Chapter 38: What on Earth Are They!

Chapter 38 What on earth do they think they are!

Karen stood up, looking at Rott, who had previously leaned his chest against him while propped on crutches to help him maintain his balance.

Taking a deep breath,

he felt a wave of dizziness wash over his brain,

unable to tell for a moment whether it was a lack of oxygen or an excess of it.

But in his heart, a sudden relief finally washed through, as if the heavy boulder that had been weighing down on him was lifted at this very moment.

Yet, this emotion could not be expressed in words, not because of its complexity, but because the tragedy of another family lay right before his eyes; the yardstick of morality made it impossible to utter anything inappropriate.

Had he not been at the scene but on the phone instead, he could have easily said:

"Hey, Rott, I heard a whole family died on your street. It terrified me, I thought something had happened to your house."

In the presence of death,

the vast majority of emotions are tinged with gray;

often, it is not out of respect for a particular deceased person, but out of respect for life itself;

after all, when most people look at the deceased lying at a memorial service, they have already imagined in their minds what it would look like if they were lying there themselves.

Of course, the inner relief was understandable, and there was no need to feel guilty for it; human suffering and sorrow can rarely achieve true resonance, especially regarding strangers.

"Karen, Karen?" Uncle Mason called out again, "Are you alright? Steady this gurney."

Karen turned around, walked over, and held the gurney steady.

Uncle Mason instructed further, "Alfred, you come with me to carry the one inside. Karen, if you can't push it, wait for us here."

Karen tried to push the gurney alone. On a smooth road, it wouldn't be much of a problem, but this place happened to be full of potholes, and the wheels could easily get stuck.

At that moment, Sarah's mother walked over, grabbed the other side, and helped Karen push the gurney together.

Rott walked alongside them, keeping pace: "Mr. Karen, did you know? On this street, everyone calls me Lame Rott, and the one lying up there is called One-Armed Siso."

"Come to think of it, his father and my father used to be coworkers. When we were kids, our fathers often drank together, and the two of us played together, too."

"Later, we entered the same factory together. On the day of the accident, we were both pinned under the machinery. I lost a leg because of it, and he lost an arm."

"He used to comfort me like this: 'Hey, Rott, I envy you to death. At least you still have a complete pair of hands to make slippers out of tire rubber, but I can't use this pair of feet to knit gloves.'"

"His family was actually in worse straits than mine. By making slippers in the summer, I could still earn a few hundred lubis a month to supplement the household, and my wife could work at the textile mill and earn a wage.

Most of the time, he could only go to the trash heaps to scavenge leftover meat to sell to the fried meat shops. Even so, he often brought the freshest and most intact meat home, and he would share it with us.

Every time he gave me meat, he would say:

'Hey, even if the meat is leftover, it still tastes savory when you chew it. Just like the two of us—missing arms and legs, but aren't we still human beings just the same?'"

"His wife always had a heart condition and couldn't do heavy labor, so she and his mother folded paper boxes at home for others. A hundred paper boxes would fetch a wage of two lubis, and they often folded them for the entire day."

"When we came back from the march that day, we were all very excited. He said to me, 'Rott, did you see that? Mr. Hickson is still standing with us. He is still the pride of our East District.'"

"He was already budgeting how to spend the two hundred lubis he could receive each month. He said he wanted to save it so his wife could go to the hospital to check her heart; he said his wife's heart condition seemed to be getting worse and worse. But his wife insisted the money should be saved for the child's schooling, because once the child entered junior high, tuition and book fees would surely be more expensive."

"Just last night, after you left, Mr. Karen, I even dropped by his house. I even pulled out that exquisite business card you gave me to show him."

"He was so surprised, saying he had seen that hearse parked on the street. When he passed by, he even lamented, 'What kind of family's person can lie in such a luxurious and comfortable large vehicle to attend their own memorial service after they die?'"

"I told him about you having dinner at my house. He said that in the future, when his precious baby entered junior high, she would probably get to know classmates from well-off families, and when she brought those classmates home as guests, he would have to prepare something to entertain them so as not to lose etiquette."

The gurney had already been pushed to the back of the hearse. Karen opened the rear compartment of the hearse and pulled down a ramp from it, so that the gurney could be rolled straight up—a feature the old hearse did not possess.

Karen went up first, pulling from above, while Sarah's mother and Rott reached out together to push from below.

Finally, the gurney carrying "One-Armed Siso" was pushed onto the hearse.

Karen stepped down from the vehicle, gazing into the distance, searching for the figures of his uncle and Alfred.

And at that moment, Mr. Rott, who had been talking continuously, suddenly thrust his face right in front of Karen's. His expression became somewhat distorted, his eyes completely bloodshot, as he roared almost hysterically:

"Mr. Karen, a father who just last night was considering how to entertain his daughter's well-off classmates when they came to visit in the future—he just committed suicide by taking poison like that, do you think that's possible?"

"I..."

"He's dead, One-Armed Siso is dead, his mother hanged herself too, and his wife took their daughter and jumped off the building. I went to see that scene—it was unbearable to look at, simply unbearable to look at, and I couldn't bear to watch.

Mr. Karen, their little Mira was the darling of their entire family's hearts.

No matter what happened, they would definitely fight with their lives to protect little Mira. Especially his wife—his wife's heart problems started ever since she gave birth to little Mira.

His wife regarded her daughter as a treasure more precious than her own life.

Even if she wanted to seek death,

how could she possibly take her own daughter to die with her!"

Karen did not know how to answer Rott's words.

Rott clutched Karen's clothes with his hands. Sarah's mother tugged at her husband from behind, but Rott just wouldn't let go.

"And another thing... why is it you, Mr. Karen, who came to pick up Siso?

Heavens,

can he afford the funeral expenses?

His family even had to scrape together money for the cremation fee!

How could they possibly have the money to hold a memorial service!

Look at him,

he is now lying inside this comfortable, grand vehicle,

this is something he wouldn't even have dared to dream of yesterday when he was still alive!!!"

"Splash!"

Rott's two crutches clattered to the ground, and then his entire body collapsed into a puddle, splashing up a sheet of dirty water. Yet he, who had always loved cleanliness despite his disability, kept beating the puddle with both hands:

"Who can tell me what on earth is going on here! Who can tell me what on earth is going on here!

Why did those reporters arrive so quickly!

Why did Siso's suicide note curse Mr. Hickson!

Heavens,

he was a One-Armed Siso who couldn't even understand his daughter's elementary school problems and had to bring his daughter to ask Sarah for help with her homework!"

At this time, a group of reporters who had already finished taking photos came out from inside;

holding umbrellas to protect their cameras, they carefully stepped across the bricks in the puddles. When they passed by Rott, who was frantically beating the puddle, they all showed expressions of shock and disdain, bypassing him from a distance.

Leaving Rott to continue sitting there alone, shouting frantically.

Just then, the uncle, with the help of a policeman, pushed out the body of Siso's mother as well.

Further away, Alfred came over pushing another gurney alone, with two people lying under the white sheet.

All the corpses were loaded onto the hearse. The wheels of the gurneys were retracted; in the center pit lay Siso and his mother, while the sides where fellow passengers would originally sit held the wife and daughter.

Mason signed the slip with the policeman, then climbed into the driver's cab.

"Young master, it's time to get in," Alfred murmured, nudging Karen back to reality.

Karen climbed inside. The seats meant for the living were already occupied by the dead, leaving him and Alfred with no choice but to sit on the floorboards below. As the vehicle jolted forward, Karen extended an arm, bracing his hand against the corpse to keep it from sliding off in the bumps.

Finally,

The clamor of the outside world began to recede as the hearse rolled out of Mine Street.

"Alfred, get me a cigarette," Uncle Mason called out from the driver’s seat.

Alfred shuffled over, retrieved the pack, and placed a cigarette between Mason’s lips before striking a match to light it.

As Alfred went to put the pack away, Mason nudged his chin toward the back.

Understanding the silent cue, Alfred flashed back to that day on the second-floor balcony of 128 Mink Street, where he and Madame Molly had shared a smoke with the Great Existence, laughing together into the wind.

Alfred offered a cigarette to Karen’s lips.

Karen took it, but waved off the offer of a light.

"Uncle..."

Before Karen could finish, Uncle Mason barked from the front:

"Suicide, suicide, suicide—suicide my ass!"

Putting down a deposit at a funeral parlor in advance, booking a specific date, and then having the whole family kill themselves just waiting to be collected... sure, it wasn't entirely unheard of. They had handled similar arrangements before; elderly couples wishing to depart together would sometimes plan their own final rites ahead of time.

But a deposit of one hundred thousand lubes?

From the Inmeles Funeral Parlor?

Was that something a family living on Mine Street could ever hope to afford?

The person who paid that deposit knew long ago that people would die, that they would die today, and that it would be the entire family!

This wasn't a case of waiting for a generation to pass before holding a joint funeral!

So how could anyone call this a damn suicide!

Others might not know,

Outsiders might be blind to it,

But how could the Inmeles family, who had taken the deposit in advance, not see the truth?

They had rested for the past few days just to wait for this "suicide"?

Mason was no fool; he had seen through it from the very beginning.

Yet, once his outburst spent its fury,

Mason's voice softened again:

"Karen, there were so many reporters out there today. I bet there will be even more at the memorial service tomorrow. That chief of police just told me his commissioner is watching this case like a hawk, and a lot of folks at city hall are keeping a close eye on it, too."

Karen pressed his lips together.

Ahead, the traffic was beginning to gridlock.