Night Bus

At the bus stop, Wen Yiqian waited.

He was slightly better off financially than he’d been that morning, but old habits held. He’d checked before leaving — Bus 101 went directly to Happy Community, no transfers, two yuan. A taxi would have been seventy or eighty. That felt like a waste when a two-yuan option existed.

A few minutes later, Bus 101 pulled up and he got on.

He paid and moved, as he always did, toward the back. It was a consistent preference. The front and middle sections carried an implicit social obligation — if someone elderly or unwell got on, you stood up, and if they refused your seat, you were left standing there with nowhere to put yourself. The back section solved that problem neatly. By the time a genuinely needy passenger appeared, there would always be someone closer to give up their seat first.

The bus wasn’t crowded. The front seats weren’t even full.

In the back section, there was one other passenger. A girl, sitting in the first row by the window — soft chestnut hair, light makeup, white-framed glasses that gave her a composed, studious look. The kind of person who tended to attract attention without appearing to seek it. Her small backpack occupied the seat beside her.

Wen Yiqian, wary of being mistaken for someone with ulterior motives, was careful not to look at her for more than a moment. He was already heading further back when she glanced up and moved the bag from the adjacent seat.

The thought arrived before he could stop it: Does she want me to sit there?

He dismissed it immediately. This was a well-documented male cognitive error — interpret any mild gesture from an attractive woman as potential interest. The bag had probably just been in her way. She’d wanted something from it.

It’s an illusion. Obviously.

He felt quietly satisfied with this analysis and kept walking to a window seat in the last row, where he settled in and turned his attention to the view outside.

The bus swayed. The day caught up with him all at once.

He was asleep before he’d finished the thought.

When he surfaced, the bus had stopped.

He rubbed his eyes and looked up. The interior was dim. The bus was completely empty. The doors were shut. Even the driver’s seat was vacant.

He looked out the window.

A parking lot. Buses lined up in the dark, every one of them empty.

The silence had a particular quality.

It was the kind of scene that called to mind every bus-related ghost story he’d ever absorbed without meaning to.

Is this the terminal? The realization came slowly. Did I sleep through my stop?

“That’s right.”

The voice came from directly behind him.

Wen Yiqian spun around.

A woman with a rotting face was looking at him. Smiling.

He screamed, lurched sideways, and hit his head against the window with a solid thud.

His vision cleared in stages. The bus was moving. The lights were on. Several passengers were looking at him with expressions ranging from concern to mild irritation.

Wen Yiqian sat back down and pressed a hand to his forehead.

A dream. Obviously a dream.

Too many close calls in too few days, he thought, working to slow his heartbeat. This is what that does to a person.

The one useful thing the nightmare had accomplished was keeping him from sleeping through his stop. Two stops later, the bus pulled up outside Happy Community.

He stood to get off and, without particularly meaning to, glanced at the girl as he passed. She looked up at the same moment, and something in her expression — a faint, knowing smile — made him stop thinking for half a second.

He got off quickly through the rear doors.

The doors closed behind him. The bus began to pull away. Wen Yiqian stood on the pavement with a slightly unfocused expression, watching it go.

When the girl had looked up, he’d caught a glimpse, quite by accident, of her throat.

Specifically, her Adam’s apple.

Good thing I’m a man of pure character, Wen Yiqian thought, with a small, private breath of relief.

He turned to head home, and then something made him look back at the receding bus.

In the rear section, at one of the windows — a head had just ducked out of sight.

He reached the building at nine in the evening and ran into his landlady on the way in. The broken lock had been replaced while he was out — she’d arranged it herself, very efficiently, and the conversation that followed communicated one thing clearly and politely: she expected compensation.

Wen Yiqian paid a hundred yuan without argument. The outcome was manageable only because he hadn’t called her when the lock first broke. Arriving home at that point with nothing in his pockets would have been a significantly more uncomfortable conversation.

The damage to the sofa and other items — that was Jin Siqiao’s responsibility, related to Jin Shuihua’s intrusion, and she had handled it already. That was one thing he didn’t need to think about.

Back upstairs, he showered, changed, went down to the 24-hour convenience store for instant noodles and two sausages, and ate.

This, apparently, was what comfortable living felt like.

He fell asleep almost immediately after.

The day had been too long. There were still unresolved problems sitting at the edges of his awareness, but his mind had nothing left to bring to them. He let them go and slept.

Another day survived. Not easy.

He woke early the next morning, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared at nothing for half an hour.

He had no plans. No immediate obligations. The day was simply open.

Am I actually allowed to rest?

The thought was almost suspicious. Every day since he’d arrived here had contained at least one thing that wanted to kill him. The absence of an emergency felt structurally wrong somehow.

Finding a job could wait. Making money could wait. He pushed both to an indeterminate future point — next time, definitely next time — and went to the living room and lay on the sofa.

“It’s been days since I crossed over,” he said to the ceiling, “and I’ve barely looked at a phone, watched anything, or played a single game.”

He’d have said, before all this, that going without those things would be intolerable. As it turned out, when your days were populated with armed robbers and schemes and people actively trying to cause your death, the absence of social media was fairly easy to bear.

“Maybe I was only staying home glued to my phone because I had nothing else happening,” he mused. “No friends. No events. Just the screen.”

He reached over and turned on the television.

Unfamiliar faces. Shows he’d never encountered. He cycled through channels and found nothing recognizable.

The thought arrived slowly, the way certain thoughts do when there’s finally enough quiet to hear them.

My novel was two hundred thousand words. That’s not very long. It never mentioned any of this — these shows, these actors, all of this peripheral detail. Someone filled all of that in.

Who?

He lay there with this question for a moment.

Then he sat up and slapped his own cheeks lightly.

“How did I suddenly end up in sage mode, pondering philosophy?” He shook his head. “Too much free time. That’s all this is. Idle mind goes strange places.”

He stood up.

“Right. Practical thoughts. Something practical.” He paced a short circuit of the living room. “What if I became an actor?”

The idea surprised even him.

His performance abilities were — objectively, he felt — not bad. But performance under pressure in a genuine situation, where the stakes were real, was entirely different from standing in front of a camera with a crew and a director and a script. On an actual set, he suspected his legs would simply stop working. He’d stand there unable to produce a single line.

That probably ruled out acting.

(End of Chapter)