Park toilets and the shabby little buildings beside them do not attract much attention: gatehouses, reception rooms, some administration office. By the time you see them, you are already standing at the door. When I woke this morning, I knew at once that something had changed. It had rained last night.
The rectangular space is usually divided into three. In the middle is a large mirror, mounted above the sinks so that the instant You enter, You can clearly see Your own ugliness. Perhaps You are drunk, Your gaze adrift. To the right of the mirror is graffiti by some restless young man. He gave himself a fright when he came in. The moment he entered—ah!—he suddenly met his own eyes. He raised a can of angry red spray paint and, in one continuous scrawl, covered up that gaze. It was the cleaner who suffered for it.
The cleaner is no longer young. You look drunk when You come through the door. A few hours earlier, the cleaner had already tried a damp rag, alcohol spray, and an alkaline cleaning agent, to little effect. Most people cannot make out what the graffitied word means. It begins with A. I do not know either. The glass is as smooth as it is every morning. The word lies across it, neither merged into the mirror nor merely floating on the surface. Everyone who sees this mirror wants to spray a little graffiti.
When the cleaner was young, toilets did not yet have authorized staff positions. She used to work at the subdistrict office. At fifty, she had finally scraped together some minor title, some responsibility attached to her name.
A few days ago the temperature was much like today’s. That was when I discovered You were drunk. As haggard as the cleaner, You swayed into this toilet, shaking Your head. At the edge of Your vision appeared now a square hut with a pointed roof, now a few small red characters. The plastic door curtain set the whole scene swaying, though no amount of wavering could keep out a single fly. Tiny insects brought the wind, which blew you into the toilet. Looking up, you frightened yourself with your own face.
It was some time after waking before I understood what was different today: the continuous, endlessly modulating rain had vanished. The puddles had dried. The rain’s clamor had become the electric motor of a lawn mower. The sound did not disturb your rest. It only made the distant traffic, the scrape of children’s rubber soles against gravel, and the things they shouted sound fuller, as if someone had added a bass line. I realized that summer always comes with the sound of motors and engines. It arrives suddenly, that continuous noise, the kind you can grow used to. By the time you notice cicadas beside your ears, or realize that someone has already started looking for you, summer has arrived.
Rain and noise and the people looking for you do not usually come with fade-ins or fade-outs. Once they are gone, they are gone; they may not return until next year. Why does someone always come looking for you at just this time? In summer, I do not even know whether the things that happen in summer are real, whether people exist. Outside, the sun is blazing, yet there is no sense of temperature, as if the sun were only an enormous LED bulb. Every sound is mixed into the hum of the motor, like a song that has already been mixed. And memory—how did it suddenly become summer?
The night before last, I fell asleep reading James Joyce. The window was open, and heavy rain suddenly began. I dreamt that four Irish leprechauns, their hats embroidered with shamrocks, carried me somewhere while rain fell outside. I drifted with the sound of rain through the nineteenth century. How enchanting that mysterious Dublin of a hundred years ago seemed in the dream. I like watching people of the modern era proudly display how progressive they are: the Irish struggle for national independence and the streetlamp beside them. They already had electricity in those days. On the road, public carriages gave off the continuous hum of rain striking the ground.
I thought the rain would last all night. The weather itself was not hot, so there was no need for rain to bring coolness. Hollows in the uneven ground would quickly fill with water and become puddles, mosquito larvae multiplying, passing cats stopping now and then for a lick.
Cats know it will rain often for a while. I am not some idle official away convalescing; I have little memory of summer in Qinhuangdao. I am always trying to depict someone. Sometimes the first-person pronoun: I. Sometimes the second person: you. When I want the writing to make less sense, I call that person: You. I keep searching for this concept as I write, but even my memory has never seen summer in Qinhuangdao.
Qinhuangdao is always blurred with fog. Rain does not fall straight, and air currents cannot drive it away. The wind itself has even become part of the fog, spreading in from the sea. The fog blows in from inside the wind. This rain had no temperature. It brought no wind. Mosquitoes bit.
The sound of rain persisted outside. Darkness and rainy nights no longer contained the terror of the unknown, but the rain brought no change either. It could not stop summer from arriving. A mere hundred years passed and utility poles linked one to the next, drawing the eye toward the traffic light’s countdown, numbers changing in real time on its screen. I was suddenly certain that a hundred years ago, at this same time, this rain was also falling in Dublin. I could hear the same rain they heard. What kind of person sees what kind of Qinhuangdao: some see millions of tonnes of ore and shipping containers; some see coastlines all made from the same mold. For me, Qinhuangdao has never had a summer, only fog by the sea and the southwesterly wind that lifts fine strands of sand in winter. But this rain brought summer. Summer: I am lonely in Qinhuangdao, because the city itself is not on my side. The days grow hotter. The gray-white, congealed dusk of winter disappears. More and more mosquitoes appear.
Rain began last night, and I can feel that now I am everywhere, not far from anyone. The night before the rain, You were drunk. Perhaps You are someone who does not drink. Perhaps I am unwilling to admit You were drunk. But I have to give You a reasonable motive so that Your reason can choose irrationality. You are the lowest grade of idealist. I am unwilling to admit that You—the kind of lowest-grade idealist one can become simply by abandoning reason—chose me. I have always been trying to avoid moving toward the non-low-grade.
Time, space, characters, place, voice, mode, and BPM: the more I think, the more tired I become. Must I always invent reasonable motives and connections between cause and consequence? Drunk people are always looking for toilets. You were drunk last night too. It is raining now. Summer is not refreshing. I am sitting in an uncomfortable modern commodity chair, reading Joyce, unable to find a comfortable way to be. The window is half open. The season itself is not hot. The rain goes on without pause; once it begins, it takes the form of a march and never stops, making me feel like cargo waiting to be moved.
This rain: I do not face it like some great peasant, longing and longing for it, hoping to survive the drought. The rain did not bring summer. Summer keeps on appearing.
The toilet is hard to find. Words cover every corner and wall of the park, notices and propaganda everywhere, but hardly a sign pointing the way. The toilet is close. There is one northwest of the centre. You were drunk and found it in two steps. In the large mirror, seeing Yourself with a line of writing across Your face made the world spin. These plastic boards were fixed around the lobby:
Regulations, Rules
Responsibility Placard
Information Disclosure Board (the cleaner’s photograph, purple under the light, and her signature)
Management System
Friendly Reminder
Service Standards
Code of Conduct
Behavioral Guidelines
You and I are equally dull symbols. Music clamors, mosquitoes bite. I can see the insects’ slender legs, like fragile works of contemporary art, alight on my body.
On this weightless night, some things slipped away along the backspace key. I suddenly understood that I could come to know this world again. I am a puddle. I am the air. I was once a bladder. Unable to find a toilet, I have already exploded, drawing the reader’s attention up to a sky the color of washed coal.