Chương 4: Laughter

The fourth wedding was the same as the third, which was the same as the second, which was the same as the first. Lin Che had stopped caring for the details that didn't change and instead tried to force changes. On his way to the office, he installed his security footage app and inputted the doorbell camera's linking code he memorised last life. The footage from before the wedding was unremarkable for the first two weeks he scrolled through.

Then, sixteen days before the wedding, a maintenance worker entered the building, wearing overalls and carrying equipment. His face was angled just enough away from the camera to not be able to identify him, but it was clear that it was not the janitor he met in a previous life. Twenty-three minutes later, he left the room. During the second day, he asked the building manager who the maintenance worker was, only for there to be no record of it.

He lasted longer in this loop because he was careful not to pry too deep into Shen Yue's life and inhuman strength. On day four, the plums went into the bowl. She entered the kitchen and said nothing and ate one standing at the counter. He watched from the hallway and was glad to see her enjoy the plums. He had stopped trying to figure out why he kept on buying them. He just did.

On day twelve, he followed her. He didn't follow her for long, only seeing what afternoon errands she ran on, and he made sure to keep a good distance away. Lin Che kept one street away and kept his eyes glued to his phone screen like everyone else. She went to three places: a pharmacy, a shop he didn't recognise (perhaps some former warehouse of sorts), and a building near the east end that looked like an office block. It had no signage that he could read.

Shen Yue spent at most twenty minutes in each building, carrying goods from the pharmacy and shop into the office building before leaving empty-handed. She looked relieved and more energetic once she emerged back into the city. Lin Che took the long way home and arrived some ten minutes after her. The shop he didn't recognise turned out, after an evening spent on his laptop, to have no online presence whatsoever.

That wasn't necessarily unusual, but there was no government record of a business at that address either. The office-like building was similarly absent from anything official. She has a supply chain I can't trace. The shops and buildings are off-grid. This is not a consulting business. He drew a small diagram of the route she'd taken, which looked like a child's drawing of a map. Below it: drugs???

He wasn't sure how to approach things any further, but that didn't matter, because he died on day twenty-one. He hadn't done anything wrong, as far as he could tell. He'd been very careful about the AC unit and the staircase and certainly kept quiet when he could. On day twenty-one, he simply didn't come home from work, because something was waiting for him between the office and the apartment that he hadn't seen coming. He wasn't sure what it was, but he saw it for approximately two seconds before it was over.

All he knew was that it wasn't a person. The tie was giving him trouble.

Note: whatever is between the office and apartment on day 21 is not human. Do not engage. Do not approach. Do not make eye contact. Dinner was the green curry, and the walk home was quiet. The apartment was exactly as it always was: back room closed, fruit bowl empty, her coat on the hook by the door, slightly crooked. He straightened it without thinking. Then he stood there and looked at what he'd done and put it back the way it was.

The first two weeks passed the way they had before: parallel lives with occasional intersections in the form of meals and brief conversations. On day four, the plums. On day nine, she was under the electric blanket when he got home, and dinner was leftovers. She went to the roof and he didn't follow. Lin Che tidied her belongings. On day sixteen, he came home to find her on the phone in the kitchen, speaking in a quiet tone that meant the conversation was not for him to overhear.

He gave her her privacy and went to his room to change out of his work clothes. Twenty minutes later, he left his room and she was at the kitchen table with a furrowed brow. He put the kettle on. He didn't ask if she wanted any tea, but he put on the kettle and got out a second cup and set it in front of her when it was ready. She looked at him and said nothing. He sat down across from her with his own cup.

They didn't talk — she drank her tea and looked at the table, and he drank his tea and fiddled with his phone. His weather app screentime spiked that day. Eventually, she managed a "thank you."

"It's just tea," he replied.

"Right," she said.

"Just tea." She finished her cup and went to the back room, whilst he sat at the table a while longer and thought about how best to guarantee his survival.

On day twenty, she laughed. He hadn't been trying to make her laugh. Out of the blue, she asked him about work, and he told her about one of the problems he was facing. There was miscommunication between two departments that had resulted in a shipment of tinned tuna going to an aquarium and living tuna going to a sewage treatment centre for reasons that were still being investigated. Somehow, she'd laughed. Briefly at least.

He kept talking and didn't look at her directly as he picked up his bowl and carried it to the sink. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"That's really unfortunate for the fish," she said.

"It really was." He washed his bowl and she finished her tea and they went back to their respective rooms. He sat on his bed in the dark and looked at the ceiling. Day twenty. One day before the thing on the street. I need to not be dead tomorrow. I also need to figure out what she finds funny, because I'd like to hear that again. He lay there for a while, holding both thoughts with equal seriousness. He slept better than he had in several loops, which he couldn't really explain.

On day twenty-one, Lin Che asked his wife if she wanted to go to the aquarium. She looked up from her documents.

"There's one about twenty minutes away. I thought, given the tuna situation—" He gestured vaguely.

"Seemed appropriate." She looked at him for a moment trying to decide whether he was worth the energy of a response.

"It's a Wednesday," she said.

"They're open Wednesdays." He kept his expression neutral, which took some effort, because Lin Che was not good at hiding things. What he was actually doing was engineering his own survival from whatever it was that had attacked him last time.

"Fine," she said, and went back to her documents. Five hours later, the two of them put on their jackets and left the building. The route from the apartment to the aquarium took them just past Lin Che's office. Shen Yue walked beside him with her hands in her coat pockets, and Lin Che didn't think to question why she felt so cold all the time.

"Have you been before?" he asked.

"To the aquarium?"

"Yes."

"When I was small," she said.

"I don't remember much of it."

"What do you remember?" She thought about it.

"A jellyfish tank. A very large one. I think I stood in front of it for a long long time."

"How long?"

"Long enough that my mother had to come and drag me away." He looked at her. She was looking ahead at the street, but felt slightly more unguarded than usual. As though, just for a second, she went back to her childlike innocence.

"We should find the jellyfish," he said.

"I'm sure it's not the same one."

"We'll pay our respects to its descendants."

"Its descendants just so happen to live in a city miles away from home," she smiled.

The aquarium was quiet on a Wednesday evening, which he hadn't planned for, though it wasn't unexpected. They moved through the blue-lit corridors past tanks of things that waded slowly through water and creatures which leapt suddenly within their glass cages. Some of them didn't appear to move at all until you looked at them long enough. Shen Yue stopped in front of a tank of moon jellyfish and stood there. He stood beside her. The jellyfish moved the way jellyfish moved.

Evolutionarily, they appeared to not have needed to develop urgency over several hundred million years. The light through the tank was blue-white and pink and it moved across her face in slow pulses. He didn't say anything; just watched the view. After a while, she spoke.

"I used to think they were ghosts."

"When you were small?"

"No, when I was big." The joke didn't land, but an elbow did.

"Ow!"

"I know better now, obviously."

"Knowing better ruins a lot of things," he said. She glanced at him.

"You think jellyfish should be ghosts?"

"I think things are more interesting when you don't have a full explanation for them."

"That's an unusual thing for a data analyst to say," she said.

"Well, I'm also very bad at sudoku." They both laughed together. It wasn't the kind of brief ones from yesterday, but rather, a real and surprising laugh. It lasted about two seconds, and then she pressed her lips together and looked back at the jellyfish once again in silence. It was too late, however, the two seconds had already happened and he'd already committed them to memory. He looked back at the tank.

"There they are," he said.

"The descendants."

"They don't know about the tuna," she said. They stayed in front of the tank for a while longer.

The post-dinner rush Wednesday evening streets were quiet and still. Shen Yue and Lin Che walked side by side, hands in pockets, talking about nothing in particular. Simultaneously, Lin Che was thinking about how day twenty-one was going to pass without incident, and that he was going to go home and write jellyfish, two seconds in that small section of his notebook that he kept. Shen Yue stopped walking. Lin Che stopped a step after her.

She was looking to the left of the street, and her posture changed, knees now slightly bent, as though she were ready to spring up.

"Stay behind me," she said, quietly.

"What—""Please." He listened to his dear wife. What came out of the side street was difficult to look at directly. It lay somewhere between man, zombie, and puppet, and staggered towards the couple with great speed. It was still too far away to hear, and he was grateful that he wouldn't have to hear the sounds it made. What happened next was fast. Shen Yue moved first, exhaling the way she did on the rooftop.

This time, the change was immediate and visible: the air between her and the thing compressed, like a translucent spear of wind. It hit the creature but it didn't go down. He pressed himself against a wall and watched his wife fight something that was not a person, on a pavement outside of a closed dry cleaner, in the city where he had lived for nearly thirty years, without knowing any of this was possible. She was better than it.

It managed to deal light blows to her, but, thankfully, nothing that would leave a mark. She slammed her knee against its jaw and finished it, the creature dissolving into shadows. She stood up and turned around.

"Are you hurt?" she asked.

"No," he said.

"Are you?" She looked down at her hands.

"No." They looked at each other on the empty pavement for a moment.

"Right," he said.

"Right," she said. They went home.

They talked in the kitchen. Shen Yue stood at the counter, didn't make tea, and didn't sit down. She just talked. He sat at the table and listened, which he was good at. She debriefed him about her life — about the world hidden within his. She told him there were people — sects and practitioners who cultivated something called Qi: a foundational kind of energy that ran throughout the entire world. Her family was one of these, and she was one of these practitioners. Her back room? That was a practice space.

And the rooftop was where she went to work in the open air because some things required direct moonlight. She told him that the thing tonight was manmade and sent for her, and he did not ask any further to give her space.

"I should have told you sooner. You had no way to protect yourself from something you didn't know existed."

"I have questions," he said.

"A lot of questions." He thought about the notebook in his jacket pocket with nearly a hundred days of observations that she had never seen because they had never happened.

"But not tonight," he said.

"Tonight I think we've both had enough." She looked at him with a grateful expression.

"Thank you. For tonight — the aquarium."

"The jellyfish were good."

"They were," she said. She went to the back room whilst he remained seated at the kitchen table. He sat there a while longer in the dimly lit kitchen in the quiet before turning on the kettle and bringing out two mugs.