1980s - Chapter 5

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Noon carried a stillness that year: sunlight flattened the tin roofs, laundry hung limp, even dogs slept through it. Zhao Rui had just finished tightening the latch on the courtyard gate when he heard the first knock — three sharp raps, confident, official.

He knew that sound. It was the rhythm of bureaucracy: measured enough to seem polite, heavy enough to own your doorway.

He wiped his hands on a rag and opened the door half-way.
A young woman stood there, clipboard tucked under one arm, red armband bright against her white shirt. She was new; he’d never seen her on this street.

“Comrade Zhao Rui?” she asked briskly.
“Yes.”
“I’m from the district records office. A few documents require verification—simple procedure.”

She smiled, and the smile was practiced. Behind her, sunlight blazed off the bicycle she’d arrived on.

Zhao Rui stepped aside. “Please, come in.”

The woman moved quickly: unfolded forms, asked questions in the tone of someone ticking boxes faster than thought.

Name.
Occupation.
Place of birth.
Relatives.

She didn’t look at him much; her eyes lived on the page. Yet the speed of her pen left no time for lies, only omissions.

When she reached “Marital status,” the pen hovered. She looked up for the first time, expression neutral.
“Unmarried?”
“Yes.”
“Engaged?”
“No.”
“Planning marriage in the coming year?”
Zhao Rui’s jaw tensed. “Not that I know of.”

A pause. Then she scribbled something that wasn’t a checkmark.

Outside, a rooster crowed belatedly — a small, absurd sound that made his pulse spike.

She packed the forms. “The committee will contact you if clarification is needed.”

When she left, Zhao Rui stood in the doorway long after the bicycle’s bell had faded. Clarification was a word that had never meant good news.

That evening, Li Ming arrived later than usual. His collar was open, his face smudged with oil and fatigue. Zhao Rui was sitting at the small table, the untouched bowl of noodles congealing between them.

“Someone from the records office came,” Zhao Rui said.
Li Ming frowned. “To you too?”
“You as well?”
He nodded. “Routine, they said. But they asked who I share meals with.”

Zhao Rui’s eyes lifted. “And?”
“I said, the depot comrades sometimes, and the neighbor across the lane when I’m too tired to cook.”
“You shouldn’t have added that last part.”
Li Ming half-smiled. “If I’d said nothing, it would sound like I hide something. Better to give them something bland to chew.”

They sat in silence. Outside, the street was lively — someone tuning a radio, a child counting marbles. Inside, the air felt thick with old instincts: the kind that smell danger before it has a shape.

“Do you think it’s connected to him?” Zhao Rui asked finally.
“The man in gray?”
“Who else?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. A new face, new handwriting — same notebook.”

Li Ming reached across the table and tapped the rim of the bowl. “Eat. Paranoia needs fuel or it starts eating you.”
Zhao Rui obeyed, though each mouthful tasted of iron.

Two days later, a stranger walked through the factory gates wearing the badge of a provincial inspector. His shoes were too clean. His questions too friendly.

Zhao Rui saw him only once — from across the yard, the man shaking Li Ming’s hand, smiling wide. Later, Li Ming found him behind the warehouse.

“Inspection from above,” Li Ming murmured. “They’re not looking at bolts; they’re looking at names.”

Zhao Rui said nothing, but the muscles in his neck tightened.
“Whatever happens,” Li Ming added, “don’t volunteer explanations. Ordinary, remember?”

“Ordinary,” Zhao Rui echoed. He’d lived through end-times once. He knew the sound of a search disguised as courtesy.

It happened a week later — high noon again.

He returned from the depot to find his room unlatched. Not broken; unlatched. Inside, the bedding was neatly folded, the drawers closed, everything seemingly untouched — until you looked closer. His tin tea box had been moved a finger’s width. The camera’s strap hung on the wrong side. A sliver of mirror-backing at the corner had been lifted and pressed back unevenly.

Someone had been here.

Zhao Rui sat on the edge of the bed, pulse slow but heavy. The tin was still there. He opened it: the letters inside remained, but the inside of the lid—where six words had once been scratched—was wiped clean.

After the end came our quiet.

Gone.

For a long time, he stared at the faint scratches the cloth had left while scrubbing it off. Someone had cleaned his secret and left it blank.

That night, he didn’t light the lamp. He went to Li Ming’s room only when the plant’s curfew bell sounded and footsteps had died.

Li Ming opened at once.
“They searched?”
Zhao Rui nodded.
“What did they take?”
“Nothing. That’s worse.”

Li Ming swore under his breath — a rare crack in his calm. He dragged a chair, sat backward on it. “We can vanish before they decide what to do.”
“And run forever?”
“Better than being called for questioning.”
“They haven’t called us yet.”
“They will.”

Zhao Rui studied him, the fierce line between his brows, the exhaustion that even anger couldn’t mask. “If we leave now, everything ordinary we built dies. And they’ll chase what they can’t understand. Better to make them understand the wrong thing.”

Li Ming’s head tilted. “Meaning?”
“We give them a story that explains the noise without opening the door.”

Over the next days, they rehearsed coincidence.

Li Ming visited Zhao Rui openly during daylight, bringing spare screws, asking for help with a “personal project” — a battery-powered water pump prototype for rural fields. Zhao Rui displayed sketches, wires, coils. They worked in the courtyard where everyone could see, talked loudly about efficiency and current.

Curiosity replaced suspicion; gossip shifted to admiration.

When the inspector returned, Zhao Rui handed him a demonstration: the pump lifting a trickle of water from a bucket to a basin with a steady, almost musical hum.

“A small invention,” Zhao Rui said evenly. “We plan to register it for community irrigation.”
The inspector blinked, then nodded, almost impressed. “Innovation serves the people,” he said, jotting notes.

Behind him, Li Ming stood with crossed arms and the expression of a man mildly proud of a colleague.

By the time the inspector left, sweat traced the back of Zhao Rui’s neck. The pump’s secret battery—a slim, futuristic cell from his storage—still glowed faintly under the casing, unseen.

That evening, Li Ming burst out laughing for the first time in weeks. “You used apocalypse tech to fool socialism,” he said between breaths.
“I used survival,” Zhao Rui corrected.
“Same thing.”

The laughter broke something tight in both of them. They leaned against the wall until the laughter turned to silence, then to breathing, then to stillness that wasn’t fear.

The next letter from the north arrived in July, though it was dated months earlier. Old routes, old stamps. It wasn’t from Li Ming’s mother, but from a fellow engineer who wrote warmly of his “marriage plans” and invited him to visit.

Li Ming read it once and set it down.
“They’re still trying to marry me off.”
“They think you’re unhappy alone.”
“I’m not alone.”

He said it quietly, not as a declaration, but as a truth that didn’t require volume. Zhao Rui reached across the table and touched his wrist. No words followed; the window was open, and noon light spilled across their joined shadows.

In late August, the young woman with the bicycle returned.

“Follow-up,” she said, handing over a small slip. “You’re due for a civic interview tomorrow. Ten minutes, routine.”

Zhao Rui’s chest cooled. “Reason?”
“Population records are being standardized. Everyone’s file must include a family contact.”

After she left, he walked to the factory and found Li Ming tightening a bolt with controlled fury.

“They want a family contact,” Zhao Rui said.
Li Ming straightened slowly. “Then I’ll be it.”
“You’re not family.”
“I will be on paper.”

It was madness, but the kind of madness that saves rather than kills.

The office was a single room smelling of ink and dust. A clerk with glasses too large for his face read the form aloud.

“Family contact: Li Ming, fellow worker at the mechanical plant, native of Hubei Province. Relationship?”

Li Ming met Zhao Rui’s eyes for half a heartbeat, then said easily, “Cousin.”
“Maternal or paternal?”
Zhao Rui replied, “Maternal. My mother’s younger sister’s son.”

The clerk nodded, wrote, and moved on. Paperwork is faith’s easiest substitute.

Outside, they walked until the street bent out of sight from the office. Then Li Ming exhaled and let a laugh break loose. “Congratulations. We’re blood now.”
Zhao Rui smiled despite the tremor in his stomach. “Ancestry forged by bureaucracy.”
“Cheaper than a wedding.”
“And safer.”

For the first time, safety didn’t feel like a cage. It felt like the space they had carved between lies and life — a space big enough to stand together.

Weeks later, another knock came. Noon again. Zhao Rui opened it without fear this time.

It was a child—a messenger from the committee. “Comrade Zhao, they said to tell you: your registration is complete. No need for further visits.”

He thanked the boy, slipped him a sweet, and closed the door.

Then he leaned against it and laughed — quietly, incredulously, freely.

From the back room, Li Ming called, “What now?”
“They’re done looking.”
“Then we can start seeing.”

Zhao Rui walked to him, sunlight slicing through the thin curtains like new beginnings.

That afternoon, they took the camera to the courtyard. The same light that had once felt interrogative now felt warm. Li Ming adjusted the lens, squinting into brightness.

“Ready?” he asked.
Zhao Rui nodded.

Click.

In the captured frame, two men stood side by side beneath an ordinary sky, the lines of their shadows touching on the stone floor like hands clasped unseen. There was nothing incriminating in it—no gesture that could hang them, only a serenity that no rulebook could forbid.

They developed it that evening, the scent of chemicals sharp in the dim room. The image surfaced slowly, grain by grain, until noon light bloomed on paper and their faces emerged—tired, wary, alive.

Li Ming whispered, “This is how survival looks.”
Zhao Rui nodded. “And how freedom begins.”

They pinned the photo behind the mirror with the others, a gallery no eye but theirs would ever see.

Outside, a bicycle bell rang once, then faded into distance.
No more knocks came that day.
No more questions.

The sun slid down the wall, golden and slow, and the two of them stood in that narrow room, surrounded by quiet, surrounded by proof.

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