In the eleven years after Niannian left, Jiang Li lived as a precision instrument.
Her schedule ran in fifteen-minute increments. Up at six-thirty, at the institute by seven-twenty, leaving at eleven at night. She moved from the district with the ginkgo trees to an old apartment near the research institute, because "commuting wastes time." She locked Niannian's sketchbook in the drawer of her study, locked it for eleven years, the key in her breast pocket—she never opened the drawer, but every day she touched the pocket to confirm the key was still there. Colleagues said she was calm, students said she was terrifying, superiors said she was reliable. No one said she was pitiable, because she did not permit it.
Physics was her bomb shelter. Equations were the only things that never died: you write one down, and there it is—doesn't yellow, doesn't fall, doesn't return to one. She studied quantum gravity—the coldest, most marginal corner of the physics map—the nature of spacetime at the smallest scales. Colleagues joked that Jiang Li wanted to drill down to the very bottom of reality, to see what this world is actually made of.
They were right, though they did not know how right.
Every year when the ginkgo turned yellow, Juekong from the temple at the foot of the mountain came to see her.
The old monk said little when he came, carrying a bag of fruit drops—the same kind wrapped in cellophane—sat on the sofa in her office, brewed tea for himself, drank it, left the candy, and went. In the third year Jiang Li couldn't help saying, "Master, I don't eat candy." The old monk said, "It's not for you." Jiang Li said, "She's not here anymore either." The old monk set the candy on the corner of her desk and said the only sentence that sounded like a real sentence: "As long as the candy is here, it's as if the person is here. Even when the person is gone, the candy stays sweet."
In the fifth year, the temple's calico cat died. Of old age; its scarf-like fur had all gone white. Juekong phoned to tell Jiang Li. Jiang Li was silent on the other end for a long time, then said, "Is a cat worth a special notification?" The old monk said, "Niannian entrusted it to me. Now that it's gone, I have to report back to Niannian's parents."
That night Jiang Li went home and, for the first time, opened that drawer. Tucked in the sketchbook was a photograph of Niannian holding up "Scarf," the cat wearing an expression of utter resignation, the child one of triumphant glee. She sat on the floor and looked at that photograph for two hours. The next day she put it back in the drawer and locked it again. Grief was something she had long since figured out: you can't touch it, or it bursts its banks; and you can't throw it away, or she would truly be alone. Locking it up, confirming each day through the wood that it was still there—that was the ceasefire she had reached with grief.
In the seventh year, again when the ginkgo was yellow, Jiang Li walked Juekong down the mountain. Halfway down, she suddenly asked a question she had bottled up for years: "Master, you Buddhists speak of rebirth, of the Pure Land. You've read so many sutras. Do you yourself believe? When a person dies, is she really still there?"
The old monk was watching the leaves covering the mountain. He stirred his tea—at some point he had brewed tea in the halfway pavilion, as if he had been waiting for this question—and said, "There. And not there."
"There you go again." Jiang Li sneered. "I've studied your rhetoric. It's called 'neither empty nor existent,' which translates to 'whatever you say is right.'"
"Benefactor," the old monk said, unhurried and unruffled, raising his eyes, "let me ask you: when water freezes into ice, is the water still there?"
"Yes. Its form has changed."
"When the ice melts, flows into the river, evaporates into clouds, falls as rain—is that original handful of water still there?"
Jiang Li thought. "Yes. But it's scattered. You can't get it back."
"Not being able to get it back—that is what 'there' means," the old monk said. "What you can gather back into your arms is attachment. Attachment is gripping a fixed shape and refusing to let go, but water has never had a fixed shape. What cannot be returned is death—it is someone insisting that when ice melts, the water is gone. What returns, and is everywhere at once, is life."
He gazed at the ginkgo covering the mountain, leaves falling one by one, the whole mountain turning gold.
"Benefactor, look: this leaf falls, rots, seeps into the soil, and next year turns green again in the veins of a new leaf. Is there old leaf in the new leaf? Yes. Can you pick out the old leaf? No. Buddhism does not preach cheap phrases like 'the immortal soul.' Buddhism teaches: of what composes you, not one thing is missing; and the shape called 'you' was never fixed to begin with. These two statements hold at once, and they do not fight."
Jiang Li was silent for a long time. The mountain wind passed through the pavilion, a little cold.
"Master," she said at last, "if people really are, as you say, scattered and gathered, gathered and scattered—then why does it hurt so much?"
The old monk put away his teacup and slowly spoke four words:
"The pain is real."
"Everything else is process. Only the pain is real. That is why the Buddha speaks of compassion—not to make you see through, but so that after you see through, you still cannot bear for others to hurt."
Jiang Li could not understand it then. She only felt there was a cold tenderness in the words, like the faint sweet, salty scent in the air before snow falls. She filed that afternoon under "harmless superstition" and turned back to the laboratory.
She did not know that this old man sweeping leaves was the last person on earth still guarding half a page of instructions. That half-page had been handed down for twenty-five hundred years, reduced to nothing but a riddle; the answer had long since scattered—scattered into the fallen leaves of every year, into every cat that died of old age, into every drawer a mother locked shut.
Nor did she know that the machine taking shape beneath the desert, inch by nanometer, was closing in on the main text of that half page of instructions.
In the ninth year, the "Deep Scan" project was approved. Jiang Li was chief scientist.
In the tenth year, the machine began assembly four hundred meters beneath the northwestern desert. It was the boldest device in human history: a quantum-gravity interferometer, using two beams of matter waves cooled to near absolute zero, to probe whether spacetime itself is smooth. At the project approval hearing, an old academician asked her: Professor Jiang, what do you hope to find?
Jiang Li said: "I want to know whether this world is solid."
The whole room laughed, taking it for rhetoric.
Only she knew it was the most honest question a woman who had lost a daughter could ask. She had spent eleven years boiling the unanswerable question "where did Niannian go" into an answerable one: "what is this world actually made of."
She planned to search from the bottom up. Whichever layer she reached would be her answer.
In the autumn of the eleventh year, the machine was completed. That same year, the temple's ginkgo turned yellow unusually early. Juekong called, saying he was ninety-one, his legs failing, that henceforth he could neither climb the mountain to see the leaves nor descend to see her, and told her to take care of herself.
Jiang Li asked, "Master, is there anything else you want to tell me?"
There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then the old monk said a sentence she could not understand at all at the time:
"Benefactor, if one day you discover that this world is empty, do not be afraid."
"In emptiness, everything fits."