Yuanye Wei sat across the dining table. His phone was placed screen-down on the tabletop, a thin shadow wedged between the black body and the white tablecloth.
I changed into a jet-black apron. She changed into a light pink apron. The livestream camera automatically framed the dining area.
The coffee in front of him had gone cold. The steam at the rim had long since dispersed. A ring of brown residue was dried onto the inner wall of the cup, identical to the ring on the coffee cup from the time we'd made breakfast at his place.
"I got an invitation today." He flipped his phone over. The screen lit up once, and he pressed it dark again. "A former subordinate called. Said the company restructured and they're short on people. Wanted me to come back as a consultant. I said no."
"You don't need to tell me what you said no to." I folded my hands on my knee. "All you need to know is that the decisions you can't make, we make for you. The decisions you can make, we save you the trouble of making."
He looked down at his own fingers. There were no cuts on his knuckles, but the edges of his nails were ringed with shallow bite marks, as if he'd started biting and then stopped halfway through.
"But how did he get my new number." He flipped his phone over and back again.
"How he got it doesn't matter. What matters is he won't be calling again." Tsukago pulled the phone from his hand, flipped it over, and glanced at the call log.
The screen's glow slid across her face, from chin to cheekbone and back. She swiped a finger across the screen, then turned it toward him.
"This number called once today. Three more missed calls, all from the same person. Plus texts—five contacts in total." She set the phone down on the table, not pushing it toward him.
"Thinking is too exhausting. Thinking has already ruined you once. Do you want it to ruin you a second time."
Yuanye Wei looked at the phone on the table. His right hand lifted from the tabletop, his fingers spreading and then curling, as if trying to grab something invisible in the air.
Then he pulled his hand back and rested it on his knee.
"Fine. I won't think anymore."
——When he handed over his phone, he wasn't handing over his contacts.He was handing over the illusion called I can still do something.
I picked the phone up from the table, opened the call log, and blocked the former subordinate's number. Then I opened the texts and swiped the unread messages away.
The red notification badges on the screen disappeared one by one, until only the clean desktop background remained.
Tsukago pulled the squirrel out of her apron pocket and set it on the corner of the dining table, facing him. "Lychee doesn't need a phone. It has no one to contact. But you used to. Now you don't."
Yuanye Wei looked into the squirrel's black bean eyes. The squirrel didn't move. Its tail hung down from the edge of the table.
He stood up and walked to the bedroom door. His nightstand was bare except for an empty cup and a desk lamp. He pulled his phone from his pocket and pressed his thumb on the power button. Before the screen went dark, he looked down at it one last time.Not at a message, not at a number—just at the screen itself, bright going dark.
"Thank you." He placed the powered-off phone on the nightstand, screen-up. The black glass reflected the lampshade on the ceiling.
He walked back to the dining table and sat down. His shoulders were no longer braced, his spine no longer curved into an arc. He picked up the cold coffee and took a sip. His Adam's apple moved once as he swallowed.
"It's cold."
"Cold is right. Hot is the one that makes you wait." Tsukago picked the squirrel up off the table corner and turned it to face his cup. "Cold coffee doesn't need waiting. Lychee can't taste, but you can.
The cold you're tasting right now—that's the taste of not having to make decisions anymore."
[chat] Powered off
[chat] Yuanye Wei finally let go
[chat] Daughter is so gentle
[chat] Thank you
I picked his phone up from the nightstand and slipped it into my pocket. The case still carried the warmth of his palm, but it was already starting to cool.
"From now on, anyone looking for you will come to me first. You don't need to know who's been looking. All you need to know is that anyone who comes looking comes to us.What we think you need to know, we'll tell you. What we think you don't need to know, you will never hear."
He nodded. Not the kind of nod that hesitates and slowly dips down. It was the kind of nod that comes after you've thought through every question and realized you couldn't solve a single one on your own.His chin dropped from high to low without a single pause in between.
Tsukago took the coffee cup from the table and put it in the sink. She ran the hot water for a moment. The stream hit the inner wall of the cup, washing the brown coffee stain into a pale beige, and then it disappeared down the drain.
I stood up from the table. When I pulled the door shut, Yuanye Wei was still sitting at the dining table. He wasn't watching us leave. He was just staring at the faint impression the phone had left on the tablecloth.
The tablecloth was cotton-linen. That impression was slowly rising back to flat. By the time it was fully gone, there would be nothing left on the table at all.
The corridor was quiet enough to hear the hum of the elevator. I leaned against the car wall, the coolness of the metal seeping through the thin fabric of my apron to my shoulder blades.Tsukago slipped her hand into the crook of my arm.
"He didn't ask but today."
"Because he can't find anything to put after but anymore. Every time he used to say but, he was leaving himself an escape route. Now we've blocked every single one."
"The look on his face when he handed over that phone was like someone who'd been constipated for three days and finally let it all out."
"Can you pick a different comparison."
"No. His brain was constipated. Thinking was the constipation. Decision-making was the diarrhea. We unblocked his intestines."
"Can you not talk about this in the elevator." "Sister, you're smiling." "I'm not smiling." "The corner of your mouth is twitching." "The elevator is shaking."
The elevator descended. The floor numbers clicked down one by one. The light tube in the ceiling buzzed overhead.