One morning, he jumped into the river and that was that.

He was quiet. He kept to himself. His right leg had a big lump, almost half the size of his calf. He couldn’t lift it up fully. His left leg had to do all the walking for him. I would see him every morning shuffling up the alley behind my office building, pushing a trolley stacked high with flattened cardboard boxes. At the end of the alley, he would load all the cardboard he had gathered onto the back of a lorry, whereupon the lorry driver would give him his payment for the day. We never talked, never exchanged nods. We only walked past each other, silently, every single day.

Until one day, I realized I hadn’t seen him that morning. There was no trolley stacked with cardboard, no lorry with its daily load. Not a single soul around. The alley felt empty—not just that there was no one around, but it felt like the air had been sucked out of the alleyway, too. The alley was holding its breath. Waiting for something to happen.

That was the day I read in the news that the body of a John Doe had been fished out of the nearby river. Police did not suspect foul play. They simply set the body down into a black body bag and loaded him into an ambulance headed straight for the coroner at the morgue. There, the autopsy revealed what the first responders had already known when they got him out of the water. All that was left was to identify the next of kin, and if that proved impossible, a state-paid cremation and a burial at sea. The body would stay in the mortuary fridge for a month until it was time for one or the other.

A few days later, the other man that always appeared in the alley—a healthier, younger-looking, shirtless, middle-aged man—set up a makeshift altar at the corner where the daily cardboard was stored waiting for its ride to the recycling. He put up cans of beer. A Styrofoam box of rice, meats, and vegetables. Peanuts. A small speaker playing old Teochew-language songs. A DIY incense holder, fashioned from a stainless steel powdered coffee can washed out and packed with soil. Three incense sticks burned steadily with a small, soft red glow.

Over a can of beer he had kept for himself, this other man said: That man had a sister. He told me that if he ever died, I should go find his sister and tell her that her brother had passed away. I never thought I would have to really go and do it.

I asked: Did you find the sister yet?

That’s the thing, he said. He never gave me her name. He never said where she was from. I don’t know if she’s real. And this other man took a deep pull from his beer can. He said: He told me to find her, but he never told me who she was. He coaxed the remaining drops of alcohol down his throat, placed the can gently onto the table, and closed his eyes to pray. It was in Teochew, so I didn’t know what he was saying.

What kind of a man was he? No one harbors an ambition to become a cardboard collector. What was his ambition, then? What was the job he wanted to have as a child? Did he manage to have it? What happened during his childhood, his youth, his adulthood, his seniority? What led him into this daily cycle of struggle, slaving away for a poor pittance of a payday, all alone without a companion, a family, with government ministers probably even unaware of his existence?

I wonder, what finally brought him to decide that to die was better than to continue living? To wake up one morning, cycle to the river, and with one foot after the other, close the door on the world with a watery wave overhead? I wonder, and I will never know.

The month is almost up. The incense has burned out. The alley crows have eaten most of the food, and some of the Styrofoam, too.

Soon, the body, fished out from the river, slid on a tray into a human-sized fridge, will be moved again. From the cold of the morgue’s backroom into the fires of the crematorium. Then, finally, sprinkled into the ocean from the hand of a civil servant, checking off another item on his list for the day.

If he truly did have a sister, she might never know that the man in the papers was her brother. She might never feel the sudden void one experiences in their heart from the death of a loved one. She might never have to look and see where there once was a person is now only air and emptiness.

She might continue to live as she does and perhaps be reminded of him on occasion, half-heartedly pledging to someday get in touch with him. But when that someday comes, there will no longer be any of him to touch.

There will be only the empty space where he lived before.

*