Ms. Lin

Ah-Xiang's mother, in her early fifties, a retired nurse, living alone on the eighth floor of an old apartment block in Xinyi District. She did things with a nurse's orderliness, and read the nursing magazines on PTT.

After her son dropped out of contact, she rationalized his strangeness into 'he's been losing weight lately' and 'he's under a lot of stress'—the least frightening explanation a mother could hold on to.

The lift in that building breaks often, so she takes the stairs and calls it exercise. Eighth floor; she stops twice on the way up.

Half a working life in nursing, and the orderliness did not retire with her: the pill box divided by morning, noon and night; everything in the fridge dated; the remotes on the living-room table always lined up straight. She has subscribed to the nursing magazines for years and stacks the finished ones on the shoe cabinet, unable to throw them out.

The living-room wall is covered in photographs, from her son's first month all the way to his first job. She will point them out one by one to a visitor, telling you which year each was taken and where—the order comes out smoothly, memorized.

She has two kinds of cups for tea: mugs for people she knows, and the porcelain set that only comes out at New Year for people she doesn't.

When Li Kaichen visited again, he found her visibly thinner. The photo wall in the living room had gone from 41 photos to 39—the two missing were her son at eleven by the pool and at thirteen on the schoolyard. The nails were still there, and there were no unfaded frame marks on the wall, yet she had no recollection of them at all.

What was even more wrong: when she spoke of her memories of her son, some things that didn't belong to him had crept in—a group photo that was wrong, a childhood that was wrong. She stood by the window, facing the direction blocked by the building across the way, where nothing could be seen, as if she were 'listening' to something.

The building was thirty-odd years old and the lift broke down on a cycle. The management committee had it repaired more than once; each repair held for a while.

She took the stairs out of habit. Eight floors, with two stops on the way—once at the turn above the fourth, once at the seventh, holding the rail until her breath came even. She called it exercise, and so did everyone else in the block.

Everything in the flat sat by rule. The pill box divided morning, noon and night; containers in the fridge labelled with dates; the remote controls on the coffee table lined up straight, so that she could see at a glance if anyone had moved them.

Half a working life in nursing, and after retirement that orderliness had nowhere to go, so all of it went into her own home.

She had started the wall more than ten years ago. A few frames at first, then more each year, and when the space filled it spread sideways.

The order was hers, running from his first month all the way to his first job. There were gaps—he refused to be photographed through his three years of junior high, and the wall simply skipped them.

The frames did not match: some wood, some plastic, a few bought at a night market. Dusting them she took each down one at a time and put it back exactly where it had been.

She knew every photograph—the year, the place, what had happened that day. She had looked at that wall for more than ten years and could have laid it out with her eyes shut.