The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(29)
Her heart felt heavy as she stopped next to the figure of a tall man. She sighed as she read his toe tag, then gently pulled back the sheet. She stared down at the pilot, studied every detail of his face, his cheekbones, his dark hair, the stubble on his chin, his eyes, which had been closed and sewn shut. Here too, she was afraid of the inevitability of forgetfulness. Then she touched his arm through the fabric. After seeing the pilot in the street, following him, a part of her expected John Garland’s body to be warm. She’d hoped it would be, through some bizarre miracle. The same way he’d shown up in Kunming with a photograph of her that she’d never seen. That perhaps she’d somehow crossed into a place where the rules of life and death were only advisements, suggestions, allowing wishes the possibility of fulfillment. But now he was cool to her touch. What was once a body that she had briefly held in her arms had become a cadaver.
“Did you know him?” the monk asked, looking up from his work.
Faye stared at the man’s body. “I… think I did.”
“Then I’m sorry for your loss,” the monk said. “And his.”
“I’m sorry for showing up like this,” she said as though this were a lucid dream, as she heard the distant murmur of airplane engines somewhere far above, fading away. “I thought I saw him, outside, in the rain. But…” She rubbed her weary eyes.
He looked at her appraisingly. “I don’t know if it will bring comfort in your particular situation,” the monk said, “but in my tradition, this is not the end of your friend’s journey, or yours. All of this”—he motioned to a wall as though staring through a window that wasn’t there, observing a world she couldn’t see—“is a stepping-stone in a wide river that connects us all.”
Faye nodded out of politeness, abiding a communal moment the way the living cling to each other at a funeral, more emotional necessity than understanding. Loose gears fitting together because their mismatched edges have been momentarily worn down by grief. “But,” she asked more of herself than of anyone else in the room, “I barely knew him. How do I grieve for him?”
She watched the monk light his last stick of incense, blowing on the ember until it was bright red, glowing. He washed himself with the smoke, then looked down at the shrouded shape of a child beneath a sheet. “We don’t have to grieve only those we know. Sometimes we grieve for that which was lost, that which was never allowed to be.”
Faye pondered this as she walked around the pilot. She came here looking for answers but was forced to settle for repose. “May I ask what the cups are for?”
She’d been to funerals for aunts and uncles in Canton and Hoiping. As a child, she’d helped her mother light prayer sticks for her ancestors during each Lunar New Year’s celebration, especially for her grandparents who died in San Francisco, long before she’d been born. She’d watch as her mother burned joss paper, spirit money to be spent by the dead. As a nurse, Faye had long since surrendered superstition to reason, given religion over to science. She had little faith in a hereafter, and if there was such a thing, she certainly didn’t believe that a soul needed spiritual pocket money for celestial bribes. Though she patiently acknowledged that in anyone’s family, traditions were important. That understanding where a loved one came from often eased the burden of letting them go to a place of such shadowed uncertainty. Even if that place, that final destination, was just an ossuary of memory in the minds of the survivors.
“I’m offering prayers of guidance,” the monk said as he opened a jug of water and poured a little into each cup. “Blessings that those lost to us might be treated favorably by the goddess Meng Po, whose task is to ensure that souls of the departed do not remember their previous lives. She does this by offering trapped spirits a cup of her five-flavored tea of forgetfulness—mai wan tong—the waters of oblivion. That the soul will forget everything from this life, and all the lives before. That the slate will be clean when she accompanies them to a long bridge of mist that the soul must traverse to return to this world, where they can begin again at a different point in time without being weighed down by memories of family, of suffering, of wishes unfulfilled.”
Faye had a vague recollection of this myth from childhood. She’d been taught in school that Meng Po was a version of Lady Meng Jiang, who Buddhists believed was so encumbered by grief from the death of her husband that she was unable to move on, to be reborn. Instead she dedicated herself to relieving the pain of others with a soup that would allow spirits to forget the misery and suffering of the material world, leaving them with only the karma they’d accumulated on their journey.
She looked down at the body of John Garland once again. She thought of how he looked at her on the runway, how he struggled to speak, how he felt in her arms.
“But… what if I don’t want to forget?”
The monk looked up from filling a teacup. He furrowed his brow as though she’d offered a Zen koan, a riddle with no answer, like What is the sound of one hand clapping? Or What was your original face before your mother and father were born?
He finished pouring water into the last cup. “I’m afraid that only a truly enlightened being is able to bear the burden of universal knowledge, to share the memories of ancestors. All others…” He motioned to the bodies.
Faye watched as the monk bowed three times to the deceased and then collected his things. “It’s clear that you’re looking for something very important.” He paused. “Perhaps you are searching in the branches for what only appears in the roots.”