Ch. 002| The Next Morning
Home at dawn with no memory of the walk back, he finds clerks won't meet his eyes and taxis won't stop — and a slip of red paper pressed inside his notebook.
Saturday, March 14, 2065, 03:00.
Gu Mingye didn't remember how he'd walked out of that street.
When the wind at the mouth of the street died, the tiny cyan oil lamp off toward the Cyan Lantern was still burning quietly at the edge of his vision. He stepped forward — a second step, a third — and when he raised his head he found that the dark red brick-tile roof at the end of the street was gone.
In front of him was a street he knew. The south end of Shuyuan Street, past Shuyuan Station and farther south, the stretch where the old river embankment turned off — the one with a few stalls selling red tortoise cakes in the daytime and no one at night.
But he hadn't come from the direction of Shuyuan Station.
A moment ago he'd walked in from Platform Thirteen. Beyond the glass wall of Platform Thirteen was a street he'd never seen, and at the end of it was the Cyan Lantern. He'd walked out from the direction of the Cyan Lantern.
The stretch in between had been switched off, in order, gently, by someone.
He looked down at his own hand. The notebook was still in it. There was a dried mark on the cover, as if it had just been taken from somewhere wet and then wiped against somewhere dry. He didn't remember wiping it.
He looked back, toward the direction he'd just walked out of — that street was gone.
It didn't feel "moved," either. More like another street had been pushed in front of him and shoved the first one away. The streetlights were the usual warmish white. No one around.
He thought for a few seconds and decided he'd just follow this street. South from Shuyuan Street, around the bend of the old embankment, then farther south into the Old River District. From here it was about forty minutes home on foot.
At 03:30 he reached the 24-hour convenience store at the crossroads where the old embankment met Shuyuan Street.
The store was lit, a "Night Service Open" sticker on the glass door. He went in to buy a bottle of water.
Behind the counter, the night clerk was a young man, head down over his phone. The bell rang and the clerk looked up.
For a second, in that look up, his eyes caught and held.
The gaze swept across Gu Mingye's face, slid down, landed below his shoulders, like it had spotted something on him.
Gu Mingye went to the cooler, took a bottle of mineral water, came back to the counter. The clerk dropped his head again, back to his phone. His hand was shaking when he scanned the barcode.
Gu Mingye lifted his wrist to the sensor pad. A beep. The wristband flashed "Charged 25, balance 62."
"Thanks, come again." The clerk didn't look up, stuffed the water into a plastic bag, pushed it over.
"Excuse me—" Gu Mingye started to speak.
The clerk didn't wait for him to finish, tore off the receipt fast, clipped it to the receipt holder, pushed it across. "Thanks, come again."
The voice was flat. He wasn't trying to hurry him off, and it wasn't like he was interacting with him either. More like keeping distance from a thing he didn't want to look at straight on.
Gu Mingye took the bag.
Walking out of the store, he glanced back.
The clerk was already head down over his phone — as if those two minutes hadn't happened.
At 03:48 he reached the corner of the middle stretch of Shuyuan Street. A taxi came from far off, its vacant light lit on the roof.
Gu Mingye raised his hand.
The car slowed. The driver glanced at him.
Sped up. Drove on.
Gu Mingye lowered his hand. He waited two minutes, and a second taxi came from the same direction, vacant light lit.
He raised his hand again.
This time the driver didn't even slow down. As it passed Gu Mingye, the vacant light went out.
The third car didn't show for another three minutes. This time Gu Mingye didn't raise his hand. He watched it drive past and waited for no reaction at all.
He thought back to last night, coming out of cram school, the convenience store clerk bent over his restocking. He'd thought then: nothing.
Now he felt he'd become a thing that clerks wouldn't look up at and taxis wouldn't stop for.
They could see him. That glance from the driver swept over, held on him for half a second, then sped up. Saw him, and then decided to go around.
The old embankment ran south from Shuyuan Street, the old river channel cut in the Qing dynasty, later filled in and then capped with the Rivermag's metal shell. But in some stretches the embankment still showed through. On his walk home from school every day he passed three of them.
At 03:55 he was walking along the second exposed stretch of the old embankment.
The smell of the old embankment was the same one as on the platform last night.
He stopped a moment.
Last night he'd thought maybe a drain was broken, maybe the wind was coming from a different direction. Now he knew it wasn't.
That river, sealed away for fifty years — its smell had come out. Or else he had started to be able to smell what had always been there in the background.
He couldn't tell which.
The wind passed his left ear and went around it.
No murmur. Only wind.
The embankment ended at a small bridge. At the head of the bridge stood an old banyan tree, and under it a brick-red Earth God shrine no one tended.
Gu Mingye passed this bridge every day after school, had seen this banyan, seen this shrine. The shrine hadn't been tended in thirty years — Grandma had told him once, when he was small, that the Earth God had been moved out during the district rezoning in the 1980s, leaving behind this empty shell.
Grandma said that the year the Earth God was moved, the rezoning office sent a few people, did it by the rules — set off firecrackers, burned spirit money, carried away the spirit tablet. From that day the shrine stood empty. But Grandma also said some Earth Gods can't be moved — you can relocate the household registry and the spirit tablet, but this patch of ground knows what kind of ground it was to begin with.
Gu Mingye used to think that was an old woman's superstition.
But tonight there was incense in that shrine.
A thin thread of smoke rose slowly from the censer.
The front of the shrine was empty. No one. Only the incense, burning.
Gu Mingye stood at the bridgehead and looked for a few seconds.
He didn't go over.
He went on across the bridge, around the banyan, and kept heading south.
Ten steps on, he glanced back.
The incense was still burning.
He kept walking. His steps were slower than usual.
That thread of smoke at the bridgehead followed along at the edge of his vision for a while, until the buildings in the alley blocked it out.
At 04:30, the mouth of the Old River District alley.
He stopped.
The alley was dark. The streetlights were that warmish white, the same kind as the convenience store, as the bridgehead.
He crouched down under the old mango tree at the alley's mouth, his school bag wedged between his knees.
By now he was usually home. Since leaving the convenience store he'd been walking slower than usual the whole way.
His feet were cold. Mid-March, and the late-night hours in the Old River District still ran chilly.
No one was home. He had a key; he could let himself in without disturbing anyone.
But he couldn't walk down that alley just yet.
It was the stretch Grandma had lived on. He'd walked it every day after school for three years. From the mouth to the far end was two minutes at most.
Today, walking it would be different.
Out past the mouth of the alley, a small truck drove by along the distant overpass, its headlights lighting the wall at the alley's mouth for a moment, then gone.
The sky began, slowly, to brighten on the Rivermag side.
At 05:30 he stood up.
His feet had gone numb. He held onto the tree and waited a moment before he could walk.
He went into the alley.
It was a residential area filled in later — the alley narrow, three-story brick-red houses on both sides, some of the arcades low enough that he had to duck his head. Grandma's old house was in the innermost row; the cyan oil lamp on the outer wall, outside the second-floor window grille, had been taken down the year she died.
The stairs creaked twice.
He opened the door.
No one home. His mother on the night shift, back around noon.
On the table was a bento under plastic wrap, with a note: "Microwave 2 min." His mother left one every time she worked nights.
He didn't microwave it.
He set the water on the table, put the notebook on the nightstand, went into his room, took off his uniform jacket, and dropped into bed.
Before sleep he went to turn off the light and found it was already off.
He hadn't turned it on when he came in.
At 14:00 he woke.
Sunlight slanted in through the window and fell on the uniform jacket at the foot of the bed. He blinked once.
His head was empty. One second.
The second second, last night came back in order. The last train, Platform Thirteen, the old man, the cyan oil lamp, getting off, the platform being wiped away, the murmur in the wind.
His mouth was very dry, his throat a little sore, the muscles in the back of his neck stiff like he'd walked all night and couldn't loosen them right away.
He looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was still a ceiling. The light slanting through the window was the usual angle, an ordinary spring afternoon.
He sat up.
On the nightstand, the notebook was still there.
He reached for his phone first.
On the lock screen, his mother's messages were stacked one on top of another.
23:55 "Are you out?"
00:05 "Where are you?"
00:20 "Late service running late?"
00:30 "Mingye send me something"
00:44 "What on earth—"
00:55 "Call me"
01:30 "I've asked a senior to cover my shift"
01:32 "Coming to find you after work"
02:00 "Answer me"
03:10 "I went past Shuyuan Station, didn't see you"
03:50 "Going home for now"
04:50 "You're not home either"
05:00 "Mingye where are you"
14:00 "I'm off work, sleep as long as you need, bento's on the table, order in if it's not enough, I'll get up at five and go back to work"
He read down from the 23:55 message, one after another.
When he got to the 14:00 one, his hand stopped on the screen.
His mother was a night-shift nurse. On Fridays she should be on the 22:00-to-06:00 shift. When he'd left cram school last night, she should already have been at the hospital.
But she'd asked a senior to cover from 01:30 and driven out to look for him. Past Shuyuan Station at 03:10, drove back home at 03:50, searched for a while, confirmed at 04:50 he wasn't home, left at 05:00 to drive back to the hospital and take the back half of the senior's shift.
He hadn't walked in the door until five-thirty in the morning. His mother had left at five, just gone — thirty minutes apart.
He closed his eyes. One second.
It was his fault that his mother had run around all night looking for him.
He set the phone down.
He opened the notebook.
The word "Thirteen" was in the upper half of that day's page. The line "This is not tinnitus" was in the lower half. Two blank lines in between.
With his thumb, he turned the page over.
The next page was blank. It was supposed to be blank.
But the paper of the next page stuck slightly to the others. As if something had been pressed between them.
He pulled the two pages gently apart.
Pressed in between was a slip of red paper.
Rectangular. Not much bigger than his thumb. The edges frayed, like it had been torn from something.
On the red paper, in black ink, one character was written.
過
At 15:00 he went out.
The Old River District alley was a different thing in daytime. The noodle stall was open, the iced black tea cart parked at the corner, the early-released primary-schoolers cutting through. He came out the mouth of the alley and headed toward Shuyuan Station.
On the old embankment stretch, people strolled in daytime. The second stretch, that small bridgehead, under the old banyan, inside the shrine — no incense now. The censer was empty.
He stood at the bridgehead a moment, looked for three seconds.
Then crossed the bridge.
Shuyuan Station, daytime version.
On the ad wall, the scrolling sign ran a normal "Next train 15:33 / terminus Qingcaohe." On the platform, a few students just out of school, a few old women carrying vegetable baskets, a college student reading with his head down.
The platform tile — was the usual white. A clean white, with no layer of cyan seeping up from underneath.
He walked the whole length of the platform, head down, checked the tile color once, looked up at the sign once: Platform Three. Shuyuan Station had three platforms total — a big transfer station, and the platform numbers went up to three.
There was no thirteen.
Announcement: "Next train arriving, please mind the gap." The usual woman's voice. The rhythm and tone the same as last night, when he'd waited on this platform for the late service.
Only today that line had changed — last night it was "await on-site announcement," today back to the usual "mind the gap."
As if nothing at all had happened.
He didn't board.
He went to the side of the platform by the glass screen, found the back of a pillar, and took the notebook out of his uniform pocket.
He took the slip out of the notebook.
Held it up to the 15:30 sunlight.
The light slanted down from the skylight above the platform and fell on the slip.
The red of the red paper was a red that had sat for decades, smoked, then washed. Not the printed red of now.
The black of the ink had a little bleed to it. Like it hadn't been printed but written, with a brush.
The 過 character in the middle had thick strokes.
It was the same kind of stroke, the same way of writing, as the 過 on those rows of paper lanterns he'd seen outside the last train's window last night.
The writing had its own rules — hide the tip at the start of the stroke, drag the horizontal slightly upward, don't bear down too hard on that final downstroke. The same as the single character on red paper in black ink that Grandma used to paste on the lintel of the kitchen door at the old house in the Old River District.
That year Gu Mingye was eleven, and his mother had torn that paper down and put it in the scrap bag at the worksite. He hadn't taken it out.
He very much wanted to know now where that paper had ended up.
He knew this wasn't written by the same person.
But he knew that whoever wrote it had learned the same way of writing.
He laid the slip gently back into the notebook.
He turned to that day's page.
Below "This is not tinnitus," he went on writing.
His hand still shook.
L a s t n i g h t w a s r e a l
He had just put the notebook back in his pocket when, on the other side of the platform by the glass screen, on a bench, an older woman in nurse's scrubs was sitting.
Eyes shut.
Was she the same woman in nurse's scrubs from last night, the one sitting with her eyes shut on this platform before the 23:53 last train came in?
He couldn't make out her face.
He wasn't sure.
But he noticed her.
Since last night he'd developed one more instinct — the moment someone sat down on the platform, his eyes went to their face first, registered the person, ran them once against the faces he'd seen last night. What time it was, how many minutes to the next train — those all got pushed to the back.
At 15:33 the train arrived.
The woman in scrubs didn't move. Didn't get up.
Like the one she was waiting for wasn't this train.
Gu Mingye leaned his back against the pillar and watched the doors open, the other passengers get off, get on, the doors close.
The train left.
Over on the bench, the woman in scrubs was still there. Eyes shut.
Gu Mingye didn't know whether he should go over or not.
But he knew that, starting from last night, he had to start paying attention to things like this.
【Ch. 002 End · South End of Shuyuan Street, Qingcheng → Old House in the Old River District → Daytime Platform, Shuyuan Station】
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