my finger to the four coins in my pocket. I would tell no one until I saw Peng and Xie.
I returned to the meat section. It too was quiet. The great black ranges stood in a row, the glow in their fireboxes snuffed down to red embers. The woks were clean and back on their rack. “Master?” I said, and my voice sounded small and childish in the air.
No one. But I felt something. I felt him. I continued walking toward the back room where the meats were hung and where long banks of prep counters were lined with endless bowls in blue and white filled with all manner of sauces and condiments and accent vegetables, all fresh minced to perfect uniformity.
Then I noticed something.
There were shards scattered on the floor, blue and white; someone had broken a bowl. I froze.
There were his feet. He lay curled around himself as if still in agony, both hands pressed to his chest. I didn’t need to touch him. I didn’t need to feel for his pulse. I knew he was dead; I could tell. The light of knowledge had gone out of him. All he knew had escaped into the air. I glanced around frantically, as if somehow I could find it and gather it back. It’s in books, he would say to me if he were here, go find it. But he was gone. He was empty and inert.
I dropped and kowtowed to him three times. After the third time of pressing my forehead to the cold tile floor, I rose and began a long and agonized wail for help, not stopping until I heard the jumbled footsteps, the eunuchs and the kitchen workers, the scuffing and clattering. Their faces, their eyes when they stumbled in and saw him, were pale and sick and horror-struck. It was as if civilization itself had died. It was the beginning of the end. All of us knew it somehow, and all together we lowered ourselves to the floor before him. Men and eunuchs crowded into the doorway, ten deep, twenty, and when they saw, they too fell to the ground.
The call was going out. I heard a bell clanging. Suddenly I knew, from deep inside me, that he was going to have one of the greatest funerals the capital had seen in decades, with a banquet lasting three days for his family, his friends and admirers, the princes and the great scholars and the high officials. And I would prepare his glazed duck.
When Maggie finished she sat for a moment in silence. This man in front of her was part of a pattern that went back in time, across generations; he was connected. Not merely to a single person, such as a spouse — she knew how quickly that could be torn away — but to a whole line. No, she thought, a civilization. She watched him move around the kitchen as if from a distance, from a boat offshore, from a life that would never be like his. Not that she felt envy. She had made it one of Maggie’s Laws this past year not to covet the lives of others. She had learned to guard against such feelings in order to continue to have friends, to have a life; almost everyone she knew still possessed what she had lost, which was normalcy and love. She didn’t know yet about this man’s private life, but now that she’d read the prologue, she did see he had something else, something that clung to him like a light. It was a connection over time, insoluble.
As a state of mind, a multigenerational sense was new to Maggie, or at least foreign; she was from L.A., where many people, including her own responsible but solitary single mother, had come from someplace else. People made their own lives; that was what Matt had always said. He’d done it. He placed himself in the world. He spent lots of time on jets and married a woman who did the same. And in his mid-thirties, after years of loving her because she was the peripatetic observer and writer he had come to know, he began vexingly to still love her but to wish that she were different. Then the moment he felt it, he had to tell her; that was the way he was. He started waking her early in the morning with his hand on her abdomen, on the warm spot in her center. Think about it, he would