RAYMOND HAD NO IDEA HOW LONG HE’D BEEN running. But when he stopped, he was gasping for breath in a small park. He turned away from the glare of the sun and wiped his face, grimacing when a blade of pain stabbed his lungs.
The park was located inside a run-down public housing estate. The kind he’d grown up in: squat dichromatic blocks with swimming-pool tiles on the wall; apartments set along mile-long corridors, thick with cooking smells; washing lines strung beside front doors. A low-rise, low-rent ecosystem.
The children’s playground to his left was empty. The elliptical lawn in front was filled mainly with old men, walking laps on a maroon track or playing checkers on concrete tables. On his right, a lady with a pointy straw hat and gumboots was scooping up dead leaves in the garden.
Raymond rested on a concrete stool.
“Who said you could sit here?” rasped an unfriendly voice from the other side of the table. It came from a dark, shabby-looking man with helmet hair and tobacco-stained teeth.
“This is public property,” Raymond shot back. “I’m entitled to use it as a taxpayer. In fact, I pay more tax than you. If anything, I should be telling you to fuck off. But I won’t. So, are you going to thank me?”
The argument appeared too much for the man’s peasant brain to counter. “What’s the world coming to? One can’t even enjoy privacy when honoring ancestors?” he moaned.
“Tell you what. I’ll give you privacy if you’ll give me fifty-three million.”
The man laughed. “Do I look like I’ve got fifty-three million?”
“I guess not,” Raymond said, eying the holes in the man’s fake Guess T-shirt. “You’ll have to put up with me then, won’t you?”
The man shook his head in resignation. He tossed a cigarette in the air and caught it with his mouth, perhaps in an effort to impress Raymond. He lit it with a cheap plastic lighter and tipped the flame to an incense stick in a holder, then closed his eyes and joined his palms, cigarette clenched between his lips.
After he finished praying, he removed half a dozen mandarins from a cloth bag and placed them next to a rice bowl.
“My father appeared in my dreams yesterday. He said he hadn’t eaten for days,” the man explained.
“If it were my father, I’d let him starve. A real asshole.” Raymond snorted. “He’s still alive. If he died, my mother might come and live with me.”
The man ignored Raymond’s comment and produced an open biscuit tin from his bag. He arranged a small paper house and car in the tin, the tip of his tongue sticking out between his lips, like a little girl playing with a dollhouse.
“He wanted a house and car, too? How demanding,” Raymond remarked. “Question. Logical one. If there were people up there driving cars, don’t you think we’d be able to see them through a telescope?”
The man inserted his hand into the cloth bag and took out a thick wad of notes.
“Whoa. You lied about having no money.”
“It’s not real,” the man said.
“I know. Can I see it?”
The man grudgingly peeled off a note and gave it to Raymond. He arranged the rest in a neat pile next to the house and car.
Raymond held the note up to the sun, as though checking if it was counterfeit. It looked like an American dollar, except the words “Federal Reserve” were replaced by “Bank of Diyu,” and in Benjamin Franklin’s place was a fierce-looking Chinese emperor with a goatee and handlebar moustache. Raymond recognized this as hell money, the currency of the underworld. He remembered burning these at his grandmother’s funeral.
His eyes slid back to the man, who flicked his lighter and held it to the paper house. The house caught fire. Fanned by a breeze, the flames swelled and leapt to the car and then the pile of money. The burning notes curled, buckled and blackened before dissolving into flecks. The man closed his eyes and ushered the thickening smoke toward the sky.
“Do you really think your father’s got a house, car and loads of money because you burnt bits of paper? Hmph. You know what this is? Guilt. A constant reminder that you’ve never done enough for your parents. A guilt that ought to die with them. But society’s found a way of keeping it alive so they can sell you bits of paper like this,” Raymond said, waving the hell money note in his hand.
The man dropped his cigarette and crushed it under his feet. “I feel sorry for you,” he said. “A man who doesn’t honor his ancestors is a lost soul. I’m not stupid. I know burning paper money isn’t going to make my father rich. It’s just a symbol of respect. Besides, if there were a way I could get real money over to him, I would.”
Raymond’s eyes widened when the man uttered the words. He looked at the hell money in his hand, then at the man.
“What?” the man asked, unnerved by Raymond’s stare.
“You just gave me an idea,” Raymond said, and left.