Mr. Wang Einstein

A few days after Qingming, I went to visit my maternal grandfather’s grave with my father, my mother, who had just made up after a fight, and my mother’s cousin, who had never amounted to anything.

I had never met my grandfather. Plagued by illness, he had died unhappy eight years before I was born. That was twenty-five years ago now.

We set out oranges, mangoes, soy sauce chicken, honey-glazed fried dough twists, cake rolls, and six orange-red plastic wine cups in front of the grave. The cups were cheap and light. A slightly stronger gust of wind seemed enough to blow them onto someone else’s grave.

I made a point of helping, so no one could accuse me of disrespecting our ancestors. My mother wiped the headstone while my father and my mother’s cousin carried over a large brazier covered in dark red rust. My father filled the six cups with beer, then picked them up and poured them onto the ground, one by one. The beer seeped into the earth, leaving only a layer of white foam.

Down below, my grandfather drank without expression.

We began burning paper money. U.S. dollars, Hong Kong dollars, and gold ingots printed with the Jade Emperor and “Bank of the Underworld” went into the brazier, rapidly shrinking, curling, and turning black. Waves of heat kept hitting my face.

It was very bright that day, but clouds covered the sky. Looking back afterward, I always remembered the sky as blue, until I looked through the photographs I had casually taken and discovered it wasn’t. The Qingming rains had gone on for days. This day was bright, dry, and cool.

Behind us were rows of headstones, less than thirty centimeters apart, like villas built close together. To the left were unused graves, like villa plots waiting for someone to move in. Farther away, headstones covered the whole mountain. From here, they shrank into little black crosses.

Besides money, we also burned Grandfather paper versions of an iPhone, an Apple Watch, a laptop, a tablet, ugly designer leather shoes and a suit, as well as roast suckling pig, cured pork, pig’s trotters, roast goose, and cured sausages. These foods looked particularly ridiculous, the thin paper printed a glossy golden brown. On the packaging, in all seriousness, were the words:

“Fine delicacies, exclusively for the underworld.”

While no one in my family was looking, I took a photograph and sent it to my girlfriend.

“Here’s something good to eat. Don’t be mad anymore.”

The brazier was too hot on my face, so I moved to the other side of the headstone. That was where I saw the photograph.

It lay on a stone slab two over from my grandfather’s headstone, only half the size of an iPhone. It should have been glued to some headstone, but it had come loose and now lay flat there. In the photograph was an old man in a suit. He wasn’t smiling. His expression was serious, but with a hint of gentleness, as though he might smile the next second. He had a large nose, puffy eyelids, and a thick head of curly white hair. The photograph was too small and too old to make out individual hairs. All that remained of his hair was a fluffy mass of white.

He had something of a scientist or a scholar about him. Something of Einstein. I thought Einstein must be the owner of the grave in front of me. After decades in the sun, followed by the spring rains of the past few days, his photograph had finally fallen off. But when I looked up from it, both portraits on the headstone were still firmly in place. On the left was an old woman in a round black cap that covered all her hair. She had single eyelids and a round face. The air of a village woman who had worked hard all her life spilled beyond the edges of the photograph. She could not possibly have been Mr. Wang Einstein’s wife.

To the old woman’s right was an old man who looked almost exactly like the God of Longevity in a New Year print. The only difference between the old man and the God of Longevity was that he was already dead, and immortals do not die.

Engraved on the headstone were the words:

“Loving mother Li Yanqing, born on the twentieth day of the eleventh month, 1936; died on the twenty-ninth day of the second month, 2011.

Loving father Yang Qishu, born on the twentieth day of the eleventh month, 1939; died on the first day of the twelfth month, 2021.

Respectfully erected by all their children and grandchildren, on the seventh day of the fourth month, 2011.”

I looked elsewhere. To the left, to the right, in the row ahead—every portrait on every headstone was intact. Mr. Wang Einstein just lay there on the stone slab, as though he had appeared out of thin air.

I stared at him.

Take him with you.

The thought suddenly flared up in my head.

All I needed to do was wait until everyone had packed up and was ready to leave, make sure I was last, then take one second to bend down, pick up the photograph, and slip it into the back pocket of my jeans. No one would see.

Almost at once, I saw what would happen after I took the photograph away.

One afternoon, I would stand in front of the bay window in my bedroom and pull Mr. Wang Einstein from the back pocket of my jeans in front of Wang Jiayi.

Wang Jiayi would be stunned.

“The fuck is this?”

“I found it.”

“Fuck, that’s awesome, hahahahaha.”

Wang Miao would say, “You’re going to make me die laughing.”

I would have one more bizarre, absurd item in my collection.

That evening, she would snuggle against me as we watched Incantation together. Li Ruonan and her daughter had been cursed. Thud, thud, thud. That was the sound of Li Ruonan’s head striking the ground again and again.

I would suddenly remember that afternoon. At first, we had all been laughing by the bay window. Then we had slowly fallen quiet, looking into Mr. Wang Einstein’s eyes together. Mr. Einstein seemed to have grown angry.

“Better to believe it exists than to believe it doesn’t,” I would say.

I was still standing in the cemetery.

I looked at Mr. Wang Einstein, then at the old village woman and the dead God of Longevity, and held my gaze on the two of them for a while in a silent salute. After all, I was standing on their territory and planning to take something away from here.

“Sorry to disturb you both. I’m just taking something.”

I looked down at the photograph again.

“Sir, you wouldn’t mind, would you?”

The paper offerings in the brazier had collapsed. My father and my mother’s cousin were starting to pack up, and my mother was calling me too. This was the moment. I only had to make sure I was last, bend down once, and pick him up in a second.

I stood there and looked at the photograph one last time.

It still lay quietly on the stone slab.

In the end, I only took out my phone and photographed it.

Then I left.