Night Hearsay | The Night-Shift People Who Can Tell

(This item is an informal field collection. All interviewees asked to remain anonymous.)

People who work nights have seen more than people who work days. Over the past half year we spoke to 11 of them; 6 agreed to be recorded. What follows is in the order we got it, with no attempt to reconcile the accounts.

A night-shift clerk at a convenience store on Shuyuan Street said that with some customers he does not dare look at the face, because “the thing is not on the face, it is on the body.” His hand shakes while he scans the barcode, and once the payment goes through all he wants is for them to leave. Asked what it is, he shook his head and gave 2 words: don't ask.

3 taxi drivers, on the same street on the same night, all failed to stop for the same person waving at the curb. The first slowed for a look and then sped up; the second switched off its for-hire light as it went past; the third acted as though it had seen nothing. Asked why, they all said much the same thing: “That kind of fare, you take it and something happens.”

A newspaper deliveryman in the Old River District said there is one lane he never goes into; he would rather go around 300 meters and deliver from the far end. Asked what is in the lane, he said nothing is, “it is just too clean.”

The superintendent of an old apartment building said the elevator sometimes stops by itself on the 4th floor in the middle of the night, the doors open, and nobody comes in. He has reported it 2 times, and the contractor said both times that the mechanism was fine. What he does now is not watch the security-camera playback.

A woman who has run a breakfast shop for 30 years opens at 4 in the morning. She said some people buy something and do not eat it, just stand at the door and wait until it gets light before they go. She wraps one extra egg crepe and leaves it on the low wall beside the shop. “That one is not for people.”

And there is the night-shift nurse who always sits on the same bench on the platform with her eyes shut. Some people say she is not waiting for a train.

The accounts do not line up. The clerk says what he goes by is everything below the shoulders; the driver says what he goes by is where the person is standing, “the ones standing in the stretch between two lamps, do not take them”; the deliveryman insists it has nothing to do with looking at all, “you smell it, like cement after rain.”

These people do not know one another, and they are scattered across different corners of the city. 2 of them asked after the interview that their part be taken out, and we took it out. The rest is left as it came.

If you also work at night and also have a set of rules of your own—which lane you do not walk, which fare you do not take—write to us. One item is enough. No explanation needed.