As agreed, Payne arrived at the cemetery gates at 6:00 p.m. Kelly hadn’t arrived yet. He leaned back against a giant rubber tree, before sliding down and sitting on the roots. Chinese cemeteries, he saw, were like Christian ones but without the crosses. In spite of having had to navigate streets busier than he had thought possible, when he got to the gate all the people had disappeared and the silence was nearly absolute; the only sounds were the raw sewage trickling along an underground drain and the songs of certain birds. The cemetery contained a large number of manhole covers, and the railway stanchions were sunk into the ground at various points, clearly exhibiting, to Payne, a perfect harmony between forces terrestrial and celestial; not only was it a resting place for the dead, but also for the effluvium—and the most advanced technology—of a civilization. One that was also perhaps dead. If his brother Robert had been there with his plane, he thought, he’d doubtless have had something more intelligent to say. He let out a laugh. As he’d observed in his room, the trains passed at intervals of 5 minutes and 50 seconds, sending clatters and booms between the slightly cracked graves and mausoleums, when everything would again fall silent. This cadence he recognized as the perfect simulacrum of sea waves. Kelly never showed up.