In the last days of December it ended.
One morning, no test. The next morning, no code to show. The morning after that, no mask.
That is how fast it went, after three years of the other thing. You would think something that large would finish with an event. It finished the way it had run — as a series of instructions that stopped coming.
I did not feel triumphant. What I remember is a kind of blankness, and then relief, and the relief had nothing to do with the virus, because where I was there was no virus to speak of. I had moved to a place with nobody in it. My risk was already as low as risk gets. What ended was the thing that had been holding everything closed, and what I felt was the hand opening.
Before that, the winter.
I want to put down what it was actually like, because people say “cold” and the word does not carry.
The flat has no heating. There is one air conditioner, which I ran for an hour in the evening and then switched off, because it costs what it costs. The indoor temperature at its lowest was six degrees. I know, because I put a thermometer in the living room and looked at it every morning the way you look at a clock.
At night I had one quilt. Under the quilt, a heated blanket off the mains, forty yuan. On top of the quilt, my clothes — the whole day’s clothes, laid out flat — to add weight and keep the feet covered. If you do not do that, the quilt drifts, and your feet find the cold at the bottom of the bed, and once your feet are cold you do not sleep.
In the morning the inside of the bedroom window was iced. Not frosted. Iced: a smooth white skin you could write in with a fingernail. It stayed like that for a month.
The building is double-glazed and faces south, so the flat keeps what sun it gets. That was the entire heating system. From eight until three, if there was sun, it worked.
I spent New Year’s Day here and I spent the Spring Festival here. Both of them, alone in a large flat.
I want to be careful about how I say this, because it would be easy to make it sound sad and it was not sad. There were two feelings in it and the second one was larger. The first was a kind of loneliness, and I am not going to pretend I did not notice it. The second was that nobody could ask anything of me, and nobody could ask me to be anywhere, and for ten days the entire country was busy with family and I was not.
On the twenty-ninth of December I noticed that two more windows in the block opposite had gone dark. I had watched a man there taping up his door and windows against the wind the day before, and then I understood: he was closing the flat up because he was leaving, going home for the holiday. Two days later he was gone. I never found out when the other one left.
They all went home. What stayed in the district was me, and a few young people like me, the ones who had come here to lie flat, whose families have mostly stopped asking.
On the night itself — the last night of the lunar year — there were firecrackers.
That surprised me. I had assumed the ghost town would be silent. But out in the dark, all evening, there were strings of them going off, and a few fireworks over the roofs. Somebody was still here. Several somebodies. It was the only night of that winter when I could hear that other people existed.
I called my parents that evening. I asked how they were. I said I was fine. They asked what I was doing for the holiday and I said, not much, resting.
What I did not say was that I had left my job three months earlier, or that I was not in Beijing, or that I was on a coast eight hundred kilometres away in a flat with ice on the inside of the window. I told them I was still in Beijing.
I do not have a good excuse. I told myself I would say it later, when it could not be hidden any more, and the later kept moving. By that evening I had been lying to them for three months without ever quite deciding to.
There was one good reason, which is also a bad one: if I had told them, the first thing to come back would have been worry, and the second would have been questions, and I did not have answers to any of them.
So I said nothing, and we hung up, and that was the holiday.
The best days of that winter were the snow days.
It snowed properly on the twenty-second of December. Not much — a few centimetres — but the first that stayed. I was up at seven and saw that the ground outside was white, and put my clothes on without washing my face and went out.
Nobody had walked on it. In the whole compound I put down the first footprints. The road had tyre marks and nothing else.
At the beach the sky had cleared. The sand in front of me was white; the sand away to the west, where the tide had gone out, was dark grey. Five or six people were out on the flats with buckets, digging, in that weather. I went down onto the sand and walked west along the edge of the water, and there was nobody in front of me and no footprints behind.
I had the sea on one side and the snow on the other. The low sun threw my shadow out in front of me, long, on the white.
Behind me was one line of footprints, going back the way I had come — the only mark I had made on anything in months.
It was the winter solstice, the shortest day, after which the light starts coming back. I went looking for dumplings, because that is the thing to eat, and the shop had stopped making them for the day. So I had rice.
You can see snow at the beach. People in Sanya will never see it.
Then I got restless.
I had been in that flat for three months and had not once left the coast — I had not even been to the city of Rushan. That was exactly the point of coming, and it had worked. But by the fifth day of the lunar year I had stopped being able to sit still.
Where would I go? I had never been to Tibet.
Not for any reason. I had simply never been, and there had never been time, and now time was the one thing I had.
I bought the ticket that night.
Two nights and a day on the train, changing at Taiyuan.
The seat I had bought was a hard seat, because I bought it late. I lasted about twenty minutes. Then I went to find the conductor and asked whether there was a sleeper, and there was, because it was not the season, and I paid the difference, climbed up onto the top bunk and lay there for the next thirty-six hours.
West of Zhongwei the country turns to loess — hills the colour of dry mud, none of them very high, with ridges so smooth and round they look like something out of a cartoon. I had not known land could look like that. Nobody tells you about that stretch. Everyone talks about Xining to Lhasa.
Qinghai Lake at half past four in the afternoon, the light in my face. Snow on the mountains from half past six: not much snow, powder on black rock, more a dusting than a cover, and enough to make me stand at the glass like a child.
At ten past ten at night we went over the Tanggula Pass, five thousand two hundred and thirty-one metres, the highest point on the line.
I was asleep. It is the source of a river and the border of two provinces and I slept through it, which I still find funny.
I woke at six, in the dark, and lay there waiting for the light. At eight the sky came up orange over the mountains and there was a wind farm on the ridge. At nine the snow peaks were close and clear on one side and the flat land was on the other and the train ran between them.
At half past twelve, Lhasa.
I had no altitude sickness at all. The light was the thing. It comes down hard and white, and in January you feel it on your skin.
I stayed in a hostel — five beds in a room, a hundred and one yuan a night. The other four were all younger than me and I was the only one asleep by ten.
The Potala is not something I am going to describe. I sat in the square in front of it, in the wind. A Tibetan woman came over to sell me a bracelet, and I said no, and she did not mind, and we talked instead.
She told me she had been shut inside her flat for three months and had earned nothing in that time and had rent to pay and a child to feed, and that she is not from here; she is from a town the other side of the mountains. I said I had lost my job too and had come out here to walk around and clear my head.
That was the whole conversation. Two people sitting on a wall saying the same sentence with different words.
I went out to Yamdrok Lake in a minibus with thirteen other tourists. Blue, deep, clear, with ice along the edges where the birds stood. Then Puma Yumco, next to it, where the ice was still thick enough to walk on, and the officer at the checkpoint told us to be careful because the warm weather had thinned it and somebody had gone through.
At five thousand metres I finally felt it: the head, the chest, the breath. I lasted ten minutes on the ice and went back to the van.
I flew out east, and I had taken a window seat on the right-hand side, which is the side the mountains are on. For an hour I looked down at the Himalayas — peak after peak of black rock with ice on top, close enough to touch and so far off that they did not move. Then they went back to being ordinary mountains, and then to plain, and that was the end of it.
Three years and three months since I had last been home.
You fly into Wuhan, and take a train up the province, and then a bus, and then walk, and then you are standing in a street you ought to know.
I did not know it. I had to ask my parents to come down and open the door for me.
The house is in my name. I have never slept a night in it.
There is a phrase for it — to come home is to be a guest. I had read it and thought I understood it. I stood in that doorway being polite to my own mother and father.
Everyone said the same thing, all of them, in the first five minutes: how have you got so black, you look like a lump of coal. I smiled, and did not tell them about three months of sun at the coast and three days of sun at four thousand metres, and that I liked it.
For four days I did as I was told. I got up at half past seven to eat breakfast, which I never do. There was meat at every meal and I ate none of it, and they watched me not eating it and put more on my plate. There is a squat toilet, which they will not change, and a basin for washing because a shower wastes water; we had that conversation twice.
And there were the questions. Not from my parents, mostly. They have stopped asking — they have worked out that asking gets them nowhere, and my sisters have children, so the line carries on and it does not have to be me.
But it is understood, in a place like that, what a man on his own is. No job, no wife, no child — you are not a private person with a private arrangement. You are a problem, and people are entitled to discuss it. It is not cruelty, exactly. It is more like weather.
I said nothing about quitting. I said nothing about the coast. One of my old classmates messaged me to meet up in Beijing and I said I was not there, and he asked where I was, and I said I had gone home to live off my parents for a while. He did not reply.
The ones I did see have two children each and a flat and a car, and they were kind, and did not press me. One of them wanted to talk about leaving the country. He had spent a year abroad and was working out how to take his wife and his parents with him. He said that with my temperament I ought to think about the north of Europe. I said maybe.
I did not say that I had already done the leaving, that I had gone eight hundred kilometres, and that it had been enough.
I saw what my father is now, after the stroke. I saw who has been carrying that — my sisters and their husbands, who have troubles of their own that I will not go into here. I was not there when it happened. I was on a coast, in the sun.
I am not going to make a scene about that either. I will simply say that I noticed, and that it is one of the reasons I do not sleep well.
The village my grandfather lived in has three old people left and no young ones, and the fields are going back to scrub. The town I grew up in I have not visited in years, and the last time I did, it had already stopped being familiar. The county town is where I went to school; the old house is rented out; the new house I have slept in once.
So there is no place to go back to. That is not a tragedy — it happens to a great many people. It is just what the last few decades did.
On the fifth of February I got back on the train.
I went north, and the sky came back. That is the plainest way to put it: four days of grey and low cloud and a cold that gets into the walls, and then across the river the sun was out and everything was dry and hard and lit.
I changed trains at Anqing. In Shandong that night there were fireworks going up all along the line, out in the villages, for the Lantern Festival — the last night of the holiday, the night you are supposed to be with your family. I watched them out of the window, going the other way.
I got in at ten and took a room by the bus station and ordered a takeaway, because a city has takeaway and I did not want to talk to anybody.
In the morning I took the coach. An hour and a bit, and I could feel the difference in the air before I was off the bus.
I walked up the stairs and opened the door. Everything was where I had left it. No water had come through the ceiling. The power was on. Nobody had broken in. There was food in the fridge and it had not spoiled.
I cooked rice and steamed two eggs in the rice cooker and ate standing up, and that was lunch.
It was the sixth of February. Four weeks after the snow, there were still white strips along the north-facing kerbs, where the sun had not reached.
I unpacked the bag I had packed ten days before and put it away in the cupboard.
Silver Beach is not home. But I went back.