The Paper-Maker

Wuxi Town was built on the water's edge, and the Wuxi River gave off, all year round, the reek of rotting weeds. At the tail of the town stood a low shed, its rafters piled with bamboo splints, colored paper, and paste — that was Gou Changshun's paper-workshop. The townsfolk called him Old Gou. For forty years, whenever there was a funeral, they came to him for paper goods — paper boys and girls, paper horses and sedans, paper hills of gold and silver, paper mansions and boats — to be burned for the dead, so that the departed might have servants and standing in the underworld.

Old Gou's craft was the finest in town. The paper figures others made had dead eyes; from afar they looked like nothing but a smudged sheet. His were different: from a distance they seemed to bow like living men, even the folds of their robes following the wind. The secret lay in the final stroke. After the bamboo frame was papered and the face painted, he would lean to the paper figure's ear and breathe a soft breath upon it, then dip his brush in cinnabar and dot two living eyes. He often told the boys who came to learn: a paper figure without that breath and those eyes is only paper; with them, it knows the way home. In forty years he had breathed upon and dotted well over a thousand. He took it for the duty of his craft, and never thought to look deeper — that those thousand breaths would, one day, come back to him from the paper, one mouthful at a time.

The shed held all year the sweet-sour reek of paste and the mildew of old paper. Gou woke before dawn, lit the lamp in the dark, bowed once to the bamboo bones lining the wall, then took up the knife to split splints. A thick callus covered his hands, earned over forty years of the bamboo's bite; yet beneath the callus there always seeped a dampness, as if his palm too hid a mouthful of water it had never quite spent.

The people of Wuxi Town all feared the water — not the drowning, but what lay beneath it, the souls that never made it to rebirth. The old folk passed down a saying: he who drowns is stuck in the river, neither risen nor gone, unless he drags a living man down to fill his place, only then may he be freed to be reborn. So no child on the Wuxi ever dared enter the water alone, and even grown men took the long way around the rapids. Old Gou's shed stood half a li from the river; at night he often heard the water, and took it for wind. The town's children feared his shed too — when a mother wanted to hush a fretful child, she would say, make another sound and I'll send you to Old Gou's shed, he'll paper a little figure to watch over you — and the child would fall silent at once.

In the town's funerals, when a coffin went out, Old Gou's paper work always led the way. The paper horse in red trappings, the paper boy and girl with their lanterns, the filial son bearing the tablet behind, scattering spirit-money all along the road to guide the dead on their way. Gou's paper was so lifelike it drew stares from the roadside; people said the paper boy's eyes seemed to watch them. Gou heard and only smiled, then went back and dotted those eyes even livelier.

It was his master, on his deathbed, who bound the water to the paper in a single warning. That year the old man could no longer speak whole sentences; he clutched Gou's hand and gasped it out: the one rule of this trade — never give a paper figure living eyes and the craftsman's breath, then set it to keep company with things that claim a master. And what claims a master? A water-ghost, for one; any wrongfully dead, un-reborn lonely soul, for another. You paper a companion for such a thing and breathe your own breath into it, and the paper is no longer goods for the dead — it becomes the craftsman's own double. You give it a breath, and it claims a master in your stead; and when your own breath fails, the first to come for you will be it. Young Gou had been hot-blooded and had laughed at his master's old superstitions behind his back; now he nodded hurriedly, then forgot it again. His hands were good and his work plentiful; where was the time to think on such things.

His master had also told of a paper-maker upriver who papered a wife for a drowned boatman, breathing and dotting her eyes; the paper wife went to the river every night to wait, and later the craftsman himself went down to wash clothes and never came up. When they pulled him out he was clutching the paper wife he had made, soaked through. The master said the paper wife had taken his breath back exactly as given. Young Gou had taken it for a tale.

Gou had not been born to this trade. His father died early; his mother laundered for others and could not save a coffin's price. It was the old paper-maker of the town who took him as apprentice, fed him, and saw to the road ahead. So Gou papered out of gratitude, and out of fear — fear that he too might one day lie in a coffin he could not afford. Forty years on, he had papered more paper than the town had dead.

In his apprentice days he had papered his first horse, which a family bought to bury with a dead child. The mother came back and said she heard hooves in the yard at night, and worried the horse was too real, that it might run. Gou took it for praise of his skill and grew only prouder, giving an extra breath to everything he made thereafter. Looking back now, that single hoofbeat was perhaps the very first mouthful of living breath, sent running ahead of the rest.

That autumn the Wuxi flooded, the water black with silt. Liu Sheng, the only son of the riverside Liu family, was ferrying a boatload of mountain goods past the rapids at the town's mouth when a wave capsized him and he went under. Liu Sheng's swimming was the best in town — a three-year-old could wade that crossing — yet this time he did not come up. The Lius hired divers for three days and pulled up only one shoe, filled with sand. The old men muttered that it was surely a water-ghost taking a substitute, and Liu Sheng's strong young body was exactly to its liking. The Lius were a wealthy riverside house; the old lady wept herself senseless more than once. She had heard the talk too, and sent for Old Gou: would he paper a boy-figure to be the companion of Liu Sheng, burned into the underworld so her son would not be lonely below, and would not need to drag a living man down to fill his place.

Liu Sheng had been a man about to wed. The betrothal paper from the Chen family across the river had long been delivered; the wedding wine was set for winter. With his drowning, the joy became mourning; the Chens returned the paper, and the red sheet was burned at the Liu gate, its ash falling into the Wuxi and floating away on the current. The town sighed in private, saying that if Liu Sheng was lonely below, the Chens' returned paper taken by the water was like a companion found for him ahead of time — only whether that companion was paper or flesh, no one could say.

The water-ghosts of the Wuxi the townsfolk had seen plenty of. In earlier years one or two strong swimmers vanished without cause each year, pulled up with a fistful of river grass in hand, as if dragged from below. The old said it was a water-ghost short of a companion, dragging a substitute; Liu Sheng's turn had only come at the apt moment, just when the Chens returned their paper and he was at his loneliest.

Gou took the work. As was his way he went into the shed, split the bamboo, bound the frame, pasted the soft paper, and built a pageboy as tall as a man's shoulder, in black robe and white sash, eyes lowered and meek, the very picture of a runner and servant. On the day of the face, he washed his hands, mixed the cinnabar, leaned to the paper boy's ear, breathed his customary breath, and set brush to eye. The instant the tip touched the paper he felt those two black dots were unusually bright, bright as if someone were looking out from within the paper, and the back of his neck went cold. He shook his head and blamed it on the swaying lamp.

The day he first brought the paper boy to the hall, the old lady Liu caught his sleeve and said in a rasping voice, "Old Gou, the child you papered has the brows and eyes of a living boy — had he been born to my Liu house, all would be well. My son was a lonely sort; if he has no companion below, I cannot close my eyes." Gou agreed, but his heart gave a lurch — the companion she wanted should indeed be in a living boy's likeness; and the breath he had breathed when dotting the eyes had given just that, only the living boy was Gou himself.

The figure finished, the Lius — at the old lady's wish — did not rush to burn it. They carried it into the mourning hall to sit beside Liu Sheng's tablet for forty-nine days, so the son's soul might first recognize his companion, lest the burning send the wrong spirit below and waste Gou's labor. The town had its rule: on the day of the send-off, the paper goods were borne by the filial son to the grave, the paper horse leading, the boy and girl behind, the son circling the mound three times, and only when he lit the fire with the word "take it" could the dead receive them. What the Lius wanted was for the companion to know its master before the burning, so nothing would fall short. Gou came to look the first few days and saw the figure sit still, nothing amiss, and set his heart at ease.

But on the seventh night, when he returned, the moment he crossed the hall's threshold his nose met a smell — the cold, wet reek of riverbed mud and waterweed, as if a length of rope had just been pulled from the Wuxi. He raised the lamp to the paper boy. The painted face had, somehow, begun to run; the brows and eyes were drifting, faintly, toward his own likeness, and on the left cheek, where there should have been nothing, a pale mole was faintly rising. Gou's heart dropped; he remembered his master's deathbed words in a rush. His breath had made the figure his double, true enough — but the first to claim it was Liu Sheng, the companion-less drowned boy in the river. In other words, he had put his own mouthful of living breath into the Wuxi, into Liu Sheng's hand. Liu Sheng now had a companion and need not drag the living; but that companion was Gou himself.

On the eighth night, while the Liu watcher dozed, Gou slipped back into the hall. This time he crouched and felt the boy's hanging hem. By day it was dry; now his fingertips found a dampness — the black robe's lower edge was soaked, cold to the touch. He gripped that corner and gave a gentle twist, and two or three drops fell onto the brick, spreading a river reek. The hall's eaves were sound, and those days had brought no rain. Where the water came from, he dared not consider.

He simply kept watch in the hall until dawn. Half a candle's worth of tears had pooled; the paper boy sat motionless throughout, yet each time he blinked and opened his eyes, the boy's posture had tilted a fraction — first the head turned, then a shoulder slumped, and at last the hands dropped, as if to stand. He rubbed his eyes and the boy sat upright again, only the pale mole on the left cheek was a shade deeper than the night before.

On the eleventh night the Liu filial son came to him privately and stammered out a strange thing: for several mornings, going in to burn incense, he had found the bench where the paper boy sat was wet through, and a trail of shallow wet footprints led from the hall door straight out toward the river road. But the door was locked, its key kept only by the old lady. The son thought a lazy servant had spilled water; the old lady shook her head and said it was no living person's doing. Gou listened, his palms turning cold — the paper boy left the shed every night to meet Liu Sheng at the river, to meet the master it had truly claimed; and the living breath upon it was Gou's.

The son added that it was not only footprints: each dawn the paper boy's collar was damp, as if someone had wiped its face in the night; stranger still, the wet mark carried a river reek, and the town's coroner, smelling it, said it was no living man's sweat but the smell of standing water. The son dared not speak of it abroad; he secretly took cloth to wipe, but the more he wiped the wetter it grew — the cloth dried, yet the boy showed fresh marks.

He could bear it no longer. On the twelfth night he followed those wet footprints and groped his way to the riverbank. The fog was thick; a man was unclear three steps off. He stood behind the reeds and made out, at the river's edge, a shoulder-high shape in a black robe, hands hanging, facing the black water. Within the mist something else reached toward it — the outline of a young man, dripping all over, as if just risen from the riverbed. As the black-robed shape turned its face, Gou saw clearly: that face was shifting, inch by inch, toward the features of Gou Changshun himself. He did not dare make a sound; he stumbled back into town, river mud on his own soles.

Back in the shed he barred the door, yet he knew: a door could be barred, but not that breath. The breath was in the river, in the paper boy, drawing him back night by night. He tried papering a figure of himself, to "lead" his breath back — but as he set brush to eye he understood: he had used this very method forty years ago; every figure he made sent another breath out. He tore the half-made figure in his hands; the scraps fell into the paste bucket and dissolved into a white slurry.

From those nights on, the strange happenings came one after another, and not only in the hall. In Gou's own workshop, at midnight, he would hear bamboo splints click — a sound maddeningly familiar, as if someone were copying his frame-binding gestures: split, bend, tie, every move exact. He would throw on his clothes and search, but the shed was empty; only the pile of paper scraps he had discarded over the years stirred faintly in the through-draft, like something breathing.

What frightened him more was his own body. Gou had always been hale, but lately he felt a pool of water pressed against his chest; at night he coughed, and the phlegm he brought up carried the river's reek. He tried holding his breath and found it shorter by a full measure, as if a ladle of lung had been quietly scooped away. He raised his hand to the lamp and saw the knuckles whiter than before, the flesh gone dry and brittle, like paper left three days to cure, ready to snap at a fold. He dared not speak of it; he took fewer jobs and shut the shed to rest, but the cold of that water could not be shut out.

He slept ill at night, ever dreaming of water flooding the shed, over his ankles, over the table's edge, softening every paper figure on the wall. In the dream he reached to scoop, and what he caught was no paper but a cold hand that clamped his wrist and pulled him down. He started awake, one corner of the quilt damp, unable to tell if it was sweat or the water of that dream.

In the days after he returned, Gou's hands grew worse. As he bound frames, a white dust sifted from his fingertips, like old paper crumbled; he closed his fist and between the fingers caught a sliver of dried paper edge — whether from some discarded piece or from his own hand, he could not tell. He held his palm to the lamp; the lines were still there, but the blood beneath had paled, pale as rice paper steeped in water.

In those days his voice changed too. At night he coughed, and what came up was no longer phlegm but wisps of fine white fiber that stuck to his cuff; held to the lamp, they were the veins of paper. He tried calling an apprentice's name; the sound was thin and the tail split like paper torn. He clapped a hand over his mouth and dared not make another sound, for fear that if he opened it, what he spat would be nothing but folded paper.

In the deep of night, by the lamp, he caught sight of his own shadow thrown on the wall — its edges were straight as if cut with a knife, the angles too hard for the wavering shadow of a living man. He raised a hand to shield the lamp and the shadow raised its hand too, but the arc of that lift was stiff, like one of his papered figures.

He went to the old lady Liu and asked to take the paper boy back and burn it early. How could she agree — the forty-nine days were not complete, Liu Sheng's soul had not yet fully known his companion, and to burn too soon would leave her son lonely below, would leave him still dragging the living to fill his place. Gou opened his mouth and in the end did not say that the figure had long since claimed a master — and that the master was himself. He understood a plain truth: burn it now, and the fire would carry Gou Changshun's mouthful of living breath, sending him with his own hands into the Wuxi to be Liu Sheng's companion for all eternity; leave it unburned, and that breath would stay in the paper, drawing his own breath back night by night until he was slowly drained. Either way he went into the water; soaked through regardless.

He sought out an old river-man of the town who knew something of the water's taboos. The old man heard him out and shook his head: once a water-ghost has claimed a craftsman's breath, that breath is bound to the river; when the forty-nine days are full, you go to the bank yourself and burn the paper, and that counts as taking the breath back — but what you take back is a breath, not a life, and what you have breathed out over the years is no longer wholly yours. At this the old man fell silent, and only advised him not to go to the bank on the night of the first seventh, to keep far away and let the Liu filial son stand in for him. Gou thanked him, but he knew: he was the one who had papered this boy, and if he did not watch it turn to ash with his own eyes, that breath would hang forever in the paper, hang at his breast — more dangerous than going to the bank.

The old river-man had also said that in the towns upriver, every paper-maker whose skill was fine and who would dot living eyes grew old and died either by drowning or by coughing blood, the phlegm flecked with paper shreds. The townsfolk called it consumption and no one thought to trace it to the paper. Gou heard this and his throat tightened — for what he was coughing now was exactly those shreds.

He remembered his master saying that if paper grew damp, one might scatter stove-ash to draw out the wet. So at midnight he carried stove-ash to the hall and sprinkled a ring along the paper boy's hem. But by dawn the ash was all wet mud, and the black robe was heavier still, as if just pulled from the river. He crouched in the hall and plunged his hand into that wet ash; the cold climbed his fingers, up the wrist, up the elbow — he jerked his hand back, and what clung to his fingers was not ash but a layer of riverbed moss.

On the nineteenth night Gou fell into a dead sleep and woke not in his own bed. He lay on the cold bricks of the mourning hall, his shoulders covered by the black robe the Lius had draped on the paper boy; the hem was soaked through, heavy on his chest, all the chill of river water. The ever-burning lamp before the tablet was guttering but not out, and by its light he saw the bench beside him empty — the paper boy was not on it. He pushed himself up; his legs would not hold him, and in his throat there came a gulp, as if he had swallowed a mouthful of water. He did not remember how he came there; he only remembered a dream of someone leading him down to the river, the water past his knees, past his waist, and the one who turned back had the face he had seen when he dotted the living eyes — bright beyond reason.

Before dawn he groped back to the shed and turned over every paper thing he had ever made. On the oldest paper sparrow in the discard pile, water beads had gathered on its wing; his fingertip touched them and the cold bit. He suddenly understood the words his master had left unfinished: the thousand mouthfuls of living breath he had breathed out over forty years had long since followed their burned paper into the dwellings of a thousand dead; now the Wuxi had come first to collect its debt, and the rest would, sooner or later, follow the scent of paper to his door. The paper-maker's craft, in the end, is this: to fold a living man's breath into a dead man's clothes — easy to fold in, impossible to take back, for the clothes will not yield, and neither will the dead.

As the first seventh approached, the Lius made ready to send the coffin. The old lady sent for Gou, saying the paper boy was to be burned together with Liu Sheng, and asked him to come to the hall to "see it off." Gou knew that what he was seeing off was more than Liu Sheng. He had wasted to a shadow; when he bent his fingers now, the joints gave a faint, papery crack, like a dried autumn leaf snapped in two. He feared fire, yet he had to go — he was the one who had papered this boy, and if he did not watch it turn to ash, that breath would hang forever.

The Liu funeral procession left the town, scattering spirit-money the whole way, the wind lifting the ash high. The townsfolk followed at a distance, none daring near the bank. The old lady, supported by others, wept first "my son" and then "my companion." Gou trailed at the tail of the line, his feet unsteady; whenever someone looked back at him, he felt they were not looking at Gou, but at the paper boy carried ahead in the filial son's arms — for that boy already wore his face.

On the night of the first seventh the hall blazed with candles. The paper boy was brought to the center and seated; Gou looked and nearly could not stand: the boy's face was now entirely his own, even the old mole on the left cheek dotted to perfection, as if he had traced it stroke by stroke from his own face. The old lady Liu wept as she offered incense, believing only that her son had below a companion who knew warmth and cold — how could she know the companion wore a paper-maker's face. The hour came; the filial son lifted the paper boy and walked out the door, to carry him to the river to be burned. Gou followed, his feet like stepping on cotton, and with every step the water in his chest sloshed.

At the riverbank the pyre was lit. The paper boy entered the fire with a crackle, and then the flames licked that face; Gou raised a hand to shield himself, and the fire lit his whole arm a translucent white. He suddenly saw his own hand clearly: the knuckles too straight, the skin too thin; when he bent a finger the sound was not of bone but the fine crackle of dry paper folding at the corner. The fire grew; that face in the flames turned to smile at him, smiling in Gou's own mouth-shape, showing the little gap in his own front tooth.

The Wuxi lapped softly at his feet. Gou could not tell whether the one standing on the bank, fire warming his face, was Gou Changshun who had come to send the paper, or the one laughing in the fire. He heard only the water in his own chest, louder than the fire, beat upon beat, as if someone were steeping the waves of the Wuxi in his bones.

The fire died; on the bank remained only a spread of white ash, and when the wind cleared it a shallow human shape stood there, shoulder-high, hands hanging, as if the print of the paper boy's kneeling. Gou looked down at his own shadow; that shadow too was shoulder-high, hands hanging, overlapping the shape in the ash. He stepped and the shadow stepped; he stood and the shadow stood — but the stance it took was stiff, as if someone had bound it with bamboo splints.

After that, no one in Wuxi Town ever asked Old Gou to paper a figure that could claim a master. He closed the shed and moved to a dry house beyond the town, yet each autumn flood the room still gave off the river's reek, and the shadow on its wall stayed a shade too neat for a man. The town's children still fell silent passing that house — only this time, what they feared was no longer only the paper figures.

A note from the Midnight Record: the breath with which the paper-maker dots the living eyes was never a lamp lit for the dead — it is a river dug for the living man himself. What you fold into the paper, the paper will one day remember for you.