“You need to go somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else?” Jiang Xingzhou’s voice was steadier than he’d expected. “First tell me who you are.”
“You will know once you are there.”
“That tells me nothing.” Jiang Xingzhou stood up, walked a full circle through the living room, and checked every corner. “If you’re selling something, I’d suggest a different approach. If you’re a scammer, there isn’t much money in my account.”
“If you’re trying to scare me, well, congratulations, you’re thirty percent of the way there.”
The voice didn’t reply.
After a few seconds of silence, it spoke again.
“You do not belong here.”
Jiang Xingzhou stopped walking.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It is time for you to go back.”
“Back where?” Jiang Xingzhou’s brow furrowed. “I’ve lived here six years. I haven’t even finished paying the mortgage, and you tell me I don’t belong here? Then what about my mortgage? You going to pay it off for me?”
The voice fell silent again.
Maybe it was his imagination, but Jiang Xingzhou thought he detected a note of not knowing how to respond in that silence.
He had no intention of stopping, though.
“Another thing. You tell me to go somewhere else, I ask why, and you say I’ll know when I get there. Do you think that’s a coherent way to hold a conversation? I don’t even know who you are, and I’m supposed to go wherever you point?”
“What if you’re a trafficker? Some new kidnapping scheme? Broadcasting into people’s heads to lure them away? Has scam technology really come this far?”
“I am not.”
“Not what? Not a trafficker? Then what are you? At least give me a name. No name, nothing but ‘the time has come’ and ‘you should go back.’ What is this, a movie? Could you get some fresher lines?”
“You will understand once you are there.”
“Can you say something else? Same line over and over. Are you a broken record?”
The voice paused a moment.
Then it said, “You talk more than expected.”
“You talk less than expected.” Jiang Xingzhou sat back down on the sofa and took a sip of water. “And your script is seriously dated. ‘The time has come.’ ‘Somewhere else.’ ‘You’ll know when you get there.’ If you’d thrown in a single ‘I’ll transfer you five million,’ I might have gone with you.”
“At this level, you’re worse than a scam text.”
“I am not asking for your opinion.”
“So you’re informing me? Then at least inform me properly. Time, place, people, event. How many of the five essentials have you covered? You won’t even give a name. You’ve told me nothing clearly, and I’m just supposed to leave?”
“Once you are on the other side, naturally…”
“Naturally I’ll know. Right, right, I know.” Jiang Xingzhou cut him off. “Then let me ask a practical question.”
“Ask.”
“If I go with you to this other side, what happens to things here? My job, my apartment, my bank cards, the grapes in my fridge I bought the day before yesterday and haven’t eaten. Who deals with all that?”
“You need not worry about those.”
“How can I not worry? Do you know my mortgage rate? Do you know my performance bonus hasn’t come through this month? Do you know my sofa is brand new? You say don’t worry like that decides it. You’re not me.”
“Something more important awaits you on the other side.”
“What thing?”
“You will know once you are there.”
Jiang Xingzhou drew a deep breath, thoroughly exasperated.
“You genuinely cannot hold a conversation. Let me tell you, if you ever went on a blind date with chat skills like this, you’d strike out a hundred times out of a hundred.”
“I am not chatting with you.”
“Then what are you doing right now? Talking to yourself?”
The voice didn’t answer.
The room went quiet for a few seconds.
Jiang Xingzhou thought it had left, and was just about to relax when the floor suddenly vanished beneath his feet.
The ground hadn’t caved in; his whole body was falling.
Everything around him was stripped away in an instant, as if he’d been yanked bodily out of the room and dragged into another space. There was no rush of wind in his ears, nothing to see; even when he reached out his hand, he couldn’t make out his own fingers.
Jiang Xingzhou hung in the air.
The weightlessness turned his stomach, like the sudden drop of an elevator, but ten times stronger. Instinctively he tried to grab onto something, but there was nothing around him, only emptiness.
“Holy shit.”
Jiang Xingzhou’s voice scattered outward with no echo.
He could see nothing, yet felt that something was out there in the grayness.
He tried to steady himself, but in a state of complete suspension it was impossible. Move an arm, and his whole body started spinning. Move a leg, and he rotated the other way.
“Hey, can you at least set me level first? I’m getting dizzy.”
Nobody answered him.
It took Jiang Xingzhou considerable effort to stop spinning, and there he hung.
“So what’s the situation now?” he said to the grayness. “Am I already on the way? Or have I arrived?”
“On the way.”
The voice was still there, but this time it didn’t seem to come from inside his head; it surged in from every direction at once.
“Your customer service attitude is genuinely terrible,” Jiang Xingzhou said. “Yanking people away without even a warning. If I had a weak heart, I’d already be on the floor.”
“Your heart has no problems.”
“How do you know? Are you my health report?”
“I am aware of your body’s condition.”
“Then do you know my neck isn’t great? Hanging like this, it’s killing me.”
The moment the words left his mouth, his body suddenly steadied.
Nothing was holding him up; the weightlessness had simply vanished. He still floated, but no longer spun in every direction, as if fixed in place.
“Better.” Jiang Xingzhou rolled his neck. “Finally showing some service awareness.”
He looked around.
Still nothing to see, and no source of light. He held out his hand, and the outline of his fingers dissolved into the gray.
“Can we get a light in here? I can’t see a thing. It’s boring, you know.”
“You are concerned about boredom?”
“What else? Being scared? I don’t even know who you are; what would I be scared of? At least show me something. Just hanging here in nothing is like a long-haul flight with no entertainment system.”
Something moved in the depths of the gray.
Jiang Xingzhou squinted toward it, but still couldn’t make anything out.
“So can you tell me now?”
“Tell you what?”
“Everything,” Jiang Xingzhou said. “Who you are, where we’re going, why me. Don’t give me ‘you’ll know when you get there’ again. I’m on the way now, so you can at least tell me.”
The voice was silent for a while.
Then the gray began to fade.
“Almost there,” the voice said.
“How fast is almost? Can you give me a concrete time? Five minutes or ten? I’d like to brace myself.”
“We are here.”
The grayness ripped apart all at once.
Jiang Xingzhou instinctively shut his eyes.
When he opened them again, he froze.