"Ring, ring, ring..."
The phone's ringtone droned on, monotonous and dull.
A man in his early thirties rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, sat up in bed, and swiped the alarm off the screen.
He lay there staring at nothing for a few minutes, then threw off the covers, shoved his feet into his slippers, and shuffled into the bathroom to wash up.
He squeezed out the toothpaste, and as he brushed, his brow furrowed.
It seemed like he'd had a very long dream.
But what it had been about, he couldn't recall at all.
Still frowning, still turning it over, he finished brushing.
He spat out the foam along with a last mouthful of clean water.
He turned on the tap, cupped clean water, and rinsed the foam from around his mouth.
Then he splashed handful after handful over his face, squeezed cleanser into his palms, and worked it into a lather.
He scrubbed it across his skin.
Then rinsed again with clean water.
When it felt about right, he pulled a towel down from the rack beside him and dried his face.
Wiping the water away, he looked at himself in the mirror.
His hands slowed. The crease between his brows deepened.
He knew the man in that mirror - a man who still looked like a college student but was in fact in his early thirties.
He was an art teacher.
His name was...
What was his name again?
The reflection knotted its brows, straining to remember.
That name had followed him for over thirty years. How could he possibly forget it?
But right now it was like a slippery loach: every time he almost had it, it slid out between his fingers.
Never mind.
The name wasn't important.
Because he was about to be late for work.
Though the colleagues in the office would clock in for him.
Right now he was in a hurry to get to McDonald's for the broke-man's value meal.
He'd fallen in love with their coffee, which tasted like dishwater from a scrubbed pot.
He'd been eating it since college and still hadn't gotten sick of it.
He gathered his things and straightened his clothes.
Just as he was about to open the door and leave, a sound came from the living room behind him.
A voice, familiar and gentle.
"Little Kagami."
"When you draw a tree, draw the trunk first, then the branches."
"The branches need thick and thin, dense and sparse, and they have to weave through one another."
"You can't just bundle them all up like a broom."
It was clearly an old woman's voice, and even without seeing her he could feel the warm smile behind the words.
The man hesitated a moment. Then he lifted his hand from the doorknob and stepped out of the shoes he'd just put on.
He didn't even bother with slippers - he simply walked barefoot straight back into the living room.
An old woman sat there, hale and kind-faced.
Old, though only just past sixty.
Not elderly yet, but no longer in her prime, either.
Her head was bent, a Hero fountain pen pinched between her fingers, the nib traveling across the paper with a fine, steady rasp.
The skin of her hands had gone a little loose; the veins stood out faintly, and the knuckles were visibly bent out of true.
The mark of a lifetime of holding a pen.
On the paper was a pen drawing.
The plane tree outside the window.
The branches strong and weathered, the foliage thick, every line as precise as if it had been measured with a ruler.
And beside her stood a little boy.
About five or six, sprawled over the table with a pen of his own, following along in crooked, wobbling strokes.
His chin rested on the table's edge, both little legs swinging under the chair.
One slipper had fallen off, baring a small foot in a cartoon sock.
"Grandma, does mine look like it?"
The boy lifted his head. Ink smudged his face and his hands, so that he looked like a little tabby cat.
"It does."
Grandma smiled and stroked his head.
"Better than Grandma's, even."
"Grandma's lying."
"When has Grandma ever lied to you?"
The boy thought it over and decided that she really never had.
So he lowered his head and kept drawing.
He worked in dead earnest, tracing every line over and over.
The paper filled up with overlapping ink until it looked less like a tree trunk than a snarl of yarn.
But Grandma didn't correct him.
She just sat beside him, watching quietly, now and then reaching over to straighten the paper when it slid crooked.
Sunlight poured through the window and settled over grandmother and grandson.
That was summer.
Cicada song surged in from outside on waves of heat, together with a ceiling fan that barely helped, rolling in one swell after another like surf.
The two of them seemed to melt slowly in that heat.
Their faces and everything around them softened and ran together.
The man watched the boy and the old woman grow younger still.
The living room turned into somewhere half-remembered and utterly strange at once.
"Little Kagami, come home with Grandma, all right?"
A younger Grandma crouched down, wearing that same gentle smile, looking at a boy of about three - young enough that he might never remember any of it.
"Grandma's house has lots and lots of drawing paper, and lots and lots of pens."
"Grandma will teach you to draw. How does that sound?"
A three-year-old doesn't know what "divorce" means.
Doesn't understand "custody," either.
He only nodded, half comprehending.
Then Grandma took his hand and led him out of that home, out through that door.
And he never came back.
Or rather, there was no coming back.
Because now the man remembered.
The boy's parents had divorced when he was very small, and each of them had built a new family.
He didn't go with his father. He didn't go with his mother.
Because both of them saw him as a stone in the road of their new lives, a burden.
So Grandma came in from the old hometown and took him away to raise.
Since his parents had gone their separate ways before he was old enough to remember anything, he carried no real scars from it.
And Grandma gave him a childhood that was, on the whole, whole and happy.
He had no shadows haunting him, no obsessions.
Grandma had drawn with a pen in her youth; after the sent-down years, when she returned to the city, she became an art teacher at a local university.
So naturally the boy learned pen drawing from her from the time he was tiny.
She often took him out sketching from life as well, and perhaps that was where his mild, easygoing nature came from.
The man watched the living room melt again, then reshape itself.
The boy had turned ten.
Grandma's living room had become his studio.
The walls were papered with drawings.
Pen drawings, ink washes, fine-line gongbi work, watercolors.
There were even plenty of simple cartoon sketches.
Landscapes, flowers and birds, figures, still lifes.
Some were Grandma's, some were his.
Hers hung along the upper row, his along the lower.
"Little Kagami, come look at this."
Grandma sat by the window, waving him over with a book in her hand.
It was a copy of the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, the Qing-dynasty compendium of ink painting technique.
The boy sprawled over the pages, lost in them.
Grandma sat in the rattan chair by the window, knitting.
"Grandma, what was it like for you and Grandpa when you were young?"
the boy asked suddenly, still looking at the book.
Her hands paused.
"When we were young, ah..."
She smiled and looked out the window.
Her gaze passed through the thick plane-tree leaves and settled somewhere very far away.
"Back when your grandpa was still with us, we used to go out sketching all the time."
"He carried the easel, I carried the drawing board."
"We'd sit on those old green trains for a whole day at a stretch."
"To Mount Huangshan, to Mount Emei, to Guilin."
"After the train we'd still have mountain roads to walk. When we couldn't walk any further we'd sit down at the roadside and draw, and when we'd finished the drawing we'd walk on."
"Was Grandpa good?"
"He was."
Her smile deepened.
"Your grandpa's ink paintings were known all over the country."
"Then I'm going to be a painter as great as Grandpa someday."
"Then Little Kagami will have to work even harder."
"I will."
Grandma set her knitting down and glanced sideways at the boy, who hadn't so much as lifted his head from the book.
She smiled faintly, and her hands started moving again.
The needles flickered between her fingers with a soft click-click.
The scene in front of the man shifted again.
The boy was sixteen now, no longer little.
In a high school office, his homeroom teacher called him in and handed him a form.
"Your academic scores are solid - you'd have no trouble getting into a first-tier school."
"But your art is excellent too. I hear you've been studying painting with your grandmother since you were small?"
"Have you ever thought about taking the art examination track?"
"With that, you'd have a real shot at one of those Ministry-affiliated Normal Universities."
The boy held the form and said nothing for a long while.
"I'll go home and talk it over with my grandmother."
The moment he said it, the scene sped up, flicking past like slides.
With his solid foundation in art and strong academic marks, the boy tested into the fine arts program of one of the Ministry-affiliated Normal Universities in the provincial capital, then earned a recommendation for graduate study at an independent fine arts academy.
On graduating, campus recruitment landed him a tenured post at a public key high school focused on academic college prep, which suited him just fine.
After all, of "light workload, good money, close to home," he'd gotten two out of three.
That counted as eating out of the state's rice bowl.
And the boy grew slowly from a green kid into a grown man.
The man watched him settle, thoroughly satisfied, into a life that ran a straight line between home and school.
His face always wore the easy smile of someone content with what he had.
Time raced on, and the young man's features gradually overlapped with those of the man standing in the living room watching it all.
And that day-after-day smile abruptly turned grave.
A hospital corridor.
The man, in a white shirt and dark trousers, hurried down the hallway with two insulated lunch containers in his hand.
The air smelled of disinfectant mixed with medicine.
Now and then a nurse pushed a wheelchair past him, the wheels squeaking against the floor tiles.
He pushed open the door of the room.
Grandma sat up in the hospital bed against her pillow, looking at her phone.
She had her reading glasses on, one finger sliding slowly across the screen. She was reading an article about ink painting technique.
"Grandma."
He set the containers on the bedside table.
"How are you feeling today?"
"Much better."
She put down the phone, took off her glasses, and smiled.
"You really don't have to come every day. Work wears you out."
"Honestly, my classes are pretty easy."
The man smiled and opened the containers.
"Made your favorite today - braised pork ribs, and stir-fried celtuce."
"Got the celtuce at the market this morning. Very tender."
Grandma looked at the food and sighed, smiling.
"This child of mine."
She picked up her chopsticks and pointed them at him.
"Everything you make tastes this good."
"Whoever marries you someday will be a lucky woman."
He smiled and let it pass.
He knew her greatest wish was to see him married with children of his own.
But he himself couldn't say whether it was because of his parents, back in childhood, that he had always kept marriage at arm's length.
Romance simply stirred nothing in him.
Maybe Grandma dimly understood that, which was why she never raised it outright.
He sat down in the chair by the bed and watched her eat.
She ate slowly, chewing each bite a long time.
Her teeth weren't good anymore; she couldn't manage the ribs.
So he sat beside her stripping the meat from the bones, tearing it into small pieces and putting it in her bowl.
"Little Kagami."
Grandma said suddenly.
"Mm?"
"When you were small, I used to feed you like this too."
She smiled as she said it.
"You were barely a year old, eating your first solid food."
"One spoonful at a time. A single bowl would take me an hour."
"I don't remember that."
"Of course you don't."
Grandma laughed.
"You flung the porridge all over my face, too."
He laughed as well.
The laughter drew the eye of the nurse changing dressings at the next bed.
She smiled too.
"Granny's in good spirits today."
"That's because my grandson's here."
There was a note of pride in Grandma's voice.
"When he comes I'm happy, and when I'm happy my spirits are good."
The nurse finished the dressing, took Grandma's blood pressure, and left with a smile of her own.
After the meal the man packed up the containers, sat by the bed, and chatted with her.
Grandma had a lot to say that day - stories from her years sent down to the countryside.
Then about coming back to the city and testing into university, then funny things that happened while she was teaching there.
Whenever she came to Grandpa, she slowed down.
As if telling something precious, afraid that going too fast would use it all up.
"Your grandpa, ah, he was a clam."
"You couldn't beat a word out of him with three sticks."
"Sometimes it was infuriating."
The man held her hand and listened quietly, smiling, without cutting in.
He knew that all Grandma needed was for him to be there.
"Little Kagami."
"Mm."
"Do you think your grandpa's still a clam over on that side?"
"No."
The man stroked her hair, still ink-black after all these years, and said it with certainty.
"Grandpa must be very talkative over there."
"Because he's been waiting for you all this time. He must have saved up so many things to tell you."
Grandma blinked, then laughed, delighted.
The scene began to dissolve and shift, image and sound blurring together.
When it re-formed, it was the hospital room again.
Grandma sat on the bed with a drawing board propped in front of her and a pen in her hand.
Her hand wasn't as steady as it used to be.
The lines trembled, ran crooked, but she didn't mind.
She was drawing the old locust tree outside the window, a few birds' nests hung in its branches.
Far off, the sky was gray-blue, with a few clouds like cotton wadding pulled apart by the wind.
The man sat beside her, drawing along with her.
He was drawing Grandma.
"Little Kagami."
"Mm."
"I want to go home."
His hand paused.
"All right."
The man went and handled the discharge paperwork.
He thanked the attending physician and the nurses, then came back to the room with the discharge slip and packed her things.
Clothes, toiletries, drawing tools, a few art books.
It wasn't much. One suitcase held it all.
Grandma changed out of the hospital gown into her own clothes.
She checked herself in the mirror of the room's washroom and smoothed her hair.
Then she turned around and smiled at him.
"Let's go. Home."
That afternoon the sun was lovely.
The taxi drove down familiar streets, past the steamed-bun shop she always went to, past the children's palace where he'd learned to draw as a boy, and down the old street lined with plane trees.
In winter the plane trees hadn't budded yet; the branches were bare.
Grandma leaned against the car window, watching the scenery go by without a word.
He didn't speak either.
The two of them just sat quietly in the back seat, each looking out their own window, each with their own thoughts.
When they got home,
he helped her back to the bedroom.
At the corner of the living room, she stopped to look at the photographs on the wall.
Black-and-white ones from her youth. Her wedding photo with Grandpa.
But most of them were pictures of the man at every age, standing beside her.
"Little Kagami."
"Mm."
"Your grandpa was so handsome when he was young."
The man glanced at that black-and-white photograph.
Grandpa wore a Zhongshan suit, hair combed perfectly neat, expression severe, lips slightly pressed together. A handsome man indeed.
"Grandma was beautiful when she was young, too."
he said, smiling.
Grandma laughed.
"I'm old. Nothing to look at now."
"To me, Grandma will always be the most beautiful."
"You just know how to make an old woman happy."
"I'm telling the truth."
She shook her head, smiling, and went on toward her bedroom.
That night grandmother and grandson sat in the bedroom talking for a long time.
About his job, about the troublemakers at school, about the art department's teaching-research meetings, about the cafeteria food.
Grandma listened closely.
Later she started telling stories from her own youth.
About her years in the countryside, about the funny parts of testing into university after coming back to the city, about the unhappy things that had happened while she taught there.
On and on the two of them talked.
Grandma leaned back against the headboard, and without either of them noticing, her eyes slowly closed.
The man watched her breathe evenly, with a faint snore in it, and smiled as he eased her down flat.
He picked up the quilt beside her and laid it gently over her.
The corners of her mouth turned up slightly, as if she were having a beautiful dream.
He switched off the living room light, leaving only a small night lamp.
Then he went back to his own room and lay down.
He slept deeply that night, without a single dream.
The next morning, when he woke, sunlight was already coming through the gap in the curtains.
He dressed, left his room, and went to knock on Grandma's door.
This time, there was no answer.
His hand stopped on the knob. He hesitated, then pushed the door softly open.
Grandma lay in bed under the quilt, both hands folded over her chest.
Her eyes were shut, her face serene.
The corners of her mouth were turned faintly up.
As if she were still inside last night's lovely dream and unwilling to wake.
The man stood in the doorway for a long, long time.
But he wasn't much surprised.
As if from the moment yesterday when she suddenly said she wanted to go home, he had already known this was how it would end.
He simply stood there, looking at the face he had been looking at for more than thirty years.
Then he walked in, sat on the edge of the bed, and took her hand.
It had gone cold, but it was still soft.
"Grandma."
His voice was very quiet, as though he were afraid of waking her.
"Breakfast is ready."
"It's the millet porridge you like, and the pickles you made."
No one answered.
The sunlight moved slowly across the room, from her face to her hands, from her hands to the sheets.
The man held that cold hand and sat there a very long while.
He didn't cry.
He didn't even know what he was feeling.
Something she had said to him once came back to him.
"Little Kagami, when Grandma's gone someday, don't cry."
"Grandma has lived a long life. I've been through everything - the bitter and the sweet both."
"What matters most is that Grandma got to watch you grow up, watch you make something of yourself, watch you become a good person."
"Grandma had Little Kagami with her all along. That's more than enough."
Now Grandma really was gone.
The man bent his head and rested his forehead against the back of her hand.
"Grandma, I'm satisfied too."
His voice was hoarse, but oddly calm and gentle.
The living room shifted again.
This time it was the funeral.
A great many people came.
Grandma's students, old colleagues, old friends.
Some he knew, some he didn't.
Each of them told him not to grieve too much, that at her age it was a natural end, a happy funeral.
The man bowed in return to every one of them.
Also at the funeral were the mother whose face had long since blurred in his memory, there with her husband and children, and the father who had apparently divorced again.
When they came over to speak with him, he felt nothing like disgust or hatred.
Nor any sense of loss or longing.
He treated them exactly like every other mourner who came to pay respects: with the barest, most basic courtesy.
"Kagami."
"You've gotten thinner."
The woman called his mother came up to him, her eyes red.
The man only gave a polite smile.
"Mom. You came."
"How could I not come?"
Her voice shook a little.
"She was my mother too."
He said nothing.
His mother looked at the portrait of Grandma, and tears spilled over.
Her husband took a packet of tissues out of his pocket and handed it to her.
She took it and wiped her eyes.
"Kagami."
She turned to face him.
"Would you like to come stay with us for a few days?"
"No need."
"I have work."
"Then on the weekend..."
"I'm busy on weekends too."
"Kagami, I'm sorry."
The man looked at her and smiled, still politely.
"Just live your own life well. That's enough."
His mother's face went complicated.
She started to speak, and in the end said nothing at all.
Her husband patted her shoulder and gave the man a nod.
She nodded too, then turned and left with her husband and children.
As he watched her go,
the man who had once been his father, standing off at a distance, came over as well.
He had come alone.
He looked older than his mother - his hair had gone almost entirely white, and his back had begun to stoop.
"Kagami."
His father stood in front of him, visibly awkward.
"Dad."
"About your grandmother... my condolences."
"Thank you."
The two of them stood face to face like strangers.
His father took an envelope out of his pocket and pressed it into his hand.
"This is... just a small token."
The man didn't take it. He pushed it back.
"Thank you, Dad."
"But I don't need the money. It looks like you need it more."
His father started to say something.
In the end he only nodded, tucked the envelope back into his pocket, and turned to go.
At some point the standing man had ended up sitting on the sofa, watching in silence as, at that funeral, the other version of himself laid Grandma's ashes to rest.
The scene started skipping ahead again, faster and faster.
The living room changed and changed.
The years moved on, but his face barely changed from what it had been.
At school he was still the same easily satisfied, cheerfully coasting, lying-flat man he'd always been.
Except that after Grandma died, he became more of a shut-in.
Otherwise his life went on exactly as before.
That day was a Sunday.
At home he finished watching the latest cam-rip of Chainsaw Man.
He'd just gone out, headed for the school cafeteria to get some food,
when a burst of noise and panicked shouting around him snapped him back to himself, and he saw a Dayun heavy truck barreling straight at him.
The man watched the truck slam him off his feet, watched it blare its horn and come tearing out of the scene with the other him still pinned to its nose - straight at the him standing in the living room.
All that was left in front of his eyes was a searing white light.
As if someone in the sky had knocked over an entire bucket of white paint and drowned everything in it.
There was no pain.
There was no fear.
In the white light, he heard a voice.
Far away, and close.
Blurred, and clear.
"Kagami."
Such a familiar name.
It was his name.
The name from his previous life.
And the name in this one.
Many familiar voices braided together, murmuring gently beside his ear, over and over.
"Mezameru!"
____
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