last sight that Liu Mei left in that world was a spurt of blood from her mouth and ears. And the force of the impact split the legs of her jeans wide open.
“You can still call me Mouse Girl,” she said. “Were you there when I fell?”
I nodded.
“Someone said I was a terrible sight, with blood all over my face. Is that true?”
“Who said that?”
“Someone who came over later.”
I said nothing.
“Was I really that scary?”
I shook my head. “When I saw you, it was as though you were sleeping, meek and mild.”
“Did you see any blood?”
I hesitated, reluctant to mention it. “Your jeans split open,” I said.
She gasped with surprise. “He didn’t tell me that.”
“Who didn’t?”
“The man who came later, I mean.”
I nodded.
“My jeans split open,” she murmured. “In what way?”
“They split into strips.”
“What do you mean?”
I thought for a moment. “A bit like the strips of a cotton mop.”
She looked down at her pants, a pair of long, wide pants — men’s pants.
“Somebody has changed my pants,” she said.
“They don’t look like yours.”
“You’re right,” she said, “I don’t have any pants like this.”
“Some kind person must have done that for you,” I said.
She nodded. “How did you come over?” she asked.
I thought back to that last scene in the Tan Family Eatery. “I was eating noodles in a restaurant and reading a newspaper when the kitchen caught on fire. There was an explosion, and I don’t remember anything after that.”
“You’ll hear the rest of it from one of the later arrivals,” she said knowingly. “I didn’t really want to die,” she added. “I was just angry.”
“I know,” I replied. “When the policeman stretched out his hand, you stretched out yours.”
“You saw that?”
I didn’t, but the people with the ten-yuan sunglasses did. I nodded all the same, to confirm that I saw it.
“I’d been standing there a long time, and the wind was so strong and so cold, I maybe just got frozen stiff. I wanted to grab his hand, but my foot slipped — I might have stepped on some ice….There was saturation coverage in the papers, I’m told.”
“For three days,” I said. “No more than that.”
“That’s still a lot. What did the papers say?”
“They said your boyfriend gave you a knockoff iPhone, not a real one, and so you killed yourself.”
“That’s not right,” she said. “The thing was that he deceived me, claiming it was a real iPhone when it was a fake. If he hadn’t given me anything, I wouldn’t have got mad. I just couldn’t stand him lying to me. The papers are just making things up. What else did they say?”
“They said that after giving you the fake iPhone your boyfriend went back home to tend to his father.”
“Well, that was true.” She nodded. “But I didn’t kill myself over some fake merchandise.”
“The journal you had on your QQ space was published in the papers too.”
She sighed. “I wrote that for him to read, and wrote it that way on purpose, because I wanted him to come back right away. I would have forgiven him if he had just apologized.”
“But instead you climbed to the top of the Pengfei Tower.”
“He never had the guts to respond to me. The only thing I could think of was to climb the Pengfei Tower. That would make him show up, I thought.”
She paused for a moment. “Did the papers say anything about him being upset when I died?”
I shook my head. “They had no news about him.”
“The policeman told me my boyfriend had rushed back and was down below, in an awful state.” She looked at me, perplexed. “That’s why I reached for the policeman’s hand.”
I hesitated for a moment. “He didn’t come, I don’t think. At least, none of the papers said he had.”
“So the policeman lied to me too.”
“He said that to save you.”
“I know.” She gave a little nod. “Did the papers mention him later?”
“No.”
“He kept his head down the whole time, the little creep,” she said bitterly.
“Maybe he never heard,” I said. “Perhaps he never went online and never saw what you wrote in your journal. He wouldn’t have seen our papers where he went.”
“That’s true,” she admitted. “He can’t have known.”
“He must know now,” I said.
I walked with her a long way. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’d like to sit down on a chair.”
The open land on all sides created an enormous emptiness around us, and the sky and the earth were all we could see. There were no trees in the distance and no river flowing; we heard no rustle of breeze through the grass and no sound of footsteps.
“There are no chairs here,” I said.
“I’d like to sit down on a wooden chair,” she continued. “Not a concrete one or a metal one.”
“You can sit down on whatever kind of chair you like,” I said.
“I already have the chair in mind,” she said, “and I’m already sitting on it. It’s a wooden bench. You have a seat, too.”
“All right,” I said.
As we walked, we sat on the wooden bench that we had imagined. She seemed to be sitting at one end and I at the other, and I felt her looking at me.
“I’m tired,” she said. “I feel like leaning on your shoulder….
Forget it, you’re not him. I can’t lean on your shoulder.”
“You can lean on the back of the bench,” I said.
As she walked, she leaned back. “I’m leaning against the back of the bench,” she said.
“Do you feel better now?”
“Yes, I do.”
We walked on in silence, and it seemed as though we were relaxing on a wooden bench.
A good deal of time seemed to pass, and in her imagination she rose from the bench and said, “Let’s go.”
I nodded, and together we left the bench of our imagination.
It seemed as though we were walking on at a more rapid pace.
“I’ve been looking for him all this time,” she said morosely. “But I can’t find him anywhere. By now he should know what happened to me. He won’t be lying low any more, surely. He must be looking for me.”
“The two of you are separated now,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s there and you’re here.”
She bowed her head. “That’s true,” she said.
“He must feel terrible,” I said.
“He’s bound to,” she said. “He loved me so much, he must be looking for a burial plot for me now, so I can have a good resting place.”
Saying this, she gave a sigh. “He’s got no money,” she went on. “And his friends are just as poor as he is. How will he work up the money to buy me a burial plot?”
“He’ll think of something.”
“That’s true,” she said. “He’d do anything for me, and he’ll figure it out.”