WC ⋆ Chapter 37

This time Qi Lin could see the little figures on the calendar very clearly. He counted them carefully: the crying faces and smiling faces were split evenly, and the remaining squares were a stretch of blank.

The blank squares made him feel an irrepressible regret. Emotions can pull a person forward and back in a relationship; having no emotions at all is far more frightening.

Two fools who didn’t know how to love had fallen into a fog of self-doubt, wandering inside it with no way out. Qi Lin reached out to touch him, but the phantom dissolved the moment he made contact, mercilessly reminding him that this was not a time-space that belonged to him. The harm already done was like an oil stain dropped into a glass of water: even if you poured the water out, a film of grease that couldn’t be scrubbed away would still cling to the walls of the glass.

Qi Lin watched Jiang Yishen aimlessly tapping at his phone, opening the contact note he had for him, deleting the name “Qi Lin,” then thinking for a long time without filling in anything new.

Jiang Yishen seemed unable to figure out what he was doing himself. He just stared blankly, then wrote “Qi Lin” back in, turned his phone face-down, and pushed it aside.

It was warm April, yet Qi Lin was still standing in the cold of January. His hands and feet were ice-cold. He watched Jiang Yishen’s back, and a tear fell with a soft pat, dissolving into a dimension no one would ever notice.

—

The moment the midnight alarm went off, Qi Lin grabbed Jiang Yishen’s wrist with force.

He wanted to ask what was wrong, but he felt an unstoppable force surge through his right hand, flipping his entire body over. A sense of weightlessness swallowed him in an instant. Jiang Yishen tried to reach back and grab Qi Lin’s hand, but when he turned to look, only he himself remained.

This feeling was not unfamiliar. He knew immediately what had happened.

The last time he had experienced that strange time reversal, it had also been through this long filmstrip corridor. He was inside it, unable to feel the existence of anything beyond himself: no wind, no air, no five senses, left to sink into unconsciousness on his own.

He had mentally prepared himself for this loop. When he opened his eyes and found himself in an unknown location, he felt no particular surprise. It was just that Jiang Yishen had assumed he and Qi Lin could go through this loop together, since Qi Lin had grabbed his hand at the moment of transmission.

Jiang Yishen stood on a marble floor. The floor-to-ceiling windows behind him announced the current time: night had fallen, and the streetlights were bright.

He looked around and found that the layout here resembled the break room of some company.

Footsteps came from a distance. Jiang Yishen instinctively ducked into the shadows, then remembered that he was already in a form that couldn’t be seen, and there was no real need to worry about whoever was coming.

The steps were steady, and they sounded familiar. A figure quickly turned the corner, holding a cup, picking through the instant coffee in the break room cabinet.

It was Qi Lin. He raised his hand to open the small cabinet above his head, his movements sluggish, as though his mind was elsewhere.

Jiang Yishen stared at him and noticed that the Qi Lin in front of him was thinner than the one in his memory, and that there was no vitality in him at all.

Could it be that what he’d said in front of the cactus had come true? Was this Qi Lin after he’d started working?

How could he have gotten this thin? Jiang Yishen fed him every single day and still felt it wasn’t enough. There was no way he could have let him end up like this.

He felt a sudden, inexplicable anxiety. He passed by Qi Lin’s side and found that the office area was nearly empty, with only a few people still sitting at scattered workstations, brows furrowed, while the lights in all the private offices had been turned off. The building was cold and quiet.

Jiang Yishen found a computer that was still lit up and looked at the time in the bottom right corner.

October 12th, 8:50 p.m.

It hit him like a flash of clarity. Of course. This wasn’t the future. This was the stretch of Qi Lin’s life after their breakup, the part he had not been present for.

Jiang Yishen snapped his head up. Qi Lin had already returned from the break room and sat down at his computer, bowing his head to blow on the coffee he had just made.

From this angle, Qi Lin’s thinness was even more obvious. His jaw traced a long arc downward, and his lean shoulders were wrapped inside a heavy coat, making him look like a withered leaf blown down by the wind.

Jiang Yishen stood behind him and found that his computer screen had stopped at the desktop. Everything on the sticky notes posted to the right had already been completed, yet he still sat in his chair, not working, and showing no intention of getting up to go home.

Only after his power bank and tablet had both finished charging did Qi Lin stand up unhurriedly, pour himself a full large cup of water, and drag his backpack toward the elevator.

He was very silent. It was a silence Jiang Yishen had never seen from him before.

Qi Lin was usually a person of few words too, but that was a matter of his reserved personality. The desire to express himself still existed in him; around friends he was warm and talkative.

But the Qi Lin now was covered in a layer of gloom that came from deep within, like a machine running on a preset program, going through the motions step by step.

Jiang Yishen followed him into the elevator and accidentally brushed against his shoulder, only to discover something unexpected: it was like two different layers merging into each other. Qi Lin did not sense his touch the way he had during that previous retrospective loop. He had become a wandering soul, utterly reduced to a bystander in this world.

“Qi Lin?” he said carefully.

Qi Lin did not hear his voice. He only stared blankly at the descending numbers on the elevator screen. The doors opened. He badged out. He walked through the front doors.

It was raining lightly outside. In October, every autumn rain brings a new chill. The wind carried fine threads of rain over, landing on clothing and vanishing in an instant, but the bone-deep cold came with them, crawling in through the skin and raising a layer of goosebumps.

Many people had no umbrella. They walked with their heads down, hurrying along. The ground was wet and reflected the light. The center of the intersection was like a stage under a spotlight, with car headlights and streetlamps shining against each other, giving concrete form to the transparent raindrops as slanted, flying lines. The red light blinked to green. Qi Lin was swept along in the flow of people, slowly inching forward.

“It’s raining, don’t get wet.” Jiang Yishen raised his hand to shield him from the rain, but it was no use no matter what he did. The tiny raindrops that landed on the back of his hand, barely felt at all, passed straight through and fell heavily onto Qi Lin’s shoulders.

At first Jiang Yishen still instinctively dodged the pedestrians coming toward him. Later he stopped caring. He passed through them, stubbornly holding his hand up to shield Qi Lin from the rain.

Qi Lin didn’t even lift his eyelashes. He walked into the subway station, stamped his feet at the entrance where people had tracked in mud, and paused for a moment when he saw the shared umbrellas placed at the subway entrance.

Jiang Yishen followed his gaze. They were transparent umbrellas, standing in a row together.

He bent down to take Qi Lin’s hand, but Qi Lin had already turned and continued walking into the subway station.

Line 2 took four stops to reach Qi Lin’s rental apartment. Not many people got off at this stop. By the time they filtered out to the corresponding exit, only Qi Lin was left. He returned to the familiar small gate outside the residential complex, where the barbecue shop they often ate at was next to a 24-hour convenience store.

Qi Lin went in, picked up a rice ball, and sat by the window, eating slowly.

“Ask the clerk to heat it up for you!” Jiang Yishen circled around him anxiously. “You got rained on and now you’re eating cold food. How can you not take care of yourself when you’re on your own?”

Qi Lin ate very slowly, looking like he had no appetite. He opened his phone and mechanically refreshed his Moments feed over and over.

But there would no longer be anything he wanted to see in his Moments. Qi Lin backed out to the chat interface and scrolled down through his contacts until Jiang Yishen’s name appeared on the screen.

The last time they had been in contact was already a month ago. Back then, Jiang Yishen had still been pinned to the top of his WeChat. Now he was fooling himself by unpinning him, yet still having to scroll down many extra times every day to find his name.

Jiang Yishen was starting to want to cry. He didn’t want to see Qi Lin like this. He wanted Qi Lin to always be happy, smiling with curved eyes, not soaked through by rain.

Qi Lin ultimately didn’t finish the rice ball. When he walked out of the convenience store, the rain was nearly stopping. He walked home with his head bowed.

The rental apartment where they had lived together for a few days: Jiang Yishen had always felt it was a warm little place, but at this moment he felt an emptiness and loneliness he had never felt before. When Qi Lin lived alone, he didn’t turn on all the lights. Only a single small entryway light was on.

He stood in front of the coffee table and suddenly forgot what he had come for, his expression going blank for a moment.

Somewhere nearby, a piano started playing softly. It sounded like a child practicing, repeating the same passage of melody over and over in broken fragments.

Qi Lin startled as if woken from a daze. He walked to the bedroom with his arms hanging at his sides, pulled open the wardrobe door, and took out a gray athletic hoodie from inside. The sleeves were full of creases.

Jiang Yishen’s heart lurched. That was his clothing. He suddenly recalled a long-forgotten episode, and his breathing instantly fell into disarray.

Qi Lin gathered the hoodie in his arms, curling over it and holding it tight. He buried his face in it. After a long while, he finally opened his phone and typed a line of text on Jiang Yishen’s chat page.

I found one of your clothes today. Come pick it up.

He hesitated for a long time without sending it. Qi Lin gripped the hem of the hoodie hard, then deleted every word.

Jiang Yishen could almost feel his reluctance to let go. Perhaps on many nights he hadn’t witnessed, Qi Lin had sat like this in a dark room, telling himself it was the last time: meet once, then cut things off completely afterward.

The darkness of tonight was especially thick. After some unknown stretch of time, Qi Lin finally opened his phone and sent out, word by word, the message he had repeated to himself countless times.

I found one of your clothes today. Come pick it up.

A message that carried the tangled longing of countless days and nights, and yet it received its reply within a minute.

No need. Just throw it away.

Jiang Yishen crouched down and used his hand to block the screen, not wanting Qi Lin to see those words. But the soft glow of the screen passed through his translucent palm and fell into Qi Lin’s eyes.

Those eyes blinked once, and a heavy tear rolled out.

Jiang Yishen gripped his hand fiercely, opened his mouth, and found he couldn’t say a word.

October 12th. He had been keeping watch at a hospital in the Capital, his father having been admitted, waiting for a surgery date to be scheduled.

He couldn’t get away to go back, and he didn’t want to tell Qi Lin about his own situation. At the time he had thought Qi Lin no longer liked him, and that leaving the clothes behind might make things uncomfortable for him, so he simply told him to throw them away.

When Qi Lin cried, he made no sound. He sat motionless in the same position, tears soaking his entire face, dripping from his chin onto the screen.

All of this so-called misguided fate was self-inflicted. They had suffered through it all before they learned how to express love. What a pity: when they were brave, they didn’t know how to love; when they knew how to love, they were no longer brave.

Qi Lin finally choked out a sob, a very soft sound, like a stray cat by the roadside that couldn’t find its way home, whimpering softly. Jiang Yishen wanted to wipe away his tears, but when he raised his hand he found his own eyes were already brimming, and he couldn’t see Qi Lin’s face clearly. There was only a blurred patch of light and shadow in the darkness of the night, close yet out of reach.

—

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