The moment Wei Lai was jolted awake by the cold, a single thought flashed through his mind: I’ve had enough. I’m heading south today.
This was his fourth month inside the Arctic Circle. By then he had already withdrawn from the fringes of the Arctic Ocean and retreated into the dense forests of the La Pu Lan region, curled up inside an abandoned kota — a tent — left behind by the indigenous Sa Mi Ren people. The kota resembled the felt lodges of Native Americans: a pointed cone, its walls layered with reindeer hides, bear skins, and thick felt blankets packed densely together for insulation. He had wrapped himself in animal skins and lain down atop a layer of ash nearly half a foot deep. He had burned a campfire before sleeping, and when he finally lay down there had still been some warmth. Now he reached out to touch the ash, and found it had gone cold as a biting mouth — catching him off guard, sinking its teeth in, numbing his arm nearly to the elbow.
It really was time to head south. Four months — especially the second half — during which he had seen fewer people than he could count on one hand. They say that people who live alone in extreme environments for extended periods begin to see hallucinations. Yesterday, he had been certain he’d seen a reindeer sitting cross-legged on the ground, applying lipstick. The brand was Chanel, shade 99 — a true red. After finishing, the reindeer had turned to look at him, lips pursed, as if asking to be kissed.
Wei Lai had actually offered a critique of its makeup: “You should line your lips first.”
Then he had grabbed his own head and crouched down. If he didn’t leave soon, his mind was going to break.
He pulled the animal skins tightly around himself and crawled out of the kota. A night of wind and snow, and yet this moment was uncannily still. High in the sky, a ghostly blue-green aurora twisted and writhed like a serpent, coiling its way into a vast canopy of orange-red dawn. The tall Scots pines had been shaped by layer upon layer of ice and snow — their heads bowed, their waists bent — every one of them bloated and hunched, like giants, like demons, like rows of bleached white bones stretching to the edge of the world.
The Sa Mi Ren believed that a fire fox lived in the sky, racing across the night, its tail sweeping the snowflakes — and so the aurora appeared.
In the Chinese view, when the sky blazes with unusual colors, it is called an auspicious omen.
The Chinese like to do things with care. Whether opening a door for a new business, accepting a betrothal gift, or breaking ground on a new home — they always choose a propitious day. On this particular day, when he decided to head south, the sky was full of auspicious signs. A good omen, at least in spirit.
Tramping through knee-deep snow, Wei Lai made his way southward, hiking on foot out of the La Pu Lan forest. When luck was with him, he managed to hitch a ride on a dogsled pulled by Siberian huskies.
Once he released that iron grip of resolve — I absolutely cannot die on this snowfield — his internal clock began to falter. His mind drifted in and out of focus, like a woman who has just given birth and spends three years in a fog, doing and saying things through clouds and mist. His meals cycled back and forth between rough pizza, stale Italian food, and reindeer meat with cold beer. By the time he reached the capital, He’er Xinji, the only two things he could clearly recall were these:
First: passing through the Santa Claus Village in Luowa Niemi, he had bowed to the illuminated post marking the Arctic Circle — he may have even said goodbye — and some tourists standing off to the side had been watching him sideways. He heard someone call him a wild man.
Second: he had hitched a ride on a massive timber truck loaded with Norwegian spruce. Fen Lan is said to be the land of five million loggers; such trucks are common. There was no room in the cab, so he wrapped himself in his animal skins and climbed into the cargo bed, sprawling among the sharp reek of timber. In the dead of night, the driver climbed up and shook him — something to the effect that this was as far as he could take him. Wei Lai heard this, but his eyes were too heavy to open and he did not sit up. He mumbled: “Then just leave me here.”
The driver had no choice. He called a companion over. One took the head, the other took the feet, and they tossed him out by the roadside like a body being dumped. He lay with half his face pressed against the mud and slept until daybreak.
Still, when he returned to He’er Xinji and caught sight of the milk-white Lutheran church rising in the distance, he snapped back to life all at once.
His hearing sharpened, his vision cleared, and his mind came alive. His nose caught the scent of freshly baked meat buns from somewhere far away, and the blood in his veins began to churn and boil, like water heating up in the sauna room nearby.
Back to the old place. Some people hate this city — find it cold and dim, like “the Soviet Union before it opened up.” Others love it, finding that this city cradled by the Baltic Sea has the gentle poetry of a pastoral landscape.
It was the end of March. He’er Xinji was still caught in the trailing edge of winter — overcast and chill. Wei Lai pulled his filthy, reeking animal skins tighter and walked past concrete apartment blocks, dust-filmed shop windows, an adult goods store, and a Thai massage parlor.
The streets were empty. No one stopped to stare. He walked on, all the way down into the underground bar that Ai Lin ran.
The bar was called: Wecareabouttheworld.
An entirely English name — not even a secondary inscription in the local Finnish or Swedish. People from every corner of the world passed through its doors, bringing with them all manner of dealings, open and hidden. Milu once said: this bar is a whirlpool sitting on the surface of He’er Xinji’s skin. If you don’t know what it is, walk around it. If you do, you’ll find your way in naturally.
Wei Lai pushed the door open and went in.
During the day, the bar had no business. Only a single wall lamp was lit. Its dim glow fell over a miniature jellyfish tank on the bar counter, where two moon jellyfish drifted — translucent throughout — in an aquarium lit with blue-green light. They trailed long, gossamer tentacles, like phosphorescent ghosts.
Behind the jellyfish tank, a face warped by the current, the light, and the glass stared back at him. She must have seen Wei Lai through that same distortion, because she lifted her head in surprise.
That was Ai Lin.
Ai Lin was a young German woman with a head of red hair — very like the protagonist of the famous German film Run Lola Run. Around her neck was tattooed a very fine king cobra coiled all the way around, its forked tongue flicking out right at the slight protrusion of her throat. Every time she spoke, the tongue seemed to twitch and hiss.
In reality, beneath that aggressive exterior, Ai Lin was a genuinely mild-mannered blank slate.
She looked at Wei Lai — puzzled, and then wary. One hand reached beneath the bar counter, where a Russian-made Makarov pistol was concealed.
Wei Lai understood that she hadn’t recognized him, or had taken him for a homeless vagrant. His hair was tangled and wild, nearly grown together with the beard he hadn’t shaved in many days, so that the two met like a pair of thickets colliding in a narrow pass. His face bore scrapes and cuts, mud ground so deeply into the skin that water couldn’t wash it away. His clothes were a strange patchwork — the stale, moldy smell of animal hide mixed with a metallic tang of blood, a reminder of those two days when he couldn’t light a fire and had eaten his meat raw.
His throat moved. He said: “It’s me.”
Ai Lin’s eyes went wide: “David’s coming?”
Wei Lai was his Chinese name. His English name was David. His agent, Milu, was a devoted enthusiast of China, and after studying Wei Lai’s name carefully, he had said: in Chinese, the word lai means “coming” — so when we say it, we are not merely stating the fact of your arrival; we are calling out your full Chinese name at the same time.
So right now, Ai Lin was calling him by his name.
Wei Lai nodded. “Key.”
His apartment was owned by Milu and occupied the top floor of this building. When he was away, he usually left the key with Ai Lin for safekeeping — purely safekeeping. It had never occurred to Ai Lin to tidy his room, clean his apartment, or change his sheets in his absence, even though she had always insisted she was deeply in love with him.
Ai Lin was still in shock. She held the key between two fingertips and passed it over. As Wei Lai leaned in to take it, a look of complicated disgust crossed her face — as though she were afraid of touching him — and she practically threw the key at him.
Wei Lai reached out and caught it.
Ai Lin said: “How did you end up like this?”
Wei Lai answered: “Spend four months up north and you’ll be the same.”
That wasn’t entirely sincere. Someone like Ai Lin wouldn’t last four days.
He turned to leave. The building interior was not quite as biting as outside, and as he walked he began pulling off the animal skins.
Ai Lin called after him: “Wei!”
He turned. She stepped toward him — then was driven back two steps by the smell. Her expression became grave, even touched with a note of anger.
“Wei, you had better go back to looking the way you used to. You know I love you — and I love you mainly for your handsome face and your figure…”
At the word handsome, she hesitated, feeling that directing such a word at the face in front of her was an insult to handsomeness itself.
“…In any case, the way you are right now, I can’t love you.”
The elevator was at the far end of a long, narrow corridor. To reach it, you had to pass the security booth. The apartment building employed only one guard — a German man named Ma Ke, bald and fat on such a grand scale that simply passing through the doorway of the security booth was a challenge. So most of the time he stayed behind the glass window at his desk, either slumped over sleeping or eating.
As Wei Lai passed by, Ma Ke was holding a fork, carefully sawing into a Bavarian white sausage on his plate. He sensed a dark shape pass the window, and as a gesture toward fulfilling his duties, called out a greeting: “Moi!”
He didn’t look up as he said it. The barely-pronounceable “Moi” came out with a spray of saliva, directed entirely at the sausage.
Wei Lai reflected that it wouldn’t matter whether a murderer, a brown bear, an alien, or a ghost passed that window — Ma Ke would never notice. He was simply a prop, a psychological comfort to the building’s equipment, furnishings, and tenants alike.
In his long career as a building guard, Ma Ke had “stepped up” exactly once.
It was Christmas night. Two men had killed someone on the third floor — indifferently, carelessly — then poured a glass of beer over the corpse, tucked it between them, and walked out as though supporting a drunk friend.
The body had only one shoe. The other foot was bare, the toes dragging across the floor, leaving a trail of blood mixed with the smell of beer.
Ma Ke was not yet so fat then. He saw people coming from a distance, and feeling that the holiday called for some festive spirit, waited until the two men and their burden drew close, then suddenly thrust his head out the door and shouted: “Merry Christmas!”
He received an unforgettable Christmas present: the terrified killers stabbed him.
That knife wound had ensured the long continuity of his employment contract, because Ma Ke told everyone he had bravely charged out to apprehend the perpetrators in defense of the residents.
Let him say what he liked. The killers were never caught anyway.
The elevator was an old one, very narrow, requiring you to manually open and close its wire-mesh gate. In one corner someone had tossed a rolled-up newspaper, trampled many times over; through the overlapping shoe prints, bold black printed words and exclamation marks showed through.
— Ransom!
Probably another kidnapping somewhere.
Four months without news. In that time the world had probably lost a great many people and gained a great many more, and a great deal of money had probably flowed from some people’s hands into others’.
Under the sun, there is truly nothing new.