Death Watch (54 page)

The two ascend many steps, past many landings and many floors and many screens that lead to many rooms. They come at last to a door, very roughly made of posts, the kind seen by travelers in the coastal
villages, made from the remains of boats when they can no longer be mended. As they pass through, the youth’s heart is hopeful that they will arrive at some chamber where he might find the person he seeks, sleeping, or eating quietly, or playing mahjong with old friends. But it is not to be. The room is empty except for a chest and a lantern. Beside him, the ghost is wild-eyed as she points at the chest
.

The youth crosses the room and opens the chest, but finds only clothes, neatly folded, inside. He looks up, but the ghost-girl continues to gesture desperately and the youth pushes his hand deeper into the chest, until his fingers sweep board at the bottom. And there, hidden, he finds strips of folded paper, tightly rolled and wrapped with a piece of torn silk sash
.

The ghost weeps then, tears coursing down her face. Her body is rimmed all in expectant flame, and the tears turn quickly to steam on her skin
.

“Do you wish me to open this?” the youth asks
.

The ghost’s mouth opens as if wailing, although she makes no sound
.

“Do you want these?” asks the youth, as he holds the papers out to the ghost. She tilts her head back in agony
.

The youth looks at the papers and can see characters written on them, and dried flowers are bound up along with the pages. The scroll is warm in his hands, as though it had only a moment ago been clutched tightly in the hand against the heart. Here were love letters, the youth knew. Secret love letters. Unfound, still waiting somewhere beyond the mist. A young man’s words for this girl, maybe her words for him. Their private words for each other. Somewhere in the world, these letters sat hidden still, but might, at any moment, be found and read, calling her most cherished secrets from their hiding place back into the circle of the sun
.

“Shall I burn them?” says the youth, more sure now of what the ghost wants from him
.

While the ghost watches, her tears abating, the youth puts the strips
of paper into the iron lantern. As the flames rise inside the lantern, the ghost smiles with an ancient and long-awaited joy. As the letters burn, she falls away to ashes, as though she too had been made of paper. Already her spirit, carried by a crane, is winging to the land of her heart’s desire; already her spirit is approaching her lover’s village in the province of Songjiang
.

When the youth turns and passes again through the posts, he finds himself back in the main room of the teahouse, close to the entrance
.

For those who may depart
,
Lu Yu may walk them to the threshold of the teahouse and speak parting words to them. The youth stands at the threshold and there, he hears these words from the ancient keeper of the teahouse:

A thousand mountains

will greet my friend at his departure
.

Always, it is the time of spring tea blossoming
.

I speak the blessings of spring upon his journey
,

whether in early mist or red cloud of evening
.

I envy him his lonely travels
.

May we meet upon the faraway mountain
.

May we share repast by the clear water fountain
.

Until then
,

light a candle

and strike upon the bell of stone

and remember where your journey began
.

The voice fades, and the mist appears, and the youth takes his leave at twilight from the teahouse that rises like a temple from the suburbs of Fengdu, the City of Ghosts. Because the youth had not eaten, because he’d not tasted even a single cup of tea, he made his way home without passing through the Hall of Twelve Corpses
.

As he left the ruin, the broken chest that had once lain on the floor was now burned black, and small embers still glowed on its charred edges. He didn’t stop to look closely. He knew the letters that had been hidden within it were ashes now. He walked away and did not look back.

Silas couldn’t hear his own footfall, and he didn’t know how long he’d been walking or how long he’d been gone. His heart was heavy, and he was ready to go home. He could see now that asking the dead about his father was nearly useless, so burdened were they with their own losses and regrets and distractions. He had no right to press them. It was not enough merely to let them speak. If anything, he should try to bring them comfort, to shorten their suffering. Anything else was selfish, thoughtless, at best redundant. He was also finding it too easy to take on their pain, perhaps because he was more like them than he wanted to admit. Or rather, he had let himself become like them, a wanderer, someone lost in a world he had hewn from his own pain.

He couldn’t keep the coffer of distraction at the back of his mind closed. His own past kept flying up around him like moths; old fears back again, the ghosts’ problems only serving to remind him of his own. Even the little anxieties that nipped at his heels as a boy were back now as sharp-toothed dogs, following him, barking loudly, drawing more and more attention to themselves. Now, as he looked for his dad, Silas felt like he had as a boy: left behind, alone, forgotten. And he could see, now, his personal feelings made his encounters with the dead and his travels through their lands dangerous and filled with the possibility of entrapment.

He thought he should just go home and forget about the last shadowland he’d planned to visit. He was only going because this place loomed so large on the tapestry and seemed so strongly
connected with the seaside and the harbor where his father had spent so much time. Well populated, watching over the ocean, it seemed more likely to be a source of information. But as if thinking made it so, Silas suddenly found himself approaching the Yacht Club, which stood proudly on the rocks overlooking the sea at the southern edge of Lichport, its flags at full mast in the salty wind.

He’d go forward, but he would ask no questions. He would merely greet these ghosts as neighbors and then go home. This was his plan. He was there, so okay, but then,
Enough
, he thought.
It is enough
.

As Silas approached the ornate front of the Yacht Club, gentlemen in midnight blue blazers and white slacks poured from the now open doors toward Silas. Behind them, waiters with trays of drinks were running to keep up.

At the Lichport Yacht Club
,
there are surprisingly few rules for the aspiring member. Only that you must leave your worries at the door and wear a jacket. Oh, yes, That Sort Of Thing may be all the rage at the other clubs, but not here. But if you wish a bit of gentlemanly company, brandy and cigars and leather chairs, come in and take a pew until Labor Day
.

The view is excellent. You can see the wide horizon and all the faces of the sea from the windows, and so the members sit, with their backs to the town, watching the boats sail by, for every day is the Saturday of regatta week. The conversation that moves about the club is respectable, though sometimes it turns boastful, taking on the kind of swaggering tone a man employs when his wife is not there to contradict him in front of company
.

“No, no!” say some of the men, their feathers ruffling at the sight of Silas on their porch, the others echoing their sentiments with emphatic
nods. “We’ll have none of your kind here! No, none of that rubbish you’re peddling, we’re staying right where we are!”

“Okay,” says Silas, confused. “That’s okay with me, really! I’m not peddling anything—”

“Oh, he says that now,” scoffs one, “but just wait, he’ll be just like the father with his ‘time for home,’ and ‘get ye gones’! Well, we’re not having any of it, young man! So you can turn yourself right around. This is private property.”

“Wait! You know my father? Have you seen him?”

“Your father is NOT a member of this club. I assure you!”

Feeling a little offended, Silas says, “I’m not here to tell you what to do. I have no intention of telling you to go anywhere. Stay here as long as you like, if that’s what you want.”

“Just so. Thank you. And, if you don’t mind,” says one of the men more quietly, in his captain’s cap with too much gold braid stitched to its brim, “no need to mention to the wives what’s become of us, righty-o?”

“Um—right,” says Silas, “but may I ask, what are you hiding from?”

“Hiding!” hollers the captain, his
sotto voce
gone, “we prefer ‘weathering over’! So much quieter here than home. Less chatter, too. More civilized. We spent so many excellent weekends here, some of us just thought we’d stay on, you know, man the helm. A man wants to be the captain of his own ship, and, well, no man can be that at home. So”—orders the captain, mustering his zeal—“you can just move along, Undertaker! We’re not leaving.”

Silas makes an obligatory scan of the ranks of club members, but sees no familiar faces, nor do any of the ghosts speak up to claim him as kin. It is clear that while nearly everyone knows of his father, no one here knows anything of his whereabouts
.

Already resigned to going home, and caring little one way or the other what the men of the club do with their afterlives, Silas raises his hands in mock defeat and hangs his head as he turns to go. But as he
begins to unwind the cord from the death watch, he looks once more on the men of the Yacht Club, who have all turned suddenly and very reverently to the east. The men have moved to stand on the rocks of the breakwater in front of the club, each on his own little island, and they now look out toward Lichport’s deep-bottomed harbor. There, Silas can just make out the misty outlines of a ship risen up from the water, its pale, hell-shredded sails billowing in a storm that blows for it alone
.

The men of the Yacht Club raise their drinks in somber reverence to the ship of mists, then drink down the contents of their glasses and throw them to shatter on the rocks, and without another word to the Undertaker, they march back into their club, closing and locking the doors behind them
.

As he turned the corner from Coral Street onto Coach, Silas felt, just for an instant, strangely comforted by not finding his father in the shadowlands he’d visited. For one thing, it might mean that his dad was still alive, though that raised many more questions than it answered. Most of those questions circled about his uncle’s name like black birds about a copse of trees. And Silas wondered how would it have felt to find his dad just sitting there on a stool in the tavern. Just sitting, glass in his hand, not looking for him, not trying to get home. Just lost like the rest of the ghosts, drunk on their own little miseries, waiting down the years, sharing their stories with strangers, their families so far away it was as though they never were.

Alive or dead, his father was still somewhere, waiting to be found.

The night was clear and fine, and the fixed stars burned with cold light across the sky above Silas as he made his way home to his father’s house. Above him, something flashed. He stopped in the middle of the street and saw a star fall, trailing behind it a thin
ribbon of fire that faded almost as soon as it flared. Just another traveler, he thought. Just another soul fallen from its sphere. A thing nearly burned out.

Still looking up, Silas felt drawn upward into the pitch of the sky, his stomach turning, because he was standing in the middle of nothing. With every passing moment, the configurations of the constellations were fading. There were no more connections he could see, or remember, or make. He felt his father’s face drawing away from him into the dark, his features becoming lost among the invisible lines between the now patternless stars. Where Amos once stood in Silas’s mind, now there was only space. Nausea rose up in him, and he felt sure now that there were only two places in town where his father might reside. First, his house, which was full, floor to ceiling, with associations—notes, letters, clothes, books. Objects and reminders that would every day bring him closer to knowing his dad, though not necessarily bring him any closer to finding him. Then there was the other place. His uncle’s house, where, Silas increasingly feared, something more of his dad than merely memories lay waiting for him. He started walking quickly up Coach Street, keeping his head down, his eyes only on the road.