One night I was reading when my friend C called me out of nowhere. He had been dead for ages.
“Hey, what are you up to?” That was the first thing he said.
I said, hey, bro, you’re already dead. How come you’re calling me?
He said, fuck, man, I’m so bored now. Death isn’t that great after all. It’s no fun. Honestly, I’m bored.
I remember you weren’t afraid to die.
Of course he wasn’t. He wasn’t afraid before he died. Afterward might be different.
My friend C was as interesting as everyone else. He ate, slept, spent money, had fun, and then took enough pills to die. I have many people like that around me, but none of them call. Only C still remembered me after he died.
I felt a little awkward, getting a sudden call from him.
So we caught up.
I told him your guitar is still sitting on its stand. Your clothes are hanging there, some expensive, some cheap, some one-offs. Lots of people want the one-offs. I wanted them too. But your mother said she was going to burn them, and I couldn’t very well have the nerve to ask. I wouldn’t even know how to offer to buy them, or say I wanted something to remember you by.
Your mother said how unlucky it would be to wear a dead man’s clothes. You had joined the ranks of the dead.
Your mother wanted to burn your old clothes. I remember F was there that day too.
At the sound of F, he sighed.
What? Miss her? Missing her won’t help. You’re already dead. You made F use up three generations’ worth of grief.
No, C said.
I remember F coming that day. Your parents were too embarrassed to throw her out.
She knocked softly. She had not brought the usual two cartons of cigarettes, two bottles of liquor, or a fruit basket. The moment your parents opened the door, her piercings and eye makeup gave them a fright. The makeup was mostly there to hide the fact that she had nearly cried herself blind, though it did look quite gothic. She wore her most expensive clothes. Remember? A slightly dated, quite flash dress with a dragon pattern, purple tights, and a pair of New Rock boots. I am so sick of New Rock. Aesthetic fatigue.
C thought so too.
After F came in, she sat on the sofa with her head lowered.
Your mother did not even say, “My son is dead; why don’t you be my goddaughter?”
Your mother really did want to see F. F was the first to come. She thought she had been your only lover. Or something beyond that.
You were dead, though while alive you had never known what responsibility meant either.
F came and sat there.
Your mother kept her head down, not daring to look at the piercings in F’s face or the tattoos on her hands.
“Auntie,” she said, trembling, “I really liked him.”
Your mother said, “C was a good child. When he was little… so well behaved. He just fell in with a bad crowd.”
F asked when the funeral would be. Your mother said they would see. Then F left. She did not even touch the little mandarins on the coffee table. That basket of fruit shrivelled up long ago. None of you had time to care.
And then what? C asked.
Your funeral was an ordinary funeral. Your mother said a child could not have a wake, and there was no band playing or singing. They moved you straight from the guesthouse to the hospital. Your mother called your maternal grandparents over to take one look.
I can’t bring myself to tell you how your grandparents reacted. Seeing them like that was like seeing a ghost. You are dead and calling me, which might also count as seeing a ghost, but I think about you all the time, C. You were my good brother. I just cannot bear to think about what they looked like then.
What have you been doing lately, since you died? I asked him.
I’m so bored, C said. Sometimes I just keep walking down the street. I see so many people, so many couples. I hate couples more than anything.
Before he died, he saw plenty of girls too. He could not accept being in a couple, but he hated not being in one.
C said he envied the men and women he saw on the street: the ones in glasses, the ones with clean pale faces, the ones who covered their pimples with blue star stickers, the ones whose features simply sat there on their faces. The women, and the men beside them, stupid enough to make a perfect match.
Bro, look what they’re wearing: fashionable jeans bought online, mass-produced in a factory, one thin skin of fabric with no workmanship, uniformly machine-washed, even the rips and patches all in the same places, cut open with a worker’s knife instead of worn through naturally. The pale, washed-out blue trousers were like sheets of paper draped over their bodies, thin as an Okamoto condom. Jeans like those would never take on the patterns and distinctive wear marks of their owners’ movements, never mind whiskers or honeycombs. Just a sheet of paper hung on a person. As they walked, the trouser legs slid backward and forward, unaware of how pitifully ordinary they were.
Then there were the people in overcoats. None of them wore real overcoats, only fluffy Korean-style ones, none of them made from virgin wool. They strutted like old-time examination champions being paraded through town. The things covered their bodies like pot lids. Lift one and it seemed filled with hydrogen, light enough to float away, under five jin—barely five and a half pounds.
True, I said.
Then I asked, did you see your friends?
F was about to leave that day when they arrived on electric scooters. The guard at the residential compound would not let them in. They said you had died and they wanted to see you. The guard was astonished. Dead so young, he said. What a sin.
At those three words, C laughed for a long time.
No fucking kidding. What a sin, he said. Those people I met.
It is all a sin. You enter someone’s life and then die—isn’t that sinning against them? And then there are all your friends, so many friends, friends online, friends who looked at your photographs every day, friends who never met you, friends who liked your posts every day, friends from social apps. To know them is to sin against them.
You were a huge star.
True, he said, but I’ve been dead a long time now.
You were absolutely a huge star, because no one cares about you. You can only see the people within your own field of vision. In fact they are nothing, and they do not care about you. In your world you are a star. You know all your friends, and all your friends know you.
You and those friends of mine who imagine themselves stars all think you’re cool. You like ruining yourselves for fun but cannot reconcile it with yourselves, and sometimes you put on a false face and tell other people not to do the same.
True, C said. After all, I’m dead.
When we were young, a lot of people were too young. Now they have grown up. By the time we no longer want to smoke. Fooling a bunch of kids. No fun.
No fun, he agreed.
I’m going to shower, I told him. Let’s hang up, bro.
All right, he said. I’ll go look in on F.
……………
The next night he came to my room in person.
He looked as if he had died twice.
I can’t take it anymore, C said. I want to die. Fuck. I want to die.
What did you see?
I saw F.
F was lying down.
She could not sleep.
I saw the toy beside her pillow. She held it and cried.
A plush toy. Plush. The one I bought her, through WeChat’s gift feature.
Thirty yuan.
She could not sleep, holding that toy. Plush, except none of it was plush. The cushion was made of polyester fiber, and the filling was one hundred percent polyester fiber.
At least polyester fiber had no strange smell. Before I died, when I was still with her, I read an article on WeChat that said polyester fiber was all made from plastic bottles.
I was already dead, dead like a plastic bottle, disgusting as polyester fiber.
F could not see the people she wanted to see or do the things she wanted to do. She could not refuse the cushion at hand. She could not refuse missing someone. Every day new people appeared on her social apps. She put down her phone, and the world ended.
She picked up her phone again to see whether anyone had replied to her comment. She picked up her phone, and the world still did not appear around her—only a few things nobody cared about.
I stood beside her. F could not see me. I looked at the polyester fiber. F held it tighter.
F thought about C. He was dead. Even before he died, he had never thought about her. F and her friends were all the same. Every time, they sorted their bottles by type and left them separately beside the rubbish bin, making things easier for the auntie who collected recyclables.
That was F.
C watched her and felt that he wanted to die a second time. He truly could not stand it, as though he had put on fashionable jeans bought online and a fluffy Korean-style overcoat.
He told me he wanted to die a second time.
I said, then give it a try.
After that, he never appeared again. Dead people cannot talk.
……………
I had been doing perfectly well lately, until all this business with C left me upset and distracted.
Everyone has a few dead friends.
Once you get a little older, the paths of your lives have long since diverged. Some people think having a friend die is an exceptionally singular event in their lives.
All they have done is acquire a dead friend, along with things one does for a dead friend—things they have never done themselves, only heard about. Singing for him on a mountaintop, drinking in front of his headstone. These are the most interesting things they are capable of. While doing them, they think about their friend: ah, he’s dead already, so what does it hurt for us to do this?
I have many dead friends. All I can do is think about them often. They lived into their teens or twenties and then went and died.
There are many people like that. They are eulogized.
I cannot do anything now. Most of the time all I have is the guilt and grief after masturbating, and after waking from a dream in which I saw people I will never see again. Then I want to die, want to die just to show the alarm clock that woke me, to show the people who are always telling me to get up, but it is no use at all.
While F held polyester fiber, I was writing—writing a little about life and death, thinking I was so far above it all. Just like holding polyester fiber.