I tried again this weekend. Foolish of me, really, to think that anything I do can measure up to her work. I should have gotten help. Ping, Xiao, anyone. Anyone who feels more than grief and regret when it comes to her.
We were happy once, I know that. Why, then, does one moment of parting sour everything that has come before?
~~~
I found her guqin. Gathering dust in my attic.
She haunts me still, it seems.
I thought I would have gotten used to the needle-like pain after years and years of the same thing. Was last year all for naught? Talking to old friends, unleashing the emptiness that lived inside me for almost half of my conscious lifetime.
I thought I would get better. That the guilt would slowly fade if I remembered how much she loved all of us.
But here it is, burrowing. Above the surface. See, I am here.
I used to be able to crush it.
She knew how to be human, however. Change, the only constant. And when I took a peek of the world below, more out of curiosity than anything, she convinced me to join them. Abandon my old banality and care for something, for once.
For the first time in years, I allow myself to resent her.
Ignorance is bliss, and she knew that. Yet she chose to open my eyes to a path that I was never meant to understand.
I am familiar enough with human philosophy. The journey is the very point of living, they say, in an effort to give their short lifespans some meaning. I understood that a long time ago. This will pass, I tell myself. It all passes eventually.
In the present, there is only regret, and my fingerprints making dents in the inch-old dust that coats the strings of the guqin.
~~~
I woke up from a dream.
The details slip away from me as I head downstairs from my apartment, wishing to set myself in motion if only to get rid of that hollow feeling, not unlike missing a step on a stair.
There was me, standing on… something. And all around, nothing.
I do not remember what I saw, but I know that only potent emptiness awaited me if I ever stepped off my perch.
What was concerning was how eager I was to take the first step, embrace the void that slept within my mind. There, at least, I would not bear the burden of remembrance. Wasn’t that what I bargained for? To put down my sense of duty, live as a human might?
Still, I did not move, even when the ground split in two beneath me, and I woke up.
The emptiness continues to cling onto me, and it isn’t until I am leaning against a railing, watching the sun rise against the blood-red sea, that I recognise it as fear.
Fear that I would fall so easily to temptation, to throw out the version of her that lives only in my mind because of the pain it causes me. I’m sorry, I say to her over and over again. It was a moment of weakness, and I’ll be damned if she isn’t preserved elsewhere other than my fragile human mind.
‘Fancy seeing you here.’
I turn around slowly, and there he is, balancing on the armrest of a bench. Childe tilts his head, indicating my hands. ‘Getting some practice in?’
I realise with a jolt that the erhu is in my hands, its case laying open to the side. I must have picked it up subconsciously, wanting something that was close to my understanding of her. Luckily Childe doesn’t seem to judge, instead looking on curiously like he expected me to do something.
He moves to make space for me on the bench. No melodies come to mind, so I settle for absent-mindedly drawing the bow across the strings. A simple scale, ascending then descending.
‘Pentatonic,’ says Childe. ‘Seems like a pattern that Liyue’s traditional music is fond of following.’
I don’t reply, changing tack. The seven-note scale Childe should be more familiar with echoes in the early morning. He watches me, the sunlight turning the red of his hair into a flaming halo.
‘You’ve got something on your mind,’ he says. ‘No, it’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. It just… sounded too much like Anthon’s violin practice after he’s had a bad day at school.’
There’s no hiding it, then. If it were even possible in the first place. I change tactics.
‘What are you doing here at this hour?’
He shrugs. ‘Couldn’t sleep.’
‘Insomnia?’
‘No, not really. There’s… nothing is enough to really wear me out, y’know.’
From a man who hunts debtors for a living. His statement calls into question multiple details of his life, but I spare him the awkwardness.
I can offer him nothing else but silence, and he repays me in kind. The sun is half-risen. The street vendors should be setting up at around this time. Strange, then, how everything is so oddly silent. Maybe it’s a holiday, and I’ve missed the memo.
I turn around, about to ask Childe, when something catches my eye.
This neighbourhood is relatively new, the result of the Yuheng’s efforts. It shows in the sheer height of the buildings, an even split between residential and office. I have to crane my neck to look up at the pleasant indigo of the sky, and the long, sinuous shadow curled against it, its claws gripping the edge of a roof.
It returns my gaze, peeking over the edge of the roof to look down. Its antennae twitch, and in the silence of the early morning I can hear the clack, clack of pairs and pairs of legs as it repositions.
Its scaly feet scratch against the roof, and it lowers itself, coiling around the upper windows of the building. The faint sunlight glints off of its golden scales, the pale bone of its claws and antlers. It blinks, one golden eye at a time.
I hold its gaze. It looks back, but I have a feeling that it is not looking at me.
I turn to my left. Childe’s head is tilted back, his gaze fixed on something distant.
‘Childe.’ I dislike how soft my voice sounds. ‘What are you looking at?’
He turns to me, and the spell breaks. All at once, like water crashing through a broken dam, is the sound of the city. Vendors calling like crows, children running down the streets, leaving their sleep-deprived parents behind. Doors click open under the keys of their shopkeepers, and like it's been tugged by a string, the sun is fully risen. The soft golden light heralds a new day.
I am reminded of flame again as Childe tilts his head. ‘I should be asking you that. What were you looking at?’
He smiles, not meeting my eyes. He looks up once more, shielding his eyes from the sun.
Reflected in those cold blue eyes is the end of a scaly tail before it vanishes over the edge of a roof.
Aren’t you a terrible liar, I think to myself. He smiles at me again, tells me he’s going to work. I watch him disappear around the street corner, clenching and unclenching my hands. My gloves are soaked with sweat. Cold. Winter approaches, then. How fitting.
~~~
With the first frost comes our first client of the season. A middle-aged man, finally gone after a month of being in a coma. His widow sobs in the reception room of the parlour as the director gets to work on her husband next door, as per her request.
I hand her a box of tissues. She takes it and sets it on her lap, not touching it. I allow her silence as she fiddles with a loose thread on her dress.
She finally speaks. ‘He’s not the only one.’
I blink slowly. ‘Pardon?’
‘He’s not the only one,’ she repeats. She twines the thread around a finger, pulling. Her finger turns pale as the blood rushes to her fingertip. ‘Asleep like that.’
She sniffs, more out of disdain than habit. ‘They wouldn’t let me see him. But I know. He was still there. He could have woken up.’
I think it wise to not reply.
‘He was talking. I could hear him when I slept,’ she mumbles, unspooling the thread. ‘Asking me to help him. But I couldn’t see him. It was all too dark, and there were… centipedes. I don’t like centipedes.’
Grief brings out the irrationality that lives in every human being, but there is something in her words that makes me stop and listen. Like a spider with its web, her fingers working the thread until it begins to fray and fall apart. And I am the fly.
‘Scuttling. All scuttling, keeping me from him. I should hate it for stopping me, but I feel as if… it has protected me.’
She drops her thread, the glimmer in her eyes fading. And there she is again, the ageing, grieving widow.
‘Give him his final peace, will you?’ she asks me. I nod.
‘We will honour him with our traditions.’
Down the hall, a door creaks and Hu Tao’s head peeks out. Underneath her hexagram hat with the crooked plum blossom in its brim, her hair is frazzled. She’s been threading her hands through it, and that sends something heavy to the pit of my stomach.
‘Zhongli,’ she hisses, the sound carrying across the corridor. ‘Come here.’
I give the widow one last glance before entering the autopsy room. It is always kept cold, but this is a different kind of cold. Hu Tao notices my shivering and turns up the temperature.
The body is covered with a sheet. Hu Tao wastes no time and throws the sheet to the floor, her eyes wide as she points to its neck.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘They say he died of an unspecified illness.’
Her gloved hands find the man’s throat and peel back a thin layer of skin. I recognise the clean cut as her own work. She continues to peel back the skin, and I find myself taking a step closer. Something terrible lurks there, but the need to know draws me ever closer.
I expect to see rot, signs of sickness that creeps underneath the skin, slowly suffocating its host. Instead, Hu Tao’s fingers go straight through nonexistent flesh and sinew to land on bone. I can hear the click as her fingernails drag against the vertebrae through her gloves.
I feel myself inhale.
His entire throat is gone. Without so much as a scratch on his skin. I look up at Hu Tao, and a mutual understanding passes between us: we will take this to the grave.
‘You’ll look into this, right?’ says Hu Tao. For once, standing there and staring into the unknown, she looks her age. ‘You always know how to make sense of these things.’
I try to ignore the silent plea in her words and nod. She pulls the skin back up and turns away, fists clenching and unclenching. To desecrate the dead like this is a personal affront to her, and her family’s trade. In a way, I understand. A legacy like this should be kept spotless.
I place a hand on her shoulder and tell her I will help. She sighs deeply and turns to me again, averting her gaze from the corpse.
‘There’s more,’ she says, indicating its left eye.
I take the gloves she hands me. Its left eye is open, and it is only until I get closer that I realise it is due to the fact that it is missing an eyelid. Almost on instinct, I tap the side of his skull.
The eye rolls back, then falls straight through.
~~~
That afternoon, I walk home instead of taking the subway, partially because I had forgotten my wallet at home once more. As luck would have it, a crowd is gathered around a pile of crates, a makeshift stage designed to accommodate that storyteller of a sailor.
His captain sits in the same spot atop a railing, a bottle of wine held loosely in her hand. Even with her lazy grin, she looks troubled.
I walk closer, holding my briefcase closer to my person.
The sailor is wide-eyed, one bad night’s sleep from looking like a madman. He’s gesticulating wildly, so much so that the audience has to take a step back to avoid getting hit. Notably, there are no children in the crowd this time.
‘I’m telling you, something’s going on!’ he says. He runs a hand through his hair, ruffling it further. ‘I went to the hospital again, and they said Yang was dead! I tried to ask, of course I did, and they threw me out!’
The sailor looks around nervously, then lowers his voice. ‘So I went around asking if anyone else was in a coma. And there it was! Miss Zhang, you know her, right? She used to sell vegetables—yeah—that’s her. They won’t let her son see her, and she’s also in a coma!’
The crowd murmurs, agreeing amongst themselves.
‘I say, the government is hiding something,’ says the sailor. ‘I think they’re using these people for something. Microchips, more like.’
The crowd’s murmuring intensifies. Out of the corner of my eye, I see his captain get off her perch, waving the crowd away. ‘Conspiracy theories,’ she says. ‘There’s no proof of that.’
I do not hear what else she has to say. I run the rest of the way home, sprinting up the stairs of my apartment building instead of waiting for an elevator. Locking the door behind me, I all but throw myself onto the couch, willing myself to fall asleep.
The sleeplessness of the past few nights catches up to me, and I sink into the gentle cold of the dream.