Parklawn Cemetery

Record

Parklawn Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland, holds the family plot of record for Andre Liang Freeman. His father, a schoolteacher, was interred there in 2019; his mother followed in 2039, under a stone she selected and filed the deed for herself. The two share a single family marker. Andre's own cenotaph was added in 2043, in the aftermath of his staged drowning death — the stone that year records not his name in English but four words of Toishanese, cut in a hand adapted from his mother's brush by a family commission. The record treats the inscription as a reassignment of the account rather than an elegy for it.

The Long Interval

For decades following 2043, the cemetery is visited only by proxy — letters routed through anonymous channels, traveling Qingming observances improvised at a rented table's distance, an account kept current without a body present to keep it. The ledger of Sundays counted against the promise made at his dying mother's bedside runs into the tens of thousands across this interval, tallied even when the counting could not be done in person.

2408

Andre's return to Parklawn in June 2408 is recorded as his first genuine, in-person Qingming observance at the actual stones since he faked his death 365 years earlier. By this date the plot has been preserved under a small trust, endowed anonymously and unknown to its own beneficiaries as his doing; the stones stand unvandalized, a path laid. He is recorded speaking the full accounting aloud in Toishanese at the grave — a recitation of all 144 names he had, by that point, carried and set down — a filing the record treats as more significant than any single name among them. The cemetery's trust log for the visit reads only: grounds occupied, maintenance deferred.