The Vagrants

“The morgue only accepts bodies from natural deaths.”

“What's a natural death?”

“Like the one with your grandmother.”

The image of the woman's body came back to Bashi. He breathed hard, trying to control a bout of nausea. “Thanks for reminding me,” he said. “I'm going there now.”

“But you're walking in the wrong direction,” Kwen said.

Bashi looked at the road, leading west into the mountain where the woman's body lay butchered under a bush. He wondered if Kwen had seen through him. He wanted to report the news to Old Hua and his wife first, Bashi said, as they were old friends of his grandmother's.

Kwen studied Bashi, and he felt his scalp tighten under the man's gaze. “So I'm going,” Bashi said, raising a hand hesitantly.

Kwen lit a cigarette. “You know I don't like anyone to be naughty around me?”

“Why would I want to? I have my own grandmother to take care of.”

Kwen nodded. “Just a reminder.”

Bashi promised that he would behave and left in haste. He should have returned the boulders to their place the night before. A good detective did not leave any traces of his investigation around. He wondered if it was too late for him to correct his mistake.

The Huas’ cabin was padlocked. Bashi picked up a small piece of coal and wrote big scrawling characters on the door: My grandma is dead—Bashi. He looked at the characters and then wiped out the word dead and wrote gone. There was no need to disturb two old people with the harshness of reality, Bashi thought, and then it occurred to him that the Huas might not be able to read.

The visit to the morgue was disappointing, one more sign that this world was becoming as bad as it could get. The woman at the front desk threw a pad across the table, before Bashi could explain things to her. When he opened his mouth, she pointed to the papers. “Fill them out before you open your mouth.”

It took Bashi some time to work out how to answer the questions. He had forgotten to bring the household register card; the woman wouldn't be too happy about it, but she would certainly understand negligence from a bereft grandson. Perhaps people would regard him differently now that his grandmother was dead; perhaps they would forgive him and love him because he was an orphan. He dipped the pen into the ink bottle and said to the woman as he wrote, “You know, she is the only one I have and I'm her only one too.”

The woman raised an eyebrow and glanced at Bashi without replying. Perhaps she did not know who he was. “My grandma, she left me today,” he explained. “I don't have parents. I never did, as long as I can remember.”

“Did I say not to open your mouth before finishing the forms?”

“Yes, but I'm just being friendly,” Bashi said. “You don't have many people to talk with you here, do you?”

The woman sighed and put a magazine up in front of her eyes. He looked at the magazine cover; Popular Movies,

the title said, and a young couple leaned onto a tree and looked out at Bashi with blissful anticipation. Bashi made a face at the couple before going back to work on the forms. The last paper was a permission sheet for cremation. Bashi read through it twice before he could understand it. “Comrade,” he said in a hoarse, low voice, intending to earn the sympathy that he fully deserved.

“Done?”

“I have a question. My grandmother—she was eighty-one and she raised me from very young—she already had a casket made. She didn't like the idea of being burned,” Bashi said. “I don't know about you but I myself would rather not be burned, alive or dead.”

The woman stared at Bashi for a long moment and grabbed the registration from his hand. “Why are you wasting my time then?” she said. She ripped the sheets off, squeezed them into a ball, and targeted the wastebasket by the entrance. She missed, and Bashi walked over to pick the ball up. “I don't get it, comrade,” he said, trying to sound humble. “You asked me to fill out the forms and open my mouth afterward, and I did as you told me.” Most women were ill-tempered at work, according to Bashi's observation; at home they served their grumpy husbands, so women had to show, at work, that they were fully in control. Bashi was willing to humor this one despite her looks—she was no longer young, and the dark bags underneath her eyes made her look like a panda.

The woman pointed to a poster on the wall. “Read it,” she said and went back to the magazine.

“Of course, comrade, anything you say,” said Bashi. He read the poster: The city government, in accordance with the new provincial policy to transform the old, outdated custom of underground burying, which took up too much land that could otherwise be used to grow food for the ever-growing population, had decided to make cremation the only legal form of undertaking; the effective date was two and a half months away.

“It seems we still have some time till the policy becomes effective,” Bashi said to the woman. “Enough time to bury a little old woman, isn't it?”