Chapter 02
It opened its mouth and said, “I don’t know whether everyone turns into a ball of ghost fire like me after they die.”
After pondering for a long time, it said again, “Maybe your mother...”
Chen Huai suddenly reached out and grabbed at it, but ghost fire had no body. His fingers passed forcefully through the middle of that blue phantom.
It was obvious Chen Huai did not want to bring up that matter, but this blue ghost was utterly tactless. It immediately continued, “If you help me find my memories from when I was alive, maybe I can help you find your mother’s ghost.”
It floated over to the car window. There was no trace of blue on the grimy glass. The ghost stayed quietly for a while, knowing Chen Huai had no way to speak to it right now, so it said nothing more and gave him time to think.
The police car turned into the police substation on Zhongxin Road. Two officers led Chen Huai inside, told him to sit on a bench in the lobby and wait for a while, then opened the door and went into the office.
It was mealtime now. There were not many people in the lobby, only one or two policewomen answering phone calls. Hardly anyone paid attention to him. Chen Huai sat there for a while with the ghost fire pressed close against him.
“Why do you always stick so close to me?” Chen Huai shifted an inch away.
It crowded closer. “I’m too weak. I need a little yang energy from a grown man.”
He gave a cold laugh. “What are you, some female demon?”
“I used to be a person.” Its voice was wistful. “Now I’m a soul.”
“What do you think about what I said earlier?” The ghost fire bounced up and down on the back of his hand as if it were playing on a trampoline.
Chen Huai stared straight ahead. Faint voices drifted through the half-closed office door. Several officers were gossiping during their meal break, talking about how people had started dying again in the low-rent housing complex in Yuzhong District, leaving everyone on edge.
Someone else said it was all old folks who were dying anyway. Their time had come.
Chen Huai suddenly thought of Old Man Sun.
The first time he met Old Man Sun, the man was already senile.
Back then, Chen Huai had just run away from home. The room had been too stuffy, so he was crouching by the entrance to catch some air when Old Man Sun came in through the main gate, carrying two steamed buns in his hand. He shuffled past Chen Huai, then backed up again. On his calm, aged face, an expression of exasperation at someone’s failure to live up to expectations suddenly appeared.
He sharply called him “Xiao Yao.” Chen Huai did not know which yao it was. Maybe it was xiao yao, “the youngest one,” spoken with an accent. It did not matter. It had nothing to do with him anyway.
Old Man Sun sighed and lamented, asking how he had gone running around everywhere again, and what they would do if human traffickers kidnapped him. He should have stayed at home and waited for his mother to come pick him up.
Chen Huai frowned. He knew the old man had mistaken him for someone else and was just about to lose his patience when the old man sighed again.
“Honestly. I’ve been waiting for you to come home and eat. Those duck intestines, duck feet, and edamame I bought for you have been sitting there since yesterday. If you don’t eat them soon, they’ll go bad. I just went out and bought two more fresh meat buns. Weren’t you pestering me for them just a few days ago?”
Chen Huai stood there blankly for a moment. He thought of when his mother was still around. Their family had eaten those same cheap braised dishes too. Three or four yuan’s worth could last them two meals. They would cook a bowl of thin, steaming porridge, and sometimes buy some chicken feet or duck carcasses as well. But his mother did not eat offal, and his father was hardly ever home, so most of what they bought ended up being eaten by Chen Huai alone.
That brief moment of hesitation was all it took for Chen Huai to be led home by the old man, pushed into a chair, and forced to eat.
No reason to turn down a free meal. Having someone feed you was a good thing.
So Chen Huai decided he would fill his stomach first and worry about tomorrow afterward. Whatever happened, it was better than starving to death and becoming a hungry ghost.
All that had happened in the summer. Now it was winter. New Year was almost here, and Old Man Sun was dead too.
The doors of the police station stood open, and the cold wind outside came howling into the lobby. A policewoman in a padded jacket stamped her feet as she went to close them, when she suddenly heard the boy sitting on the bench speaking for no apparent reason.
“If I help you, I’ll be able to see my mom one more time?”
“...”
“I understand.”
The policewoman looked around. She had not heard him clearly, but she felt a chill down her spine. She only glanced in Chen Huai’s direction a few times, said nothing, and went off to eat from her lunchbox.
Not long afterward, the officer who had brought him in called him into the office to take his statement and asked him a number of very detailed questions. The statement took a full two hours. Afterward, the officer had him sign and fingerprint the printed record, then let him go.
When Chen Huai walked out of the police station, light snow was falling outside. Step by step, his shoes sank into piles of snow made up of old snow and fresh, making dull, muffled sounds.
Afraid of being extinguished, the little ghost fire trembled as it burrowed into the collar of his down jacket. Chen Huai lowered his eyes and glanced at it. When he spoke, the vibration of his voice rumbled through his throat.
“You were a woman before, weren’t you? Have you no sense of shame?”
“But I’m a ghost now. What do I need shame for? All I need is a little yang energy.”
Chen Huai frowned. “You’re not going to suck me dry, are you?”
It was generous about it. “No. I’ll leave you some.”
“Besides,” it said with complete certainty, “what do you need so much yang energy for? You might as well give me some.”
Chen Huai fell silent, unable to answer something so shameless.
Then it started talking about how warm it was inside his down jacket.
He shoved his frost-reddened hands into his pockets. When he breathed out, the warm vapor from his mouth curled upward like clouds of nicotine smoke, blurring his vision.
While waiting for the bus, Chen Huai grew bored and started chatting with the thing inside his clothes.
“What’s your name?”
It answered, “A melancholy corpse...”
“I mean your real name.” Chen Huai cut it off.
Only after a long silence did it finally say, “...Qin Yao.”
The ghost fire poked out from his collar, seeming to study his expression. When it saw that Chen Huai showed no particular reaction, it burrowed back inside.
He merely commented flatly, “What an ordinary name.”
Qin Yao retorted sullenly, “Your name isn’t any better.”
Once they had exhausted all the trash talk, Chen Huai finally remembered to ask something serious.
“If you find all your memories from when you were alive, you’ll come back to life? Then could my mom come back too?”
Qin Yao said, “No. Dead is dead. You can’t come back to life.”
“Then what happens if you find all your memories?” His voice dropped another degree.
“It would make me happy, I guess.”
Chen Huai found that talking to this ghostly thing often left him with something stuck in his throat.
After giving him that answer, Qin Yao keenly sensed his mood plummeting and added, “You know, people are made up of memories. Even after they die.”
“So?” Chen Huai did not even lift his eyes.
“So if you could see your mother, it would be through her memories,” Qin Yao said. “I’m guessing you never knew what she was like before she gave birth to you.”
He had never thought to find out before. Later, he had no chance to know.
Before giving birth to him, Sun Hongping had been a woman. Afterward, all that remained of her were the identities of “mother” and “wife.” Before, she could live for herself. Afterward, it seemed she could only live for Chen Huai and her husband.
No wonder she had died in the end. People like them had not been enough to sustain Sun Hongping’s life.
Chen Huai only knew that his mother had lived a difficult life. He had seen the hardship of the latter half of it with his own eyes, but there was no way for him to know about the hardship of the first half. She had never spoken of it.
The bonds and memories between people only begin from the moment they meet. Everything that came before has to be sought out before it can be brought to light.
Chen Huai did not want to talk about any of this with anyone, so he merely patted his clothes and said evenly, “...You talk too much.”
Because he had put all his money beneath the potted lily of the valley outside Old Man Sun’s window the night before, Chen Huai now had only a few coins left, just enough to take the bus a few times.
But because of the snow on the roads, the city buses were moving very slowly. It took Chen Huai two hours to get home. He did not return to his own room first. Instead, he entered the stairwell and went up to the fifth floor.
Old Man Sun’s door was locked. He probably had no family, and no one had come to collect his belongings.
Chen Huai had seen him once just yesterday afternoon. The old man had enthusiastically washed rice and cooked porridge, muttering incomprehensibly to himself the entire time. Chen Huai knew he would not understand him anyway, so he treated Old Man Sun like someone he could pour his heart out to and told him that he had decided to die the next day.
To his surprise, Old Man Sun had understood. He grabbed Chen Huai’s hand, his lips wrinkled, and kept asking, “Why? Why?”
Chen Huai silently watched him, watched the white porridge on the stove steaming thickly, and answered in a calm voice, “What do you mean, why? If you can’t go on living, then you die. A lot of people living here want to die. It’s not just me. There’s nothing strange about it.”
Fate was a strange thing. Chen Huai thought that Sun Fusheng definitely had not understood what he was trying to say at the time, because after Chen Huai finished speaking, the old man had even nodded solemnly before turning around and continuing to cook.
And yet he had left before Chen Huai did.
The police said he had probably fallen by accident. The old building had no safety measures whatsoever, and the windows high above the ground had no railings. Hanging laundry out or watering the flowers on the balcony, all it would take was one careless moment to fall.
Chen Huai had the old man’s key. He first retrieved his thousand-odd yuan and put it back into his pocket, then unlocked the door and saw that nothing inside had been disturbed.
Although the old man was senile, he was still capable of looking after himself and usually liked to keep things clean. Everything was arranged neatly and tidily.
There was no sofa in the house, only two wooden recliners placed side by side, with thick cushions laid over them to serve as a sofa. The television was an old model from decades ago, square and covered in various buttons. A piece of white lace cloth had been draped over the set-top box to keep off the dust.
There were only two shriveled apples left in the fruit bowl on the table, their skins pocked with wormholes. The window stood wide open.
That was where Old Man Sun had jumped from.
Chen Huai leaned against the door and studied it for a while before shifting his gaze to the wall. There was only a framed commemorative portrait of a one-year-old boy hanging there. Not even the old man’s wedding photo was displayed. Instead, he had hung up a picture of his grandson.
“Why was your diary in his house?” Chen Huai asked.
Qin Yao answered, “He picked it up as scrap, so I followed him back. But he couldn’t see me, so I just floated around. I watched this place for a while and tried a lot of households. You were the only one who could see me.”
Chen Huai did not question it. He had seen a ghost already, after all. His heart had grown considerably stronger, and he was no longer surprised by any kind of coincidence.
“Where’s the diary?”
Qin Yao drifted around uncertainly, her voice equally unsure. “I don’t know where he put it either. Why don’t we just look around?”
“Don’t go through a dead person’s belongings,” Chen Huai said. “We’re not his family.”
He was only the old man’s fake grandson, someone he had mistaken for another person. Even when he came here to eat, he had never touched Old Man Sun’s things. Deep down, he felt that only the real “Xiao Yao” had that right.
“If we don’t look through his things, how are we supposed to find it?” Qin Yao sounded troubled. “You’re a living person, so you can’t. But I’m already dead. I’m one of the dead too, so I should be allowed to, right?”
The blue ghost fire bumped into things here and there, as if it really had a nose that could smell the scent of its own diary. It made several rounds through the room before finally stopping in front of the wardrobe in the old man’s bedroom and calling for Chen Huai to open it.
“I have a feeling it’s in there,” she said.
The ghost could not touch anything, so it could only use Chen Huai’s hands to pull open the wardrobe. A few old coats hung sparsely inside. The wardrobe was just as damp as the one in Chen Huai’s home, if not more so.
On the shelf below sat a shoebox. Its edges were worn and damaged, and it looked as though it had been there for many years. Qin Yao circled the shoebox several times before finally declaring with certainty, “It’s here! Help me open it.”
Chen Huai felt as though he were being ordered around like a servant, but he could not be bothered to say anything. When he lifted the lid of the shoebox, there really was a leather-bound notebook inside. Old Man Sun had probably thought it felt nice and kept it to use for himself.
Aside from the notebook, the box contained only some identification documents and a mess of receipts from various purchases. Chen Huai had no intention of touching those. He only took out the notebook, unfastened the clasp, and opened it.
On the first page, written only in a bent-nib fountain pen dipped in blue ink, were a few words:
Diary for the Fish with the Broken Tail
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