“I know about your friendship too,” I said.
“Friendship?”
The two of them chortled.
“What’s friendship?” one asked the other.
“Haven’t a clue,” the other said.
Laughing away, they raised their heads, and two pairs of cavernous eyes looked at me. “You’re a newbie, are you?” one of them asked.
“He came with that cute girl,” the other said, before I had time to reply.
The two skeletons lowered their heads and with a titter resumed their game. It was as though they had never been arguing, as though neither of them had ever taken back a move.
After playing for a little while, one of them raised his head. “Do you know what board game we’re playing?”
I glanced at the movements of their hands. “Chinese chess.”
“Wrong. It’s Go.”
Soon the other one turned to me. “Now you know what we’re playing, right?”
“Of course,” I said. “You’re playing Go.”
“Wrong! It’s Chinese chess.”
They then asked me the following question at the same time: “Now what are we playing?”
“If it’s not Go, it’s got to be Chinese chess.”
“Wrong again!” they said. “Now we’re playing Five in a Row.”
They heaved with laughter, each of them making exactly the same gestures, pressing one hand against his own midriff and the other hand on the other’s shoulder. The two skeletons shook with laughter, like withered trees whose intersecting branches tremble together in the wind.
Afterward the two skeletons continued their game, but before long they were in an argument once more, because of yet another retracted move. It seemed to me that they were playing these games just in order to be able to argue, with each of them taking his turn to denounce the other’s record of retracting moves. I stood there listening to the history of their happy chess playing and the history of their happy arguments. Gleefully each fulminated against the other’s vile record of retracted moves, and when their respective surveys of past offenses finally went back as far as seven years earlier, I lost patience, knowing there were another seven or eight years of retracted moves still to be accounted for.
“Which of you is Zhang Gang?” I asked. I hesitated a moment, realizing suddenly the inappropri
ateness of referring to the other man as “the male surnamed Li,” as the newspapers at the time put it. “And which of you is Mr. Li?”
“Mr. Li?”
They looked at each other, then burst into gales of laughter.
“Why don’t you guess?” they both said.
I studied them carefully, and to me the two skeletons looked exactly alike. “I’ve no idea,” I told them. “You could be twins, as far as I can tell.”
“Twins?” Again they burst into laughter. Then, once more, they resumed their game in the most cordial of moods. The tempestuous argument of a moment earlier had vanished into thin air after my interruption.
Soon they were back to their old tricks, asking me, “Do you know what game we’re playing?”
“Chinese chess, Go, Five in a Row.” I recited all the possibilities.
“Wrong!” they chortled. “We’re playing Chinese checkers.”
Once again they burst out laughing and again I saw each of them gripping his midriff with one hand and clapping the other hand on his adversary’s shoulder. The two skeletons shook with a tidy rhythm.
I laughed too. More than ten years ago, the two of them had come here, six months apart. The grudge between them had not crossed the frontier between life and death. Enmity had been sealed off in that departed world.
My search continued endlessly, like the hands on a clock that go round and round but can never leave the dial. My father was nowhere to be found.
Several times I ran into a crowd of skeletons, dozens of them. They were not like the other skeletons that sometimes gathered together and sometimes separated — this crowd stayed consistently together as they walked, a little like the moon’s reflection on water, which keeps floating in a discrete shape no matter how the waves tug.
The fourth time I ran into this bunch, I came to a halt and so did they. We sized each other up. Their hands were linked and their bodies leaned on each other, and they grouped together like a flourishing tree whose branches spread high and low. I knew that among them there were men and women, old and young. I smiled and greeted them.
“Hello!” they responded in unison, a chorus of male and female voices, hoarse old voices and tender young voices, and I saw a cheerful outlook in their empty eyes.
“How many of you are there?” I asked.
“Thirty-eight,” they answered.
“Why are you always together?”
“We arrived at the same time,” a man’s voice answered.
“We’re all one family,” a woman’s voice added.
Then I heard a boy’s voice. “Why are you on your own?”
“I’m not entirely on my own.” I looked down at the black armband on my left arm. “I’m looking for my father. He’s wearing a railroad uniform.”
Another voice piped up from among the skeletons in front of me. “We haven’t seen anyone in a railroad uniform.”
“He may have changed his clothes before coming here,” I said.
The crisp voice of a little girl rang out. “Daddy, is he new here?”
“Yes,” the male voices said.
“Mom, is he new here?”
“That’s right,” the female voices said.
“Are they all your moms and dads?” I asked the little girl.
“That’s right,” she said. “In the past I just had one mom and one dad, but now I’ve got lots of moms and lots of dads.”
“How did you get here?” the boy who’d addressed me earlier asked.
“I think it was a fire,” I said.
“How come he’s not burned?” he asked the skeletons next to him.
I could feel their silent, rapt gaze. “After I saw the fire,” I told them, “I heard an explosion and the building must have collapsed.”
“Were you crushed to death?” the little girl asked.
“I think that’s maybe what happened, yes.”
“His face has been altered,” the little boy said.
“You’re right.”
“Are we pretty?” the little girl asked.
I looked awkwardly at the thirty-eight skeletons arrayed in front of me, unsure how to respond to the girl’s blunt inquiry.
“Everyone here says I keep getting prettier,” the little girl said.
“That’s true,” the boy said. “They say everyone who comes here just gets uglier, and we’re the only ones who get prettier.”
I hesitated for a moment. “I wouldn’t know,” I answered in the end.
The voice of an elderly person sounded among them. “We were so charred in the fire that when we got here we were like thirty-eight knots of charcoal. Later, the burned bits peeled off, leaving us as we are now. That’s why people say this.”
He recounted their story as the other thirty-seven listened silently. Now I knew their history, how, on the day of my father’s disappearance, that department store half a mile from my little shop caught on fire and was reduced to a pile of blackened ruins. The city government had reported that seven had died and twenty-one were injured, of whom two were in critical condition. On the Internet some said over fifty had perished, and some even claimed the death toll topped one hundred. I looked at the thirty-eight skeletons in front of me: they were the deleted dead. But what about their relatives?
“Why did your families not make a fuss?”
“They received threats, and they accepted hush money as well,” the old one answered. “We’re already dead, and just so long as our relatives can go on living an undisturbed life, we’ll be content.”