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It began the day after the end of the world.
It was a cloudless noon in Hengdian. Gong Jun stared and stared at that canopy of blue, wondering if yesterday had been all but a dream, if he had not stood and witnessed the heat death of a universe, unable to lift a finger. Someone pushed an object into his hands. He stared at the colours uncomprehending, green and white and brown. A painter’s palette, shards of paint chips, a window of stained glass.
The world fell away and reconfigured itself laboriously around him. He blinked, looked down, finally recognised what he was holding. Here was the green of vegetables, the steamy white bed of rice. He remembered what meat looked like. There was a plate in his hands, and the earth continued to rotate beneath his feet.
He ate very little.
It was lunchtime in Hengdian. He picked up his mobile phone, opened the messaging app, and swiped to a name. The familiar, mundane gestures felt as if they belonged to another world. After trying and failing to gather himself, this was what he wrote: “Try to eat.”
‘Sending,’ the app said, and Gong Jun felt as if his edges were unravelling. He was certain the app was mocking him. How could something as mundane as a scrambled signal drifting through the atmosphere reach a universe that ended yesterday?
‘Sending,’ the app said, and Gong Jun’s screen popped into a palette of green and white and brown. He tilted his phone away from the glare of the sun. Looked into the photograph. Recognised them: vegetables and rice and meat. A pair of wooden chopsticks, unbroken, sat next to the plastic container
‘Sent,’ the app said. The text bubble floated underneath the photograph of takeout. A reminder. An exhortation. A prayer.
“Wow, Gong-laoshi,” Zhang Zhehan replied, “I was just about to say I had lunch delivered, but now I don’t feel like eating. How did you know?”
The next breath Gong Jun took almost suffocated him instead; the air felt too big for his lungs. Ducking his head so that passing crew members would not realise that their main actor was on the point of hysterics, he admitted to the screen, “I don’t know.”
It was a cloudless day in Hengdian. Lunch break was ending soon, and the crew members were hurrying about, hoisting equipments, flipping through call sheets, calling out a name. The sun was shining too bright, the earth rotating too fast; it took a while for Gong Jun to recognise his own name, numbered as it was amongst people moving on with their day.
The world ended yesterday.
It was a strange thread
“What are you having for dinner?” Sent 19:44.
“Dinner today:” Sent 19:44.
Zhang Zhehan has sent a picture. Sent 19:44.
stretched between them
“New Li Ronghao!” Sent 12:01.
“New Li Ronghao!!!” Sent 12:01.
through the air
Gong Jun has sent a picture. Sent 17:39.
“Hey send me a pic of the sunset” Sent 17:39.
“How did you know?”
“I don’t. I thought it was beautiful.
I thought you might like it.”
across the sea
Gong Jun could hear the incredulity in Zhang Zhehan’s voice, could remember the taste of it in his mouth. Missed the taste of him in his mouth. “Did we literally just try to call each other at the same time?” Zhang Zhehan laughed.
Gong Jun closed his eyes. Thought of the calls that did not go through, photons colliding along ley lines criss-crossing the ocean bed. Their noses bumping against one another as they hurried towards one another, as they surged into a kiss. “We did,” Gong Jun said, and joined Zhang Zhehan in his laughter.
beyond the mirror
“Good night.” Sent 23:29.
“Good night.” Sent 23:29.
“I sent it first.” Sent 23:30.
“I sent it first!” Sent 23:30.
Zhang Zhehan has sent a screenshot. Sent 23:30.
Gong Jun has sent a screenshot. Sent 23:30.
darkly.
“Maybe it’s all that zhiji shit,” Zhang Zhehan mused.
“Maybe,” Gong Jun sighed, laying the phone on the hotel pillow next to him. If he closed his eyes, he could almost fool himself into thinking that Zhang Zhehan was next to him, instead of a crumpled duvet and a disembodied voice travelling through space and time. Almost. “Maybe it’s a thread.”
“What thread?”
Gong Jun was getting sleepy, and he knew Zhang Zhehan was, too. Between moving on from the end of the world and going about while pretending the world did not end, it was difficult to say which one was more exhausting. “The kind that can unspool across a river of stars,” Gong Jun mumbled, tucking his chin under the blanket. “The kind that magpies follow as their guide when they build their bridge. Y’know,” he yawned, “the red kind.”
They fell asleep to the white glow of their screens, breathing in sync.
There were a pair of large mirrors in the studio’s bathroom, facing each other. Gong Jun stepped between them and peered into a long hallway of overlapping dimensions. Watched himself fracture into a thousand, a million alternate selves, extending into an infinite, unfathomable distance.
He tilted his head. If he looked deeply enough, could he see a version of his self who was with him?
Perhaps, if he walked long enough, if he travelled far enough, he would be able to find the man in the mirror. But the glass was cold and solid beneath his fingertips, and when he ran his hands across its frame, no magic door revealed itself to him.
He wanted to send a message to Zhang Zhehan. Something. Anything. The message was not important; it had never been important. What Gong Jun wanted was to reach and be reached.
His phone was charging somewhere in the dressing room. Someone knocked on the bathroom door, calling out a name. Lost as he was, looking into his own reflection and looking for another, it took him a while to recognise his own name.
It took a while, but Gong Jun did it in the end. He gathered the shattered fragments of his self and stepped out of the mirrors’ gaze. He walked out of the bathroom door pretending he was the same man as the one who existed before the end of the world.
Somewhere across the impenetrable distance, a pair of stars orbited each other in the dark, glowing in time with one another. A screen lit up in the hands of the man beyond the mirror.
“I miss you always.” Sent 17:11.