Mei Lin crosses the courtyard of Guandu Elementary School Number Seven at six forty in the morning having counted the hundred and forty-two steps from the parking lot to the entrance, a hundred and forty-two because she had counted them on the phone the day before, when the clerk at the Liuyang District Security Bureau had told her that her father was number twenty-three and that the identification would take place on the morning of May fifth at the requisitioned school; because counting was her way of keeping her distance from things that asked for something else, the way she measured the distance between her desk in Shanghai and the office window (eight meters forty) or measured the days since her father's last phone call (two hundred and forty-six, calculated with the lunar calendar open on the living room table), and when her father, the last time, during the March visit, had handed her his left blue plastic sandal and asked her to glue the sole back on because it had come loose, and Mei Lin had glued it twice in a row with the heavy adhesive used for floors, telling him "that'll hold until June, then you can buy a new pair," and her father had answered: "glue it well, I need to make it to June."

The local bureau official comes to meet her in the courtyard and is fifty-three years old, a blue notebook in hand, and a name tag sewn onto his shirt that reads his surname: Wang. Wang guides her toward a row of black bags resting on school tables lined up along the east wall of the courtyard; each bag has a paper tag tied to its handle with white string, and Mei Lin notices immediately, as she walks and counts the bags (one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two), that some tags have a name written on them and others only a number; bag number twenty-three is the first in the second row and has a tag that reads only: 23. Wang explains, as he lifts the zipper of the bag with a slow gesture she reads as professionally compassionate: "For the twenty-three on whom a document was found beside the body we have the name. For the others, family identification; signature on the form, and the case is closed. Transfer to the county funeral home is the family's responsibility: the director of Huasheng has been detained, the company is suspended." He adds: "The company had been fined in January: fifteen thousand yuan for two violations in workshop four, they were mixing reducing and oxidizing agents in the same laboratory." He says it as a concession, as though the data justified the procedure.

The sandal emerges from the open bag: the left blue sandal with the sole glued twice. Mei Lin leans down, not to identify it—identification is a verb that presupposes a doubt, and she has no doubt—but to check whether the right one is inside the bag as well. Wang watches her. Mei Lin asks: "And the right one?" Wang shakes his head: "We didn't find it." Behind him, on the far side of the courtyard, the clerk managing the identification queue calls the next number: "Twenty-four." An elderly woman detaches herself from the waiting group and walks toward a bag in the third row. Mei Lin hears her shoes on the gravel.

Then Mei Lin turns to Wang and says: I would like you to write my father's name on the tag; above the number, before the signature. Wang looks at her for two seconds without answering, then consults the blue notebook as though searching for a specific page, although Mei Lin understands he is not searching for anything—he is taking time, procedural time, because the request is not provided for by the form, which has a field for "number" and a field for "family member's signature" and a field for "family member's identity document" but no field for "name of the deceased above the number"; the compilation manual does not prohibit the thing, it simply does not provide for it. The queue clerk calls: "Twenty-five." A man detaches himself from the group. Wang says: "All right." He takes out a ballpoint pen, a blue Parker with a gold cap that strikes her as out of place in that courtyard, and writes in precise characters above the figure 23 the three characters of the name: 刘建华. Liu Jianhua. Then he passes her the form. The clerk calls: "Twenty-six." Another elderly woman walks toward a bag. Mei Lin signs. The handwriting of the signature belongs to someone who counts the strokes of each character before writing them, eleven strokes for the surname, seven strokes for the second character of the given name, eight for the third; Mei Lin always counts.

Wang closes the bag. Two assistants carry it to the van that Mei Lin's cousin in Liuyang rented for the transport: an old Wuling Hongguang with the flatbed covered by a green tarpaulin. The bag takes up the back seat. Mei Lin gets in front. On the passenger seat, beside the bag behind her, she sets down something she has been holding in her hand since she left the courtyard: the left blue sandal. She took it from the bag before Wang closed it, without anyone seeing her, because there were no surveillance cameras in that courtyard—Mei Lin had checked at the entrance—and because Wang was already signing his own report in the blue notebook. The odometer on the dashboard reads 84,317. Her cousin has not arrived yet. Mei Lin waits ten minutes.

The bag's tag is still visible from the passenger seat, attached to the handle with white string; the tag shows the name—Liu Jianhua—and below it the number, because Wang had not crossed out the 23, he had only written the name above it. They coexist. The left sandal is on the seat beside her. The right one is not there.