There was nowhere the stench hadn’t penetrated.

He walked with the mother deer for two days, maybe three. Nobody cared about the passage of time anymore, because too much time had passed, and the units used to measure time had lost their meaning. He had a single, extremely clear mission. It seemed (in fact, it “seemed” very clear) that tidying up was all he knew in life, the one thing he remembered how to do. He didn’t cover up his nose or mouth, and he didn’t squint—this was a sign of maturity, a demonstration that he didn’t allow potentially foul odors and unexpected looks of shock to get in the way of his work. He was an old hand, and little things didn’t get to him anymore. He didn’t panic. He would stare down the corpses with steely contempt, snorting scornfully at his own nonchalance.

He was thirty-five, and pinned to his chest was a square tin nametag embossed with his name. He had been on the job for a decade: he could strut down the street, jaywalk if he wanted to, with the metal nametag on. No one cared what his name was. No one had the energy to be concerned with names, and more often than not, no one had time to notice the tin nametag. When he first started in this line of work, he was known only by a number, “Three Oh Nine.” They explained to him that as one of the maintainers of order, he was in hallowed company.

In the beginning, Three Oh Nine used secret rituals he invented himself. The first body he ever cleaned up was that of an old, wizened woman. When he found her in her home, she had already been there for almost a month. Body fluids had leaked from her eyes, nose, and mouth, leaving her dry. Pale yellow tracks remained where the fluids had flowed out, the dry crust stinking of viscous aloneness. When the stench hit him, he almost fainted. He had never before been in such close proximity to the odor of isolation. He squatted down on the floor before the old woman’s body and rubbed it down with standard-issue dry detergent. None of her personal effects revealed who she had been, except for a cellular phone that had long since run out of battery. There was no rotten food in the room—in fact, there was no sign of food whatsoever. It occurred to him that the woman had been awaiting death for a long while. He didn’t know if she had been ill, if she had suffered in her final moments, if she had regretted her life. Shutting his own eyes, he closed her eyelids, too. He silently recited an incantation so that her soul could rest, and she wouldn’t be lonely anymore up in heaven. He hadn’t joined any religious group, so he could only seek help from heaven through prayer.

Later, he gradually realized all bodies smelled the same. Whenever he passed by a secret passage, whenever he was climbing the interminable stairs of a cement building, he would know immediately whether there were any newly forgotten bodies there. He realized that among the living, the stench of death could not be concealed. Sometimes he thought, was even firmly convinced, that the dead deliberately gave off this stench to draw him to them, exuding a final, fervent wish to be found. When he was a boy, he remembered, his father had explained to him that the world was just. By becoming one of them, he believed, he would become a defender of justice.

People seemed to be growing constantly older. There was nearly no new life in the world. The hospital wards were blasted, barren places. The maternity nurses simply sat in the cavernous delivery rooms all day long, yawning. As the people grew older, the world went silent. The leader of Three Oh Nine’s team was a short man who, it was said, didn’t want to have children because he wasn’t tall enough, and since he didn’t want children, he had no need to get married. One day and then another went by, until only he remained, staring into an abyss of old age. It was said that the same fate had befallen another man because he feared the sound of babies crying, and yet another man ended up in the same situation because he was sickened by the bodily fluids of the opposite sex. There were hundreds and thousands of curious reasons. What it boiled down to was that people were unable to tolerate the presence of any other person. Sociologists had coined a name for this phenomenon: “end-of-century isolationitis.” It was an affliction characterized by loneliness and long life, or maybe it was better to say long life and lack of hope.

The squad leader had disappeared at the age of fifty-two. His tin nametag was laid out neatly in the innermost desk drawer. No one knew where he was, whether he was alive or dead. In this city, suicide was not permitted—you could die of illness or old age, you could be murdered, you could be killed in an accident, but you couldn’t kill yourself. The meaning of suicide was despair taken to extremes, a challenge to the proper order of things. It was for this reason that, year after year, the government spent more than half its annual budget on “life engineering” projects, building fully equipped group homes for the elderly, even adding freestanding seniors’ apartments to respect their freedom of choice. After he inherited the tin nametag in the drawer, becoming K, leader of Sanitation Squad Number Five, a new law advocated by a religious group had mandated the construction of worship facilities on every block. Of course, for the sake of fairness and freedom, every religion had its own central temple. The religious believed religion would comfort people as old age inevitably stretched on.

At this point, we may begin referring to Three Oh Nine as “K.”

By the time the government realized that the population growth and the death rate had stabilized, both in the negatives, the sociologists had come to their own conclusion: if things went on this way, human beings would die out, perhaps to be replaced by some other species. This touched off a short-lived panic, so short-lived in fact that no one could determine if there was any real difference between being abandoned and being replaced. Another group of people shouted loudly that at this rate, humanity had about two-hundred years left. Two-hundred years: this figure obviously gave the people great comfort, assuaged their panic, since at least those whiling away their days in the old folks’ homes, and those who dwelt in the halls of worship, would not need to witness the end of the world. People were afraid of the end, and they were afraid of the future. On the screen, a female sociologist said in a reed-thin, monotone voice, maybe we should have an arranged marriage system to encourage people to have children, the proper duty of all citizens. K remembered that the sociologist had been denounced the next day on the Holomedia, and masses of young students had rushed the gates of government to rail against this abuse of authority, this trampling of the people’s freedom. And then, the female sociologist had vanished from the public eye. K was fairly sure he saw her once after that, in the archive room of the vegetarian temple behind the government building. The corpses they collected from the temple were always so light and thin that given a bit of time, the bones and flesh would fuse into a hard, odorless mass like white iron. That was why the sanitation squad paid special attention to the place. K made the rounds there every two weeks. Because they had no odor, the bodies of the deceased vegetarians always ended up wedged into places where no one could detect them—among the gnarled roots of aged pines, in halls where effigies of the old gods stood watch. Dim, chilly places. K imagined them growing old in places like these, praying their lives away, waiting to die, death’s silent majesty hovering in the still air. He was convinced he had seen the sociologist sitting on the windowsill in the temple archives, hair draped over her shoulders, looking like a lost mother deer.

K had another reason for visiting the temple. He was on a secret mission, one only the squad leader with the tin nametag was authorized to carry out. The government had asked them to collect the strongest living female specimen of each species, and K had been assigned by the Sanitation Bureau to gather female mammals. K knew that behind the temple, near the ancient pine, there was a large swath of swampland and a grove of trees. He had seen cows and goats coming and going, and luxuriant, nameless plants and flowers.

All in all, there were twenty-six sanitation squads, each referred to by a letter between A and Z, and each squad leader had a tin nametag. Obtaining a nametag meant the squad leader became one of the twenty-six letters; the other squad members were referred to only by numbers. This was how all government agencies worked. It seemed that, following an in-depth statistical and anthropological investigation, this had been determined to be the fairest, most upright administrative method; they said the joint operation of squads of equivalent status preserved the everyday order, and the letter succession mechanism ensured maximum fairness. Thanks to this, the people were able to die under the most stable possible social conditions, which was the meaning of being civilized.

K’s late father J had worked for the Research & Development Bureau, a tall, ash-gray cement building with twenty-six different laboratories. No one had any idea what the researchers did there. The first condition of working at the Bureau was maintaining confidentiality. As he remembered it, his father would leave in the morning and come back in the evening, returning every time with a dinner arranged neatly in a sealed plastic box: rice or bread. His father rarely spoke. On only one occasion, he brought back a vibrant green bird that looked like a parrot, telling K the bird could have water to drink, but was absolutely not to be given food. From then on, K could barely think of anything but the bird. One evening, the Astronomical Bureau forecast a rare full moon, and he saw the bird singing beneath a giant silver moonbeam, letting out a low, resonant cry. When his father arrived home late, late in the evening, K reported this, and his father patted him on the shoulder, and just then K glimpsed in his father’s expression a short-lived, enigmatic sorrow, a look as incomprehensible to him as the letter that arrived one day from a faraway land.

The next day, when he gave the bird water, it refused to drink, and the morning after that, it died. K stood woodenly before the birdcage. He didn’t cry. He never cried, not even when his father told him, “Your mother, like her faith, is gone.” The letter had been written by a fellow member of his mother’s sect, and had taken a full month to reach their city from the Holy Land. This was one of the dictates of his mother’s faith—she and the other members spurned all technology. After finishing the terse letter, his father folded it many, many times, turning it into a tiny square, and K knew at that moment that his father, like him, had seen his absent mother in the dense square of paper. Seven years ago, maybe even longer, his mother and her faith had left the city forever—she and the other adherents had set out to cross the world in their bare feet, trampling over land which was at times scorching hot, at others freezing. His mother’s Holy City lay in the westernmost desert, an unimaginably remote place to K and his father. They had heard that people aged quickly in the scalding, dry desert, and when the isolation became too much to bear, they went to the High Priest of the Desert to pray, and the next day, their lives slipped away peacefully as they dreamed. The Brethren (as the adherents referred to one another) would stand in a circle around the slumbering bodies, hands joined, and the door to the Sky City would open. K and his father believed that, as his mother’s letter claimed, she had “gained bliss.” From that moment on, K and his father had a mysterious, shared secret of which neither could say a word. In the city where they lived, it was against the law to mention his mother or other members of the sect. To the government, the beliefs that brought them bliss were nothing but a nefarious plot to pilfer pharmaceuticals: in fact, almost all the sodium barbiturate and chloride had been smuggled overnight into the desert, and the remaining drugs were sealed for safekeeping in the gray basement of the Research & Development Bureau.

His father returned with a string of several other green birds, all the same size, all wearing similar expressions. Every time, on the night of an unforeseen full moon, the birds let out nameless cries and keeled over. K put all their bodies in a white cardboard box, scattering dry white pebbles on the box’s sides, until the pebbles formed tiny pyramids. He couldn’t explain why he was doing this, or where he had gotten the idea to do it. He wasn’t even sure if he had ever seen or heard of anyone doing something similar. What bothered him was that, beginning with the third bird, the white cardboard box, the white pebbles, and the entire series of acts began to seem mechanical, stripped of emotion. He bitterly hated his own coldness and inertia, at the same time suspecting that he, his father, and the others would never understand his mother’s “bliss.” It was also after the third bird that he joined the Sanitation Bureau. Three Oh Nine kept a handful of white pebbles in his pocket. This, it seemed, was the beginning of everything, and also the end. He gradually came to use cleanliness and prayer in place of pebbles. What they needed was to be put to rest, not left to rot. Finally, when he brought back the seventh green bird, J declared that the birds were going to swallow up everything. Beneath the simulated sunrays of the ring-shaped track lights, K saw in his father’s pale, wizened eyes a beam of wild joy so intense it resembled despair, and he knew his father had seen his mother again. The next day, the green bird grew rapidly, transforming overnight into a giant. That was the day his father passed away.

Heart failure, said a colleague. K, by then squad leader, collected his father’s body and put it in a giant transparent box made of plexiglass. All people who died of exhaustion on the job were to be interred in a climate-controlled memorial hall. They said this was the way to commemorate the heroism they had shown in serving the city to the last.

Later, when he assumed the previous squad leader’s letter, becoming the new K, the government officially began making use of the green birds, which had by then evolved into giants. They would spiral in the night sky beating their giant wings, stirring whirlwinds as keen and ice-cold as moon rays. The Heavenly Messengerbirds, as a P&R commissioner named them, were a species for a new age. They would swoop down on the pyramids of corpses, swiftly, ruthlessly ripping apart and swallowing the useless bodies, until the final remaining bony arm had been devoured. There was never so much as a drop of blood. The bodies by now were so numerous that there was no way to dispose of them all, not by burning them, not by throwing them into the sea. It became more and more difficult to distinguish these people who died in isolation, these people walled in by old age, from their bodies, their hair, their clothes, and the indelible odor of decay hovering in the air all around. K knew there were several other squad members who tried to bring eternal peace to the dead (or the living) with mystical rituals they themselves had invented, like he had done in the beginning. As living people, though, they had forgotten that a dead person’s final offense was to fail to decompose. This new species, these newly cultivated Heavenly Messengerbirds, solved all their most difficult problems. The birds worked silently, precisely, speedily, cleanly, leaving no trace behind, more merciless than the fire and the sea. K could guess at the habits of the Heavenly Messengerbirds, because he remembered what the green birds his father had brought home had been like: they fed at nighttime, and during the day, they slept. It would take the entire day for them to fully digest the food in their bellies, and at nightfall, they would continue to feed; they would suck the blood from the bodies, along with whatever other fluids remained, and the fibers they digested would turn to excrement which would then seep into the soil, providing rich fertilizer to the wild flower fields of the religious sects and the halls of city government. All was subsumed within a vast cycle of biodegradation.

The people disputed everything, distrusted everything, invented everything, and laid waste to everything.

The corpses continually piled up, until they were nothing but numbers. He and the others forgot their rituals, that is, they forgot the order in which the rituals were performed: were you supposed to pray first, or close the corpse’s eyelids? What was the significance of the order of these acts? Did it even matter at all? Could this process truly aid the annihilation of flesh that was already dead? It was around this time that bands of night pilgrims emerged. They would gather in the night around the pyramids of bodies (the grounds had never been officially named) and watch raptly, even piously, as the Heavenly Messengerbirds gobbled up the bodies. Silence, vast silence. Even their breathing was thrashed to death amid the silence. Only the intermittent cries of the Messengerbirds sliced open the grave-like night. The people listened, but couldn’t understand the birds’ feelings. The night pilgrims formed rectangular queues. New people were constantly joining their ranks, joining their silence. When the full moon shone on their faces, their tired, dead eyes gleamed with the same scorching radiance as the birds, seemingly both near and far, like the cries of the dead. They watched through the long, long night, always waiting for tomorrow, when the people too would die and be devoured by the birds.

Even K was surprised when he managed to recognize the body of the female sociologist. She had aged so incredibly quickly, her entire body shriveling, like a lonely female beast forgotten by everybody. He arranged her body at the edge of the pyramid, knowing that by morning, every trace of her would be gone. For the first time, he joined the rectangular ranks of night pilgrims and watched the birds feeding with a sense of anticipation not even he could explain. Finally, letting out a loud cry, one of the birds snapped the sociologist’s frail neck and gobbled her up in what seemed like the blink of an eye, and he suddenly understood the origin of the name “Heavenly Messengerbird.” The next morning, in the woods behind the temple, he found a mother deer. He decided to walk with her until tomorrow came again.

translated from the Chinese by Michael Day