The heating in the apartment worked in surges. It came on with a shudder through the pipes around five in the morning, filling the radiators with a sound like someone swallowing very slowly, and by seven the rooms were so dry and warm that the windows ran with condensation and the air tasted faintly of rust. Then it would cut out again around noon, and the cold crept back in stages — first the bathroom tiles, then the kitchen floor, then the space around the windows where the seals had gone, and finally the center of Alice's room, which she thought of as the last warm place, the way you'd think of an island.
She'd been in Xi'an four months now. Long enough to stop counting.
Her father's appointment at Northwest University was for a year, possibly two, depending on the grant renewal, depending on the collaboration, depending on whatever other conditionals adults used to avoid saying the word permanent. He studied Tang-dynasty legal codes. He was happy here, or performing happiness with the same diligence he brought to his translations — it was hard to tell, and Alice had stopped trying to tell, which was either maturity or exhaustion, and those too had become difficult to separate.
The apartment was in a compound south of the wall, near Xiaozhai, on the eighth floor of a building that smelled like cooking oil in the stairwell and like nothing at all inside the apartment itself. Her father had bought an air purifier the second week. It hummed in the living room with a blue light that made the space feel like the inside of a medical instrument. Outside, in winter, Xi'an's air thickened into something between haze and geology: not quite fog, not quite smog, but a particulate suspension, a mineral veil, dust from the Loess Plateau mixing with exhaust and construction debris and the exhalations of fourteen million people until the sunlight came through the color of a bruise healing, yellow-grey, tender and wrong.
Alice noticed the light before she noticed most things. It was one of the ways she was strange, though she did not think of it as strangeness — only as what happened when she opened her eyes. In Xi'an the light had a body. It had weight. It pressed against the windows in the morning and lay across the floor in slabs, and in the afternoon it thinned and withdrew and left the rooms looking like photographs of rooms, slightly flattened, slightly past. She'd tried to explain this once, to her father, and he'd looked at her with the expression he reserved for her mother's side of the family — interested, cautious, as if she might be about to say something that would require professional attention.
She did not try to explain it again.
---
She met Wei Lan on the metro.
This was in early January. The Line 2 train heading south from the Bell Tower station at ten at night, half-empty, the fluorescent lights giving everyone the same greenish pallor, like specimens in a jar. Alice was standing near the doors because she liked to stand near the doors. She liked the cold draft that came in when they opened, the brief blast of platform air that smelled different at every station — fried dough at Beidajie, concrete at the Sports Center, something fungal and sweet at Xiaozhai that she never identified.
Wei Lan was sitting in the priority seat, which was technically for the elderly and pregnant and disabled, reading a book with a red cover that she held very close to her face. She was maybe nineteen or twenty. She had the kind of thinness that wasn't fashionable or sick but simply structural, as if she'd been made with less material than other people. Her hair was cut short and uneven, possibly by herself. She was wearing a coat that was too big for her, army green, and her hands coming out of the sleeves looked like a child's hands, except that they weren't — the knuckles were too prominent, the tendons too visible. Alice noticed hands the way other people noticed faces. She couldn't help it. Hands told you what a face was trying not to say.
The train stopped at Xiaozhai and Alice moved toward the door and Wei Lan looked up from her book and their eyes met and Alice felt — later she would try to describe this to herself and fail — something like recognition, except she'd never seen this person before in her life. Not recognition of identity. Recognition of texture. As if they were made of the same wrong material.
Wei Lan said, in English that was accurate and completely without fluency: "You are also going nowhere."
It wasn't a question. Alice almost laughed. She didn't.
"I live here," she said. "This is my stop."
"Then you are going nowhere very specifically," Wei Lan said, and turned back to her book.
Alice stepped off the train. The doors closed. Through the glass Wei Lan didn't look up again. Alice stood on the platform and breathed the sweet fungal air and thought: that's not how people talk to strangers, and then thought: that's not how I talk to anyone.
She went home and lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling and didn't sleep until three.
---
They met again four days later in the underground mall beneath Xiaozhai, which was one of those Chinese commercial spaces that seemed to exist in a dimension adjacent to reality — five floors below the street, lit entirely by fluorescent panels, full of tiny shops selling phone cases and hair clips and milk tea and counterfeit sneakers, staffed by bored girls Alice's age scrolling on their phones. Alice went there when she couldn't stand the apartment anymore, when the air purifier's hum began to sound like accusation, when her Mandarin homework sat on the desk looking at her. She walked the corridors. She bought a milk tea with tapioca pearls that she didn't particularly want. She looked at things.
Wei Lan was in a shop that sold stationery — notebooks and pens and stickers and washi tape, all in soft pastels, the kind of place that seemed designed for a version of girlhood Alice had never experienced. She was holding a notebook with a cartoon rabbit on the cover and staring at it with an expression of absolute seriousness, as if it were a contract she was deciding whether to sign.
"You're going to buy it," Alice said, because she'd come up behind her without deciding to, and saying something seemed less frightening than standing there silently.
Wei Lan turned. She showed no surprise. "I'm going to steal it," she said.
"Don't," Alice said.
"Why."
"Because the girl at the counter is already watching you."
Wei Lan looked at the counter. The girl at the counter was, in fact, watching — not with suspicion exactly, but with the alert stillness of someone who has seen this before. Wei Lan put the notebook back on the shelf with great care, adjusting its position so it was perfectly aligned with the others.
"My name is Wei Lan," she said. "I don't steal things. I was seeing if you would tell me not to."
"Why would that matter?"
"Because most foreigners in Xi'an pretend not to see what Chinese people do. They think it's cultural sensitivity. It's actually cowardice."
Alice felt something shift in her chest — not offense, not agreement, but the sensation of being seen from an angle she hadn't prepared for. She said: "My name is Alice."
"I know," Wei Lan said. "You look like an Alice."
---
Over the next two weeks they fell into something that was not friendship. Friendship implies warmth, or at least a direction toward warmth. What Alice and Wei Lan had was more like a shared frequency, a bandwidth on which they could both transmit and receive. They met in the underground mall, or in the Muslim Quarter at night where the smoke from lamb skewers mixed with the cold air until the whole street seemed to be breathing, where old men played cards under bare bulbs outside shops selling dried dates and where the cobblestones were slick with grease, or in a chain convenience store near Alice's compound where they sat on plastic stools and drank hot soy milk from the microwave and Wei Lan talked and Alice listened and sometimes it was the other way around.
Wei Lan was from Tianshui, a smaller city in Gansu province, west and poorer. She'd come to Xi'an for university — she was a second-year at Xi'an International Studies University, studying translation, which she described as "learning to betray two languages at once." She lived in a dormitory with five other girls and she hated it the way you hate something you can't afford to leave: comprehensively, silently, with your whole body. She never said this directly. Alice understood it the way she understood the light — as a quality of the air around Wei Lan, a tension in the space she occupied.
What they talked about: translation. Tiredness. The taste of Xi'an's water, which was hard and left a mineral film on everything. Whether consciousness was a hallucination. Whether the Tang dynasty city wall, which still enclosed the old center of Xi'an in a massive rectangle of rammed earth and brick, was a comfort or a cage. Whether Alice's face frightened people.
This last topic came up once, at eleven at night, in the convenience store. The fluorescent lights were buzzing. A delivery driver was asleep at the next table with his head on his arms. Wei Lan looked at Alice for a long time — not rudely, but with the focused patience of someone reading a difficult text — and said: "Your face is a problem."
Alice's hand went to her cheek. She stopped it. "What do you mean."
"I mean that people look at you and they see something they can't place. Your eyes are too — I don't know the English. Too occupied. As if something is living behind them that isn't you. And underneath" — she gestured vaguely at the skin beneath her own eyes — "you look like you've been awake for a very long time. Not days. Years. People see this and they feel" — she paused, searching — "bu ānxīn. Uneasy."
"I sleep fine," Alice said. It was a lie. Wei Lan knew it was a lie. Neither of them said so.
"I didn't say you don't sleep," Wei Lan said. "I said you look like you've been awake."
The delivery driver shifted in his sleep. The fluorescent light flickered once. Alice drank her soy milk, which had gone lukewarm, and thought about what it meant to look like something you weren't, or to look like something you were but didn't want to be, and whether there was a difference. The thought had no conclusion. She let it sit.
---
February came. The dust got worse. Alice's father went to a conference in Beijing for a week and left her alone in the apartment with money for food and the air purifier and a note on the kitchen table that said Call if you need anything, which was the most honest thing he'd ever written, because it contained, in its seven words, the entire architecture of their relationship: the offer of help, the assumption she wouldn't ask for it, the relief — his, hers, mutual — that the phone would not ring.
She spent the first night alone watching the city from the eighth-floor window. The apartment made different sounds without her father in it. The refrigerator compressor cycling. A tap dripping in the bathroom that she'd never heard before, or that he'd always masked with his presence — his cough, the scrape of his chair, the particular way he set down a cup. Xi'an at night was a different proposition than Xi'an by day. By day it was dust and construction noise and traffic and the weight of history compressed into a second-tier city's restless development. By night it became a field of lights — apartment compounds and office towers and the illuminated outline of the city wall and, beyond it, the new districts spreading outward, all of it softened by the haze into something that looked almost gentle, almost beautiful, almost like a city you might love if you didn't live in it.
She texted Wei Lan: My father is gone for a week.
Wei Lan replied: Is that a statement or an invitation.
Alice stared at her phone for two minutes. She typed: I don't know. She deleted it. She typed: Come over if you want. She deleted it. She typed: Statement. She sent it.
Wei Lan came over anyway, the next evening, carrying a plastic bag with two containers of roujiamo from the shop near the south gate and a bottle of cheap rice wine that she placed on the kitchen table with the same precise care she'd used to replace the notebook on the shelf. They ate the sandwiches sitting on the floor of Alice's room because Alice didn't like the living room, with its air purifier and its blue medical light and its sense of being a space designed for a family that functioned.
"Your room is very empty," Wei Lan said.
It was true. Alice had not decorated. The walls were white. There was a bed, a desk, a chair, a suitcase she had not fully unpacked. On the desk: her laptop, her textbooks, a glass of water. Nothing that said someone lives here. Nothing that said someone intends to stay.
"I haven't decided what to put in it," Alice said.
"You've been here four months."
"I haven't decided."
She pulled at a thread on the cuff of her sleeve. It came loose in a long curl and she wound it around her finger without thinking, tight enough to whiten the skin.
Wei Lan drank from the bottle of rice wine and passed it to Alice. The wine was sweet and slightly rough, like something that had been made in a hurry. Alice drank. The warmth spread through her chest. Outside, the wind was blowing — she could hear it against the window, carrying dust, carrying the sound of a city that never fully quieted — and she felt, not for the first time, that she was contained inside a life that was too small, except that the container was enormous, millions of people, and somehow that made it worse.
"Do you want to go back to England," Wei Lan said. Not gently. She never said anything gently.
"There's nothing in England."
"There's nothing here either."
"That's different," Alice said. In England the nothing was familiar. It had the shape of her mother's absence, her father's politeness, her own small bedroom in a terrace house in Durham that she'd left at fourteen. That nothing was finished. The nothing in Xi'an was active. It pressed against her. It had texture — the dust, the cold, the fluorescent lights, the city wall visible from every elevated point. It was a nothing you could inhabit.
She said none of this. She drank the rice wine.
"My mother used to say," Wei Lan began, and then stopped. She picked at the label on the bottle. She said: "Never mind."
Alice did not ask. This was the thing between them — some doors were marked not with Do Not Enter but with Not Yet, and respecting the not yet was the only form of intimacy either of them could bear.
They sat on the floor of the empty room and finished the rice wine and didn't talk for a long time and the silence was the closest thing to peace Alice had felt since arriving in this city of dust and walls and light that had weight.
---
After Wei Lan left that night — late, past midnight, taking the last metro south — Alice stood in the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She didn't do this often. The mirror was small and hung too high and the bathroom light was the same harsh fluorescent as everywhere else in this country, a light that forgave nothing, that showed you your face the way a stranger would see it: all surface, all evidence.
She looked. She saw what Wei Lan had described — the occupation behind the eyes, the hollows beneath them that never lightened, the pallor that in England was unremarkable but here, among faces that ran warmer, made her look like something preserved in cold water. She touched the skin under her left eye. It was thin. She could feel the bone beneath it, the orbital ridge, the skull.
She turned off the light. In the dark the mirror held nothing.
She went to bed. She didn't sleep. She lay there listening to the heating pipes — they'd come on early tonight, shuddering, swallowing — and she thought about Wei Lan's unfinished sentence, my mother used to say, and she thought about the notebook with the cartoon rabbit, and she thought about the dust in Xi'an, the way it never fully settled but hung in the air, day after day, on every surface and in the light that came through every window.
Toward dawn, she almost slept. The heating cut out. The cold came back, starting at the windows.
She pulled the blanket tighter and waited for the light to return, knowing it would be the same as yesterday — granular, tender, wrong — and knowing she would open her eyes to it anyway, because that was what you did in a place like this, in a life like this. You opened your eyes. You looked at the light. You didn't call it beautiful and you didn't call it ugly. You simply let it in.