She shook her head. She'd gone back to the grove to look. There was nothing there. She'd stayed inside for a long time, but when she came out, she was still in this universe.
She'd never told anyone about this experience. No normal person would believe it.
I asked awkwardly: "Then why are you telling me this all of a sudden?"
She said that just now, for a moment, I'd looked like the alien she'd glimpsed inside the UFO. But then I didn't anymore.
I didn't understand.
VIII
Perhaps it was the monotony of office life. After that, during downtime at work, I added a new activity: helping Mandy research things.
About: the 1999 UFO.
There were quite a few records online. People had sighted them in China and abroad.
1999 was also rumored to be the end of the world. Maybe that was why people had developed such vivid fantasies about UFOs. In any case, theories abounded.
And about: how to send someone back to a parallel universe.
This yielded nothing. No relevant literature. Web novels, on the other hand, offered all kinds of methods. Getting struck by lightning, traveling faster than light, and so on.
I watched Mandy at her desk, snacking and writing code.
I couldn't help imagining the day she developed an enormous massage chair for the company.
During testing, she'd tell us: "This isn't actually a massage chair—it's a vehicle for returning to my timeline. Sorry, everyone."
Then she'd climb in, poke her head out again: "Tell accounting they don't need to pay me for this month."
The switch would flip, and she and the machine would vanish, leaving the rest of us standing there, completely dumbfounded.
I looked over at Mandy at her desk and couldn't help grinning foolishly.
Mandy had long since made peace with it. She said she'd already accepted that she couldn't go back.
Besides, she'd lived in this universe for so many years now.
She'd given up. She'd just live here.
IX
The summer of 2012 was exceptionally hot. One night, I was sleeping in my rental, drenched in sweat, when I was jolted awake by an urgent phone call. I checked the time—4 a.m.
An unfamiliar number.
I answered, and a torrent of cursing came flying through the phone.
After a while I figured it out—someone was saying my apartment was leaking, and the water was dripping down to their place downstairs.
I rushed to my bathroom. Bone dry, nothing there. Then it hit me—I called Mandy.
On the other end, Mandy was panicking. She sounded exhausted too.
I said: "Pipe burst?"
She said: "Yeah, the bathroom... how did you know?"
I said: "Telepathy."
She laughed: "Telepathy with your bathroom, you mean."
I said: "Did you get hold of someone to fix it?"
She said: "Property management isn't answering, and the repair guy isn't picking up."
I said: "I'll come over."
The words were out before I realized—I shouldn't say that. The middle of the night.
But after a pause, she said: "Wouldn't that be too much trouble for you?"
A foreign guest from a parallel universe is still a guest.
X
The leaking pipe was plugged, but the bathroom floor was a mess.
Some water dripped onto the floor—water running off my hair, landing on the living room tiles.
I was soaked. I didn't dare sit on her sofa. So I sat on the floor, head lowered.
She gave me a towel, and I started drying my hair.
By now it was light outside. Downstairs came the explosive cracks of an old man cracking his whip in the square.
She hesitated, then said: "It's almost time for work. You can rest here for a bit."
She said: "There's a dryer. You can wear my dad's clothes first."
Steam drifted from the dryer. The two of us sat in the living room.
At this hour, neither of us was particularly sleepy anymore. I ate her snacks, she lit a cigarette. And just like that, we started talking about parallel universes again.
She said she once thought smoking might help her go back. So she'd started learning to smoke. Later she got a tattoo, hung out with the tough girls in her class.
Once, the tough girls took her to a nightclub. Everyone there was going wild. Someone handed her a special kind of cigarette, saying it'd feel amazing.
She knew exactly what that was.
But she felt like it didn't matter anymore. This wasn't her universe anyway—none of it mattered. Luckily, after one drag, she started vomiting violently. Then fear surged through her, and she bolted from the place alone.
In the living room, she fell silent again after saying all that, staring at the curling smoke from her cigarette. I looked at her profile—her face betrayed no expression.
I said: "Do you still... smoke?"
She said: "No. Even in a different universe, you've still got to live well, right?"
I thought for a moment. I didn't know why I was telling her this. Maybe it was how she looked gazing at the smoke—she seemed so lonely, like someone living all alone in a strange world.
I said: "If... I mean, if you ever want to talk about these things, I'm always free."
She looked at me in disbelief, then smiled.
She said: "Then I'll add an extra dish to your lunches from now on."
XI
After that, we chatted often. About her original universe, about that evening in 1999. On the company intranet, on WeChat...
That year, on Singles' Day, our coworkers organized a singles' dinner. Mandy and I were both there. Our colleagues kept teasing us, saying we looked more like a couple than anything. They said we should pay for the meal.
I told them to get lost, but then I noticed Mandy was sneaking glances at me. I looked away first, embarrassed.
Later, driving Mandy home, she didn't get out right away when the car stopped.
She was silent for a moment, as if she had something to say, or as if she was waiting for me to speak.
I had a pretty good idea what the subtext was. Elevate the friendship, strengthen diplomatic ties with the foreign guest... But I stayed quiet, and the silence gradually shifted from charged to awkward.
After a while, I broke it: "Rest well when you get home... It's Singles' Day today. Our holiday."
She smiled: "Yeah. Happy Singles' Day."
XII
I didn't know myself why I'd rejected the possibility that night in the car.
Maybe I resented a certain unfamiliarity. Mandy and I were good friends, with a shared secret and an unresolved problem. But going from friends to a couple—there was something alien about it that made me instinctively resist.
Whether at work or in relationships, I instinctively wanted to stay in my comfort zone.
But the comfort zone broke anyway. First, the lunchboxes stopped. Then came subtle shifts—Mandy and I still chatted, on the intranet and on WeChat. But we only talked about work.
By the time I noticed, it dawned on me that our "complicated" relationship had quietly reverted to a simple coworkers-only dynamic.
XIII
One evening that winter, I got off work and saw her in the distance. I hesitated about going over to say hello, when a tall guy came and picked her up.
They were chatting and laughing. Without thinking, she glanced back and noticed me, giving me an embarrassed smile.
The temperature had dropped sharply. That night, bundled in my blanket, I had my final conversation with her on my phone.
I said: "Congratulations. When did this happen? You didn't even tell me."
She said: "It's nothing. A family setup—we just met once."
She said: "He's not my type."
My fingers hovered over the screen, hesitating, as I typed out a line:
"Then am I your type?"
I didn't have the courage to send it. One second, two seconds, a minute. Then she suddenly sent: "Good night."
I deleted the words one by one, replacing them with another "good night."
Many days later, a coworker told me that Mandy had gotten together with a guy. A tall guy.
And many days after that, I received a transfer from Mandy. The note said: rent.
I froze for a moment.
Mandy said it was his idea. He said they couldn't live in my place for free. She told me to accept it.
XIV
In the winter of 2012, an ancient prophecy started circulating again. They said that on December 21st, the world would end.
I didn't believe it, of course. But I still secretly stockpiled quite a lot of compressed biscuits and several large jugs of mineral water at the supermarket.
I hauled everything back to my rental, only to realize I'd stockpiled for nothing. My boss sent notice that I had to go to the neighboring city for a week-long business trip.
I spent three days in the neighboring city—meeting clients, entertaining, drinking nonstop. One evening, after bowing and scraping to send off a client, I crouched by the curb and threw up.
I pulled out my phone and realized the world was supposed to end in three days.
I opened WeChat, and countless messages flooded in. They were from my coworkers.
Mandy was missing.