246 Tickets to Heaven

In truth, no one ever understood why Kamiya Zhan came to work part-time at the crematorium. My father was the director there, and the place was always short of hands, so when someone delivered himself to the door, my father was so delighted that he went out that very night and bought a lottery ticket. The day Kamiya arrived, I was still in class. During the break, the girls were clustered in little groups trading gossip. Who had broken up with whom, whether the Chinese teacher wore flats because she was pregnant, how handsome the transfer student in Class Seven was, what a beautiful three-point shot he had. I sat on my desk peeling an orange by myself. There were sixty-one students in our class, and I probably spoke ten lines in a whole day: the math teacher's two routine scoldings, one answer for the history teacher, two or three hellos from classmates suddenly seized by kindness, and the names of three dishes at lunch in the cafeteria. Every day I also bought a copy of the Citizen's Times, because it was thick, cheap, and perfect for my two rabbits to chew. None of that was worth complaining about. I had to deal with dead people every day too. When I went back to the crematorium after school, the backyard was in uproar. The staff were standing at the door armed with whatever came to hand, one holding a funeral wreath, one a vase, one using a pair of condolence banners like nunchaku. "Suran, there's a thief in the building," Aunt Xu the makeup artist whispered from behind me, trembling. I slipped quietly inside. As I passed the storage room, someone suddenly caught me by the collar and shoved me in. The owner of that hand laughed with great satisfaction. His voice was low, and when he spoke it sounded unfairly good. "Ha. Caught another one. Stay in here and rest a while. We'll wait for the police." He raised his brows in a grin, made a point of turning on the light, then locked the door and strode away. The storage room was another name for the body room. Sure enough, in the corner there was another strange boy, presumably the real thief, shaking all over and pointing hopefully at the corpse on the slab. "That's fake, right?" "Why don't you touch it and find out?" I said kindly. He was on the verge of tears. "Where is this? A hospital? A morgue?" "A crematorium," I reminded him. He closed his eyes and fainted dead away on the spot. The door flew open. All the aunts and uncles from the crematorium rushed in around me with expressions of heroic resolve. The boy who had locked me in stood at the doorway looking panicked. "Aoki Suran," he said, "I'm Kamiya Zhan, the new part-timer." He introduced himself without mentioning the important parts. He looked refined and harmless, like one of my white rabbits. But what sort of rabbit throws a thief into a room full of corpses and then thoughtfully turns on the light so he won't miss the details? Later, in the backyard, everyone relaxed enough to gossip. Aunt Xu tugged my sleeve and whispered, "That boy Zhan, lips red, teeth white, where couldn't he find a decent job? Why come to a crematorium like ours?" Then she lowered her voice further. "Do you think he might be one of those psychopaths they talk about on TV?" I nodded vigorously. This piece of gossip immediately rose to the top of the crematorium's Ten Greatest Mysteries.

It did not take long for me to discover one of Kamiya Zhan's little conspiracies. Before long it turned out that the mysterious transfer student in Class Seven was him. He was the sort of person who felt familiar on first sight, with three-point shots so precise they could be fired from half a court away and still land directly on my lunchbox. I say that with irony, of course. In high school I liked novels more than textbooks and used to tear the covers off my schoolbooks so I could wrap romance novels in them and read brazenly in class. But I had more tricks than that. For example, I used to tuck love letters into textbooks. At seventeen, girls are allowed a little yearning for love. Back then we thought boys did not have to be impossibly handsome, but they did have to be good students. Muscles were not our thing. We liked the thin kind, the kind who wore a school uniform like a reed and looked neat and green as spring onions. In Class Seven, Zhou Zhijia was exactly that kind of boy. The girls in our class used to talk about him constantly, though lately they had started shifting the subject to Kamiya Zhan. Having grown up in a crematorium, I possessed a natural lawless streak. One afternoon I slipped a love letter into my Chinese textbook, sneaked into Class Seven during lunch, and swapped my Chinese textbook with Zhou Zhijia's. It was an outrageously bold thing to do, and I spent the whole day in a state of unease. Zhou Zhijia showed no particular reaction. I smiled at him; he smiled back. Oddly enough, when I went to the crematorium after school, Kamiya Zhan had arrived early and was practicing makeup with Aunt Xu, who was pretending to be a corpse. He was carefully painting lipstick onto her mouth when his hand slipped and he gave her a blood-red grin. She whacked him with a feather duster and scolded him for being absent-minded. He said nothing, only stalked off to the backyard. Then he pulled a Chinese textbook out of his bag and smacked me on the head with it. Pages flew open like spirit money in the furnace. I stared at him. "Why is that with you?" He said darkly, "Sending love letters is your business, but at least scout the target properly before you do it. Don't shove one into some random desk." I blinked stupidly. "Did I put it in the wrong place? I put it in your desk?" Kamiya nodded with righteous severity. "What's so great about Zhou Zhijia? He has limbs and no brains. And if you dare fall in love this early, I'll tell your father." A chill went through me. My first sweet little crush died right there in his hands. Yet the matter did not end there. In our final year, after the classes were split into arts and sciences, I transferred into Liberal Arts Class Seven and ended up sitting beside Zhou Zhijia. One day during review season he pulled a Chinese textbook off my desk and frowned. "Why is my second-year Chinese textbook with you?" I froze. He pointed to the spine. Though the writing had faded, his name was still clear. Then he picked up his own book and said, remembering, "This one used to be Kamiya Zhan's. Last year he suddenly went mad and tore through my desk. In the end he insisted on swapping Chinese textbooks with me." I covered my face in silence, then quietly traded Kamiya's textbook back for mine while the scenery outside the window moved slowly toward July.

From the moment he ruined my chances with Zhou Zhijia, I refused to speak to Kamiya Zhan. If he threw a ball at me, I ignored him. If he spoke, I looked away. There is a saying: if you can't afford to provoke someone, then at least you can avoid them. One weekend there was a memorial service, and Kamiya and I were posted at the door to welcome guests. Everyone at the crematorium adored him, especially my father, who said that with a face as upright as his, Kamiya Zhan was practically a living advertisement for the funeral parlor. As if a good advertisement could ever make people want to spend more time at a crematorium. Worth mentioning: the day my father bought that lottery ticket, he won fifty yuan for the first time in his life. Standing at the entrance, Kamiya chatted idly with me. "Suran, are you still angry?" I pretended not to hear. "Aoki Suran, I genuinely don't understand how you could ever have liked a monkey-faced creature like Zhou Zhijia. Your taste is unbelievable." I made a little motion toward my eyes and explained that boys in glasses looked especially refined and elegant. Kamiya ran off at once. When he came back, there was a pair of glasses perched on his nose. I stared in horror. "Why does that frame look so familiar?" "They're your father's reading glasses. I popped the lenses out," he said cheerfully. Aunt Xu sidled over and whispered in my ear, "I've been thinking my apprentice probably likes you." By then they had become a teacher-and-disciple united front. I shook my head and answered firmly, "What on earth could he possibly like about me? If I change it, will that help?" Just then a car horn sounded at the back gate and a driver leaned out shouting, "A man got struck by lightning while walking. The family is grief-stricken and wants him cremated immediately." The crematorium was short on hands, so Kamiya and I were pulled out to deal with it. When the body was taken off the vehicle, Kamiya smacked his lips and said, "He's so fat." He really was, close to two hundred pounds. We pushed the trolley together, panting. Halfway there, Kamiya let go and stopped to rest in a display of laziness that should have been a crime. Just before we reached the furnace, the fat man's hand twitched. Every hair on my body stood up. Then the fat man opened his eyes leisurely and asked, bewildered, "Hey, where is this?" I shrieked, grabbed Kamiya, and tried to shove him forward while stammering, "A corpse revived! The corpse revived!" Kamiya went white as paper and dragged me out with him. The entire crematorium leaped into motion. There was a memorial under way at the time, so as I ran screaming into the main hall, the guests scattered in all directions. Later a team of doctors came and took the fat man back to the hospital whole and alive. He had not come back from the dead at all. He had only been stunned by the lightning. Before he left, he solemnly stacked my hand and Kamiya's together in his own. And naturally this exact scene was captured by a television crew who had rushed over after hearing the story. It rolled over and over on the local news. At school we were instantly saddled with a ridiculous nickname, the Crematorium Twins, and it nearly killed me on the spot. The last thing I heard about that lightning-struck man was that later, carrying an urn in his arms, he threw himself into the river. Once I asked Kamiya whether there really was such a thing as love so deep a person never regretted dying for it. "There is," he said.

By September the heat and drought had become unbearable. Even the plants in the crematorium yard were on the verge of collective death. Kamiya Zhan stood there with a hose watering them, pinching the end so the stream sprayed out like a man-made rainstorm. The water caught the light and broke into brilliant shards. Only then did I truly look at him. His brows and eyes were fine and clear, his nose straight, his lips sharp. Every feature was exquisitely made. And yet if you looked closely, it was not hard to see the unhealthy pallor underneath it all. Suddenly Kamiya turned around and said, "Aoki Suran, I'm a really handsome guy. Aoki Suran, I don't like you at all. Aoki Suran, I'm leaving." He went away in early September. In total, he spent exactly two hundred forty-six days at the crematorium. He never knew that I remembered the number perfectly. Without Kamiya Zhan, the whole place seemed to collapse into silence. Even Aunt Xu lost interest in gossip. In my room there hung a drawing, a childish sketch made by the boy next door who used to be my playmate. He had always been weak and sickly and loved to hide in corners and cry. Later I took him to the crematorium to play. It was a sad place, full of strangers coming and going, crying as if their hearts would break. When he cried, I used to threaten him like a little hooligan with no morals at all: cry once, and I'll kiss you once; cry again, and I'll kiss you twice. Time passed. Even that tiny childhood sweetheart vanished. One day I took that drawing down. The paper had yellowed and grown brittle, but the two characters on the back were still clear, written in a crooked hand: Kamiya Zhan. The truth is, I recognized him the moment he arrived.

This summer, Typhoon Lotus rolled up from the south, and Takano City's rains grew unusually heavy. Kamiya Zhan, just as you guessed, I still stubbornly think the rain is because you are gone. I sat in a milk-tea shop sheltering from the storm. The seat by the window felt too empty. Rain struck the glass with an almost frightening force. There were no other customers inside. One by one I smoothed out your tickets and tucked them into a dictionary. Carrying those two hundred forty-six tickets home, I could not even describe what sort of mood I was in. After hearing my story, the shop owner looked astonished. She told me that if I wasn't making it all up, then that boy had been unbearably moving. To have met someone like that, even once in a lifetime, was already too much luck. Kamiya Zhan, your sister told me that you had been ill for a very long time. When the doctor finally said there was no hope, you came back to Takano City to watch other people's births and deaths. Kamiya Zhan, you really were a conspirator. You were afraid one day people would forget you, so you wanted to stamp a footprint into someone else's heart like a mischievous child, then vanish suddenly before they ever realized what had happened. But that man who died for love last September made your conscience stir at last. I know what you meant without saying it: Aoki Suran, I have to run away before you start to love me. And the moment that thought crossed my mind, my tears came down as heavily as the rain outside. In Takano City, the flowers of July bloom everywhere, but only the water lilies in the pond open in silence.