AUS Chapter 75: How It All Began

He lost him.

That was a line I was supposed to say.

I had always believed I was the one searching alone in the apocalypse. I was the one who always regretted ignoring his love back then, only to find it unattainable so many years later.

Shouldn’t that be how it was? When did he lose me?

No, I had never left.

Now, I looked directly into his eyes. In those familiar yet strange eyes, I couldn’t find a single trace of deceit. This was the look he had when he told the truth.

He was the one who lost me.

He lowered his head slightly and took one of my hands. It wasn’t to seek warmth, but merely to observe it, like admiring a work of art. Then he raised his eyes again, his gaze calm.

“You remember everything. You just can’t recall it for the moment.” He lifted the corner of his mouth slightly, though it didn’t look like a smile. 

“Just like the ‘me’ in the Normalcy Project. Do you remember?”

My temples throbbed for a second as memory yanked me back to the day I first entered the Normalcy Project.

I had kissed Liu Jiang, and by a strange twist of fate, was sent to the dean’s office. Then, for some reason, I went home with him and met his group of rowdy friends who were partying in his self-built house.

He and I went back to his room and lay on the bed like any other aimless teenagers, talking about everything and nothing.

He asked me when my so-called “sickness” would act up.

I said, the moment I thought of a certain person, it would trigger.

He asked, “I couldn’t be the one who’s making you think of that person, could I?”

He was smiling when he asked, but as he smiled, he started to cry.

Liu Jiang was easily moved to tears, but not to the point of being touched by a stranger he had just met. At that moment, a thought had flashed through my mind.

I asked myself, could it be that he knew everything, but just couldn’t remember?

If this simulation had been run countless times, then theoretically, he did know what would happen between us.

—And theoretically, so did I.

I knew what had happened. I just couldn’t remember it for the moment.

The Liu Jiang in front of me didn’t seem to be in a hurry for me to remember. His tone could even be described as gently guiding.

He said, “The day we separated, it was a clear day after the Mid-Autumn Festival. The temperature had dropped, and the sky was vast and clear. Do you remember?”

A glimmer of light flickered in my memory. I didn’t fight his hand. I let him lift my arm and bring it towards his cheek.

“Our relationship back then wasn’t as bad as you think.” He closed his eyes, feeling the warmth of my palm. 

“It’s just that I was too willful. I didn’t want to leave our hometown for somewhere else. Grandma’s death hit me hard. So you turned down the celebration dinner for the end of your department’s project and chose to come back to Liancheng on a Friday night.”

“You didn’t tell me. You were planning to come back quietly to give me a surprise—but I didn’t tell you either. That day, I snuck out of school and went to the capital. At six in the evening, we passed each other on two subway lines heading in opposite directions.”

The glimmer of light in that crack of memory began to intensify. A sound was clamoring from behind the crack, wanting to break through everything.

“But we didn’t miss each other,” Liu Jiang’s voice was gentle, as if telling a fairy tale. “At six-ten, the subway line I was on suddenly stopped. The train announcement said there had been an accident on the opposite track and emergency repairs were underway.”

As his words fell, I could almost hear the subway broadcast in my ears.

Calm, gentle, and emotionless.

Liu Jiang suddenly smiled.

He asked, “Yang Pingsheng, why did you never tell me that the emergency contact number you listed was mine?”

The light from the crack began to roar, and the rumbling sound of a train filled my ears.

I knew it was all in my imagination, but at this very moment, both the light and the sound made me feel as if I wasn’t in a shelter in the apocalypse, but had returned to a long time ago, to the autumn Liu Jiang had described.

My vision was filled with a brilliant light, and I felt dizzy. From the corner of the halo, Liu Jiang’s voice came again.

“The signal in the subway was terrible, and with the emergency repairs, everyone was scrambling to let their families know they were safe. I couldn’t get a call through no matter what. So I waited. Ten minutes later, I received a call. The person on the other end asked if I was Yang Pingsheng’s family.”

The light slowly faded. I squinted, gradually making out that I was standing in a subway car. The car was swaying as it moved forward normally. The passengers around me were either resting with their eyes closed or aimlessly scrolling through their phones.

In the subway car at six in the evening, everything was excessively ordinary.

Liu Jiang’s last sentence rang in my ears. He said, “That day, I lost you.”

I remembered.

I remembered what happened that day.

From that day on, he and I were like two trains heading in opposite directions, forever missing each other.

---

Liu Jiang was right. It was indeed a dry, cool, and clear day. Just after the Mid-Autumn Festival, not a cloud in the sky.

Liu Jiang’s grandmother had passed away a week earlier.

In truth, we had known for a while that her health was poor. After she suddenly fell three months prior, Liu Jiang hadn’t gone back to school. He took a leave of absence from his vocational college and stayed in Liancheng, not leaving the city.

A week before, Liu Jiang had called me. When I answered, he didn’t say a word, just sobbed. I didn’t speak either, nor did I hang up. I just held the phone like that until late at night.

Our relationship really wasn’t as one-sided as I remembered it, or perhaps, the one-sided phase had already passed.

My parents’ company had suddenly gone bankrupt two years ago, during the winter break.

Shareholders were jailed, the capital chain broke, and all the properties my family owned for rent were seized to pay off debts. In their forties and fifties, they had to re-enter the workforce. The atmosphere at home dropped to a freezing point overnight.

For the first time in the twenty-some years of my memory, I saw my mom cook. My dad helped out. In a short while, a meal of three dishes and a soup was on the table. They certainly didn’t look as good as when our housekeeper made them.

A few bites in, my mom suddenly started crying.

It wasn’t because the food was bad. On the contrary, her cooking skills were quite good.

My dad only knew to hand her tissues, unable to even utter a word of comfort.

The meal ended amidst my mother’s sobs. I stood up and announced to them that I would return to the capital next week to look for an internship that could earn more money.

On the coldest days in Beijing, I returned to the area outside South Zhongguancun Avenue.

The moment I stepped out of the subway station, a gust of north wind nearly blew me back onto the platform. The thought of going home crossed my mind right then, but when I came to my senses, I realized I had no way back.

Recruitment apps were just emerging back then and weren’t very reliable. All information had to be gathered through social channels, acquaintances, and connections.

I applied for a temporary stay at the university and holed myself up in the school’s computer lab, applying to every company I could find.

My prestigious university background got me a lot of responses, but likewise, I rejected many positions because of the salary.

Also popular that year were unpaid internships, and students from top universities were no exception. Many HR representatives were confused when I brought up salary right away. They would ask me, with such a good academic record and experience, isn’t it good to gain some experience while you’re young?

I could only smile.

Actually, I had other ways to make money, like tutoring or working at a bubble tea shop.

But my pride seemed to have drawn a circle around my life, preventing me from stooping to that level all at once.

Liu Jiang knew about all this.

During that time, my hostility suddenly vanished. I was still slow to reply to messages, but I would no longer be quick to criticize or judge others.

This “others” included Liu Jiang.

Liu Jiang noticed my mood was off almost that very night. He asked if I wanted to talk. I said I was tired and we’d talk later.

The next morning, when I returned from submitting resumes, I suddenly saw someone at the entrance of my dorm.

Liu Jiang was wrapped in a thick, heavy scarf, his precious bass slung over his shoulder. His hair looked like it had been tossed and turned on a hard-seat train all night.

Seeing me, he smiled sheepishly, the tip of his nose red from the cold.

He had found a small inn on a backstreet near the school. The price was low, it had WIFI, and the only drawback was that the hot water temperature was inconsistent. The showerhead would suddenly spray a burst of cold water, then return to its original temperature as if nothing had happened.

Before, it was always me who found the hotels, me who booked the rooms. This was the only time he had taken the lead, looking as if he knew the place well.

I later found out that whenever I refused to see him, this was the inn where he would stay. The owner knew him well, gave him a 20% discount, and would even invite him to be a singer at the barbecue restaurant his sister owned at night.

We did nothing in the inn that day.

He slept until the afternoon. After I came back from an interview, we had a meal together at the boxed-lunch shop downstairs, and then I went to the barbecue restaurant to listen to him sing.

When we got back late at night, he asked if I wanted to talk about what had happened.

Over a handful of skewers we got from the barbecue restaurant owner’s wife, we talked until three in the morning. As we talked, I suddenly understood that my life hadn’t hit rock bottom; it had just fallen to a very ordinary level.

A level where I could see eye to eye with Liu Jiang.

And Liu Jiang’s attitude all along, his choices all along, were what I should learn from.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t living his life with enough effort, but that I had been too lucky all this time. Because I was too lucky, I didn’t know what a normal life was supposed to look like.

Even ordinariness had become a misfortune in my eyes.

After that day, I felt my life begin to turn around. I received an interview notice from a company I had always wanted to work for.

The interview went very smoothly. The first thing I did was call Liu Jiang.

On the phone, after he listened to my description, he suddenly said to me, “This seems to be the first time you’ve called me about something happy.”

My smile froze. Liu Jiang, realizing it might not have sounded right, quickly added, “Call me often from now on!”

I thought my life would continue to get better like this, until that one thing happened.