On Monday morning, Wei Chen zoned out in the conference room.
Not the kind of distraction that came on gradually. It happened all at once, like missing a step on the stairs. One second, he was looking at the architecture diagram on the projection screen. The next, he realized he was staring at the wood grain of the conference table. The grain was dark, almost black, curling in rings like some kind of compressed time.
“Wei?”
He looked up. The project manager was watching him, his expression somewhere between confusion and impatience.
“What do you think? About the backend schedule.”
“Just run it as planned,” he said. His voice was steady. He wasn’t sure he’d heard the question, but that answer was correct most of the time.
The project manager nodded and continued talking. Wei moved his gaze back to the projection screen. But his attention was like a severed thread, hanging there, impossible to reconnect.
He didn’t go to the break room for lunch. He sat at his desk with his headphones on. A code editor was open on his screen, but the cursor had been sitting on the same line for twelve minutes.
He was thinking about the dream.
Three place settings. White bowls. Wooden chopsticks. He knew who had set them out—his mother. He knew who the other two places belonged to—his father and himself.
But he couldn’t remember their faces.
They weren’t blurry. They were empty. Like two human-shaped silhouettes, with their features in the right places but nothing filled in behind them. He tried thinking of them from another angle—his father’s hands, his mother’s voice, any single detail.
His father’s hands.
Something flashed. Not an image. A sensation. A hand gripping his wrist, hard enough for the knuckles to dig into his skin. The hand was hot. Not warm—feverish, abnormally hot.
He took off his headphones. The office AC poured in, even and steady like white noise. He glanced around. His coworkers were all focused on their screens. No one was looking at him.
He put his headphones back on and moved the cursor to the next line.
That evening, when he returned to the apartment, he smelled it again in the elevator.
dried flowers. More distinct than last time. No longer faint or intermittent. It was definitely there, as if someone had hidden a bunch of flowers that had been sitting around for years in some corner of the elevator. He looked down at the four corners of the floor. There was nothing.
The elevator doors opened. He stepped out and passed the door to Unit 1203.
He stopped.
There was light beneath the door.
Very faint. Not the white light of a fluorescent bulb, but yellowish and warm, like an old-fashioned tungsten bulb. It seeped through the one-centimeter gap beneath the door and drew a thin line across the hallway floor.
He crouched to look. The light was steady. No flickering. No moving shadows. Just a motionless bar of yellow light.
He stood and looked toward both ends of the hallway. No one was there. He brought his ear close to the door.
He couldn’t hear anything.
He stood there for about thirty seconds. Then he took out his phone, opened the camera, aimed it at the gap beneath the door, and took a picture.
In the photo, the gap beneath the door was black.
He looked at the phone screen, then back at the gap. The light was still there. Yellow. Steady. Right there. But it wasn’t in the photo.
He put away his phone, walked back to his own door, and went inside.
That night, he didn’t put away his camping gear. He hadn’t canceled next week’s trip to Jianshi, but he hadn’t continued preparing, either. The gear was still spread across the living room floor. The tent’s stuff sack was half open, like a mouth that hadn’t finished speaking.
He sat on the couch and looked at the gear.
When he used to go camping, what he liked most was the night. The darkness outside the tent was clean, unlike the city’s darkness, polluted by streetlights and neon. The darkness in the mountains was complete, like a sheet covering everything. He would lie in his sleeping bag and listen to insects, the wind, and the stream. Those sounds were alive. They had sources. They could be explained.
Not like the sounds behind this wall.
He stood and walked over to the wall on the right. He pressed his palm against it.
The wall was cool. He closed his eyes, as if listening for something.
At first, there was nothing. Only his breathing and heartbeat.
Then he heard it.
Not knocking. Not scraping.
A voice. A human voice.
Very, very low. So low it was as if it had traveled a very, very long way from the other side of the wall before reaching him, leaving only an outline by the time it reached his ears. He couldn’t make out the words, but he could recognize the texture of the voice.
It was a woman’s voice.
His hand jerked away from the wall.
He took two steps back and stared at it. There was nothing on the wall. Off-white paint, smooth and clean, without even a nail hole.
He turned and went into the bathroom. He turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on his face. The water was ice-cold. Bracing himself against the sink, he lowered his head and let the water drip from his chin into the basin.
He raised his head and looked in the mirror.
His reflection was looking back at him. This time, nothing felt wrong. Everything was normal. But the word “normal” suddenly seemed strange, like a word he had repeated too many times until it lost its meaning.
He turned off the faucet.
At 10:38 p.m., he lay in bed with his headphones on. Today, he had chosen “Rain — Thunderstorm.” Volume 55.
55.
He closed his eyes. Thunder rolled low in his headphones, as if something enormous were moving in the distance.
He didn’t dream. But somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, he heard a sentence.
It didn’t come from the wall. It didn’t come from his headphones. It came from inside his own head.
A woman’s voice, calm in tone, like she was calling a child to dinner.
“Wei, come back.”
His eyes flew open.
2:44 a.m. The room was very dark. His headphones were still on. The thunderstorm was still playing.
He lay there without moving.
He knew whose voice it was. He had always known.
But he wasn’t sure whether it was a memory or something he had made up himself.