Everyone hoped to be sitting in an office in a little while. That meant keeping their trousers dry: wet trousers would soak the computer chairs too. The cleaner at the bureau did not particularly want to get drenched either, though wet or dry made little difference. Almost no difference. For the moment, at least, she still had the freedom to be rained on.
K remembered the division chief saying that, back then, whenever the officials saw her come into the bureau dripping wet, they would feel a pang of sympathy and let her rest. They would pour her a cup of hot water and tell her there was not much to do just then. They would ask what year her son was in at school, whether her parents’ cancer had improved. Just a few questions.
Whichever official happened to be chatting with the cleaner would offer a few remarks about young people: “Look how clean it is around the printer. Saves you the worry. Only they don’t use their heads when they work. Day after day. Kids now, every last one of them.”
The cleaner asked why the official did not arrange a bureau job for his own son. He could not even be bothered to laugh. It was still an iron rice bowl—a secure job for life, she said. The official replied that his son had been spoiled since childhood—how could he endure this kind of hardship? When the official himself was in his thirties, he had drunk with business contacts until the early hours every night, leaving his child home alone. She said, ah. She said, right.
Now the cleaner’s son was home alone too. The official’s son was alone overseas.
High-rises had gone up in the surrounding counties as well. But none were buildings like the bureau: 1990s in style, neither tall nor short, a dozen or so storeys, without decoration.
Most conspicuous were the vast panes of dark green glass, the height of fashion then, like the great dark green sphere on every secondary-school observatory. No one wanted to clean them now. They were so high that someone had to be willing to go up there. Back then the officials believed their splendour would last forever. Now there truly was no money. Without money there could be no aesthetics, and the officials did not know what to do.
The green glass could not have been cleaned in ten years. In principle, every year the bureau was supposed to hire proper high-rise window cleaners, but now the work was contracted through labour agencies. There was no money. People’s minds were full of ugly thoughts, and no one cared about the filthy glass. In their spare time the officials could not even be bothered to talk about their children. They stared at their phones without lifting their heads. No one had the energy to look outside.
Back when she first started cleaning, an official would bring her a cup of hot water as soon as she came in. If she had not been caught in the rain, perhaps it would be boiled water left to cool.
Besides, cleaners were difficult to recruit now. Most came in from the county. They formed cliques, becoming a force inside the bureau that was difficult to deal with. When the bureau had money, cleaners had all been permanent staff. Now they were all hired through labour agencies.
The officials were afraid of them too, imagining them as a herd of wildebeest crossing a river. The river was always there; whether the crossing happened depended on the wildebeest’s mood, not the mood of the fish below. If a school of fish were asleep in the river, they probably would not want the wildebeest to come. But now there was nothing to do except sleep.
None of the cleaners intended to stay for long. They would even threaten Human Resources with resignation, demanding higher wages or more leave.
Finances were tight. How could anyone joke about that? New employees earned less than the city average. Look at their CVs: every one of them had a master’s from the University of Manchester, every one enduring the hours at a cramped little computer desk. They all sat on the same company-standard chairs: round backs, square seats, a thin layer of padding, paired with white desks.
The bureau once had everything.
That morning, K stepped out of the family compound and was soaked as soon as he came downstairs. He wore a blue suit. His mother had arranged for him to serve as the division chief’s secretary. K used to love the bureau. Everything in his childhood had revolved around it: the bureau’s housing estate, the bureau’s benefits. But the bureau was failing now, and he did not want to stake his future on it.
The first housing estates, built around the year 2000, were beautiful. Six Roman columns stood at the entrance. There were nine six-storey apartment blocks and yet five gardens, each crowded with marble statues: Venus, Young Pioneers. Back then nothing would ever stop. Everything was new, pouring in without end like rain. The place had been built by people who did not know how fortunate they were.
When K was a child, his mother had brought him to the bureau. The bureau looked like this then; the city did too. Personal computers were rare, but everyone in the bureau had one. The word bureau carried real weight. Every day the most important things happened inside it. Everyone ate in the work-unit canteen. The system of allocating housing had only just ended, and people were becoming addicted to business entertaining.
K had visited the bureau as a child; now the bureau was still the bureau. In those days he did not have to get wet on the way there. He rode in his mother’s car, which went straight to the car park in the rear courtyard. The bureau’s layout was complicated, but whenever his mother brought him she drove directly to the right place. The gatehouse saluted them.
The cleaner remembered the bureau entirely differently: as something repellent. She was going to get wet whether she wanted to or not; she had never done it for that cup of boiling water. Her child was alone back in the county. Otherwise she would rather have worked in some little restaurant.
When K was a child, he went to a wedding in the county town. He had never seen people eating outdoors, flies circling the dishes. The flies frightened him. The guests spoke dialects he could not understand. Dogs ran around, plenty of people smoked, and he kept retching.
In those days, the cleaners would rather put up with rats running around a restaurant than look at the cadres’ faces. Before entering the bureau building, they had to cross a bare, empty car park. They hated the glare off the glass and concrete. Now and then a cadre dropped a few cigarette butts on the ground. Every storey seemed impossibly high. The glass doors had the handles of a grand hotel; the dark red velvet carpet gathered dust; the ceilings of the bureau rose far above them. People from different departments never mixed, and the cleaners could not freely chat with people from their hometowns.
Now the cleaner was growing old, though her square face remained as rigid as ever. She had always moved this slowly. By now she was out of new tricks.
K could not remember how many storeys the building had. He had never paid attention; his mother pressed the button. The lift was elegant. Once through the bureau’s great glass doors, everything was large. K thought it a lifeless place. Everyone recognized him, everyone knew whose son he was, and still it felt strange.
Every floor was the same, and K could not remember which ones he had visited. Whenever the lift doors opened, an enormous space appeared before him, rows of fluorescent tubes extending to the limit of sight. He could not even be sure there were windows at the far end. Pale blue carpet covered the floor, looking like plastic under the harsh white light. Then came the cubicles and workstations.
The bureau gave people a sense of security. When K was a child, he did not yet know how to swear. Now, standing in the rain, he did not much want to go in. On a day of heavy rain he might as well stay home and read in comfort. He did not want to face this reality. These days even cadres did not want their children entering the bureau; only petty urbanites dreaming of a leap in social class wanted in. But K’s mother would rather see him become a secretary than read at home every day. Having weighed it up, K found he would rather spend his life as a cowardly secretary, never taking a step outside the bureau: going to work by day, staring speechless at the filthy green glass; writing a few lines of complaint on paper at night—even if the bureau remained forever stalled in the year 2000, when everything was an employee benefit to be proud of, when even the Yellow Pages were rare.
In the old days, the bureau offered employment for life. Perhaps K remembered it wrong, but no one was ever fired; they were merely moved to secondary posts. He could no longer remember exactly what the bureau looked like. He assumed everyone knew without his having to say. Not everyone had been inside one, yet anyone could easily imagine it and point fingers.
The bureau around the year 2000 looked much the same as it did now, except that now it had no money. The lack of money was not their fault, nor was it the bureau’s. But what could anyone do?
How had the bureau gone bad in only twenty years? It had been picked clean long ago. Only a few remains were barely holding it up.
Each time K masturbated, it was over in a few minutes. It disgusted him.
For the cleaner, things were actually better now. Wages kept rising, and going from permanent staff to agency work had not been so bad. The agency supervisors were all young and gossiped far less than the cadres in Human Resources. To her, the bureau had always been a colossus whose whole shape could never be seen. She did not care whether it was in decline. She knew only that her pay had risen from two thousand to three thousand five hundred. The bureau was something that had already happened; it did not need to be proclaimed.
K was meant to become the division chief’s secretary, but now he had no wish to go. In the past, the prescribed path for children like him had been to serve as leaders’ secretaries and drivers, then step straight into a section-chief post. Now they could only enter on agency contracts. Like the cleaners, they still had to sit an exam for a permanent position.
The area around the bureau used to be spotless white, apart from the green glass. Now supermarkets and milk-tea shops filled the street-front units, and a shopping centre had gone up five hundred metres away.
The bureau was still the tallest building nearby, yet any shopping centre was more attractive. K would rather wander aimlessly through the mall than enter the bureau, though the mall’s lights were a tiresome white and its tiled floors gave it a modern cheapness.
K was still stalling. He came out of the restaurant on the corner, beside which stood several claw machines. The horror was that the fish were here. Fish, here. Five claw machines sat there, each holding a thin layer of water and a few live fish.
The cleaner sometimes brought her child to the mall. K knew her. Sometimes she too would stare at the claw machines and feel uneasy. K and the cleaner’s son were both still young then. Her son made a fuss about catching a fish, but after several tries caught nothing. The claw opened halfway up and the fish thrashed around in terror, losing several scales where the metal scraped its body. K walked over and seized the boy by the nape of his neck.
The cleaner slapped her son. The little boy did not cry.
K did not want to serve the bureau, nor did he want to stop here, least of all before the claw machines or in the mall. Like a pitiful fish, he was asleep.
Looking at the claw machines, K always wanted to say something to the cleaner. Your child is your entire hope. You never had an education. You look at these fish and feel nothing, but your child is a little heartbroken. Look how timid he is.
In K’s memory, the bureau had held few people when he was a child. The whole place was his world; it seemed he could play on any computer he liked. But now he did not want to go. He was an adult and this time he was supposed to meet them. The things in the tank had stopped moving, and still they said this place was alive.
These fish had spent their whole lives drifting around the shopping centre beside the bureau. They had seen all kinds of people. The cleaner’s son made a fuss about catching one. He had never learned respect; he knew only how to fall silent before people stronger than himself. If he grew too frightened, he would pretend someone had punched him hard even when no one had touched him. Now that the bureau had no money, the cleaner wanted to tell K: the bureau never needed your permission or your judgment. It was simply running.
Later, the cleaner’s son became a cleaner at the mall. Whenever he passed the claw machines, he tapped on the glass. The fish did not move. He thought they were asleep and wanted to wake them.
Whenever K spoke to the cleaner and her son, he wanted to complain, then thought them too shallow to understand anything.
“Look at these fish,” he said. “They’ve slept themselves groggy.”
“Maybe they have something to say too, but fish can’t talk.”
“Look. People put fish in machines, then let children spend three or five yuan on a little pink or blue plastic tank and take them home.”
“If I were a fish, I wouldn’t want to live in a place like that either. Those plastic things are covered in burrs… Just look.”
K repeated these words over and over, saying everyone was pitiful, himself included, until even he no longer knew whom he pitied. They did not understand. Neither did the fish.
By the time K was saying all this, he was already sitting in the division chief’s office. He was still talking about how pitiful the cleaner was. The chief gave no answer. He huddled in an old chair without even a set of casters, like a sleeping fish.
The division chief smoked too much. Sticky phlegm blurred his words, and his mind along with them. K caught a smell: the smell of water left too long in a fish tank. He had never kept fish, but he knew it. Dozens of generations of dust-mite families lived in the bureau’s purple carpet, sharing its fortunes through thick and thin.
The division chief said he had heard K could write.
Outside, it was still raining. Water streamed down the window; the glass reflected the rain into green water, distorting the world beyond into a blur of colour. K felt very safe. The sickening sense of security came like a tide. He no longer had to face the mall’s dazzling white light or the fish in the claw machines.
The division chief beckoned, then stood. K went over and sat in his chair.
In here, everyone was wet.
Perhaps in a little while, K thought, he too could close his eyes like the chief and sleep comfortably in this musty fish tank.
It was already dark. The division chief had left work before nightfall. White lights flickered in the office. The filthy green glass made it hard to see outside. Perhaps the mall was still ablaze with light, but even if the glass were clean, no one would feel like looking towards the bureau. Sitting in the chair, K stubbed out a cigarette in the chief’s tea mug. A ring of dirty tea scum coated the inside.
The cleaner’s son leaned against the door, a fake GUCCI sweater pulled over his cleaning uniform. He pushed another cigarette into the tea mug.
“What did you say to him that time?” the cleaner’s son asked K.
K sank into the division chief’s chair, just as he had on the day they first met.
“The chief said I could write,” K recalled. “My mother told him I could write, but they’ve never read a novel.”
“I haven’t read a book since I finished middle school,” the cleaner’s son said.
At that moment, K began to recall every feeling he had ever written. He thought of all his feelings, humble as they were. They were nothing before the bureau. Even now, they were nothing.
“Did you have sex with the division chief?” the cleaner’s son asked.
K did not answer. People were like little fish in claw machines, barely finding a breath of oxygen in the shallow water, waiting for ignorant children to carry them away in plastic tanks worth three or five yuan. There was nothing he could do. K said nothing.
The cleaner’s son began moving faster with the brutal strength he seemed born with. K wanted to moan a few times. He held it back and thought instead of grand stories, the worlds he had created, worlds that belonged only to him.
“Isn’t that what secretaries are for—to get fucked? Am I right?” The cleaner’s son taunted K.
K’s world would never come true. The stories he wrote, the feelings he described, all the subtle emotions he cherished—they were only his wishful thinking. The bureau had already come to this. That day, the division chief too had lain limp in his chair.
“Did you have sex with the division chief?” the cleaner’s son asked again.
K could not bear it any longer. He did not move.
He remembered the wedding in the county town: flies circling colourful platters of cold mung-bean noodles, cigarette butts covering the ground, rough men with square faces smoking. The cleaner’s son had a square face too, like his mother.
K did not answer. The cleaner’s son clamped both hands around his throat with all his strength, powerful hands like the claw of a claw machine. K could not breathe, like a little fish lifted out of the water.