Chapter 10: The Thermal Barrel at 2 AM

I worked the night shift at the internet cafe until 2 a.m. During the last hour, I sat at the front desk, so sleepy that my head slumped down three times, each time hitting the keyboard with my forehead before bouncing back up. The owner, Mr. Sun, was snoring in the back room; the only two people left in the entire internet cafe were playing games all night, the clatter of their keyboards like rain.

I collected fifty yuan in wages and rode my bicycle back home. Jianshe Road was deserted in the early morning, with streetlights spaced thirty meters apart, casting dim yellowish circles. The night wind was hot, clinging to my face like a damp towel; sweat was dried by the wind as soon as it appeared, leaving a salty, sticky residue. My right hand had a cut on a finger from the courier station’s tape, and every vibration of the handlebars sent a sharp pain through me. My left shoulder, injured from carrying cement slabs at the construction site, had gone from painful to numb; even lifting my arm was difficult.

When I rode up to the Yimin residential area, I looked up at the fifth floor.

The windows were lit.

It’s 2 a.m., and the lights are still on.

I carried my bicycle up to the fifth floor, each step a test of my knees’ endurance. When I reached the fifth-floor door and reached for my keys, the door opened from the inside.

My mom was standing in the doorway. She was wearing a gray T-shirt as pajamas, with knee-length cotton shorts underneath. Her hair was loose and half-down, with stray strands sticking to her neck. She was holding a steaming bowl of something in a stainless steel thermos on the shoe cabinet, the lid askew to one side.

”Why are you so late?” Her tone wasn’t questioning, but declarative, carrying the low-key atmosphere that precedes a muttering monologue.

”This is the time for the night shift.” I leaned my bicycle against the corridor wall and squeezed through the doorway. As I passed her, we bumped into each other at the door frame. Her chest brushed against my arm.

The touch was brief, lasting less than a second. But the soft pressure traveled through the thin cotton fabric to the skin of my arm—warm, elastic, and so substantial that even a light touch revealed its softness. She seemed completely oblivious; as she stepped aside to let me in, those two mounds swayed naturally with her movement, their outlines beneath her gray T-shirt tracing a clear arc under the motion-activated lights of the hallway.

The tingling sensation lingered on the patch of skin on my arm where the friction had occurred. It was warm.

”Wash your hands.” She shoved a bowl into my hands. It was rice soaked in braised pork broth. She had used the leftover broth from lunch to make a bowl of rice. The pieces of pork were at the bottom, and oil was floating on the surface of the broth. “Mom heated up your rice. Eat quickly, and then go to sleep.”

”Why aren’t you asleep?” I sat down at the table and shoveled a mouthful of hot rice porridge into my mouth. The warmth filled my stomach, and I felt a sense of relief, so much so that I almost dropped my chopsticks.

”I can’t sleep.” She sat down opposite me, propping her arms on the table and resting her chin on her wrists as she watched me eat. This position caused the neckline of her T-shirt to drop slightly forward, revealing a large expanse of fair skin below her collarbone and the upper edge of the cleavage squeezed between her breasts from my angle. Her arms were pressed forward on the table, squeezing her breasts from both sides, making their already large size appear even more bulging, stretching the fabric until it was almost white, and revealing the cleavage that extended from the neckline down to an unseen depth.

I fixed my gaze on the pieces of meat in the bowl, trying to tell if it was pork belly or spare ribs. It was pork belly.

”What happened to your hand?” Her voice suddenly became a little higher.

I glanced down. The band-aid on my right index finger had curled up, revealing a still-bleeding cut underneath.

”It’s nothing, it was cut by duct tape.”

She grabbed my right hand and turned it over, pressing her fingertips against the skin next to the wound. Her fingers were cool, the touch exactly the same as when she applied mercurochrome to my skin twenty years ago. But her hands looked different. Fair, delicate fingers with slender knuckles, short nails, and no calluses on the base of her thumb. Before, her hands were rough as sandpaper, the result of over a decade on a factory assembly line, each knuckle swollen and deformed. Now, her hands looked as if they had never done a single day of heavy labor.

”This cut isn’t shallow, why didn’t you treat it properly?” She rummaged through the shoe cabinet drawer for iodine and gauze, and began to re-bandage me. Her movements were swift and efficient; a quick application of iodine, a bandage, a bandage, and it was done in thirty seconds. While bandaging, her hand held my finger firmly, the pressure just right, her fingertips pressing warmly against the base of my finger. “Look at your hands, covered in calluses and cuts. You’re only twenty-two and your hands are already this rough; what will you be like when you get old…”

”There are still decades to go, why worry?” I said, my throat tightening. Five years. Not decades.

She finished packing but didn’t let go, holding my hand and examining it from all angles. There were red marks on the back of my hand from handling boxes at the delivery station, gray stains from construction cement on the sides of my fingers, and black grime that couldn’t be washed out from under my fingernails. She gently rubbed her thumb against a red mark on the back of my hand without saying a word.

After a few seconds, she put my hand down and stood up to collect the bowls.

”Have you finished eating?”

The bowl was empty. I put the chopsticks on it and handed it to her: “Finished eating?”

She carried the bowl into the kitchen. The tap gushed water for a while, followed by the sound of dishes hitting the tiles. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes for a moment, my lower back cracking twice.

She came out of the kitchen and, as she passed by me, reached out and pressed her hand on the top of my head. The warmth of her palm was greater than that of her fingers, and she lingered on my hair for a second.

Go to sleep.

I hummed in agreement and moved to the folding sofa to lie down. The springs were still creaking. She turned off the living room light and glanced back at me before going into the bedroom. The light from the hallway shone from behind her, outlining her silhouette against the light. The silhouette under her T-shirt was even clearer in the backlight, from her shoulders to her chest to her waist to her hips, like a contour map drawn by the light.

Goodnight, Bao’er.

The bedroom door closed. The spring mattress creaked.

In the darkness, only the cicadas chirping outside the window and my breathing remained. The spot on my arm where I had been touched had cooled down, but I still remembered its temperature.

Day 7/1819.

She rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. The pillow smelled of laundry detergent. She had washed it.