1980s - Chapter 4

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Snow melted into slush by mid-February, the river loosening its grip on ice inch by inch until thin plates broke free and drifted downstream like shattered porcelain. Zhao Rui stood on the embankment with his hands in his coat pockets, watching the water carry winter away. He measured time in small, stubborn survivals now: the first steam from the noodle pot each dawn; the way laundry took one day fewer to dry; the new leaves that matched his thumbnail for size.

A year had done strange things to him. It had sanded down his edges without softening his caution. He slept with his back to the wall out of habit and checked the window latch twice before bed; he also learned how to laugh without wincing at the sound. People in the alley nodded to him. The dumpling seller called him “Little Zhao” even though he wasn’t little. The old woman across the lane pressed vegetables into his hands and muttered, “You’re too thin.” Somewhere along the way, the town had accepted his silence as a kind of temperament rather than a threat.

He kept a careful distance from joy. He let it sit near him like a cat he refused to startle. On some afternoons, when the sun was a pale coin behind cloud, he would take out the Seagull camera and line a shot in the alley: steam lifting from the soy-sauce vat, bicycle spokes blinking, a boy playing at flipping bottle caps. He’d raise the viewfinder to his eye, feel the world quiet under the frame, press the shutter, and tell himself he was collecting stillness, not loneliness.

Li Ming’s letters came irregularly: a thin, steady line threaded through the months. Zhao Rui handled each like live fire. He didn’t keep them under the floorboard anymore. He kept them in a tin tea box on the table— ordinary, visible, easy to explain away as a cousin’s note if needed. He read them at night, lamp trimmed low.

They moved me inland for a month. Turbine blades sing when they spin just right— did you know that? Like a kettle about to boil, but steadier. I think of you when the sound steadies.

The factory director asked why I don’t marry. I told him the machines don’t complain if I come home late. He laughed. My mother didn’t when I wrote the same thing to her. I’m a bad son, Zhao Rui. Or just the wrong kind.

I dreamt we were on that platform again and I missed the train on purpose. Woke up laughing. Then I woke up angry at myself for laughing. The north makes you honest by accident; the cold rubs lies raw.

Zhao Rui never wrote back. He didn’t know how to write into a world that might be opened by a stranger’s hands. But he kept every word. Some nights he read them until the paper’s edges felt warm.

Spring pushed carts back into the streets. The mechanical plant hired three new apprentices; the supply depot took on more inventory; the power went out less often. Zhao Rui noticed it all, because noticing was a survival skill he had never let dull.

He also noticed a pattern: every week or so, a man in a gray jacket walked past his alley twice, not once. He didn’t linger. He didn’t knock on doors. He simply walked, and his gaze skimmed surfaces without landing, the way a finger tests water temperature.

It could be nothing. It could be something. Zhao Rui cleaned his room top to bottom and moved certain items into storage— quietly, invisibly, the air around his hands shimmering for a breath when he opened the pocket space that did not belong to any era. He left only plain things behind: a basin, a blanket, the camera wrapped in cloth, two bowls.

He kept living.

On market days he traded quietly— batteries that were suddenly available when the hardware stall ran out, a spool of fishing line he swore he’d found at the back of the depot, iodine tablets pressed into the hand of a mother whose child’s fever wouldn’t break. “City cousins,” he said when asked where he got such things. He said it calmly, and calm wrapped truth like paper around a knife.

People called him lucky, resourceful, guarded. They started knocking on his door when small disasters struck. A cut too deep to be a scrape. A day when the tap spit out brown water. He kept his miracles small on purpose: a bandage, a boiled kettle, a plan.

Every good deed increased the number of eyes that knew his door. He counted that too.

He had just washed rice when the polite knock came.

Not the old neighbor’s impatient rap, not the dumpling seller’s friendly thump. Three knuckles, measured. Zhao Rui dried his hands on a cloth and opened the door halfway.

The man in the gray jacket smiled as if they’d met. “Comrade Zhao? I’m from the neighborhood committee. We’re updating residency cards before the festival.”

“Mine is current.”

The man nodded, unbothered, and flashed an official-looking booklet that could have been a prop in a play and still pass. “These are renewed yearly now. It won’t take long.”

Zhao Rui stepped aside. The man entered like someone who had learned the choreography for such rooms: pause by the threshold, eyes glide, hands still. He sat when invited. He declined tea. He accepted information without asking questions— where Zhao Rui worked, whether he had relatives, how long he planned to stay in town. He wrote neatly.

“People say you are useful in emergencies,” the man said conversationally, as if commenting on the weather. “It’s good to have useful men.”

“Everyone is useful,” Zhao Rui said. “In different ways.”

“I agree.” The man lifted his gaze just enough. “You are friends with Comrade Li Ming?”

Zhao Rui breathed once before answering. “We know each other.”

“Good worker,” the man said. “Transferred north for excellence. The plant director speaks highly of him.” He clicked his pen shut. “We like stable, excellent men.” He smiled again, brief, thin. “Happy early Festival, Comrade Zhao.”

When he left, the rice had absorbed too much water. Zhao Rui cooked it anyway and ate standing up, tasting nothing. The man’s smile stayed in the air like a faint chemical.

He did not panic. Panic made noise. He took the camera out and wound the film forward. He checked the window latch again.

That night, he slept with his shoes near the bed.

The first storm came in late May— thick-bellied clouds rolling across the hills, rain falling so hard the gutters gagged. The town had grown used to outages and leaks; it had not learned humility in front of water. By midnight the river swelled, licked the edge of the bamboo groves, then stepped over like a guest who decided to stay.

Zhao Rui woke to shouting. He opened his door to the alley turning itself into a thin channel. He lifted the Seagull to his neck, out of habit rather than reason, and waded.

By the time he reached the embankment, volunteers with rope had gathered. The neighborhood committee man— gray jacket now dark and clinging— handed out orders that were more cheerleading than instruction. A section of the east wall had softened. Another hour of rain would find a way through.

“Sandbags,” someone yelled. “We need the factory’s sacks!”

“The plant is at the low end,” another voice called. “They’re bailing their own floors.”

Zhao Rui looked downriver. In bad water you always looked downriver; that was where trouble traveled. Lights jittered in the distance. The mechanical plant’s gate was open, figures moving like ants.

He could stay and be one more set of hands on rope. Or he could go.

He went.

The plant smelled of oil and river and fear. Workers shoved machinery up on blocks; others swept water away from the electrical boards with brooms that were jokes against a flood. In the center bay, a turbine housing— a huge, ribbed belly of steel— sat bolted to the floor with its maintenance panel open, its innards shining in the flicker of emergency lamps.

“Don’t touch it!” someone shouted as an apprentice sloshed too near. “One spark and—”

“Where’s the engineer in charge?” Zhao Rui asked, grabbing a sack from a stack and heaving it toward the doorway to build a lip. “Who’s Li Ming’s superior?”

A foreman blinked at him. “Li Ming’s not here.”

“I know he’s not here,” Zhao Rui said, and kept moving. “Who’s in charge?”

“Director Wang. He’s at the back building. The drainage failed.”

Zhao Rui nodded, filed that away, and made three choices in rapid sequence.

First choice: he opened the invisible seam under his sleeve and palmed a set of thick rubber gloves rated for voltage that no one here had reason to meet. He let the foreman see only a flash of them. “Put these on your best electrician,” he said. “Keep that board alive long enough to power the pumps.” He didn’t wait to be thanked.

Second choice: he slipped three iodine bottles to the apprentice whose mouth hung open every time fear taught him a new shape of the world. “If the river water gets in cuts,” Zhao Rui said, “use this, then bandage. Don’t be stingy.”

Third choice: he went to the eastern wall.

The breach announced itself as a tremor underfoot. Then the clay gave like wet bread. Water keened through a seam and widened its own mouth.

“Rope!” someone yelled. “We’ll lose the whole wall!”

“Get the sand by twos!” another shouted.

Chaos wanted to help but didn’t know how. It grabbed at sleeves and slipped on mud. Zhao Rui stepped into it the way a surgeon steps into blood— with precision, not bravado.

“You,” he told the three men closest. “Link arms. You weight; I place.” He did not raise his voice; he made it narrow. Orders travel farther when they are tight. He hauled a sack, leapt into the sudden channel up to his knees, and planted the bag at the breach’s lip. The water punched his thigh cold. The ground shivered. The linked men steadied him. Another sack. Then another. He made a wedge, then a curve, then a low wall for the wall. The river battered and decided the path of least resistance was elsewhere. It turned, furious, and went.

When his legs began to shake from cold, a coat landed on his shoulders. He didn’t need to look to know whose hands had done it.

“Of course you’d be here,” Li Ming said behind him, voice low, already threaded with tired amusement. “I leave for a year and you still collect disasters.”

Zhao Rui turned.

There he was: hair plastered, coat soaked, jaw set in the stubborn line that stored gentleness like a secret. He looked older by a few winters and brighter in the eyes— a paradox Zhao Rui recognized as happiness suffered on purpose.

For a second, Zhao Rui simply let his eyes confirm reality. Face. Mouth. Hands. That slight, habitual squint when he focused. Then he nodded once, as if Li Ming’s presence were an expected arrival rather than a circling planet finally returning.

“You’re back,” he said.

“Train last night,” Li Ming answered, as if they had scheduled this flood for their reunion. “Came straight to the plant when I heard the river. Because I knew some fool would be standing in a hole trying to stop it with his bones.”

Zhao Rui’s mouth tipped despite himself. “It worked.”

Li Ming’s gaze ran over him swift and clinical. “You’re shaking. Move.”

They didn’t touch, not fully. But Li Ming’s hand hovered at the small of Zhao Rui’s back as they exited the worst of it, a nearness that stabilized more than any rope. Behind them, men kept stacking sand. The breach held. The plant did not drown.

The rain tapered to a sulk by dawn. Birds tested song like a match struck and snuffed. Volunteers slumped on their heels in the mud and laughed the relieved, hysterical laugh of people whose bodies had done a thing and were only just informing their brains.

Someone passed a thermos. The tea tasted like steel.

“Director Wang wants you,” a foreman panted to Li Ming. “They say the outflow valve— we need calculations.”

Li Ming nodded. He pushed the thermos into Zhao Rui’s hands. “My room. After. Third floor, west side. If you don’t come, I’ll come find you and it will be more obvious.”

Zhao Rui held his gaze two beats longer than could be called accidental. “After.”

Li Ming left with a long stride that said purpose and with a set of shoulders that said he was very aware of being watched. Zhao Rui watched too. Then he rolled his sleeves, reset his face, and returned to the river’s edge to be one more pair of hands among many.

The plant’s dormitory smelled of damp bedding and old books. Li Ming’s room had a single bed, a small desk, and a thermos that steamed properly. He had left the door ajar, an invitation that could be mistaken as carelessness by anyone who needed to mistake it.

Zhao Rui knocked anyway, then did the small, paranoid thing that had kept him alive: he checked the corridor both directions twice before stepping inside.

Li Ming closed the door gently until only a finger’s width of hallway remained. He stood there awhile, both hands on the wood, back to Zhao Rui, as if anchoring the building to quiet.

When he finally turned, the air between them changed temperature.

“I kept thinking,” Li Ming said without greeting, “that if I came back you’d be gone.”

“I thought of leaving,” Zhao Rui said. “I didn’t.”

Li Ming felt the words like a palm on the chest. He breathed once, out. “You never wrote.”

“I didn’t trust letters.”

“I know,” Li Ming said. “I sent them anyway to see if you were still where they could find you.” He gestured to the chair. “Sit before you fall.”

Zhao Rui sat. His knees argued about the night’s heroics. Li Ming poured tea and put it exactly where Zhao Rui’s hand would rest without looking. The intimacy of that small navigation was more dangerous than any embrace.

“How long can you stay?” Zhao Rui asked.

Li Ming’s mouth quirked. “I came home, Zhao Rui.”

Home. The word moved in the room like light. Zhao Rui watched it touch corners and retreat. He took the tea to keep from answering too quickly and burned his tongue on purpose.

“There will be talk,” he said when his voice decided to be steady. “There already is.”

“I know.” Li Ming leaned against the desk, arms loosely folded. “The committee man asked me last night if I plan to bring a wife with my new salary.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I have a friend who needs a space heater more than I need a wife.”

Zhao Rui’s laugh started and stopped in the same breath. “You think that helps.”

“I think,” Li Ming said, very even, “that I’m tired of pretending I live for machines so I can avoid living at all.”

Silence clicked like a camera shutter between them.

Zhao Rui set the tea down. His fingers were steady now. “What do you want, Li Ming.”

Not from me. What do you want. It mattered.

“I want,” Li Ming said, choosing each word like a rung on a ladder over a drop, “to be the person who knocks on your door and it isn’t a risk you have to calculate. I want to eat bad congee with you and complain about it. I want to bring you a broken radio and let you fix it while I pretend I’m the reason it works. I want it to be boring so we survive it.”

Zhao Rui felt something unclench and then panic that it had. “We could be found out.”

“We could,” Li Ming agreed. “So we’ll learn to be ordinary where we must, and honest where we can. We’re not children. We can hold both.”

“You make it sound like wiring.”

“It is. Load, ground, insulation.” Li Ming’s eyes warmed. “You’re the best insulator I know.”

“Insulators burn if they carry too much.”

“Then we don’t carry it alone.”

Zhao Rui looked at the thin line of light under the door. Beyond it, footsteps and voices moved like a low tide. He stood up, not because he was leaving, but because his body wanted to confirm he could still move freely in this room.

“I can’t give you a vow that looks like anyone else’s,” he said finally. “I can give you spare keys that hide as screws in a jar. I can give you medicine. I can give you a way out a minute sooner than other men might find. I can give you my presence. I can give you that I will not run unless I must, and if I must, I will leave a sign where only you will see it.”

Li Ming’s throat worked once. “Show me the sign.”

Zhao Rui went to the desk, took a scrap of paper, and drew a circle broken by a short line at the southeast: a fisherman’s moon, imperfect, running toward dawn. “If I ever chalk this on your door frame, it means not now but later. It means meet me by the railway mile-marker with the nicked seven.” He looked up. “You passed it the day you left. We watched a dog chasing the train and you said—”

“—that the dog had better sense than most men,” Li Ming finished, smiling with eyes that knew the exact day. He reached for the paper and did not touch Zhao Rui’s hand only because the door was thin. “Alright. And if I can’t reach you?”

“Then wait,” Zhao Rui said. “I am good at finding.”

Li Ming’s breath left him as a laugh that was not a laugh so much as relief re-shaped. “Come tonight,” he said, voice rough. “I have to finish a report, but come. We’ll fix the radio and make the room smell like burned dust.”

“Tonight.”

“Bring your camera,” Li Ming added. “I want a photograph that looks like a life.”

Zhao Rui paused. “It will be dangerous to keep it.”

“Then you can hide it where you hide the rest of your impossible things.”

Their eyes held a moment too long. The doorline of light brightened as someone in the corridor flicked a switch; footsteps approached and passed. They stepped apart in the practiced dance of men teaching their bodies to be plural in private and singular in public. Li Ming opened the door with his work face on. Zhao Rui left with his careful walk.

On the stairwell landing, he stopped and breathed in the smell of iron and soap. He pressed one finger to the wall where no one would see and dragged it in a small, quick arc southeast. Not the sign. Only a habit. Then he went down into the noise of the day.

The Dragon Boat Festival arrived with drums that made the river feel like a long animal rolling onto its back. Men raced the boats. Women shouted advice at men who couldn’t hear advice. Children ate sticky rice tied in leaves and ran until they fell down on purpose.

Zhao Rui watched from the bank, camera at his stomach, the strap worn soft. He took frames carefully— the dip of oars, a boy biting into dumpling and juice running down his wrist, an old man’s hands knotted on the drumstick like roots. He did not photograph Li Ming sitting on the slope three lengths away because some pictures are better as memory, where they can’t be confiscated.

After the races, the polite man in gray appeared again as if the crowd had delivered him on tide.

“Comrade Zhao.” His smile had not learned new tricks. “I see you find joy among the people.”

“I like the river.”

“As do we all. Festivities are good for unity.” He scanned the slope and did not settle on Li Ming. Skilled eyes. “You have not registered your camera with the committee.”

“It’s second-hand,” Zhao Rui said. “It barely works.”

“Then it won’t matter if we record it.” The man’s tone stayed pleasant. “Bring it by tomorrow.”

“I will.”

“And your friend Li Ming,” the man said, almost lightly. “We are pleased to have him returned. The plant’s reports glowed. Stability is best served by exemplary men setting examples.”

“I’ll tell him your congratulations.” Zhao Rui’s expression did not change. “He respects structure.”

“I’m sure he respects many things.” The man nodded as if they had agreed on something. “Happy Festival.”

When he left, Li Ming rose without hurry and came to stand shoulder to shoulder with Zhao Rui— close enough to belong to the same conversation, far enough to be casual. They watched a team haul a boat onto shore and fail to lift it straight.

“Registration,” Zhao Rui said. “He wants the camera.”

“Let him look at a camera,” Li Ming said. “Not necessarily the only camera.”

“We have one camera.”

“Do we?” Li Ming’s mouth twitched. “Check your cousin’s city box.”

Zhao Rui did that night. He took out the Seagull he loved and slid it into storage; he took out a second— older, knocked around, lens with a scratch that softened edges like memory— and polished it until its dents looked dignified.

He registered that one in the morning. The polite man inspected it and wrote its number down as if he collected edges. Zhao Rui signed the ledger. The man’s eyes held his a beat too long, then let him go.

For a month, nothing happened, which is a way of happening.

Summer shortened tempers and lengthened evenings. Li Ming and Zhao Rui practiced their choreography until it felt like habit, not caution. They learned where to stand in a teashop so their reflections could be seen but their faces could not be fully read. They perfected the art of mentioning each other in sentences that built walls around the mention:

“Comrade Li says the west pump stutters at low power; I adjusted the timing.”
“Comrade Zhao fixed Old Chen’s radio— you should’ve seen the smile.”

They built a cover story that was not untrue: elder brother, younger brother from the village; neighbor; comrade; friend. They let themselves be useful so that their usefulness made better gossip than their closeness.

At night, they built something else.

The first time Zhao Rui photographed Li Ming again, it was by accident. He had come to fix the radio’s stubborn humming and left the camera on the desk. Li Ming, bent over the schematic, looked up mid-explanation with the patience he saved for work and for Zhao Rui. Zhao Rui’s finger moved before his brain argued.

Click.

Li Ming blinked. “Warn a man.”

“I did,” Zhao Rui said. “Just not out loud.”

They developed the photo after midnight in the bathroom, the window painted over for darkness, the bath filled with a makeshift tray. The image rose slowly from blankness like a memory admitting it had always been there. Li Ming’s face, softer than the plant ever saw it. The radio’s insides open like a book. A cup at the edge, blurred into suggestion.

“It looks like we’re married,” Li Ming said, voice so low it counted as a sin.

Zhao Rui did not laugh. He took the wet photograph and held it up until the droplets ran together and fell like one bead of rain off the lower edge. “We’ll put it where only we can find it.”

“Where’s that?” Li Ming asked.

Zhao Rui touched the mirror’s corner. “Inside the silver.” He meant the thin backing behind the glass, easy to peel and reseal if you knew how to coax glue into patience. He had learned long ago to hide the smallest thing inside the most ordinary object.

Li Ming slid the photo across the mirror and watched himself and Zhao Rui become a thin flicker under his own face. He exhaled, chest relaxing in a way work never made it relax. “There,” he said softly. “Now I can shave and look at us.”

“You and your impossible requests,” Zhao Rui murmured.

They slept— not together because the door was thin, and also because sleep is a skill men relearn in parts. They slept in the same room, four feet apart, quiet enough to hear each other’s breath. The distance was a promise and a plan.

At the end of August, the polite man knocked again. No booklets this time.

“Comrade Zhao,” he said, stepping in without waiting for an invitation. “A quick question.”

Zhao Rui set his chopsticks down. The rice in his bowl steamed like the breath of a small animal.

“Why,” the man asked, friendly as a man borrowing salt, “do your neighbors rely on you for medicine when the clinic is two streets away?”

“Convenience,” Zhao Rui said.

“Convenience is a fine thing.” The man wandered— and did not touch. “Also, one wonders where you sourced antiseptic during shortages.”

“I had some.”

“City cousins,” the man said lightly.

Zhao Rui did not correct him.

The man stopped by the window and examined the latch with aesthetic appreciation, as if he might purchase one like it for his own home. “Comrade Zhao, forgive the bluntness. Stability is precious. Men who are not anchored by family or party sometimes float. Floating men capsize boats.”

Zhao Rui’s heartbeat did not change. “I work at the depot. I pay rent. I help.”

“You do.” The man turned, smile gone. “I will be frank now because I dislike writing reports. Keep your usefulness aligned with the committee’s sightlines. Register the things that ought to be registered. Do not give the impression of being a node through which things pass.” He lifted a hand and dropped it. “And be cautious about attachments that complicate your future. Do you understand me?”

Zhao Rui did. He also understood that the man’s “be cautious” carried the weight of “be invisible.” He nodded once.

The man’s eyes softened a fraction, as if he regretted having to play the part he wore. “I prefer to speak rather than act. Make sure I can continue preferring that.” He looked at the table. “Finish your rice. It’s bad cold.”

After he left, Zhao Rui ate, because you do the normal thing when warned you are abnormal. Then he packed a small bag: spare shirt, money, iodine, a single strip of photographs sealed in wax paper. He wrote nothing down.

He went to the plant on the pretext of delivering a ration slip. In Li Ming’s room, they spoke with their faces, not their mouths.

“I can leave first,” Li Ming said, already folding socks with unnecessary neatness, a tell-tale tell. “I can be the problem that removes itself.”

“You are not the problem,” Zhao Rui said. “We are not a problem. We are a fact. The problem is sight.”

“Then we dim their lamp.” Li Ming’s jaw set. “We did it for the flood.”

“This is not a flood.” Zhao Rui stepped nearer. “It’s a man with a pen and a ledger.”

“Pen runs out.” Li Ming’s mouth lifted without humor. “Ledger burns.”

“Li Ming.”

Li Ming blew out a breath. “Alright. No burning.” He rubbed his temple. “What do you propose.”

“Ordinary,” Zhao Rui said. “We get more ordinary. We get boring. We get so useful he trips over gratitude before he reaches suspicion.”

“You already do that.”

“Then we do it louder.” Zhao Rui’s eyes touched his and held. “And we are careful. More careful.”

Li Ming nodded slowly. “We can be careful. I’ve been careful my whole life. I’m just… tired.”

Zhao Rui reached out and, with the privacy of the door and the length of the corridor’s emptiness, placed his hand over Li Ming’s where it lay on the table. Their fingers didn’t lace; they lay parallel, like two rails. “We are allowed to live the long kind of tired,” he said. “Not the short kind.”

Li Ming looked at their hands like he could build a motor from the geometry. He turned his palm slightly until their fingers met and held. “Stay the night,” he said.

“I will.”

“And if they come tomorrow?”

“Then we fix a valve until their curiosity floods out their ears.”

Li Ming laughed into his wrist. “Engineer’s strategy.”

“It works on turbines and men.”

Autumn tempered the air. The polite man did not return. Instead, an inspection team came— two outsiders with clipboards who walked the plant like a slow storm. They frowned at safety rails, at inventory, at the dormitory’s cracked steps. They did not frown at Li Ming, whose report spread like a warm cloth over everything they touched.

Zhao Rui kept his head down and his hands busy at the depot. He lifted boxes in straight-backed lines and filled out forms with square characters that said “unremarkable citizen.” He wore a cotton jacket without patches and a hat that was neither new nor shabby. He spoke in three-sentence parcels and never chose a fourth.

On a Saturday, the town organized a group photograph in front of the cultural hall: workers, children, committee members, the director, the dumpling seller, all arranged by height and perceived usefulness. Zhao Rui did not intend to be in it. He preferred the stillness behind the lens. But the organizer saw his camera and conscripted him into both roles: “You have one; you must know how to use it. Set the timer. Run.”

He set the timer. He ran. He stood two rows back, left side, blank face.

The shutter clicked. Everyone cheered themselves.

He printed two copies at the hall’s small darkroom. One went to the committee. One went to the bulletin board, where it curled at the corner within an hour in the damp.

A week later, when Zhao Rui passed the bulletin board on his way to buy vinegar, he stopped. Something in the photograph had rearranged itself for him once time gave it permission to be seen.

On the far right, Li Ming stood in the second row. He wasn’t looking at the camera. He was looking left— not quite at Zhao Rui; that would be too neat— but at a point just offset enough that any man could claim he had been checking light. The line of his mouth, however, knew exactly what it was doing.

Zhao Rui stood there too long for a man who didn’t like vinegar that much. The dumpling seller’s son tugged his sleeve. “Uncle Zhao, you’re in a picture!”

“So I am,” Zhao Rui said, and bought vinegar he didn’t need.

That night, in the plant’s bathroom, they made a third copy from the negative Li Ming had persuaded the hall attendant to let him borrow for “engineering documentation.” They developed it slow. They slid it behind the mirror’s skin next to the radio photo.

“There,” Li Ming said, fixing the last corner with a pocketknife’s cleaned tip. “A public photograph that isn’t public.”

“We’re very modern,” Zhao Rui murmured. “Hiding inside pictures.”

“It’s safer than hiding outside them.”

They stood shoulder to shoulder in the cramped room where their breath fogged the mirror faintly, two men in a frame no one else would ever see.

By the time the first frost traced leaves in sugar, the town had moved on to better gossip. The new teacher boarded with the butcher’s family. A city troupe would perform revolutionary opera in January. The price of kerosene had climbed and then settled.

Li Ming and Zhao Rui’s choreography became fluency. They formed a small savings habit— coins in a cloth bag, mark scratched inside a drawer, quiet math. They made plans that were not named “plans”: a stove better suited to a room with thin walls; an extra set of bowls stored in a different cupboard; a patch of north-facing roof that might one day hold a panel once the world admitted it could.

They did not say “together” when they talked about later. They placed “we” around the edges of tasks until it held the shape without being drawn.

On the longest night of the year, the power went out early. The town yawned and went to bed. Li Ming carried a lamp and knocked once at Zhao Rui’s door. Zhao Rui opened before the second knock.

They cooked dumplings that stuck to each other and decided to take it as a blessing for a life that could not be legally blessed. They ate sitting on the floor, knees bumping, and counted the seconds between the lamp’s small flares when the oil hissed.

At midnight, bells did not ring; there were no bells. The river cracked, far away. Someone lit a string of firecrackers too early for New Year and apologized to his wife by laughing louder than the noise.

Li Ming leaned his shoulder into Zhao Rui’s. Not an embrace. A declaration that used a different grammar. “This is the part,” he said, “where we should say vows.”

Zhao Rui’s mouth tilted. “We don’t have any witnesses.”

“The mirror’s full of us,” Li Ming said. “It’ll do.”

Zhao Rui considered. Then he said, “I vow to be late to dinner three times a month and bring you a reason that’s honest two times and imaginative the third. I vow to argue with you about valves and pretend to lose when I am wrong. I vow to keep iodine and patience in stock. I vow to admit when I am afraid even if I only admit it by making tea too loudly.”

Li Ming listened with his whole face. When he spoke, it was with the surety of a man who tightened bolts for a living and understood what it meant to keep something from shaking loose. “I vow to oil the hinges so we don’t have to hear our own caution all the time. I vow to remember to buy rice when you forget because you were helping everyone else. I vow to stand between you and men with pens if I can, and beside you if I can’t. I vow to stay ordinary so we can be extraordinary in places no one thinks to look.”

They did not kiss after. They did not need the door to remember how thin it was. They sat with their shoulders touching until the lamp failed, and then they sat in the dark, where the feeling of safety did not need light to prove itself.

The polite man in gray was posted elsewhere in spring. The new committee woman wore a bright scarf and worried about the state of the basketball court more than about men’s friendships. A different kind of stability took root— not trust from the world, exactly, but a truce with it.

Zhao Rui still woke sometimes with dust in his lungs that wasn’t there and blood on his palms that had washed away a long time ago. He still kept his shoes near the bed. He still checked the latch twice.

He also learned the exact sound Li Ming’s keys made in the corridor when it was safe, and the different sound when it wasn’t. He learned that boredom can be a feast if you starved long enough. He learned how to stand next to someone in public and feel full.

On a clear day in late March, they walked by the river and did not talk. Li Ming skipped a flat stone and missed in a way that was not an accident. Zhao Rui took a picture of a cormorant and pretended he had been aiming at the sky.

“Are you happy,” Li Ming asked without looking at him.

Zhao Rui thought about the apocalypse, about the station at dawn, about a broken wall in a flood and a photograph hidden where shaving cream lived. He thought about rice, and burned dust smell, and a vow delivered to a mirror.

“I am… alive,” he said. Then he added, because he was allowed to add now, “And I am with you. Which makes living not just stubbornness.”

Li Ming’s mouth shaped a smile that was mostly in his eyes. “Good. I’d hate to be the only one.”

The cormorant dove and surfaced with a fish. The river took both where it wanted them to go.

That night, Zhao Rui cleaned the camera and wrote six words on the inside of the tea tin’s lid where the letters from the north slept.

After the end came our quiet.

He closed the tin. He set it on the shelf. He trimmed the lamp. He went to the door when the keys made the good sound.

He opened.

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