Translated from the Chinese by Chen Zeping and Karen Gernant

I actually got together with Ginger when the pandemic situation was still grim.

Even though I’d been numbed by the protracted pandemic, I still felt a little uneasy out on the streets and felt tense, too, as if I were committing a crime.

Meeting up with Ginger didn’t seem necessary. After all, we weren’t particularly close friends—we’d been colleagues three years ago. She contact me through WeChat and invited me out for lunch. Things that were casual in normal times now became extraordinary. Because of the pandemic, being invited to have lunch was almost like being dragged through fire and water, but I accepted without much hesitation.

Maybe it was because I was going stir-crazy. But I knew my reason could not be so simple; I just couldn’t sort out the complicated threads at the moment. Human behavioral cues were a jumble that you couldn’t easily make sense of. You didn’t know why you had to run out into the empty streets when it was raining, and you didn’t know why you shivered on a summer evening. You couldn’t look into yourself, because you didn’t have the courage, or the detachment, not to mention that the whole world was presently in an unprecedented state of confusion.

The outdoor food bar in front of Lido Square wasn’t strange to me. The office building where Ginger and I worked three years ago was nearby. Far away, when I looked at the parasol set up by the bar, I felt a glimmer of comfort. I slowed my pace, just to prolong this fresh, dizzying emotion.

Ginger was already sitting at a table. She asked for a glass of water, which I thought was just a legitimate excuse to take off her mask. I sat down across from her, not knowing for a moment what to say. Even though wearing a mask was the main form of etiquette during the pandemic, I took mine off, too.

Looking at each other, we felt momentarily embarrassed.

“Happy weekend,” I said, a little stiffly.

She forced a smile. “Is it the weekend?”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure, either, but she quickly returned the greeting: “Happy weekend.”

I could tell that she wasn’t sure what day of the week it was, either. That was sort of nice. When no one was sure about the world, the world suddenly seemed a little less strange.

She was carefully groomed—so much so that she did not quite match my memory of her. It was far from warm in late March, yet she was already wearing a sheer purple skirt.

“Don’t you feel cold?” I controlled my tone, but I still felt my question might sound offensive.

“I’m okay.” She seemed more worried that her bare calves might offend me.

We were treading carefully. I realized I had another motivation for meeting Ginger today—to once again enjoy communicating in person, and to do so with subtle detours and evasions. I liked this.

Unexpectedly, masks were the first thing we talked about. God knows, masks had been my nightmare for three months. The company where I now worked engaged in international trade of medical devices. How could that be my fault? I did my job for a living, just as we used to sell insurance together. I didn’t deserve to be subjected to such rude abuse—our industry became a disaster zone overnight: people from all over the world talked to you about masks. “Do you have any masks for sale?” or “Do you buy masks?” Buying and selling were both on a scale you couldn’t have imagined. In under a hundred days, I had handled hundreds of millions of masks. Masks had flooded my hard days, making me anxious, but so far none of those deals had gone through.

I realized that my primary motive to come out here in this severe pandemic was to temporarily escape this desperate absurdity. But now, another person was still talking about masks.

“The whole world is suffering, and only businesses like yours profit from this disaster.” She wasn’t teasing me; she seemed to be trying to cheer me up. “You must have received a huge bonus from selling masks.”

“That’s what everyone thinks. Would you believe that I actually had my pay cut?”

I tried to explain to her, as calmly as I could, that none of the rats on board would survive when the ship sank. But I couldn’t go on. My stomach felt queasy.

From my expression, Ginger sensed how serious this was. She ordered a lemonade for me.

“Well, I really don’t know much about that,” she said. “You do look depressed.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was worse than “depressed,” and her words made it seem that I hadn’t been depressed in the past. That wasn’t true.

Without waiting for me to respond, Ginger changed the subject. She told me that she had become her family’s full-time nanny. Taking care of a baby girl under one year old kept her too busy to pay much attention to the world in turmoil. She wasn’t complaining; she was flaunting her happiness. I pretended to be interested, and at the same time, I was thinking, if I had to choose between having a baby girl or swimming in a sea of masks, which would I choose? It was hard, really hard, not because I was intimidated by both options, but because I discovered that the world didn’t give me much choice at all. This discovery was a relief. I think this explained her motive to meet with me—she hoped that sharing her plight with me would give it a layer of “lucky” color and reduce its heavy burden.

In the past, we had often shared like this. When I was fresh out of school with an M.A. degree, I could only land a job with an insurance company. Naively, I thought that with my training in literature, I could be a copywriter. I was surprised to be assigned to the brutal battlefield of selling insurance. I had felt unfortunate, but Ginger convinced me that I should feel lucky. She was seven years older than I was, and I considered her an elder. She had a Ph.D., and a Ph.D. didn’t need to say much to convince an M.A. She made me feel that I was as lucky as a lottery winner for not being assigned to be a janitor for the company.

She came to Beijing from Anhui province. Of course, it was because of a man that her life was suspended in an awkward zone. She could only stubbornly float in something like a gravitational field with no way to escape. As if to prove something, she was making every effort to stay in Beijing. I also told her my secret: my biggest goal at the time was to get out of Beijing—anywhere else would be fine. Anhui would be fine, Mars would be ideal, just because there was a stepfather in my home who was as annoying as any stepfather. We had different experiences and opposite goals in life, but we worked together and shared our secrets. This had helped me, and I think it was probably therapeutic for her, too.

Selling insurance was supposedly a decent job, but everyone should have known that no job was as decent as it was thought to be. They were definitely different from what you thought, different from what you had read in textbooks, and way different from what you saw on TV shows. Ginger and I worked on the same team, and our income was based on collective performance. She had a larger volume of business than I did, although the company considered it just average. So I always felt that I had not only shared her secrets, but also had benefited from the fruits of her labor for a long time. I saw myself as someone who had reaped without sowing, and I was grateful.

“I probably shouldn’t be talking about this with you.” Ginger finally understood that something was wrong. Actually, I didn’t think she had said anything improper. In other words, I wasn’t upset. I just thought that she should realize that what she was saying might upset me. So I said nothing and waited for her to realize this.

Three years ago, Ginger had gone with me to the hospital, where I had a miscarriage. Now, as you can see, talking to me about her baby girl wasn’t very considerate.

She chose the hospital for me. I had intended to go to a small clinic—mainly because I couldn’t afford anything else. But afterward, I had to admit that I was also driven by a certain impulse to abandon and destroy myself. After I came out of the operating room, Ginger sat with me in the empty hospital corridor for a long time. She had insisted on choosing this expensive hospital. I had never seen a hospital as spacious as this one; with its tall Gothic columns, it resembled a luxurious palace. It did have reason to be expensive—at the height of summer, it was comfortably cool, and I was shivering all over. This was understandable, for I had just been hollowed out. But it was not the only reason.

To comfort me, Ginger was holding my hand. She relayed some startling physiological information: Sperm is a heterosexual antigen for women. According to transplantation theory, this foreign antigen will be rejected. It’s because of maternal-fetal immune tolerance that most women don’t miscarry. However, if this mechanism isn’t functioning properly, miscarriage may occur.

That’s what she told me back then. But what did this have to do with my current plight?

She must have done some homework; otherwise, she couldn’t have talked so professionally. Yet, her stiff expression showed that she was reciting, and she did not quite understand what she was reciting, either. Her Ph.D. was in literature, after all.

“There is also another condition,” she said seriously, “that’s called spontaneous abortion—natural selection occurs, eliminating fifty or sixty percent of fetuses.”

It’s amazing, isn’t it? I wasn’t sure that what she said was scientifically accurate, or that I’d fully understood the rules of human reproduction, but I was persuaded. Since the rate was fifty or sixty percent,” there was no reason for me to continue shivering. When “natural selection” comes into play, it’s like flowers blooming and falling, or spring coming and going, you just have to submit to the mighty will of nature, even if what you had experienced was an unnatural hollowing out, dripping with blood.

I’m not sure if I’d misinterpreted this lesson of human reproduction, but from what I understood at that time, I think a lot of miscarriages happen without the woman even noticing it. Nature quietly makes a mysterious balance—constantly selecting and weeding out defective fetuses, and female bodies are merely the operating facilities. Today, this is what I still think.

That day, I gradually calmed down in the twilight of the setting sun. Holding my hand the whole time, Ginger patiently enlightened me. I had never thanked her for that, just as we never say thank you to Mother Nature. And I left the insurance company without saying good-bye.

Yes, I was cold in most of my interactions with others. It was just the safest and cheapest way to protect myself when I had to describe myself to the world. I know how disagreeable I’ve always been. I have neither the strength nor the courage to confess all my feelings or my despair, and, of course, my folly and greed, so I just consider all of my characteristics innate.

Our relationship back then was tepid. Sometimes we had a cigarette together on the rooftop, and sometimes we had a meal together at an outdoor food bar in front of Lido Square. She started smoking under my bad influence; I hadn’t been interested in Italian pasta at first, but she liked it and so I learned to like it, too. Taking stock now, I think I gained more from our friendship than she did: I taught her a vice, and she introduced me to new cuisines. Besides, she paid for most of our meals. All of this embarrassed me now, and I wanted to show her a moderate degree of warmth, and if I could, to apologize and ask her to forgive my irredeemable indifference and be my friend again. But I didn’t know where to begin.

A waiter in a mask brought our food. It turned out that Ginger had ordered before I arrived. That was all right. That’s what she had done in the past, too. It was just a light meal anyway. Chips, wings, and pasta.

“Insurance meal,” I blurted out.

“What?” Ginger apparently did not understand.

“Insurance meal” is a name I used to call this kind of food. In addition to matching the business we were engaged in, the name also represents suitability, inner peace, and restraint. I liked pasta, because it was better than unpalatable and not quite delicious, slightly rewarding your taste buds. My tongue couldn’t handle food that was too rich, and fancy dinners scared me as much as unrealistic happiness did. So I usually found an excuse to be absent from the working team’s dinner parties.

Ginger couldn’t get out of these dinners. She was older than the rest of us, so she had to play the role of a “big sister.” Whenever someone closed a deal, the team would celebrate in a restaurant. Eventually, even if there was only a possibility of a deal, the team celebrated. So I was embarrassed even more often. When I saw my colleagues the next day, I felt as if everyone’s lips were still glistening with oil and sarcasm aimed at a self-isolated loser.

“The food here should be very safe.” I popped a french fry into my mouth. God knows why I added, “as safe as Jessica.”

“Jessica?” Ginger froze for a moment and immediately understood what I was saying. She frowned and stopped me, “Still, you’d better not use your fingers.”

Jessica was also a former colleague, the youngest member of our team. She had just finished her undergraduate degree in finance. Selling insurance should be a good fit for her specialty, but in fact, she adapted even worse than I did. She was unique, always as if on the edge of a disaster. Jessica looked like one of those so-called avant-garde works of art made of resin, which had a strong appeal, but you couldn’t simply define it in terms of beauty or ugliness. When she was talking to you, you felt she was about to start crying at any moment—tears flashed in her eyes, and you couldn’t tell if it was real or illusory. You know, you were probably just talking about what you had for breakfast, and that wasn’t a reason to cry, but she was almost in tears, and so you wondered if you had said something wrong. Colleagues rarely talked with her because no one wanted to make her cry. Everybody thought the anxious Jessica was the most harmless person on the team. As long as you left her alone, she was like air—you weren’t aware of her existence.

Insecurity was the most common emotion in our small group. Everyone was on high alert. Outwardly, we operated with team spirit, but actually hostile competition was our reality. I had been harassed by some nasty clients, and had also been undercut by some colleagues. Sometimes, I was so humiliated that I rushed onto the roof, where I vomited uncontrollably. What really scared me was that I also felt an urge to jump from the roof, and that’s not just a metaphor. The company had been wise to add Jessica to our team. Maybe there was a Jessica on every team. A harmless Jessica could relieve some of the tension on the team.

“Harmless Jessica,” I said to myself.

I felt better with Jessica on the team. I could politely decline to go to the team dinners, but she had to go, pale and innocent.

“As it turned out, Jessica wasn’t completely harmless, either,” Ginger said.

All at once, Ginger looked like a stranger, as if she had put on an invisible mask.

“Yeah, that’s why that incident was so shocking,” I said, a question in my eyes.

Ginger tilted her head and smiled to show that she was fine.

The “shocking” incident referred to the day when Jessica was blocked in the office by a group of strangers—accused of snatching someone’s husband.

We saw our department manager Liu only at the regular meetings before leaving work every Friday. She was in her thirties. I had never learned her full name. Maybe I didn’t need to know it, or maybe the company purposely kept a distance between supervisor and subordinates. Anyhow, I didn’t feel she was a real person. She was more of a symbol, representing organization, management, discipline, and the principle of distribution. She was not pretty, but quite persuasive, which was a charm made of synthetic material.

At dusk that Friday, Manager Liu came to the meeting when everyone was already seated on either side of the conference table. I hadn’t taken time off after my miscarriage. It seemed to me that the right way to recover was to ignore the wound. And I doubted if I could ever recover, or if I needed to recover. Pale as usual, Jessica was sitting across from me. Her hands were on the table, and a notebook was in front of her. She always made a point of taking notes, though no one asked her to.

Manager Liu sat down. For a moment, she didn’t say a word. Then she tapped on the table, and at this signal, the door swung open. The security guard peered inside and then let in the troops.

“It was like a rehearsal for a play,” I said.

Anyhow, that’s how I felt at the time. It was all very ritualistic, like a well-rehearsed stage play. It imitated life, but at the same time it was an exquisite performance. I was still feeling ill from my miscarriage, so my reaction could have been a hallucination. As I recalled, the accusers who entered were quiet, speaking clearly. One of Jessica’s male clients had gone missing, and she was the last person who had contacted him. Now, she had to account for his whereabouts.

“That’s what I thought, too,” Ginger said.

She picked at the pasta with a fork and put her drooping hair back in place with her other hand. She looked more attractive than before.

“I occasionally think about Jessica’s answer that day,” I said.

Jessica’s answer was indeed amazing. Though it was clear, it led to a new question. Or something like a “proposition.” Jessica didn’t cry. She seemed very calm. As she spoke, she wrote something in a notebook as if recording her own words in sync.

Jessica admitted that she’d had dinner with the man three days earlier, and she knew where he was heading after dinner.

“She said,” Ginger repeated Jessica’s words, “he had gone to a friend’s house.”

Apparently, Ginger couldn’t forget the scene, either.

A two- or three-year-old boy ran up to our table; the mask on his forehead covered his eyes as well.

“Come back here!” his mother shouted from behind him.

“He had gone to a friend’s house.” Yes, that’s what Jessica had said, as if she knew all about the man’s whereabouts, and this was information that only she could provide. “Well, he had gone to a friend’s house.” Even I was expecting that she would go on and tell everyone where this friend’s house was.

“But she didn’t know where the friend’s house was.” I had to laugh. No, I didn’t feel this was funny; my laughter was triggered by something sad. “Where was that friend’s house? It’s almost like a philosophical proposition.”

“Did you feel sorry for her?” Ginger looked at me and asked.

I ate a chicken wing.

“I don’t know. Maybe I was confused. At least, I wasn’t disgusted with Jessica for what she had done. Probably none of us was. Sure, in order to close a deal, she used a disgraceful tactic, but that wasn’t a secret in the trade, was it? I was sad for her, but sadder for myself. Anyway, I often thought of the way she seriously answered the question with a riddle: She knew where the man was—he had gone to a friend’s house. She had answered the question. She didn’t think the location of that friend’s house was any of her business.” Why was I getting a little emotional? I couldn’t expect Ginger to understand what I was saying. Honestly, I didn’t know what I was trying to convey, either.

To my surprise, Ginger said, “I know what you mean. You talk about the helplessness of the weak. When overwhelmed by the tough world, the weak sink into their own logic. You feel as if this had happened to you.”

“Yes, probably…”

I was shaking, leaning back in the plastic chair and looking around.

I asked a question out of the blue: “By the way, what is manager Liu’s full name?”

“Manager Liu?” Ginger bit her fork and said, “Her name is Manager Liu.”

I laughed so hard that my french fries fell to my chest.

Ginger put her fork down and began wiping her mouth with a napkin. I was afraid that she would put on her mask next.

“Well, have you ever wondered where that friend’s house was?” She picked the fork up again. “Have you ever been curious about the answer to this question?” she asked me, looking down again at her plate.

“I don’t think so. That’s not my business…” For a moment, I was acutely aware of something. I could feel Ginger’s steadfastness. It was a natural gift. “Okay,” I was resigned. “I knew you were the friend in question. He went to your house.”

“Not my house, though. You know, I shared an old rental apartment with someone near the third ring road,” she said without looking up.

“You aren’t kidding, are you?” I knew she wasn’t, but I just didn’t like losing.

She still looked down at her food, just as Jessica had looked down at her notebook.

“Well, then, did you know where the man was?” I knew it wasn’t my business.

“Yes, I knew.” She picked up a noodle and put it into her mouth, and then another. “He stayed with me that night and left the next morning.”

“Where did he go?”

“He went to a friend’s house.” Pausing, she added, “That’s what he told me when he left.”

The answer didn’t surprise me at all, or rather a much larger unimaginable surprise enveloped me, like a mask. I wouldn’t even be surprised if she stuffed a mask into her mouth now.

“He was the riddle maker. He passed through one woman after another, and told each of them the same thing—that he was leaving for a friend’s house. He said it this way so they wouldn’t feel they could question him closely.” I wasn’t talking to Ginger. I was talking to myself.

Yeah, no more questions. The girls all stopped at this abstract “proposition”—he went to a friend’s house—because any further inquiry would cross the line of their relationships.

“He was such an attractive man, and his charm was magical. I think Jessica approached him not entirely because he was a potential client. At least, I didn’t. Yeah, he was very rich, he was personable, he was so cultured, and he seemed so insurance conscious. He was a perfect target for our business. But I wouldn’t go to bed with all of the men like him,” Ginger said.

“But he had such magical charm that he got all of you into bed with him.”

“Probably not intentionally. Jessica was the one who took the initiative.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Jessica sneakily went through my notepad, and then she called several clients I was contacting.”

Jessica’s vulnerable appearance, which was like a work of avant-garde art, appeared before my eyes.

“I can’t blame her. I know how hard it was for her. I was actually a little worried about her. That man left his wife in the morning, telling her he was going to a friend’s house; he had dinner with Jessica in the evening, and when he left, he also told her that he was going to a friend’s house; then he came to my place for the night, and the next morning, he told me that he was going to a friend’s house. And so, he disappeared in a closed loop, or a Chinese box. But the women had to go on living their own lives. His wife would be all right, and as you can see, I’m all right, too, but I’m not sure about Jessica. She’s still living in reality, but her soul was kidnapped into another dimension.”

“Maybe we’re all the same—disconnected from reality, belonging to one world but living in another.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I don’t, either,” I said. In fact, I sort of did. For example: Ginger lived in Beijing, but she didn’t belong to Beijing. And I lived in Beijing, but belonged to Mars.

Ginger finally stopped eating, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, she looked sideways at the little boy not far away who was wearing his mask as a hat.

“You always dress like a student,” she said.

I looked down and saw that I was wearing sweatpants that were actually my pajama pants.

“I don’t know how Jessica is doing.” She waved to the waiter and asked for two draft beers. “She stopped coming to work the next day without telling anybody, just as you did. Why did you quit, anyway? I’ve been a little puzzled, but I didn’t ask you.”

Ginger looked me straight in the eye. It wasn’t right—she appeared a little aggressive. An undercurrent was surging between us. We both sensed something.

Again, I couldn’t help but laugh for no reason at all.

“I went to a friend’s house,” I answered, laughing breathlessly. I felt that this was a wonderful answer.

“Fuck you!” She began laughing along with me until she was also out of breath.

The beers were served. We clinked glasses and each of us took a swig. I made an inner toast: Hi, congratulations for staying in Beijing, while I haven’t yet begun anything.

After I quit my job at the insurance company, I kept in touch with Ginger on and off. She informed me when she was getting married, but I didn’t go to her wedding. She married a university professor who had been her classmate in grad school and had landed a job teaching at a university in Beijing. Ginger had finally realized her ideal: not just living in Beijing but also belonging to Beijing. She still worked for the insurance company, and had become Manager Ginger who only showed up at Friday meetings. Her personality was probably changing. I visited her in the hospital when she had the baby. When we sat together in the shadow of the columns in the corridor, my lower body felt wet, and I guessed that it was another  secret natural elimination.

“You know, I should thank you.” Ginger raised her glass again.

I clinked glasses with her, taking her words as a polite toast.

“I started liking pasta only after you brought me here,” she said.

“What?” I was a little confused.

“This is an amazing food, um—like a placebo.”

I sort of understood what she meant. I just couldn’t remember who brought whom here the first time.

“Did I bring you?”

“You don’t remember? It was raining and I met you outside the gate of the company…”

Then I remembered: it was raining hard. When I dashed out of the building onto the empty street, and saw Ginger getting out of a taxi, I felt as if I’d bumped into the world’s only survivor. She didn’t have an umbrella, either, and the parasol at the nearby outdoor food bar became our refuge.

“I didn’t tell you before: that day, I had just run away from a private club where some guys tried to molest me. It was disgusting. You had no idea how relieved I was when I saw you running in the rain. The chips, the wings, the pasta—it was like God had personally prepared the meal for me. You may think I’m exaggerating, but that’s what I thought at the time. There are some things in the world that suit you perfectly—nothing more, nothing less—and make you feel you’re no longer alone.”

“Congratulations!” What on earth made me say that? I was sincere in congratulating her. At least she was comforted, and she remembered it all, and was able to describe it in a relatively understandable way. As for me? I had no way to explain why I ran out into the rain onto an empty street that day. This world has never been peaceful. Even in normal times when we didn’t need to wear masks, people were still stuck in their own commonplace predicaments.

“That was a hard time for me,” she said, as if trying to explain something. “Fortunately, my landlord was nice enough to allow me to pay half the rent later.”

I was speechless. She didn’t have to explain anything to me. When she couldn’t even pay her rent, she had taken me to a palatial hospital. That’s where the problem lay.

Finishing our beer, we stood up to say goodbye. After hesitating a little, I stretched out my hand. In this grim moment, two women firmly clasped each other’s hand. The friendship between us was not going to become deeper and stronger—nothing like that had ever existed between us. Our relationship didn’t start that way, and would never develop that way. We just came across each other in the rain, and got drenched together. It was better than being drenched alone, and that was it, nothing more. You have to believe that each person’s sorrow is private, and isolated: they will never flow together.

After putting on her mask, Ginger looked relaxed, as if she had covered half of her uneasiness. I think, as the world came to a standstill, and everyone was wearing a mask, it was an opportunity for all of us to clear up some loose ends of life. Ginger had reason to relax when she claimed that she was the mysterious “friend” of that man; I also felt a lot better. If I had been depressed before meeting her, at least it seemed I was less depressed after.

I watched Ginger leave. I was in no hurry to go home. She went home to be with her baby girl. Waiting for me at home were the ever-present masks and a troublesome stepfather. Across the way, the glass curtain wall of the Noggin Hotel glistened in the March sun. I sat down at the flower bed in the square and watched the boy running around, wearing a mask on his forehead. Several times, he dashed toward me and I was prepared to be knocked off my feet, but he never actually bumped into me. You’re never prepared for things that happen to you.

There was one thing from my past that I didn’t tell Ginger just now. I thought about it, but then thought it would seem like trading secrets—you told me one of your secrets and now I’ll tell you mine. That was a game for teenagers. We probably no longer needed to share our inner storms with anyone. More important, the thing didn’t seem real.

But it did happen, because I was unprepared.

The man who caused my abortion showed up one afternoon. As I walked toward the office building, he called out to me from behind and said in the tone of a confident hunter: “Are you Ginger’s colleague?” That’s how we met, and that’s how it happened. He had a gift for making you believe that, with a little more persistence, he could help you be launched from Beijing to Mars.

After I quit my job, I stubbornly tracked him down. I found his company and his home. I stood next to his home, watching and waiting. Honestly, I was more curious than miserable. Probably I was just trying to figure out how the world operates, and how to make sense of so many significant things. It didn’t take much effort: ten days later, he came back. Turning into his home, he looked as if he had just returned from visiting a friend’s house. The result completely bored me. It would be a legend if he had never returned home, so the girls would be able to beautify their wounds forever, imagining that they had been taken seriously, or that they had ever been close to the moment of being launched out to Mars. But he came back from a friend’s house, exhausted, carrying something in his hand that didn’t look like a gift for his family, not a bouquet or anything like that. It looked like a doggy-bag.

There was no hallowed aura, and there was only your ordinariness.

So I still didn’t know how the world operates, and those significant and extraordinary things were still glittering. It didn’t destroy me. I just admitted that there was nothing mysterious about the whole thing. When we became the next “friend” of somebody, we were all, more or less, hoping to “sign a deal.”

This was cruel, of course. But only after I had understood myself could I tolerate myself and understand the world with a heart that was tranquil and unashamed. That’s why, right now, I was dancing in my pajama pants in the spring sun. Of course, the world would restart, and then, there would still be an unending stream of people leaving me, to form the new loops or new Chinese boxes. They would say to me, “I’m going to a friend’s house.” And at times like that, I would bravely respond with a divine inquiry: Where is your friend’s house?

Note: Published originally in Chinese as 《掩面时分》 (“When Everyone Wore a Mask”). In December 2021, this story earned Yi Zhou the prestigious Lu Xun Literature and Art Award for Short Story.