Lying there in her sleep, Mother looked wonderfully serene, as if she were having a beautiful dream. Perhaps she was dreaming that she was strolling down one of Beijing 's broad, paved avenues. I knew that after she got sick and had difficulty breathing, she especially liked open spaces with lots of green trees and lush grass, and the grand streets of Beijing were a perfect match for the ideal streets of her dreams. I imagined that in her dream that night, she was surveying that city where she had lived for more than fifty years through those eyes that would never know youth again, ardently looking at every old tree along the streets, every old-fashioned doorway, and even the stray stones along the roadside worn smooth with time. She looked intently at every wall she passed along her way, as if searching for the secret dreams of her youth hidden in the patterns etched there by the rain and grit-laden winds. Like a pair of loving hands, her eyes caressed the passing scenes along the streets. Time seemed to be flowing backward, and from the deep sockets of her eyes there issued a cloudless radiance.
She so looked like she was sleeping that final night, that I could not believe she had died.
And from that time I have also harbored a quiet secret in my heart: my mother, in actuality, had not left me. Because she couldn't breathe properly, her organs slowly atrophied, perhaps very much in the way that things left in badly ventilated places go wormy, so she got rid of her body and became invisible. She was playing a joke on the living.
But the doctors and the people around me had no sense of humor. They insisted that she was dead, period. Even the stupid professors in my school believed this, and they said I was losing my mind and sent me to the hospital for treatment. (That was where I met Qi Luo, the psychiatrist I mentioned at the very beginning.) The school also used this as an excuse to make me discontinue my studies.
In my heart, I have gone over the factors involved in my case many times, and I know the source of the problem. The key thing is the fact that I still don't know whether the bullet that pierced my calf was red or black. The two different colors for bullets indicate two different things. This has a bearing on all my other problems.
But I never found the bullet. It was total chance that I got caught in the line of fire. There was nothing I could do.
I remember that at the time, when in confidence I told Doctor Qi about my conjecture, I saw him write in my case history: "block in logical thinking; excessive fragmentation in symbolic thought association."
I regarded him as a friend, but I found out that he was not on my side.
So after a while I didn't talk openly with him anymore, though he still wanted to help me. I lied to him all the time and didn't let him know what I was really thinking, but this didn't stop him from wanting to be my friend. He was always loaning me psychology books to read. I really learned a lot from those books, which helped me to eventually understand myself and straighten myself out.
In the beginning, I insisted on telling the people around me, "My mother hasn't really died; she's just playing a joke on us."
But when I talked like this, all of them (except Doctor Qi) felt uneasy about me and then started to avoid me, as if they were afraid.
Eventually I smartened up and didn't talk that way anymore. But in my heart I knew that what they saw as reality was false.
I went home and looked in the mirror to find out what it was about me that made them avoid me. There was nothing about my appearance that was frightening; even my eyes weren't swollen, because I hadn't cried at all.
Why should I have cried? I didn't in the least believe that my mother had died, as they all said.
After Mother's body was gone, all the sounds in her apartment, such as the ticking of her wall clock and the gurgling in the water pipes, seemed to die away.
But her clothes were still alive, I'm absolutely certain of that.
Often, I would knock on her door, then, opening it with my key, I'd go in, saying, "Mama, are you sleeping?" After that, I would talk with her clothes for a long, long time. They were definitely alive, because I clearly heard them talking to me.
One evening when I was out for a walk, I saw a girl who looked a lot like my friend Ho. She was standing under a scholar tree watching the dancing shadows of the leaves beneath the street lamps. For a long time I stood watching her as she watched the shadows moving like dark clouds.
At last, my curiosity got the best of me. I went over and asked, "What are you looking at?"
Of course, I really didn't care what she was looking at, I just wanted to get a closer look at her face.
Pointing to the mottled shadows that the leaves under the street lamps cast on the pavement, she said, "Look at the way the leaves are shaking. There must be an earthquake."
I said, "That's impossible. If there was, you'd feel the shaking too. It's just the wind."
The girl said, "But look, the tree's trunk is shaking too."
I stepped back out of the tree's shadow and looked up at its trunk and main branches, and they were indeed moving – quietly, almost imperceptibly. Extending my arm, I touched the tree to see if this was really so. Like great heads of flowing hair, the shadows of the trees were dancing in the lightly moving air, their roots like giant buttons fastening them to the earth.
I wasn't quite sure what to make of this.
But whether or not it was an earthquake didn't interest me in the least. An earthquake was nothing compared to the upheavals my heart had been going through.
I said, "How can you stare so long at the shadows of the trees under the street lamps? It must be terribly boring."
The girl said, "What else is there that's interesting?"
I said, "I don't know."
After Mother was gone, in the evenings I would spend a long time sitting in my room watching how the sunlight slowly shrank away from the walls. I also followed the tracks of a mouse as he moved about secretly over the course of a day, and I measured how the footfalls of winter first found the tips of my fingers, then slowly covered my whole body. This habit of watching was something that came to me only after all my dearest friends had left me.
So I totally understood this girl.
The wavering shadows of the trees suddenly made me feel that there was a separation between my own body and the insubstantial things around me. It was as if there were a crevice between me and the rest of the world, or a great glass screen, and anything that passed through it lost all substance.
My mind suddenly changed, it was no longer my own mind. The person standing there was no longer me, it was someone called "Miss Nothing."
This peculiar feeling lasted for only a few minutes, then it was gone.
After that, the lineaments of the girl's face gradually became clearer to me. She did not really look that much like Ho, it was only her outline in the distance that seemed a bit similar.
I turned to leave.
"Good-bye," I said.
That evening in my mother's apartment, I opened her closet and told her clothes about this encounter.
Mother's clothes said, "The girl must be very lonely."
It was amazing, it was just as if my mother had been speaking.
Once, on another evening, when I was walking aimlessly down some street, the pale pink light of the setting sun fell through the gradually thinning leaves of the trees onto the faces of the bustling crowds below, and the sweet fragrance of autumn floated on the air. All the shops were closed and the broad street seemed filled with casually wandering souls. Cars flashed past me, weaving their way to and fro.
I was seized by a sudden impulse to throw myself under the wheels of the speeding cars, unable to resist the feeling that it would be a kind of reincarnation, that I would be reborn.
Just then, a handsome young man came up to me, breaking my train of thought.
He said, "I want to give you a pair of tickets."
I was a bit nonplussed, but eventually said, "Tickets – to what?"