The Astonishing Color of After(79)

“I met Fred. The one who married Jingling’s ghost,” I tell Feng.

Her fingers tug at the hem of her daisy-print blouse, where a thread has begun to unravel. “Poor Jingling,” says Feng. “She—well. I bet she would have wished for the chance to fall in love before she died.”


The sky is a velvety indigo with the hint of dark silvery clouds.

My mother once told me: The clouds you see at night hold promises.


“I saw the bird, too,” I tell Feng. “And I think she saw me. But she didn’t come down. She didn’t—”

My voice cracks and suddenly I need to gulp down air.

“Maybe she didn’t need to,” Feng says very quietly. “Maybe it was enough.”

“What do you mean? She told me to come to Taiwan—she has something to tell me.”

“Maybe what she really needs,” Feng says, “is just to remember. And to be remembered.”





Smoke dances through the air at the night market, drifting past in sheets. I slurp at a bowl of soup full of wide squares of flat rice noodles—a savory treat Feng ordered for me. It’s just the two of us here, sitting on a bench, watching children playing with a dog. They’re crouched on the ground, giggling at the floppy, silken ears.

Then one of the kids jumps to her feet and starts to shout.

“Agong! Agong!”

Their mother rushes over to shush them. She unspools a long string of words, all of them too far out of reach for me. She looks distraught.

“What’s happening?” I ask Feng.

“The girl says she sees their grandfather. Her mother’s saying that’s impossible.”

“Why?”

Feng shrugs. “The mother says their grandfather is in the sky. ‘No he’s not,’ says the little girl. ‘How do you know?’ says her mother.”

The girl is shaking her head.


In just a few more hours, the forty-seventh day will be over.


“The little girl says, ‘Because only angels can go up into the sky.’ And now… the mother’s saying that her grandfather is an angel. But the girl doesn’t believe it.”

We watch in silence as the mom leads her daughters away. The older one—the one who made the outburst—won’t stop looking over her shoulder, her gaze fixed on something in the distance.

“Children know the truth,” says Feng, her voice going very quiet.

I turn to look at her. “What? What do you mean?”

“They haven’t learned to walk around with a veil over their eyes. That’s a habit that comes with adulthood. Kids always know what they see. That’s why ghosts can’t hide from them.”

Ghosts can’t hide from them.

I think of the bird and her feathers and my awful dreams of her suffering and disappearing.


I look out into the city, at the cars and mopeds, at the glass and lights. The distant buildings twinkle and shine, a collection of artificial stars.


We watch a young couple walk through the night market, bumping shoulders, fingers threaded together. They share a dessert and trade smiles and laughter.

“Have you ever been in love?” Feng asks.

“I don’t know,” I answer, but it feels like a lie.

Love. And what do any of us really know about that?





81





FALL, SOPHOMORE YEAR


It’d been almost two months since Nagori told me about the Berlin young artists show, and Dad hadn’t said a word. My guess was Mom wasn’t planning to tell him. What would happen would happen.

June felt like a long way off, but Nagori was nagging me about my progress.

“What the hell am I supposed to draw, Axel?” I flopped onto his couch facedown, pressing my nose into the tweed. My sketchbook was on the floor, where I’d flung it so I didn’t have to look at the drawing I’d begun. “I don’t know how to make a goddamn portfolio.”

“What’s wrong with the things you’ve been making?” he said, pressing chords into his digital keyboard. He’d turned the volume way down low; I could hear the tap of the plastic more clearly than the actual notes. “Haven’t you been working on stuff in the art room after school?”

“None of it’s good enough. I can’t just keep doing these weird, surreal, sketchy… things. If I want to get into the show, I need to send in pieces that are more…”

“Profound?” he offered.

“Yes! Exactly. Profound and, like, more polished.”

“Polished just takes time. But I’m not sure you can really try to be profound. I think that’s how you end up doing… pretentious hipster crap.”

“Hipster? Really? That’s coming from Mr. Opera Electronica.”

He put his hands up. “Hey, I’m not going out of my way to try to be ‘profound.’ I’m just trying to do something genuinely interesting to me. Which was what you were already doing before you got your suspenders all in a twist over this Kreis thing.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Suspenders?”

He shrugged. “Just trying out some alternatives. Panties is annoyingly sexist. But anyone can rock suspenders.”