under the crumbling mulberry and, with Verdi’s Macbeth blasting out the bedroom window, puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard. He leaves no note except a calligraphic copy of Wang Wei’s twelve-hundred-year-old poem left unfurled on parchment across the desk in his study:
An old man, I want
only peace.
The things of this world
mean nothing.
I know no good way
to live and I can’t
stop getting lost in my
thoughts, my ancient forests.
The wind that waves the pines
loosens my belt.
The mountain moon lights me
as I play my lute.
You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life?
The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.
Mimi is in SFO, on her way to Seattle for a site inspection. She’s mock-shopping the concourse when out of the cacophony of gate calls and public service announcements her name blares out. Something cold grabs at her scalp. Before the people at the customer service desk even hand her the phone, she knows. And all the way home to Illinois she thinks: How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?
HER MOTHER IS HELPLESS. “Your father doesn’t want to hurt us. He has some ideas. I don’t understand all of them. That’s just how he is.” Her words come from a place where the blast she heard from the basement is only one of several possibilities that branching time might try. She looks so gentled, so at peace in her confusion, so utterly under the surface of the flowing river that Mimi can do nothing but share her unreal calm. The job her father leaves is Mimi’s to finish. No one has touched the scene except to remove the body and the gun. Pieces of brain dot the stones and tree trunk, like new species of garden slug. She turns into a cleaning machine. Bucket, sponge, soapy water, for the spattered deck. She failed to alert her sisters or stop what she saw happening. But she can do this—clean up the backyard carnage forever. Cleaning, she becomes another thing. The wind loosens her hair. She looks at the bloodied paving stones, the bits of soft tissue that housed his ideas. She sees him by her side, amazed by the flecks of his own brain lying in the grass. Look the color! You ask how people rise or fall in this life? Like this.
She sits under the diseased mulberry. Wind slaps at the coarse-toothed leaves. Wrinkles score the bark, like the folds in the arhats’ faces. Her eyes sour with animal confusion. Even now, every square foot of ground is stained with fruit, fruit stained, the myths say, with the blood of a suicide for love. Words come out of her, crumpled and tinny. “Dad. Daddy! What you do?”
Then the silent howls.
CARMEN AND AMELIA ARRIVE. United, the trio sit together one last time. They have no explanation. There never will be one. The least likely person in the world has gone on an impossible tour without them. In place of explanation, memory. They put their hands on each other’s shoulders and tell each other stories of how things were. Sunday opera. The epic car journeys. Trips to the lab, where the tiny man floated down the halls, celebrated by all his giant white colleagues, the happy maker of the cellular future. They remember the day the family scattered from the bear. Their mother holding Amelia above her head, in the water. Their father talking to the animal in Chinese—two creatures, not quite of the same order, sharing the same woods.
They hold a silent liturgy of memory and shock. But they hold it indoors. Mimi’s sisters don’t go near the yard. They can’t even look at the old breakfast tree, their father’s silk farm. Mimi tells them what she knows. The call. My time coming.
Amelia holds her. “It’s not your fault. You couldn’t know.”
Carmen says, “He told you that, and you didn’t tell us?”
Charlotte sits nearby, smiling a little. It’s like the family is still on a camping trip somewhere, and she is at lakeside, unsnagging the smallest knots in her husband’s fishing line. “He hates it when you three fight.”
“Mom.” Mimi shouts at the woman. “Mom. Enough. Clear your head. He’s gone.”
“Gone?” Charlotte frowns at her daughter’s foolishness. “What are you talking about? I’ll see your father again.”
THE THREE GIRLS attack the mountain of paperwork and reporting. It has never before occurred to Mimi: