Wei Lai had gone to Ke Ke Shu’s room to wash up, but in just the short walk back, he had already broken into a thin, clammy sweat all over again.

He found this genuinely baffling: there was no rain here, just dry heat — shouldn’t it be desiccating people? How was anyone still sweating?

He knocked and entered. Cen Jin was sitting on the palm-mat, holding a tray and eating. Her hair was half-dry, and she had wrapped herself in a length of black silk.

Wei Lai remembered that piece of silk. When they were trimming the luggage, she had explained its uses: it could serve as a bath towel, a sleeping robe, a head wrap; on a beach it worked as a wrap; if clothes ran short, it could be a skirt — half-length or full-length, either worked.

Its versatility had made him think that if he were ever born a woman, he’d absolutely have to get one.

Her skin was fair, and black made it stand out especially well.

The ceiling fan was already running at its highest setting — at any moment it seemed ready to wrench itself free from its hook.

Cen Jin looked up at him: “You’re staying in here with me?”

Wei Lai pulled open the folding chaise longue: “Protocol says so. Of course, you can ask me to sleep by the door — though if someone breaks through the window, it’ll take me one or two seconds longer to reach you.”

His real motivation was to sleep inside and enjoy the fan.

Cen Jin lowered her gaze and patiently worked her fork against a slippery piece of lamb: “Then sleep there.”

Wei Lai relaxed slightly. When he lay down, he felt as though something was missing.

It wasn’t until the lights went out that it came to him: “Are there mosquitoes?”

“The north is more of a desert climate — too hot for them. They only come out when it cools down a bit.”

Wei Lai grimaced in the dark: even the mosquitoes wouldn’t clock in under these working conditions.

“You seem to know a lot about the culture and conditions here?”

“It’s a specialization. I studied this. Same as you knowing your way around a gun.”

Her tone suggested she wasn’t particularly in the mood to chat. Wei Lai stopped talking, closed his eyes, and focused on sleeping.

But sleep wouldn’t come. Wherever his body pressed against the chaise longue, heat accumulated quickly, and he found himself constantly shifting and turning to find a cooler spot. In the sealed room, the air was churned by the fan — though if anything it felt like the friction was generating more heat — producing what seemed to be hot wind.

He had no idea how much time passed. In a half-conscious haze, he suddenly heard a sound — the particular kind of sound that signals the sudden absence of all sound.

The fan was slowing down.

The electricity in this area must have been draining away as fast as water absorbed by sand.

The power had gone out.

The air was suffocating and heavy with moisture, and his body was clammy. Sleeping outdoors would have been better than this. Wei Lai felt he couldn’t take it anymore.

Someone else gave out before he did.

There was movement from the bed — Cen Jin sat up, and then reached for the magazine beside her and began fanning herself.

When he had bought this magazine, he had sensed it would be useful to her — just not in this particular way.

And yet strangely, now that she was the one suffering, he somehow felt more settled. A faint, inexplicable sense of superiority even rose in his chest.

Cen Jin was thoroughly miserable. She fumbled her way out of bed — apparently barefoot, because her footsteps made no sound — and went first to the window to open it, but the latch was stuck fast and she couldn’t get it. She then tried the door.

The door opened. Outside was an ashen blue sky. Cen Jin leaned against the doorframe to catch some air, her figure a slender black shadow growing out of the wall.

That really wasn’t easy on her.

After a while, she made her way back, stopped beside his chaise longue, and crouched down halfway: “Hey.”

Just a little while ago, when he had tried to make conversation before sleep, she had barely acknowledged him. Now that she couldn’t sleep, she had come looking for him?

Wei Lai was in no mood to oblige. He adopted the drowsy, irritated tone of someone woken up: “Mm?”

“It’s too hot.”

“Too hot… you woke me up for that? What good does disturbing someone else do you? What’s the point of something that hurts others and helps no one?”

Cen Jin scoffed: “Stop pretending.”

“You’ve been wide awake this whole time — eyes practically glowing. Did you think I couldn’t tell?”

Fair enough. His own eyes were too bright for his own good.

Wei Lai had no choice but to sit up.

“What do you want to do?”

“This building is made of brick, with a concrete roof on top. Concrete cools quickly, and there’s higher ground for the breeze — we could go up to the rooftop to cool down.”

“……One hundred euros.”

“What?”

“Escorting a client onto the rooftop in the middle of the night — that’s not in the contract. One hundred euros.”

She asked the Saudis for money; he’d ask her for money — did she think only she could charge people?

Ancient poetry had a saying: every head can be shaved; without shaving, there are no heads.

Wei Lai wanted to see her lose her temper — he had never actually seen it.

A long pause.

“……Last time, you borrowed one of my cigarettes to smoke. One hundred and twenty euros. Non-negotiable.”

He ground his teeth silently: she had to outcharge him by twenty euros.

Wei Lai was more amused than annoyed: “Do you need me to pay now?”

“No — costs are accumulating on this trip, I’m keeping a running tab. We’ll settle at the end.”

Wei Lai stopped being irritated and laughed instead. He paused, then leaned toward her ear.

“And you’re not worried the tab might get tangled up and impossible to clear?”

He shoved her aside, stood up, and walked to the bed, yanking the palm-mat off with a swift pull.

When the building was originally constructed, the owner apparently never imagined anyone would want to go up to the roof — there was no staircase to a higher level, and no trapdoor cut into the ceiling above the corridor.

The only way up was to climb over the balustrade railing.

For him, a minor stretch of the limbs.

Wei Lai steadied himself on the railing quickly, reached high with one hand to grip the roof’s edge, took the palm-mat Cen Jin passed up to him, swung his arm a few times to gauge the weight, and on the final swing hurled it upward with full force.

The palm-mat skidded a few meters across the roof surface and came to rest. He then braced his arms and pulled himself up.

There was genuinely a breeze up here. He crouched and pressed his palm flat against the concrete — it was faintly cool.

Looking out, the view was wide open. The muddy-yellow moon hung sideways, like a tooth bared in a wide grin. The great river lay sleeping in its dark bed of compacted mud, surrounded by a jumble of houses — if it were to suddenly wake and stand upright, those buildings would probably shake off it like ticks falling from a shuddering animal.

Cen Jin had been waiting below for quite a while before Wei Lai finally leaned over the eaves.

“How do I get up?”

“I’ll brace here — you grab my hand, stand on the railing, and I’ll pull you up from there.”

“Wait a moment, then.”

She stepped back into the dark doorway, released the black silk wrap, and, holding it by its edges, rewound and refastened it — tying it at the back.

Then she came out and extended her hand to Wei Lai.

Wei Lai didn’t take it.

“Are you sure you want me to grab your left arm? I might tear the wound on your arm open. Right arm.”

Cen Jin paused, then — after a few seconds — seemed to process this, and switched to her right hand.

“I forgot for a moment.”

Wei Lai gripped her wrist firmly and signaled her to grip his in return — crossing their holds for mutual leverage.

She had her moments of nervousness too. She started by sitting backward on the railing, swung her legs over one by one, and as she slowly stood upright, there was a faint trembling — it traveled through her damp palm and into his arm.

She finally straightened up. Cen Jin’s chest was heaving; she looked up — the rooftop was still just above her head.

“Now what?”

Wei Lai lowered his head and neck: “The angle isn’t good for leverage here. Wrap your arms around my neck, and I’ll handle the rest.”

If the position hadn’t been so precarious — nowhere to go up, no way to go back — she probably would have given up on the whole rooftop idea entirely.

She released one hand first, steadied her breath, and looped it around his neck. Wei Lai brought his other hand around to brace against her back — that anchor gave her the security she needed. She gritted her teeth and wrapped her other arm around as well.

A drop of sweat fell from above onto the back of her neck and traced a line downward, burning as it went, mixing with hers as it slid beneath her clothes.

The back of Cen Jin’s ears went hot. Suddenly she felt awkward.

She looked back down and said: “What if we fall?”

Her body was rising — Wei Lai was clearly attempting to kneel, then rise.

“If we fall,” he said, “the newspaper headline will read: Saudi Arabia pays a fortune for a negotiation expert — two people climb onto a roof in the middle of the night to cool off and both plunge to their doom—”

Before the words were finished, he suddenly gave a muffled grunt and shot to his feet. His hands slid from her waist down to the sides of her legs, bracing beneath her with full force, and at the same moment he leaned back, retreating two steps.

Before Cen Jin had time to react, he had already set her down.

Beneath her feet: solid, hard concrete rooftop.

She had made it. And there was a breeze.

Cen Jin sat down on the palm-mat and took a long time to recover. When she finally looked up again, Wei Lai was standing at one edge of the rooftop. The corner of the moon drooped comically and seemed to snag on the top of his hair, as if it were trying to hook out a tuft.

His body suddenly tilted to one side, swaying as if he might topple.

Cen Jin cried out: “Hey!”

Wei Lai steadied himself, turned to look at her, then came over and sat beside her.

“Revisiting an old training drill,” he said. “Testing how far the body can lean before it corrects itself.”

“Didn’t you get discharged?”

“Discharged, yes — but not for lack of skill. That cohort — I wasn’t the best, but I was easily top three.”

“So the Beret special forces training program specifically discharged the high performers?”

Wei Lai thought about it: “I suppose my discipline was too poor.”

“There was one week of high-intensity survival training in the jungle — no food. You had to eat snails. The instructor set a daily limit: three per day, maximum. Some people couldn’t hold out and ate four, five.”

“Those people were punished. Specifically: stripped down to just their underwear, hands and feet bound to a wooden post, left tied up for the whole night. That alone would have been bad enough — but the jungle was full of white ants. The moment you sat still, they swarmed up your clothes — straight away, covering your entire body, and they’d burrow into your… groin.”

“I managed to work the ropes loose and ran. That counted as the most serious possible offense: not only were you immediately discharged, but if they caught you, you might even be shot — the Beret training program had an allowable percentage of fatalities. So I ran completely — and never dared go back.”

“Any regrets?”

Wei Lai was indifferent: “None. Those Malaysian soldiers were pushing themselves to the limit to defend their homeland — but what homeland was I defending? I had no home. And as for the country — it had probably stopped acknowledging me long ago.”

The mat wasn’t big enough for him to lie on, so he put his hands behind his head and lay down on the ground. Sleep was creeping in; when he looked at the moon, it had multiplied into several overlapping images.

In all of Khartoum, the two Chinese people who had climbed onto a rooftop to look at the moon — it was just the two of them. A foreign land, another country, a vast black vault of sky, and a surge of desolation that welled up like a tide — this moment, he would never forget for the rest of his life.

He slowly closed his eyes: “I’m just a broken ship drifting in water… and that’s that. I’m not like you — even though you’ve gone off the rails, I know you must have a backup plan.”

Cen Jin said nothing.

“You said between us, there’s no real conflict. I hope you stay safe — genuinely.”

“And there’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for a while.”

“If you write editorials again in the future — dial it back a bit. Those people are not what you’d call decent, and bringing them down on you would be easy. You’re alone. Be smarter about it.”

Sleep was pulling him under now. The sounds around him were growing muffled, and his body sank into the dense tide of sleep — a vast, pale grey, boundless and private: enormous, tightly clustered green stems spreading and spreading, and then, from within the layers of deep and light jade green, slowly unfurling petals of porcelain white — a spathe, slightly furled, like the heavenly robes draped from the crown of Guanyin Bodhisattva.

Back in Chinatown, to make ends meet, he had moved through various Chinese-run shops. Chinese people tend toward folk belief and geomancy, and the shops had always displayed a colorful assortment of deities in prominent spots: the God of Wealth, Guan Yu, the Laughing Buddha, Zhang Fei, Zhong Kui, and Guanyin Bodhisattva.

Wei Lai liked Guanyin Bodhisattva. He always felt that in her face, in the curve of her brow and eyes, there was boundless compassion.

He should remember to ask Ai Lin — how were those two white calla lilies doing?

In the drifting haze of near-sleep, he heard Cen Jin say, very quietly: “I won’t write anymore.”

It must have been a dream.