Building 46

Chapter 2

10. Dead End

******* could think of no way of recreating the feeling of the Xizhimen subway transfer’s crowds at Building 46. The weight of so many people would crush such an old building, and then it would cease to matter what had happened in the ping pong room or whether Sam found records of what had happened, hidden away on the sixth floor.

Sam returned to his dorm from dinner with Sandra a little after 9 p.m. to find Building 45 cloaked in darkness. Cuthbert greeted him at his desk with a large handheld flashlight and escorted Sam to his room. There would be no light or hot water until morning, Cuthbert said, apologising on the building’s behalf.

Sam laid in bed, not bothering to brush his teeth or wash his face in the dark. And then thoughts of invisibility descended upon him like the night. He leapt up and opened the door to the hall beyond his little apartment. He didn’t sense that anyone was there. From the hall, he peaked out into the corridor where Cuthbert’s desk was located. Cuthbert was not at his desk. Sam knew to cast his gaze to the right of that corridor. He noticed that the little red light from the CCTV camera that observed his conversations with Cuthbert and his comings and goings was not on. He realised that this was a rare opportunity to move through Wei Da unseen. The power outage had been thorough, at least in Building 45. He wondered whether it had extended to Building 46.

Sam exited Building 45 through the doors behind Cuthbert’s desk. Instead of heading to Building 46 the back way, through Yu Chun, he turned the corner through a short alleyway and found himself moments later before the building’s formidable edifice, where he noticed that none of the lights were on. There was typically at least one light on in one of the foreigner sleeping quarters. Some one or thing was always awake in Building 46. He marvelled for a moment at the absence of perceptible life there, like he was observing an act of the occult. Frenzy had so often been a forgone conclusion of both the building and of Beijing. And then sure enough, he saw a flickering light — He wasn’t sure if it was a candle or a flashlight in its final moments of battery life — travel from the stage-left arm of Building 46’s fourth floor, to its centre. The doors of all the rooms must’ve been open, Sam thought, dazzled by the spectacle of the light traveling, slowly, past all the windows, with brief punctuations as it moved from room-to-room. The light appeared more faint as it shone through the classroom windows in the centre of the building. Finally, at the centre of the building, the flickering light either turned off or went out.

A guard, identifiable as such only from the silhouette of his uniform cast on Building 46 by the pale moonlight, bolted out of the front doors of the building and ran in Sam’s direction. The guard was in too much of a hurry to notice or enquire about Sam’s presence there. They passed each other in the night without acknowledging each other. This had been the night guard who would have made passage into the building more tricky, Sam thought. It was as if the Universe itself had accorded Sam the Xizhimen invisibility of his wanting.

As Sam ascended the stairs, he became resolved to move with purpose — to make adroit strides into the unknowable night of Building 46. He realised that in the perfect darkness, with the exception of the occasional person who would pass him with a flashlight, no one would question whether Sam lived in Building 46 if he seemed to know where he was going. And he did.

Sam arrived at the sixth floor. He immediately sought out the little red light that would indicate he was being watched in a control room somewhere. Its absence was a great relief to him. But he wondered for how long — power outages were only occasionally planned. This one had thrown even the night guard and other building staff into frenzy. Which was to say that the power could resume at any moment.

The sixth floor was in a state of perfect silence. On the lower floors, foreign students were busily embracing the fun of the darkness — traveling between floors and paying clandestine visits to their neighbours. As Sam traveled down the hallway on the sixth floor, he heard not a peep. All the doors were closed. Sam reached for the doorknob at what he identified, with the help of his mobile phone light, to be the f*******n Records Room. He turned the knob gingerly, so as not to make a sound and opened the door only wide enough to allow himself to pass through. Still, as he closed it on the other side, it made a sharp creek that made his heart jump. Sam’s hand passed over the light switch reflexively, but then he recalled the outage and passed his opened flip phone over the room like a magic wand.

Sam glided over to a wall, felt around for a cabinet and pulling it open, placed his hand inside. Inside, he found a void. He shone the light from his phone over the drawer to inspect what he had not felt, dumbfounded. Emptiness. He closed the drawer and opened the one below it to find the same. He ran around the empty desk to the other side of the room and opened more filing cabinets. All were empty. In a fit of frustration, Sam began to open more and more of the filing cabinet drawers, allowing them to slam shut. He no longer cared whether he was caught, he thought. There had been nothing at all in the f*******n Records Room. The f*******n Records had been wiped clean. He stood in the darkness, wondering whether it had always been this way or the janitor had ordered it done after Sam’s initial trespass. And then Sam heard footsteps up the hall, from the stairwell at the centre of the building, outside of his classroom. He heard the sound of those footsteps grow louder on approach. Sam was conscious of the fact that there were no stairs at the other end of the hall. No easy escape.

Sam let himself out of the f*******n Records Room into the hall. He saw a silhouette in the distance, a dark shadow in the shape of a person atop the other shades of darkness that comprised the hall. The shadow figure stopped in place for a moment and then began hurtling toward him. Instead of rushing past it, Sam made for the bathroom behind the f*******n Records Room. There was no way out of the building that did not lead past the shadow figure, Sam thought. He entered the bathroom and stood on a toilet bowl, holding his breath and the stall door. The showers had no curtains in the adjacent shower room, he thought, recalling the public s*x; he’d done well to choose the toilets. He heard the sound of the shadow figure’s shoes hitting the concrete of the bathroom floor with several thuds. When Sam heard those shoes in the adjacent shower room, he swung the stall door open, barrelled into the hall and made for the stairwell.

Perhaps because the sound of his own heartbeat was drumming in his ears, Sam could not hear the shadow figure follow him, so after he sped down a flight of stairs, he stopped for moment, wondering whether it had only been a student who needed to use the restroom. And then, from back at the sixth floor, beside the f*******n Records Room that had been cleaned of all records, Sam heard the shadow figure shout, ‘****!’

Xiang si jiu qu!

If you want to die, go die!

Sam tripped over himself as he glided down the stairs in the dark, hand holding to the walls as though he was passing through a circus fun house. With the moonlight pouring in through the classrooms, he looked above to see the head of the silhouette poking out over the rail. No longer shouting, the voice called out once more, in a foreboding certainty, more frightening than before:

‘*****’

A light and imposing voice. Striking. The sound of it replayed in Sam’s mind, as he collected himself outside, and then again and again, for days. And then the sounds and half-sights of the obscured shapes of that night scattered into the recesses of his mind, until they were lost.

When Sam returned to Building 45, Cuthbert pointed a flashlight in his face, almost as a punitive measure. ‘You! I thought I’d put you in your room,’ he said. Breathless, Sam asked once more to be put in his place.