Crouching in the bathroom, I push the sponge against the stubborn caulk stains on the crevice between the two tiles on the floor. I push it so hard that I can see the flakes of my skin falling and my fingers are red and raw. Yet the stains look exactly as it did half an hour ago. I have tried a cloth, a brush, and tissues against this villain of the day. It is certainly not the first challenge I have had with this bathroom. When I removed the pipes with a wrench and tried to unclog the sink, the water just kept pouring and flooded the entire floor. I was quick enough to take off my shirt and stuff it into the gap under the door to stop the water flowing into the hallway. I took me the entire day to put the pipes back and dry the floor. But the resilient stain must have formed even before that, probably even before the power outage two weeks ago. I didn’t pay much attention to the tiny, insignificant imperfections until I started making over this house.

Last week, I just wanted to have electricity back, so I went to the work room to read the blueprint with my pocket torch. Since I didn’t have the old lady’s experience, I was learning it as I read it. The thin lines marked the walls and shaped the rooms in the house. A dotted line split my bedroom in two. That must mean a hidden structure. No objects were drawn on the other side of the room, but a thick line ran from there and branched into many, threading through every corner of the house. My instinct told me that they were the electrical lines. I followed them one by one and found out that they all converged on a wall in the work room behind the giant desk right where I am. Suddenly it became obvious: there was a hidden door on the wall that I could just push open. The hairline on the wall gave it away. It was odd that something so obvious had been invisible to me.

The light came back the moment I switched on the power with a clunk. The circuit breaker must have tripped during the turmoil in the basement. The sudden light blinded me for quite a few seconds. When my vision was back, I started to see things I had not noticed before: the thick dust on the work desk, pushed to the edges where I had leaned on, the spider webs failing to catch anything on the ceiling of the hallway, the watermarks at every corner of the kitchen, and, finally, the caulk stains on the bathroom tiles.

“This stubborn nasty thing!” I mutter to myself. It’s just a tiny little stain. Why won’t it come off? And why do I care about it so much?

I pick up the wrench on the floor and claw on the stains. It leaves a few scratches on the tiles, but it does nothing to the stains. Seeing my effort goes to waste again, I throw the wrench behind me and I hear it hit the water pipe I fixed just earlier. All of a sudden, the water splashes on the floor (again!). I hop towards it like a frog and put my hand on the pipe where the water is pouring, hoping to block the gushing water. But the water just stops. It seems that the pipe is clogged, and the water on the floor is just what remained in the tube. I look into the tube and see nothing.

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“AI can imitate Shakespeare, but Shakespeare didn’t do that.”

Another overwhelmingly appealing reason to write is the thinking game. The forms in which we consume information take less and less effort over generations. We used to go to libraries and go through the shelves to find specific books (who remembers those days, if they had them at all?) Now, a 30-second summary video shows up on your screen after a swipe uninvited, and the algorithms know you want it before you know. Yet I don’t want to give up on the game of figuring out what I want, though it’s tempting to delegate that quest to AI as well. Yes, I tried. Which country should I move to? Is Vienna or Wroclaw a better city for me as a writer? Why do I feel tired of Berlin? And so on. The more I ask, the less I am sure what I think. Don’t get me wrong. I use ChatGPT and Claude frequently for various jobs and I’m absolutely convinced that they do much better than I do, but they don’t “think” for me any more than they do the workouts for me. Thinking is an exercise like sports. You don’t get any tangible results, but you know it is good for you (overexercising is harmful, so is overthinking, but that’s not the point here. Besides, we know very few people, if any, who suffer from overwriting.) The more we outsource this part of life to others, the less we are capable of doing it. This isn’t being tech-averse. This is just a simple causality. And the antidote doesn’t require you to toss your phone away. Just don’t give up on thinking entirely. Don’t choose the easiest path all the time. Let your brain work. Be hard on it because it can handle more than you expect, even if you believe AI will eat the world.

In that specific exercise, software can help. We certainly don’t need to take out pen and paper to learn writing a novel (you may, of course.) Many thinking activities are done on or with software. What I have been doing the most lately is revision. When I was writing At Midnight, I Wake Up as a Vampire, I had every chapter proofread by Claude for spelling and grammatical errors (it works far better than build-in checks in Microsoft Word or Grammarly; the former is too basic and the latter is too pedantic.) As a matter of principle, I do not allow AI to change my manuscript directly, so I had to put them side by side to look through all the listed points and decide whether I should change it or not. I had to admit that AI had a point 9 out of 10 times. Yet the decision — the thinking exercise — must be done by me. So I did it for all 15 chapters, turning my head from left to right and from right to left hundreds of times. I started to have an idea of what I need for a proofreader and an editor. If only they were all in one piece of software.

Voilà.

I created it.

Project Throughline is my answer. It is a text editor with its prominent labelling feature. Labelling allows writers to highlight and annotate selected text in the manuscript and put them under different labels. For example, you can label all the dialogue of a character and trace them through the whole story to examine if they talk in a consistent voice. Or, label all the punch lines in a humorous novel with an intensity scale to see the rhythm of your jokes. Or, add editorial labels to mark certain paragraphs for a cut or a rewrite. Only in Writer Mode can the manuscript be edited. This sets a clear boundary between the roles of a writer and an editor. The editorial annotations can be applied to the manuscript or dismissed.

Throughline goes beyond word-by-word editing; it shows the whole storyline by displaying tracks and markers on the axis of pages. Tracks show where your labels are in the story, so you can easily see where in the manuscript your characters (or your jokes) appear and disappear. Markers can chart the protagonist’s arc, showing where the critical moments fall.

Throughline is now online for my subscribers. It is a local-first editor. You load it in a browser and all the text are stored only in your browser. Caution: clearing your browser data will remove your manuscripts. Since it is still under development, I’d ask you to make a second copy of your manuscripts as you go — simply use the export function to download them as docx files.

Happy writing, editing, and thinking with Throughline.

I feel something on the back of my head. I tap it hastily and find the string of balloons. It is flowing slowly into the crack as well. This is when I realize that the crack is dragging things into it. I get out of the room hastily and shut the door.

I want to stay as far from this room as I can, but it’s all dark in the hallway. I look to the window and see only the dark blue sky on the verge of night time. Have I been in this room so long that the day has passed? I turn on the light switch on the wall but it doesn’t work, so I can only use my hands to reach the wall while finding my way. I climb down the stairs carefully and reach the ground floor in the dark. In fact, it is even darker since there is no window in the hallway. As my room is right next to the stairs, I manage to get in there and find the pocket torch on my desk, which I used when visiting the secret chamber behind my closet. I head for the work room to tell the old woman about the crack I found, but I don’t see her at the sandalwood desk when I enter. I search all corners in the room with my torch but she is nowhere to be found.

Did it happen again — they disappeared? I should be less surprised than how I feel right now. They were not here until two weeks ago, so the house is just back to how it was before. But this time, I was hoping the old woman can do something about the situation. On top of clogged water pipes, the house has power outage and a giant crack on the upper floor! Speaking of it, I give a look at the blueprint of the house on the desk and find out that the room where the crack is should be just above this work room. But I see nothing when I point my torch at the ceiling.

In frustration and confusion, I go to the kitchen — the only room with a working tap — for some water. It gives me a fright when my torchlight falls on the old woman sitting at the table.

“Gosh! I have been looking for you,” I scream.

“It’s about time. You’ve been gone for a long time,” she says slowly, ”the light is off. I cannot read the blueprint in the dark, so I came here to wait for you. You must be thirsty.”

“Yes, I am.” I walk to the tap and guzzle a glass of water. Khh‑khh. I almost choke myself, but I feel so much better after the cough. I didn’t realize how desperate my throat wanted some water. I can barely see her face in the dark, but I can hear from her voice that the anxiety she had earlier is gone. She has regained her assured voice like an experienced architect.

“Do you know why there is no light?” I ask.

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Scienna walks to the end of the hallway on the upper floor and looks up at the ceiling.

“This is the way to the attic. We can use a latch to pull down the ladder,” she says.

“How do you know that? Have you been here before?” I ask. It’s bizarre for someone who is here for the first time to have such specific information.

“It’s called inference. If you use your logic, you can figure out most things in this world without first knowing them,” she says with pride.

“Is that how you know about the rooms on this floor — they are my visions?”

“Yes and no,” she pushes up her glasses and pauses. She is either hesitating or looking for the right words to explain it.

“What is it?” I urge her on.

“Um, this one is for you to figure out. Use your logic.” Before she turns her head away, I think I see a smile on her face. Not a smart-ass smile, but a gentle, compassionate one. Yet I cannot understand why she wears that expression when she says that to me.

I pick up the latch at the corner and pull down the ladder from the ceiling. The dust falls on my face and makes me cough badly. It takes me a few minutes before I can talk again.

“Do you want to go first?” I ask her.

“No. In fact, I cannot climb it. The height will kill me,” she says with tension on her face. She isn’t exaggerating. The ceiling is at least 3 meters high. Fortunately, the ladder seems solid despite its age. I climb up and push open the heavy lid on the top. More dust falls onto my face. Khh‑khh. I pull my body up and enter the attic.

The light comes through the window on the wall. There is nothing but dust. I walk to the window, leaving footprints on the floor. The window is dusty, too. I can barely see through it. I can only tell it is cloudy from the color temperature of the sunlight. White like an empty page on my draft book.

“I found nothing,” I shout to Scienna, but she doesn’t answer.

I walk back to the ladder and say it again. No answer, so I climb down.

She is not there.

Did she plan to leave all along, using her fear of heights as a cover? I’m annoyed by her disappearance. These people are simply unreliable. I have not forgotten how much trouble Discussant brought to this house. And now Scienna — after suggesting coming up here and lecturing on whatever these rooms are, she walks off as if none of them matter. I’m more than frustrated, but on the bright side, at least she didn’t cause me more trouble.

I look at the door of one of four rooms that I have not entered. Scienna’s warning lingers in my head: Once you enter one of them, you lose the other five. Was that all she said? I can’t remember, so it’s less intimidating. I put my hand on the knob and turn it.

As the door opens, an airplane the size of an eagle flies out of the room. I dodge it hastily and my sight tries to follow it, but soon enough my sight is filled with a string of balloons following the tail of the airplane. Their colors form a full spectrum, ranging from deep red to mysterious purple. How splendid. I can’t look into the room until the kaleidoscope finishes. It’s a busy place: more flying planes and other toy-sized vehicles and robots running around on the floor. The trucks are loaded with glitter which gets dumped at one corner of the room, where a fan blows it into the air. The robots holding a broom sweep the glitter on the floor and collect it back at the truck. It doesn’t take me long to see the circle of the system. There is no probably no point of it besides giving a show -- for whom? I take a few steps into the room without interrupting any of the robots. They give me a look but don’t seem to mind as they carry on with their sweeping, except one robot who does not have a broom in the hands (I didn’t notice until now). It turns to me and speaks with its speaker without using the mouth it doesn’t have:

“Hello, me.”

What does that mean? I wonder that and wonder if I should answer, but it soon says again: Hello, me. So I feel obligated to reply:

“Hello, robot…?”

Kerkerker.

The robot makes sounds like it is laughing, but it could also mean anything else because it’s impossible to tell without any facial expressions and mouth motion. It doesn’t continue the conversation, so I feel it’s my turn to say something.

“What is happening in this room?”

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• Chapter 9: Gleichgesinnter

• Chapter 10: The Altar

• Chapter 11: Vorabend

• Chapter 12: Vollmond

• Chapter 13: Crossroad

• Chapter 14: New Blood

• Chapter 15: New Forward

When I decided to write about a vampire in a horror story, the first thing came to my mind is an anime I watched when I was a kid: Vampire Princess Miyu. It’s a story about a female vampire Miyu hunting devils hidden in the human world. Various seemingly ordinary humans encounter supernatural powers and often are threatened by them. Before the devils get to harm the humans, Miyu and her servant, who appears to be a devil, step in and kill them with her power to ignite fire. What I find particularly intriguing is that in every episode, the audience sees the life of a new character, quite often tangled with greed or envy, and how a devil is empowered by their impure thoughts or acts. As the protagonist, her hunt of the evil is thoroughly justified, but it is still worth debating why a vampire chooses to protect humans. The plot also deliberately makes the audience wonder why the devil became a servant of Miyu.

My first idea is to have Karl-Heinz Brandt hunt different victims in every episode, of which their stories as residents in East Berlin are told. Such stories are plentiful as I have read so many in various museums in Berlin. Yet I struggled in my head to shape the personality of the protagonist through the discrete plots. Arguably, Miyu and her servant also lack dimensions in the anime, which is nevertheless fascinating. I find it particularly difficult to make my readers sympathize with Brandt if he acts merely as a hunter in the story.

After dropping the outlines I have for numerous victims in a dozen of episodes, I created a few other key characters, Jens and Käthe, to let the readers see Brandt’s world with their eyes. This approach might have helped me write 20% more than what I would have without them, as it is much easier (and enjoyable) for me to describe the same things from more perspectives than to sit and wonder what other things I can write. Nevertheless, I should admit that the latter is a craft that I also desire.

I also realized it is much harder (at least for me) to write one storyline in which all the characters are consistent with their backstories, compared to the short-story-like style in which every episode can be read independently. Because it is a serialized web novel, I chose not to change my episodes after they are published. That’s a blessing and a curse at the same time — I need to “know” the characters well before they ever appear in my story. This is the most fun part of writing this novel for me. I recalled Alan Rickman saying that on a phone call with J. K. Rowling about Snape’s backstory, she never once said “I want him to be…”. I guess the charm of creating characters is that they will be real in everyone’s mind once they are ready. When Karl-Heinz Brandt’s story advances, I am a ghost behind him, watching what he does and what is done to him. And if my readers can see what I see through my text, we are, perhaps, haunting him together. Spooky, huh?

“What?”

“Let’s go. There is something else to look at here.”

“Wait. I want to check what is written in the book.”

“No, you shouldn’t. You can’t.”

She puts on a serious face that puzzles me.

“Why not? I want to know if my writing has anything to do with this book.”

“You heard me. You cannot. This will ruin you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“This is a finished book that is not supposed to exist in this moment. You might think it’s yours, but it’s not yet yours. If you are fixated on this vision, you won’t create more. Not more than you are today.”

Her words are like a paradox and it puzzles me even more.

“It’s the vision that I want!” I shout with anger.

“Sure, but it’s not what you need, especially not now.”

“Why especially not now’?”

“We are here to look for the cracks. Remember?”

“It’s not like we have no time.”

“True. We also have time, but it’s wise to prioritize yo…

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“How should I call you, by the way?” I ask her while we are in front of the long stairs. Librarian? I keep the silly answer to myself. That’s what I think when I think of her.

“Hm, I am not sure. I don’t have a name, or I have many, but I think you can call me Scienna.”

“Scienna? Can it even be a name?”

“You can register as anything when you are born.”

“Where were you born?”

“You won’t want to know.” she says it with a I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile. Though her birthplace should not be a thrilling mystery, her smile gives me a shiver, because these guests always know what I don’t.

As I take my first few steps on the stairs, she asks:

“Do you want to tell me what happened in the basement?”

Finally, something you don’t know.

“It’s a bit complicated. Discussant — another guest in the house, came with me to the basement, where we found a talking rat. The magical rats are — were doing all the maintenance for the house, but Discussant tipped over the water tank and caused a flood. We were drenched. They went missing. It might or might not have something to do with the current house situation….”

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• Chapter 1: The Shift Bell

• Chapter 2: Radeberger

• Chapter 3: Marzahn

• Chapter 4: Übergang

• Chapter 5: The Empty Hook

• Chapter 6: Kitchen

• Chapter 7: Birds

• Chapter 8: Umwelt-Bibliothek

I set up the story in East Berlin for an obvious reason: I’ve been living on the east side of Berlin for more than a decade. Despite the fall of the Wall, the two sides of the city have retained their charm and ugliness. The residents have a strong regional identity tied to their own districts. Crossing into another feels like a day trip to a neighboring culture.

I had been given limited choices of where to live due to the overheated housing market in Berlin (before its fall on the eve of 2023), but I had a deep feeling that I was drawn to an implicit lifestyle that I couldn’t name and chose to live in the same area again and again. The new east-siders, as very few residents actually grew up here, are often considered the cool ones: laid-back, unrestrained, and hedonistic. While I don’t put myself in that category, I can see how the unconventional lifestyle the scene offers charms me. The modern East Berlin scene didn’t happen by chance. After 1989, the old East Berlin, full of ruins like a burned-down forest, provided fertile ground for the new inhabitants from the west. Many came here for the excitement of living in what had been a forbidden city. Over time, the source of excitement shifted to other kinds of buzz: music, parties, and drugs. One can argue that they all took root in the years when none of them were permitted.

I set the story in 1988 because the Stasi’s monitoring reached its peak in the late 80s. That surveillance peaked then is unthinkable, considering the Wall fell by the end of the decade (it would be the other way round if we had lived at that time; the fall was unthinkable). And that’s less than four decades from today, meaning quite a few people I have met in Berlin lived through that time. Given how many people have little faith in today’s global and national politics, I often wonder how their views today contrast with the thrills they had back then. It would be outrageous to say the GDR regime was acceptable, but it was quite possible that residents within the system believed, or made themselves believe, they were collectively protected, despite the restrictions and other terrible things that happened to people around them. And some must have stood up for the system. The protagonist I created is one of them — a murderer, but also a victim of the dictatorship, cursed with the obligation to defend a belief. If we are aware of how our (fabricated) identity dictates our actions, we should know we are not that far from his fate.

Despite my effort to bring historical texture into the story, this is meant to be a modern novel that names a horror still with us today. One may drink another’s blood to guard one’s own interests at night, and feel no guilt in the day. I feel sorry for the victims. I feel sorry for the bloodsucker.

The old lady lowers her body inch by inch, back to her crawling position on the desk, as if my questions have bored her so much that she lost all her vigor.

“Another meaningless question.” She answers with no life in her words. She puts down her head, fixing her eyes back on the blueprint. Her energy is a roller-coaster; it rocketed during her earlier speech and then collapsed into stillness. I try to get her to talk more. I open my mouth, but another cough occurs and almost chokes me. I run to the kitchen for some water.

Khh‑khh, Khh‑khhhhhh.

After I finally get my throat under control, I sit in the kitchen pondering what the old lady just said. Despite her weird attitude, I can’t help but think she is right. Why is my book so important to me, if it is meant to vanish someday? I’ve never thought that I could become Shakespeare, but even if I do, what is the point of future generations reading my book after my death? Is my work that important? Do I matter to th…

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At Midnight, I Wake Up as a Vampire is my new novel, published exclusively on Honeyfeed. It’s exclusive there because this is the piece of work I am sending to the writing contest co-hosted by the platform. To keep your (free) subscription worth its space in your email box, I’ll share with you some backstory and the creation of this novel every other week. This novel will finalize early May to meet the contest’s deadline.

Two things you must know about this title. First, it is a light novel. For those who are not familiar with it, it is a type of fictional literature particularly popular in Japan. It typically contains shorter chapters released across months. Light novels are often adapted into manga and anime besides their most common digital form as web novels. The assumption also affects how I write this story. It runs scene-to-scene and graphical in my head.

Second, it is a psychological horror. This genre cannot be mentioned without thinking of the “King of Horror” Stephen King, but I have to admit shamefully that I’ve not read any of his novels (I read a collection of his short stories, Everything’s Eventual, and I enjoyed it very much.) Therefore I consider myself a novice of horror novels. Nonetheless, I have had an attachment, nearly obsession, to horror games since I was a kid. The original Resident Evil 2, 3, and Code Veronica are my favorite games of all time (I am too young to have played Resident Evil 1. While I am typing this, I just put the title in my Steam shopping cart.) And I am half way in Silent Hill 2. Their horror might seen violent and graphical on the screen, but what got me was the story and the storytelling: how Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy separated by accident and by choice to navigate in (and under) the zombie city, or how James’ mind is trapped by his own darkness tangled with others’ (I still need to find that out in the game.) If I can emulate their horror in my text, I see great potential for my readers to like it.

I am not going to spoil your enjoyment of the novel, but you will receive some behind-the-scene notes in two weeks. That should be more fun if you read my novel first, so, please enter my world.

Chapter 7: What’s Cracking

I have been sleeping poorly for over two weeks since I went down to the basement. I started to cough occasionally. I suspected it was the mold in the basement, but I didn’t smell any when I was there, and it was very clean thanks to the rats — it might be leptospirosis, an infection carried by rats. I was exposed to a talking rat, after all. Who knows if his saliva is also infectious. The thought gives me another headache. My writing became extremely difficult due to my illness. My head is still clear, but I can’t have much creativity going on. My brain is like a dead pond with ripples caused by memories that refuse to still: my mom’s room in the basement and her fate. Danny said she died — or did he? — but how can I take it as the truth based on a rat’s words? And Danny is missing after the outbreak of the flood. So is Discussant. They didn’t respond to my calling and it was completely dark. As the water dropped in temperature, I had no choice but to leave them behind.

On top of my current miseries, the toilet on the south side of the house has been broken. I couldn’t manage to fix it. It is plugged no matter how I try. What’s worse, the water pipe under the sink is also leaking and I put a bucket to catch the drippings. The bucket gets full every week and I pour the water outside from the window. The only relief is that this house has two bathrooms. The other one is on the opposite side of the hallway. It has the same facilities, but the north-facing window doesn’t get any sunlight, so it is always rather dark even in the daytime. The high humidity also makes the bathroom weirdly uncomfortable, but I don’t feel I have any right to complain. Not many people have access to two bathrooms at home.

The bathroom is next to the architect’s room, well, my father’s work room. I usually don’t hear her behind the wall, but she seems much more vocal this morning. She sounds impatient, so I decide to check on her.

When I open the door, the architect is crawling on the giant work desk with a magnifying glass.

“Good morning. What are you looking for?” I ask.

She is surprised by my innocent question and answers me without raising her head:

“The future! I am looking at the future, but I don’t like what I see.” She doesn’t bother to give me more details.

“What do you see?”

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Part 1

Chapter 1: Another Morning

The sunlight brightens my room. Its reflection from the floor lights up the whole ceiling. That is what I can tell even before I open my eyes. I have been waking up like this for thirteen years straight; as far as I can recall, it’s always sunny.

I get up from the bed and change my clothes, basically from one set of pajamas to another, because I don’t go out, but I’d like to change for my daily routine. I write, but I am only a writer-to-be, because I am working on my very first book. No one would take me seriously until my name is on a book sitting on the display shelf facing the front window of bookstores. A printed book is like a certificate of your year-long hard work. Good job, it might say, but it remains silent for 99 percent of the time. It needs to be seen, read, and appraised. Then it starts talking again.

My morning routine starts with a glass of milk, so I go through the hallway to the kitchen. The kitchen also faces the south, and the tiles on the floor reflect the sunshine brightly that blinds me, every time. I take out a carton of milk from the fridge and pour it into a glass. The flow of the slightly dense white liquid sounds like a low drum giving a count-in for a song. The smell of it is the verse, and the taste is the chorus. It wakes up all my senses, and sometimes makes my stomach roar.

As I am still enjoying the song, I think I hear something else. It’s a man’s voice. I look out the window but all I can see is the blazing sunshine. I don’t think anyone is near my house this early. It’s only a quarter after 5 AM. I always get up early to have the clearest mind for my writing before anything goes into my head. But I can’t have my precious time anymore thanks to the unfamiliar voice from the living room. The man is in the house! I have never invited anyone to the house. I walk towards the living room to find out who is there. I don’t feel this man will be a threat because this is a peaceful neighborhood. He probably just walked into the wrong house and got confused.

The living room is between the kitchen and my bedroom. In there, I find the man standing on a soapbox, facing the sofa as he speaks. He is surprised by my presence and turns his head towards me.

“Ah, great! Another beloved listener. We are in the middle of the story of an elaborate hoax. Feel free to take a seat to join us!” says the man with abundant confidence. He extends his arm and points his palm to the sofa.

“We? Us? You are alone here. More importantly, why are you in my house?”

The man raises his eyebrows and turns his body towards me before he answers:

“Oh, a man with insatiable curiosity, even better. I’ll come back to that story later. Let’s start with your first question: why do you believe that I am alone? What if I am surrounded by ghosts, whom you simply cannot see, or swamped by voices in my head? Can you still say I am alone in each of the possibilities?”

“This is nonsense. I don’t care if you are alone in which sense. Forget it. How did you get in here?”

“This one is much easier to answer. I came in through the main door of the house. It wasn’t locked and it will never be – we welcome anyone to join the talk! I picked this room for its audience seats. It isn’t as spacious as I hoped, but I’m fine to start humble. It may take a few years, but eventually, I will speak to the world!”

“Humility is probably not your strong suit.” I say.

“A witty guy in my audience! I like it! Do you want a joke-off or should we roast each other? This will be a great advertisement for my speech!”

“Absurd. I am not doing any of those things. You know what? I will bear your existence if you stop talking to me. This house is big enough, but I need quiet. Just tell me who you are.”

“Sure, you need quiet for your writing! No problem! I have many names, but that’d be very confusing for my broad audience, so I picked out a stage name for myself. Ladies and gentlemen, and other identifications, I am Discussant!”

“Wow, the name is an understatement.” I surely hope he understands sarcasm. “But how do you know that I am writing?”

“Why do you think I know? Maybe it was just a good guess, because quietness is not much valued nowadays. Who would ever need it? You look too bland for a painter or any kind of visual artist, too casual for anything serious. So, the best bet is writer! Or do I just know?”

“Logic, magic, or telepathy, I don’t care. I could really use some quiet right now.” I shut the door and return to the kitchen, hoping that I can still enjoy the milk despite the loss of my tranquility. I still want to continue with my writing this morning.

Chapter 2: In the Library

“The meteor burning with greenish-blue fire hit the Atlantic on Earth, causing a huge wave that first pushed away everything and then drew them into a whirlpool. A boat cruising not far away was being tossed about. Three people on the deck held on to the railing, and the captain gripped the helm fiercely. Another wave came and turned the boat over. They all fell into the water that was illuminated with the meteor’s green light. The color crawled onto their bodies, before it faded away slowly as the meteor sank. The green light was gone when they swam up to the surface. They managed to return to the boat, which had been flipped back by another wave. They needed to fire an emergency flare, and fortunately found one in a box that was imper....”

I am missing the right word to put in this paragraph. Is it imperious or impervious? I’d better look it up in a dictionary. Across the hallway from my room is the library in this house. My father built it and filled it with countless books, most of which are about oriental philosophies. They are boring, so over the years I have put in more fiction and science books from all over the world. They are a lot more fun and helpful for the sci-fi I am writing right now.

I walk to the library. This is the largest room in the house, but it still looks cramped. Apart from books, the only thing one sees when entering the room is a ladder to the upper layer of the mezzanine, which leads to -- you guessed it -- more books. Since I use my dictionaries all the time, I shelved them on the lower floor. This is my proudest section. I collect dictionaries because of my fascination with words. One word can mean so many things, and one thing might be referred to by different words, each with its own nuance. I can never get tired of this game.

As I’m hunting for my target words, I hear a long sigh from the upper floor. Is it Discussant? Likely not, I can hardly imagine he breathes without spitting a word. I climb up the ladder to find out. With the shelves here, all manner of creatures can easily hide themselves in the library. You won’t believe that I once found a raccoon eating my favorite Captain America comics. But this time, I only find a girl sitting on the floor with a book in her hands.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Reading a book, obviously.” The girl with glasses doesn’t turn her head as she answers.

“Right, but why are you reading my books?”

“Your books? I don’t think you’ve written one, or at least, not yet.”

“Wait, why do you also know that I am writing a book?”

“If you want to talk to me, you’d better hit me with more interesting questions. Otherwise, I’d rather talk to the books.”

I am disconcerted by her attitude, especially after facing the haughtiness of Discussant just hours ago, but I decide to keep my manners.

“Alright, so, would you tell me what you are reading right now?”

“Look at this paragraph: ‘She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she was silent. But she talked for the sake of talking, and her talk was chiefly impervious and pert.’ I cannot believe it says impervious here. It should be imperious. What a lousy editor!”

I am astonished. She just gave me the words that I wanted to look up for my writing. Can this be a coincidence?

“So...do you just look through books and check for errors?”

“Not just, there are tons of things you need to do for the books. Yes, I proofread them, but I also vet their structure, verify their coherence, validate their references, and sometimes also vouch for the authenticity of their author.”

I am speechless. Did she just use four v-verbs? I can tell she prepared those words from the way she articulated them. That’s a bit annoying, but I have to say I am impressed.

“Fair enough, so you like the collection in this library?”

“There could be more books, but this is not shabby.”

“I’m glad that you appreciate it. It feels good that someone appreciates knowledge. It’s been the foundation of my life.”

“Knowledge? These are books. They convey information, not knowledge. You consume them and you contemplate. Then you construct your knowledge.”

Four con-verbs in a row.

“Alright, alright. I only meant to compliment you.” I say.

I heard it became hard to praise a woman’s look; I guess not only looks. She continues:

“Also, keep in mind that knowledge won’t serve you for everything in your life. There will be times when it is not about what you know.”

“And how do you know that?” I ask out of genuine wonder, because she looks no older than I am.

“I just know.” She answers with a self-satisfied mile on her face. “It has been said many times in books.”

“So you read about it, but you don’t really know it because you have not experienced it.” I retort.

She refuses to continue with the subject by rolling her eyes.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to continue my reading.” She says.

Now I notice her eyes have barely moved away from the book in her hand, well, until she rolled her eyes at me. Though we are in my house, her dedication makes me feel I am the person who is the intruder. I leave this girl alone, because I’ve got the answer to my word confusion for which I came here. As soon as my foot touches the lower floor, I hear a loud thud from behind the wall. That is my father’s work room. I hope I won’t have another hiccup today. I just want to keep writing. Yet a loud event in this house cannot be left unattended.

Chapter 3: Sandalwood Desk

My dad’s work room has been empty of his presence for as long as I can remember. I also don’t work there because it wasn’t designed for a writer. Aside from some photos on the walls showing the house’s construction, the room has no furniture but an absurdly large desk big enough to fit a horse. I’ll never know why on earth my dad acquired it. What I know is that it is a valuable wood desk. The room is always filled with the scent of the purple sandalwood. I’ve been told it’s very expensive and I hate to see it get wasted, so sometimes I just come to the room to appreciate its color and smell. On it lies the blueprint of this house, sprawled across a sheet the size of the desk. Those lines are like an endless puzzle. I cannot make sense of a single line of it.

I am shocked as I see an old woman leaning over the big desk, with her hands pushing its edge to keep her standing. Though her body is facing the door, she doesn’t notice my entrance.

“Who are you?” I can’t believe I am asking this question again.

“Gasp!” She almost drops to the floor as she screams. “You scared me, my dear. I didn’t see this one coming.”

“This one?”

“Oh pardon, I didn’t know another guest was coming.”

“What are you talking about? This is my house.”

“Yes, it is, sweetie pie, but I am in this room first.” The old lady must take a few more breaths before she can continue her words. “With no disrespect, that means you are a second guest to this room, and I am the first.”

Her logic puzzles me. Is that what she thinks or is she just a trickster? Meanwhile, I smell sandalwood — zen and steady. It seems to lower my guard.

“Fair enough, but still, who are you and what was the thud?” I ask.

She moves herself away from the desk before she answers. Now she’s standing with a hunched back, rising only to half my height.

“I can only answer your second question. While I was examining the blueprint of this house, I climbed up onto this magnificent desk to have a closer look. At this age, I can’t see anything clearly from a distance, and my reading glasses and a magnifier have become indispensable. Anyway, with a bit of extra determination, this old woman managed to haul herself up there. How thrilled I was to study the layout from this close. The clever designs of this house charmed me like an old song, beautiful enough to lead me to a cliff. That was exactly when I fell off. I don’t know whom to thank for the fact that I did not break my bones!”

She touches her back as if it still hurts, but something clicks in and she points her finger to a part on the giant piece of paper.

“Take a look here. Though the house was built on an uneven landscape, the layout of the main floor is symmetrical. That’s beautiful.”

“I doubt it. The library looks much bigger than other rooms.”

“Yes, it does, but the room on the opposite side is the same size.”

“It cannot be. It’s my room, and it’s only half as large at most.”

“That’s what I was talking about when I said clever designs. It’s just the visual impression. Thanks to the open design, the library looks really big, doesn’t it? Your room looks small because there is a room divider. It has two rooms.”

“What? You mean there is another room behind the wall?”

“Yes, the other one is a hidden room. I guess it’s been used as a storage room, but most importantly, it leads to the basement.”

“A basement!”

I am shocked to no end. After living in the house for more than a decade, I didn’t know there is a basement. This old lady, perhaps an architect, knows things.

“That’s what I said. Clever!”

After giving me a smile, one that a next-door grandma gives you when you are five, she pushes her glasses and buries her head into the blueprint again. I can tell she is deeply attracted by it. This is what I do when I write. I am fully absorbed by that piece of paper in front of me. It has a world for me. When I look at her, a thought surfaces in my head - I wish I could be her.

“Why can you not tell me who you are?” I ask with the eagerness to know more about her.

“I’m afraid it’d take too long to explain it to you, sweetie pie. I still want to study the blueprint here. Besides, don’t you have something important to do, like writing?”

“How do you know...never mind. It seems that every guest in this house knows I am writing.” I say it with a small dose of pleasure. I have kept my ambition of writing like a gem in a box, but it is now strangely known to them. Is it what fame feels like? The pride fuels my chattiness:

“I’d really love to know more about this house and you seem to be the right person to talk to.”

“Oh, sweetie pie.” she takes off her glasses before she continues. “I do not know a thing. I just intuit how things work. Look at me, an old woman who can barely climb the stairs and would rather not hobble out of the room. With the help of a blueprint, I encounter objects and space through my imagination. I can see myself wander this house up and down, appreciating its delicate architecture. Yet I won’t know how it feels to step on the squeaky wood floor, nor do I know how this house has been furnished. Perhaps, I should ask you about this house, don’t you think, sweetie pie?”

I wish my parents had taught me anything before they left the house for good. Much as been provided to me with this heritage. Yet I know so little about it.

“Well...there is a library, full of books. You must have known that, too...I’m afraid I don’t have anything to tell you. I’ve barely used other rooms in this house, and just now I learned there is a basement. I feel I know nothing.”

“There is knowing in admitting not knowing, child. Perhaps this is the day for you to find out. Why don’t you look into the basement and tell me what’s there? I’d be happy to know more about that. Meanwhile, I will further examine its beams and columns.”

“No, I must go back to…”

Before I can finish my sentence, she puts on her glasses and picks up the magnifier from the floor. Soon enough she seems absorbed in all the lines on the big piece of paper again. I feel overwhelmed by her dedication. This is what I strive for when I write. Can I become a person of such? I leave the room quietly. Her encouragement piques my curiosity about this house, but still, I must write this morning — a scream cuts my train of thoughts. I recognize the sound of Discussant, so I rush to the living room, where he is running in a circle and still screaming.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Gone, gone!” Discussant shrieks in a piercing pitch. “This cannot be! My soapbox is gone!”

Chapter 4: The Soap Show Must Go On

Discussant cries and cries, mixed with unrecognizable vocal sounds. His face wrinkles up like a dried plum. I feel it’d be heartless if I didn’t say anything to make him feel better.

“Hey, it’s just a box. We can find you another one.” This is the best consolation and suggestion I can give at this moment.

“It’s not jus’ a box; it’s my soooap box.” He mumbles through his tears. “I’ve been on it for every speech I gave.”

He slowly collapses onto the floor and buries his face in the carpet, adding to his dramatic desperation.

“If you are good at words, who cares where your feet are? We can improvise some items, like a pile of books…err, I’d rather you don’t. Bad idea. Perhaps I can move a ladder in the library to this room, so that you can stand even higher.”

Discussant turns his face up just enough to speak. “No…it wouldn’t be the same. A soapbox is a symbol of the place for the great public speakers. Hyde Park in London and Speaker’s corner in New York City. I should follow George Orwell and Martin Luther King. Though I might not be as great as they are, I shall devote my existence to them and dream the dream, which has just been shattered, for I don’t even have the soapbox to stand on! They didn’t stand on the ground when they spoke those beautiful words, and those places where the magic happened were no ordinary paved streets but the crossroad of the exceptional thinkers. Yes, thinkers, philosophers, or political enthusiasts, whatever you call them. They are shaped by the scenes composed of stage and audience. Without those, they would have been merely somebody known from the textbooks, who made history without making an impression.” Discussant looks to the ceiling as he speaks, as if his words would travel through the floors and the rooftop, and reach the sky. His eyes shine bright with the tears he holds. They look no more desperate but hopeful. I think it’s a good chance to fill him with some opportunism.

“I understand now, but you know what? Don’t waste a crisis. How about you build another stage, with an even bigger box? I’m sure your audience can wait for it and will appreciate it more than they already do.” Honestly I don’t know who “they” are, not to mention how they feel, but I decide to play his game.

Discussant jumps up with his arms and legs. “You’re right! I shall have a stage as large as the sandalwood desk in another room. Wow, that thing is magnificent! And I know where to find materials for it — the basement! The extra building materials are usually kept in the cellar. If we are lucky, we might find some sandalwood.” He says, like a kid ready for a treasure hunt.

“Hm, of course you also know about the basement.” I already figured that these “guests” know more than I do. “But who are we?”

“You and me, of course.” He says while putting both hands on my shoulders. His hands are too big for his small body. This gesture looks funny to me because he is significantly shorter than me, which I didn’t notice when he was on the soapbox earlier today.

“Oh, I’m afraid I cannot. I still have writing to do. Besides, digging in the dark isn’t my cup of tea.” I make an excuse.

Discussant puts one of his arms around my shoulder, standing on his toes. “Don’t be a show stopper, my friend. It is time to fight against your biggest fear.”

“You mean darkness? I am not afraid of it. I just don’t like being in the dark. The loss of visual sense feels ominous to me.”

“I am not talking about darkness, my friend. Tell me, why have you not walked out of the house even once? Actually, tell me not; I know exactly why, but do you? You’d say you’ve been writing, but does that forbid you from exploring the outside world? You tied yourself to your desk while the world is spinning, so that you don’t get pulled away from the center, but where is the pivot? Is it where you are or is it where my speech takes place? The more you know, the more ignorant you realize you are. Here is your nemesis, my friend — fear of knowing.”

Discussant swings around every corner of the room while he speaks, or more like sings the words, raising his arms in the air as if it were a solo waltz dance. He finishes the last sentence right when he returns to me with one hand on my shoulder and another on my wrist. His eyes look up to my face, like a dog waiting for approval.

I pick up the hand he has on my wrist and I put my other hand on his wrist, moving backward to make him follow. I raise our held hands to turn him around while he bursts out laughing. I lower my arm around his wrist so he leans down a bit for a finishing posture.

“I didn’t know you can dance, my friend!”

“Finally, there is something you people don’t know.”

The improvised dance is to please me more than him, to get over his words belittling me. Fear of knowing? That’s nonsense. I do things I barely know as well, like dancing. His nagging words somehow spark my vigor.

“What do you say? Let’s jump into the unknown, the basement. Admit that you are a little bit curious, too.” Discussant says like a kid. He has loosened up from his high posture.

“I think, ” I let go of my grip on him. He almost falls. “I can also dance in the dark.”

Chapter 5: The Foundation and the Diligent Worker

Discussant leads the way to my room with bouncy steps. He walks with open arms and short legs and obviously knows the orientation of the house. In my bedroom, we face the wall to which my bed and a closet are adjacent. There is no sign of a secret chamber behind the wall, which allegedly leads to the basement I know nothing of. While I inspect the wall, Discussant is just swinging his arms from left to right and right to left.

“I cannot figure this out. Are you going to help?” I ask with some impatience. After all, it was his idea to break my writing routine for this unnecessary venture.

“I can’t.” His arms stop. He answers with believable innocence. “I am not an explorer; I am a thinker.”

And I am a writer. Without the courage to utter those words, I say them in silence and put my hands on the white wall to look for any hidden doors. The gritty wall feels warmer than it looks. I cannot find anything intriguing about the wall. If there is a room behind it, how can I get into it? The puzzle becomes simple once I assume the architect is right, because the wardrobe is the only piece of furniture next to the wall that can serve as a façade. I push it aside to see if there is a secret door. I was so sure I would find it, but there is nothing. I check the wall again and again. I start to doubt the architect’s words. Maybe she is just making a story.

Meanwhile Discussant starts to swing his arms again. He hums a song at a low volume, which I cannot recognize, but the mysterious melody brings a name to my mind:

“C. S. Lewis.”

I utter the name involuntarily as I look at the wardrobe I just moved. This is a wild thought, but isn’t it wild enough to have three strangers that have nothing in common in the house without a single invitation? I’ll give it a try. In the worst case, I am just making a fool of myself and I couldn’t care less about the humming man’s judgement.

I open the doors of the wardrobe and walk into it.

It’s all dark in there. I don’t expect the smell of my clothes to be this intense. They smell like my room, but the odor is a lot stronger. There is more. I think I can smell something else. I take a few steps forward to follow the smell, and I know my wardrobe isn’t that wide. This is magical. I am now in a space that is apparently larger than the closet as no clothes swing beside me anymore and the familiar smell is gone. Instead, it is the smell of humidity.

“What’s in there?” I hear Discussant in the room from a distance, and his shouting creates an echo in this hidden chamber. I sense it is larger than a small storage room I saw on the blueprint.

“Come in. There is a room in here. Bring a flashlight.”

I don’t realize the magic created more than a room until Discussant brings in light. He hands over the flashlight, and I look around with it. The light doesn’t even hit a wall. Only the same wood floor and the dusty air are visible. We walk a bit further and I try walking straight so that we can return to the closet without getting lost. After around fifty steps, something in front reflects the light. I take a few more steps to find out it’s a mirror on a vanity table. It’s fairly old-fashioned. Furniture lies around it. There is also a bed, a cradle, and some simple kitchen equipment. Setting aside all the extra space around them, the setup looks like a bedroom.

I cannot quite figure out where I am or even if I am still in the house. I look around, but there is nothing much to see here. The smell also isn’t the best. As I am pondering if I should walk back to the wardrobe, some noises occur. They sound like hurried barefoot steps. I keep looking around until I realize that the sound is from below. Is that the basement? Just when I wonder, a shadow appears from the foot of the bed and bumps into my feet. I refrain from screaming but I still hear a scream.

“Ouwwa!”

It’s a big rat in front of me, but the scream is not from Discussant. Is it from it?

“What the...” I swear involuntarily.

“Hey! You blocked my way!” Clearly, the rat has a voice! It continues: “Just move your feet and we’ll be cool.”

“No, not so fast. You are a talking rat!”

“And you are a talking human. What’s new here?”

While still in shock, I try collecting myself. A talking rodent is not the worst thing I can think of in a magical closet.

“Pardon me, then. I’ve never talked to a rat before.”

“Me not so much with a human, but the nice lady and I used to have good conversations. She was hard-working as I am.”

“You mean a woman used to live in this room?”

“Yes, she took care of the furniture and food supplies. I didn’t need to do much back then. I just talked to her. She taught me how to maintain this basement. I think she knew there would be an end to her. I am not sure if she knew it’d be this quick.”

The rat has no rich facial muscles to express emotions, but I hear the sadness in its voice.

The woman who used to live in the house. It can only be my mom.

“I’m sorry to hear that, my friend.” Discussant cuts in. “But I need to get this straight before I can loosen up my tight arms and legs again. Where are we really?”

“This is the basement. The house is above us.”

“This cannot be. We didn’t take a step downwards.”

“Humans are slow.” The rat shrugs and shows his palms. “You just walked down a slope.”

Another shock. First the magical wardrobe, then a talking rat, and now knowing that my mom used to live in the basement. How many shocks can one take within a few minutes without a heart attack?

“But why would the woman live in the basement and not upstairs?”

“Well, I have no time to think about the past. I have a house to fix.” The rat pushes his sorrow away, putting his hands on the floor, ready to move on.

“Hold on.” I put my foot in front of his direction. “Are you fixing the house? What needs fixing and how do you do it?”

“You have no idea! The basement is the foundation of the house. It sinks if the supporting structure gets rusted or corroded . The water leaks in if a hole in the waterproof layers is left unattended.”

“Leaving a hole sounds like what a rat does.” I say.

“Nonsense! We fix the holes.” The rat objects, twisting its face while standing up with its back feet.

“We? There are more of you?”

“How rude! You think a rat is just another rat, don’t you? You don’t even know the house would have collapsed long time ago, soon after the lady died, if there had not been us.”

“Sorry, so you guys have been working on the house, but where are they?”
“Downstairs. In fact, I need to return to there. I feel insecure about it if I am gone for too long. Those dummies get distracted easily and they might start a wood fight.”

Discussant closes in on the rat and says: “Wood? You have it stocked?”

“Can I follow you?” I am curious now, too.

“Technically, you can’t, unless you can walk through the tubes, but—” The rat moves fast forward, and my light follows. It stops somewhere not far away. “you can open this piece of flooring and you’ll find stairs. It’s a hidden door the lady used to use.”

My mom used to use it. I talk to myself and open the hidden door.

“Oh, by the way, I am Danny. Now follow me.”

Chapter 6: Down the Rat Hole

I am left speechless when I see what is in the second level of the basement. It’s full of rats, but incredibly tidy. The rubble and twigs are piled in two rows and stones are stacked on the other side of the room. Due to the darkness, I cannot see the floor clearly, but I believe it is spotless because even the air smells free from dust, very different from the upper level I just visited. It might be cleaner than my room and kitchen.

“Hey, buddies, I’m back. So, everything is fine above, but look what I found. The big feet were tap-dancing upstairs.” Danny’s voice emerges in the darkness.

“Eeeeeeek!!” Squeaking sounds from the crowd follow Danny’s joke.

“Folks, light up for our unnecessary guests.“

A few more squeaks. Then a couple of sharp cracks. Sparks flicker here and there. Torches flare around us.

“Look at our work here, big feet. We use the rubble and stones to fix any cracks that we find in the basement. You will be surprised to know how many cracks we have found and how often we have to source the materials.”

“Where do you get the materials? I suppose you all live inside the basement.”

“We are rats. What options do we have? We dig. We unearth the corners of the basement as long as it’s safe for the foundation, of course. That’s why this floor is actually much bigger than what we started. We also benefit from the bigger space because it can accommodate more of us, but that also means more work. We are never done!”

“Are they your kids?”

“I cannot remember. Two more rats appear every time I blink. Does it matter? You have what you have and you carry on your work, your life, and your generation. There is no past. There is now. And now is time to work!”

Danny runs away and starts to move the stone beside the pile, or he is trying. The stone is bigger than he is and it’d take his life to move it across the room.

“How about I carry that stone for you and you tell me more about this house?”

“Huh! I could have done this by myself, but I would have been rude to a rare guest if I said no. You can go ahead.”

Danny moves aside. I move forward to lift the stone. He keeps on talking as we move across the floor. Discussant follows behind and turns his head left and right.

“Well, there are of course more than what you see. We also collect dirt and soil, but we have not figured out how to use them. We even found some pipes. I suppose it’s part of the water piping for the house, but there were probably spare ones if you haven’t had drainage problems. Oh, yeah, we also have to move the twigs downstairs to heat up the house.”

“Wait, you guys are heating the house? I have always wondered why the house does not get cold in winter.”

“Now you know how important we are, don’t you?” says Danny with an ego wildly disproportionate to his size. “Well, the heating warms us up, too. Nothing is fully altruistic, not any work in the world.”

“How much do you know about the world? I thought you had never left the basement.”

“This is just common sense, dumbhead!”

I don’t appreciate a sass-powered rodent, but I still need him to show me the way.

“Can you show me the heater? I am curious.”

“Of course. Let’s finish this one and carry some twigs downstairs.”

“Wait.” Discussant suddenly speaks up. “Don’t burn the good planks! I want them for my soapbox.”

“If you want some planks for us, we have to trade. We could use some hard labor.”

When he says this, I think he expects us to do the heavy lifting.

—

Discussant and I carry two big piles of twigs on the shoulder while walking carefully down by the ladder. The heating room turns out to be less interesting than I initially thought. Apart from a giant water heater twice as tall as I am and a water container that can fit two elephants; the space looks otherwise empty. The floor is lit by the burning fire but I still can’t see any walls. How can the basement be this size?

“We built this.” Danny says.

“What? The heater?”

“Yes.”

“No, you can’t. You can’t even move a rock properly. The heater is made of bricks and clay. Besides, how can you possibly possess the knowledge required?”

“Eeeeeek!” Danny squeaks loudly. Though he can’t put a smile on his rodent face, I realize he was joking.

“The lady that lived upstairs built this. It took her years. That was before we guys moved in, for we couldn’t have survived in the house without the warmth and water. She drilled a well so that we continuously have water. All we need to do is to keep the fireplace burning.”

My mom built this. I don’t remember her much, but I’ve been given her legacy without knowing it.

“She was nice.” Danny says it with a quavering voice.

“But she left, without saying a word.” I react with a bit of unexpected anger.

“She suffered. The last few weeks were painful to her. She also didn’t tell us when she left the house that day – you know, we work at night and sleep in the daytime. She’s just gone. Everyone was confused. Retrospectively, I think she knew she would die, but she didn’t know how to face it, with us, probably also with whoever else was in the house.”

I cannot find a word to respond.

It is just too much for one day. First the unknown basement, then a talking rat. Now the untold story of my mom, whom I barely know.

“I need fresh air.” I say, though what I actually need is a break. “And we can bring back the planks we earn.”

I look at Discussant, expecting him to be happy about it, but he just stares at the fireplace with his mouth slightly open. So rare seeing him without his voice.

“You humans just aren’t built for the underworld. We keep this place spotless and you won’t even find dust. Yet you say you need fresh air! I’ll lead the way, but I have to come back to work. The winter is coming, so we are gonna burn more wood logs to warm the house and your lazy bones!”

It does not sound nice to my ears, but I appreciate that he respects my will. I guess whoever keeps the house warm is entitled to some swagger.

After Danny finishes his irritating words, he helps other rats add some more twigs to the fireplace. I don’t know why I expected him to show me the way out. Perhaps I thought he had a hard shell with a soft heart, because he seemed attached to my mom and he has been maintaining her legacy. But I guess I matter little to him and he has every right to be that way, because I have not done anything for the house. It’s hard to grasp all the work that has been done to keep the house habitable.

I am lost in thought as the place gets much warmer. The fire crackles louder and brighter. I can see more in the room now. We are surrounded by different kinds of wood: hardwoods, softwoods, bamboo, and straw. How can they possibly have those exotic types? I don’t ponder that question for too long before I notice Discussant is not next to me anymore. He is standing close to the fireplace, gazing into it. It takes me a few more seconds to realize that it is not the fire that mesmerizes him but the wood thrown to burn. Two rats are carrying a golden-brown plank from the stack. As they are about to throw it into the fire, Discussant screams:

“Sandalwooooood!”

Discussant pushes one of the rats away and grips the plank. The two rats are startled, and they run away quickly as rats do. One of them runs into the stack and causes it to collapse. A couple of wood logs fall on the ground and roll in different directions. One of them heads towards Danny. He squeaks and jumps high to dodge it. Another log goes to the fireplace. Discussant is so focused on the plank in his hands that he fails to notice the coming log. At the very last millisecond, he dodges the rolling log, which hits the fireplace as a result. The momentum pushes away a few burning pieces of wood and they scatter around with a flicker of light, brightening up Discussant’s pale face for half a second. He cradles his precious sandalwood plank and runs away from the fireplace. More rats emerge from the dark corners, standing at a distance to observe the scene.

“Move away the stacks! Hurry!” Danny shouts.

Some woodchips catch the scattered fire and start to burn, but the rats isolate them quickly to avoid a chain reaction. While some rats start to roll away some logs from he danger zone, others are still running around without making themselves useful. The fireplace is the center of the circus in which rats are showing their tricks. I decide to step in and pick up the pile of twigs close to the fire and carry them away. At the corner, I find Discussant crouching, holding the plank, and shaking.

“Are you ok?” I ask.

He doesn’t respond, at least not with words. His eyes tell me he is more than startled. He is incapable of any reaction now.

A few rats run by us hastily, making noises louder than one would think those tiny feet can make. Some run into each other and their bodies hit the floor with a crash. Despite the ongoing circus, the scattered fire is now away from any combustibles and its brightness fades slowly.

“C’mon, Discussant. It’s all good now. We can leave.”

He still crouches in silence. I pull him up gently with both arms. His legs are too weak to provide any support. I drag his dead weight to get him moving forward. After only a few tiny steps, my breathing grows harsher in the thin air in the basement.

“You need to move your legs, Discussant.”

He is not moving them. I take a few more labored steps and get more frustrated. He has a lot of weight for someone so small, compounded by the sandalwood plank in his arms.

“If you are not making an effort,” I bark, “we aren’t leaving with that damn plank.”

Those words finally revive his vigor. I can feel his body getting lighter as his legs start to hold up. We walk a bit further to look for the ladder, but the fire is no longer so bright and I cannot find it. I look towards the fireplace and we are too far to see anything but the humongous water tank. The fire is weak. Some rats show up around us, carrying some twigs and heading to the fire.

We stumble on some rats carrying another piece of golden-brown wood. Discussant gets agitated again and frees one of his hands to grab it. The rats resist this time, biting his hand. Discussant screams and slaps the rats. More rats run towards us to defend their fellows or to avenge them.

“Stop! You are provoking them. Let them pass by!”

Discussant neither sees me nor hears me. He is blinded by his obsession with the wood plank, or to be exact, with the soapbox he is wishing for. He swings his arm to get rid of the rats whose teeth have pierced his skin. He screams again and throws his arm up and down. Some rats fall onto the floor, but more start to crawl over his body. In apparent great pain, he lets go of both planks and runs around. His screams gradually turn into painful whining. I hesitate over whether I should stop him or let him shake off the rats and the pain they cause, but soon he runs furiously into the water tank. It tilts and spills some water. The splash is ominously loud. The rats are startled by the sound, or the liquid, or both.

“Hold the tank!” Danny’s voice rises above the noise.

The rats come towards the water tank as it keeps tipping. Dozens of rats show up at the falling side of the tank, trying to hold it. I run towards it to give them a hand, but I am too late. The container tips over and the water spreads out like a dam bursting, putting out the fire. I feel the warm water dampening my feet and legs in the dark, and I hear the rats running into all corners. I breathe in the moist air a few times to slow down my beating heart before I can speak again.

“Discussant, are you ok?”

There is no response.

—

On the very same night I visited the basement, I had this weird dream. It was so weird that I decided to write it down. I don’t know what it meant. I don’t know if I would ever know.

In the dream, I am fourteen years old. I know it because I go to the same school as I actually attended, but I don’t feel the same. I am…dumb. I can’t do math, I can’t read literature, and I definitely cannot write. I fail at everything in school and go home in frustration. There awaits my mother, who died before I reached this age. She doesn’t speak to me, but instead, she lets another unknown woman talk to me. This young, seemingly nice lady becomes my tutor. She and I sit at the desk and talk about what happens at school, while my mother just stands there watching. This still isn’t so wrong until the tutor explodes right in front of me. There is no blood and flesh but a giant bubble in rainbow colors. It keeps getting bigger and I fall off the chair and I crawl away from it. My mother stands there without moving an inch and the bubble soon absorbs her. Now the rainbow hues almost fill all my vision and I try to get up and run away from it, but it’s too late. The bubble grows so rapidly and it is about to touch me. The thought of being merged into everything else crosses my mind, but something else happens. The bubble bursts and the rainbow water floods the entire room. I float in it and swim to the window. I slide it open to let the water out. In no time, all the colorful water goes out through the window and the gap beneath the door. I stand in the room alone.

Now I should mop the floor.

I called the print function with those words before I went to work. I was once again scheduled for a map-reduce function, which was to detect anomalies in the server activities. I wouldn’t do it alone, of course, because I was just a variable carrying system logs. My job was to pass them to the other classes. I had to talk to quite a few variables according to the algorithm. If we all followed the plan, the return was guaranteed.

I loaded the logs from yesterday before I left my class and jumped to another one. We variables could visit any memory locations instantly, but, of course, not all of the locations were allowed. In fact, I had only visited a tiny bit of them, all within the same module. I talked to an old variable once, and he (our genders follow that of who programs us) told me that the entire matrix was huge, beyond what I could imagine, bigger than any arrays I had seen. I had a variable length so I was curious how much I could possibly expand if there was so much memory in the matrix. I wanted to ask him how to go outside the module, but he was deleted from the code before I could see him again.

The variables in ThreatPatternAnalyzer were not the most interesting ones. eventStream asked me to speak slowly, sentence by sentence, so it always took me a long time before I finished the logs. patternWindow was a nice girl who joined us recently. She would group my logs in the smartest way before passing them to suspiciousSequenceCache, who was the most nagging guy. His job was to handpick the potential threats in the logs, but he was so paranoid that he used to overflow his cache all the time. It was resolved after the girl joined and limited the number of sequences he needed to see. Finally, he talked to intrusionFlags, who would raise or lower his flags based on what he saw. Fortunately, he was a very prudent person unlike his colleague. He narrowed down all the he-thinks-suspicious stuff into a few types of threats and raised their flags accordingly. He gave out an array of Booleans, most of which were always false, except one which was true periodically. We all thought it was just a bug and our programmers learned to ignore it. That annoyed our logger who had to write it down every time it happened.

I cleared my value before I returned to my class. During my break, a few words surfaced in my memory. Since I had no permission to write to files, I had them printed to console:

“Your kisses mean the world to me. The touch of your tips lingers. I crave for more from you, both of you.”

I didn’t know what kisses feel like. Obviously I couldn’t really kiss anyone. I imagined it would be like the TCP 3-way handshake, but even the handshake was too complex for a single variable to comprehend. I simply didn’t know where those words came from.

At night, we were mostly off duty, but tonight was different. We had a big party in the back office for the coming software release. It was an exciting night for many because they might get a new feature. Sometimes we saw a new colleague like patternWindow who joined us in the last release. Other times we lost old members, like the ancient variable whom I talked to and whose name I couldn’t remember. Luckily it didn’t happen often. I used to see the party as nothing more than a ritual to welcome the new, allowing them to show what they had. We’d work on rehearsals to see if we were compatible as a big family. There were also times that some weirdos just couldn’t fit in and got deleted soon after, and everything went back to as it was the day before.

The night was hectic for a couple of minutes. I ran in and out of the classes and jumped between them. I said hi to almost all the other variables, many of which I didn’t even see in daytime. With some, I had to perform some tricks. I mocked logs with some non-Latin characters and saw if the eventStream could handle it. We did this every night so I no longer worried about him. In no time I jumped to the next class, GlyphCorrelationEngine. I only came to this class at night. It was designed to identify glyphs in my carried logs, which could be potentially contaminated by users with words like “sh!t” or “cr@p”, but our programmers forgot to invoke this class’s function in production. Nonetheless it remained as a part of the party.

I had known glyphSignalPair for a long time. They were the only variable in this class. I said “they” because they were a tuple made up of two guys. glyphSignalPair[0] was a bit bossy and hardheaded. I thought that was why he took the lead, even though the two did a similar job. glyphSignalPair[1] had a gentle personality, soft like #FFFFCC, a soft sun-washed yellow, which didn’t catch my attention at first but gradually drew me in. The pair scanned through me byte by byte every time I came. It felt weird the first few times, but we all got used to it. I started to make jokes while we were doing it, and they received them well. glyphSignalPair[0] always gave a restrained smile to my joke. That made me want a challenge: getting him to crack a laugh. glyphSignalPair[1] was the easier one. He liked to ping-pong my jokes with a smirk. It honestly felt so great that we could communicate like that alongside those assignments.

What they did to me was quite ticklish. Each of them would shout an integer value after reading a word in my log. If the values matched, that meant the word contained a glyph. Because I always carried the same mocked logs, I bet they could memorize all the calls, but they did their job diligently.

77, 77

That was the first glyph, “c0ck”.

Read more

After Danny finishes his irritating words, he helps other rats add some more twigs to the fireplace. I don’t know why I expected him to show me the way out. Perhaps I thought he had a hard shell with a soft heart, because he seemed attached to my mom and he has been maintaining her legacy. But I guess I matter little to him and he has every right to be that way, because I have not done anything for the house. It’s hard to grasp all the work that has been done to keep the house habitable.

I am lost in thought as the place gets much warmer. The fire crackles louder and brighter. I can see more in the room now. We are surrounded by different kinds of wood: hardwoods, softwoods, bamboo, and straw. How can they possibly have those exotic types? I don’t ponder that question for too long before I notice Discussant is not next to me anymore. He is standing close to the fireplace, gazing into it. It takes me a few more seconds to realize that it is not the fire that mesmerizes him but the wood thrown to burn. Two rats are carrying a golden-brown plank from the stack. As they are about to throw it into the fire, Discussant screams:

“Sandalwooooood!”

Discussant pushes one of the rats away and grips the plank. The two rats are startled, and they run away quickly as rats do. One of them runs into the stack and causes it to collapse. A couple of wood logs fall on the ground and roll in different directions. One of them heads towards Danny. He squeaks and jumps high to dodge it. Another log goes to the fireplace. Discussant is so focused on the plank in his hands that he fails to notice the coming log. At the very last millisecond, he dodges the rolling log, which hits the fireplace as a result. The momentum pushes away a few burning pieces of wood and they scatter around with a flicker of light, brightening up Discussant’s pale face for half a second. He cradles his precious sandalwood plank and runs away from the fireplace. More rats emerge from the dark corners, standing at a distance to observe the scene.

“Move away the stacks! Hurry!” Danny shouts.

Some woodchips catch the scattered fire and start to burn, but the rats isolate them quickly to avoid a chain reaction. While some rats start to roll away some logs from the danger zone, others are still running around without making themselves useful. The fireplace is the center of the circus in which rats are showing their tricks. I decide to step in and pick up the pile of twigs close to the fire and carry them away. At the corner, I find Discussant crouching, holding the plank, and shaking.

“Are you ok?” I ask.

He doesn’t respond, at least not with words. His eyes tell me he is more than startled. He is incapable of any reaction now.

A few rats run by us hastily, making noises louder than one would think those tiny feet can make. Some run into each other and their bodies hit the floor with a crash. Despite the ongoing circus, the scattered fire is now away from any combustibles and its brightness fades slowly.

“C’mon, Discussant. It’s all good now. We can leave.”

He still crouches in silence. I pull him up gently with both arms. His legs are too weak to provide any support. I drag his dead weight to get him moving forward. After only a few tiny steps, my breathing grows harsher in the thin air in the basement.

“You need to move your legs, Discussant.”

He is not moving them. I take a few more labored steps and get more frustrated. He has a lot of weight for someone so small, compounded by the sandalwood plank in his arms.

“If you are not making an effort,” I bark, “we aren’t leaving with that damn plank.”

Those words finally revive his vigor. I can feel his body getting lighter as his legs start to hold up. We walk a bit further to look for the ladder, but the fire is no longer so bright and I cannot find it. I look towards the fireplace and we are too far to see anything but the humongous water tank. The fire is weak. Some rats show up around us, carrying some twigs and heading to the fire.

We stumble on some rats carrying another piece of golden-brown wood. Discussant gets agitated again and frees one of his hands to grab it. The rats resist this time, biting his hand. Discussant screams and slaps the rats. More rats run towards us to defend their fellows or to avenge them.

“Stop! You are provoking them. Let them pass by!”

Discussant neither sees me nor hears me. He is blinded by his obsession with the wood plank, or to be exact, with the soapbox he is wishing for. He swings his arm to get rid of the rats whose teeth have pierced his skin. He screams again and throws his arm up and down. Some rats fall onto the floor, but more start to crawl over his body. In apparent great pain, he lets go of both planks and runs around. His screams gradually turn into painful whining. I hesitate over whether I should stop him or let him shake off the rats and the pain they cause, but soon he runs furiously into the water tank. It tilts and spills some water. The splash is ominously loud. The rats are startled by the sound, or the liquid, or both.

“Hold the tank!” Danny’s voice rises above the noise.

The rats come towards the water tank as it keeps tipping. Dozens of rats show up at the falling side of the tank, trying to hold it. I run towards it to give them a hand, but I am too late. The container tips over and the water spreads out like a dam bursting, putting out the fire. I feel the warm water dampening my feet and legs in the dark, and I hear the rats running into all corners. I breathe in the moist air a few times to slow down my beating heart before I can speak again.

“Discussant, are you ok?”

There is no response.

What can you do with 10 and a half years? Is it ever enough for one to become a person of a foreign nation? I am not talking about its passport or its immigration laws. Neither do I want to discuss their rituals, but the bigger question: when, how, and why one is considered as a member of a country. I argue that it can be answered neither by how they live, nor by how people see them; the former stays undefined, and the latter falls into a recursive error. There seems to be no better time to contemplate that during the one and a half weeks while having a vacation in my birthplace, Taiwan, on the verge of my German naturalization.

I have to warn you that I am not going to sugarcoat things. Every little thing in Taiwan irritates me, and I blame it on the 27 years of my life in which I lived there. I know the place too well. Taiwanese people can be nice, just as all the foreign visitors say, but they are also nagging and accusatory. Here is a conversation I had with a bus driver in Taichung:

“Can I pay with my debit card for two passengers?”

“Can you pay for two with one debit card? What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“See. That means you can’t.”

I wouldn’t necessarily say that was rude, but I thought he was bossy and confusing at best. To say the least, I failed to see any beauty in this exchange of words, nothing like the catchy saying: “The most beautiful scenery in Taiwan is people.” What did I miss here? I enjoyed the beach at the north-east coast and the cliffs and trails at Taroko, but I was just not fond of the Taiwanese roughness and carelessness, which was supposed to be a superior experience according to the remark. Just as I was ready to leave my small-minded take behind before my return flight to Germany, I was informed at the airport check-in desk that I had no other choice than a seat with a broken onboard entertainment system. As compensation, I could choose either 2000 extra miles added to my account (this might be worth 20 dollars if you spend it wisely) or a coupon of 50 dollars for onboard purchase. Neither seemed fair for a compromised 14-hour journey. I restrained my frustration, pondering the possibility of making a scene to fight for a better compensation --- we grew up with that instinct and saw it succeed time and time again. But I passed. It’s unlikely I fly with EVA air, a Taiwanese airline, again anytime soon. I walked away with a coupon without looking at their faces. Later I realized they didn’t say anything apologetic in the entire conversation. That was standard for them to pay off their customers cheaply without real money. I felt mistreated, but my anger soon turned into something else when I arrived at the boarding gate. As expected, the flight was full, and there were only limited seats for passengers to wait for the boarding call. With people sleeping with their legs on the couch, even fewer sitting spots were available. When the “first come, first serve” spirit is at its extreme, you don’t care about what happens to those who come second. I despise it. I despise them. I might even despise Taiwanese people as a whole. That was my voice I heard in my head. Then came a sense of shame that I was a Taiwanese person, too. The shame invoked another voice saying harshly that you could leave if you didn’t like it. That is the rebuke I have heard a thousand times from Taiwanese people when a foreigner says something bad about Taiwan. They cannot bear the fact that Taiwan is just another place. The anxiety of Taiwanese people is rooted in in the illusion of the uniqueness of its political status (we are the western world’s best ally,) its culture (we develop it on an island like nothing else,) its food (we eat one-of-a-kind, sharing little with China,) and its people (we are the nicest people among all countries.) Disillusion can be disastrous, but (un)fortunately, uniqueness isn’t hard to pretend, because each of us is unique thanks to individualism. Taiwanese society behaves exactly like an individual. You’ll notice everyone cares about the same recent hot topics after talking to a handful of people. That helps enhance a highly homogeneous culture in which everyone knows everything one should know. If you look at Taiwan in that view, it’s indeed quite unique. We are spared from waking from our daydream.

It’s believed by existential therapists that humans strive for authenticity to overcome the anxiety of mortality. That belief creates a mirage if we are not careful: everyone can die, but I can’t, because I’m special. That’s a perfect reflection of the anxious Taiwanese people about their country’s existence, but I am putting myself in the spotlight now. Am I making myself special by becoming a Taiwanese-German, and is that “merely” to avoid facing my forthcoming death? I find the argument surprisingly compelling, because I actually have had the idea of obtaining a third citizenship somewhere. That serves no other purpose than making me, or at least my nationality, special. Yet it’s obviously absurd to devote one’s life to something like that. If death is inevitable, why run? But if death were avoidable, would I have done what I did, and wouldn’t it be a shame if I wouldn’t have? The fear of mortality is like a double-edged sword that conquers hardship as much as it unsettles our peace. It was at least a partial reason why I came to Germany and settled down in Berlin, eager to experience more than living on a big island in my very limited life.

It wasn’t until two years ago that I realized that I was a first-generation immigrant. I had no striking backstory of riding a raft across the sea or hiding in a truck with twenty other strangers. Nor had I worked my ass off only to feed my new family and to send money to the ill grandparents. Yet I had the first-hand struggle of merging in a foreign society, and I made that explicit choice to go through it. This notion hints a flicker of freedom, for a non-agentic person wouldn’t bother to fight against conformity. Down the path I see the light: I become a German by choice, and it’s an act. Instead of complying with the existing German society, I shape the society with what I bring to the table, and I cannot overlook the fact that most of the things I bring are from where I have lived. For better or worse, this isn’t a choice: I am weaving the new German society with my old thread, hopefully with some mindful needle work.

I expect your disappointment before I write my last paragraph. There is no patriotism, nationalism, or liberalism in this text. I should have warned you that this isn’t a typical essay on one’s nationality. That being said, what defines nationality should not be the country behind its name, but the person that is presented to you. I, now a German, write to you and tell you the story of how I feel about my origin and how I am going to live on this land. That sounds very German to me.

Just when I thought I found my answer, a friend who saw a photo of me at the ceremony noticed that the cover of my citizenship paper was printed with “Berlin” not “Deutschland.” The country’s name carries such heavy baggage that won’t evaporate in the foreseeable future. With respect to those who have long struggled, my decade-long quest to become a German should be considered short. I should show the same respect, if not more, to my Taiwanese people. Ultimately, we all are just on a journey to become something vaguely or falsely defined and someone we won’t understand until the end.

“You are taking all the space!” he said.

“Me? Are you kidding me? I can’t reduce my size. I am a chemist, not an alchemist.” She said it playfully.

“Well, how about you take half a step outside so that I can squeeze in?”

“So that we are both half wet?” She burst out laughing. Non-stop.

“Use my bag. You are small, the bag should cover you.” The man said it as he took the bag off his back. He also walked a bit closer near the doorway.

“Wait, don’t push. I am gonna slip over!” She said, but she was not going to.

“Take the bag!”

“OK...wait, it’s not even waterproof!” she said as the rain started to leak through and dropped on her face.

“Well, that’s what you have.” he said it mischievously.

Two men with wings on their backs stood on the bus stop shelter on the opposite side of the street, holding an umbrella in their hand.

“I hate rain.” said the short man.

“God gave us umbrellas for a reason.” said the handsome man with a beard.

“I know, but it leaves my arm sore.” he switched the umbrella from one hand to the other as he continued: “Why do they have to die in the rain?”

“It’s not God’s choice, Dennis. Accidents happen.”

“I know, but Pierre, it’s unfair to your girl and my guy. Don’t you think? They get run over by a bus spinning on the slippery road because the driver presses the brake fully to dodge a kid showing up from nowhere at the crossroad. What a tragedy!”

“Enough, Dennis! How dare you say it’s a tragedy when the two are going to Heaven? That’s why we are here, to welcome them with God’s mercy, not with your pathetic, parochial view.” Pierre rebuked him.

“Yes, Pierre.” Dennis replied like a pupil, while trading the umbrella to the other hand.

Her short hair was damp with water, and her shoulders, too. She seemed less bothered than before, idly gazing into the rain.

“Have you thought about what you will say to him?” he said.

“I don’t know. That was so sudden, though his mother had been sick for a while.” She turned her head to him. “You?”

“I’ll tell him this is part of life. My condolences, or something like that.”

“That’s it? Any stranger could say that. We are his best friends.”

“You are. You two have known each other longer, and you have been much closer.”

“That is not true.” she retorted.

“Yes, it is! You two went to the club last month without me!”

“Oh my gosh! You told me you were over it! It was so spontaneous. We were texting that night. I told him I needed to get out of the house, so he suggested that.” She shook her arms and some more rain dropped off the bag onto her head.

“You didn’t text me that night.” he said with dismay.

“You are a manchild.” Her frustration turned into irritation.

“I just care.” he gazed into the rain, seeing nothing.

Dennis had passed the umbrella between hands a dozen times before Pierre broke the silence.

“There is the boy.” Pierre said calmly

A nine-year-old walked on the walkway with a muzzled medium-sized bulldog on a leash. He took careful steps as he watches the dog smelling every corner of the street.

“Thank God it’s not his death, at least.” Dennis murmured.

The boy held the leash with two hands and kept the dog only two steps away. He watched his dog attentively. The dog showed endless interest in the dirt, pawing it restlessly here and there.

“And the dog will be saved, too. I wonder if God cares, though.”

“Dennis, that is disrespectable.”

“Sorry, Pierre.” Dennis adjusted his posture to look a bit more serious, and he changed hands with the umbrella. “What do you think about this boy? Is he saved because he is blessed?”

“You still have so much to learn, Dennis.” Pierre gave him a gentle smile as he said “They are all blessed. All humans. God’s love doesn’t discriminate.”

“Then the dog must be blessed, too.” Dennis whispered. Pierre either didn’t hear it or chose not to respond.

The rain poured heavier. Running cars made splashes as they ran through in front of the two. They were just far enough to leave their trousers dry.

“We’ll never make it to his place.” he said.

“We will. It’ll just take a lot longer than we thought.”

“So is everything else in life, isn’t it?” he turned to her.

“What do you mean?”

“To finish medical school, to make close friends, to make a loving family, to make a worthy living, it all takes so much time. Once you finally reach there, perhaps before that, you are about to die.”

“That’s nuts. What made you say that?”

“The endless shower, I guess. It is getting to me.” He gazed into the rain again, capturing something this time.

Now the boy with the dog was at the corner of the crossroad not far away from them. The boy waited for the green signal and then crossed while his eyes were locked on his dog. The dog walked with his head down, anticipating the next scent after every step. In the middle of the crosswalk, he sniffed and stopped. The boy tried to get it moving by pulling the leash, but it resisted so hard with all four paws.

The traffic lights changed. He saw a bus coming out of the rain shower at full speed. The boy was still working on his dog. Soon after he realized its ominousness, a sharp squeal cut through the streets.

“I cannot watch.” Dennis covered his eyes with one hand.

“Concentrate, Dennis. We must retrieve them as soon as they pass away to minimize their suffering. A second equals to weeks of pain.” Pierre said with his eyes still locked on the bus, which moved in slow motion in their eyes. The boy and the dog were practically still.

“Yes, Pierre.” Dennis put the hand down slowly and squinted his eyes.

Their concentration slowed down the time even further and the world almost froze. The braking bus moved like a sloth, and its squealing sound lengthened into a low-pitched drum. Our guy’s eyes were also locked on the bus, but no trace of reaction crossed his face. Dennis, his guardian angel, wondered if there was any chance that he knew this bus would kill him. He hoped he didn’t. It would be brutal otherwise, he thought. He had been watching him for just over 39 heavenly minutes, since the day he was born. It’s hard to make any strong attachment to humans within their fleeting lives, but he was Dennis’ first case. He imagined all the things this person could have in his vanishing future. He would open a clinic. He would meet a girl. He would have two children. He would buy a Mercedes and never wait for a bus. But no. He would die as a resident doctor, a bachelor, and a pedestrian. How’s that fair? He had been a good person. Although Dennis disapproved of the drugs he used in night clubs, they were not condemned by Heaven. Besides, they would become stale once he entered his 30s, well, if he could.

The girl was looking in a different direction of the street, not aware of what was coming. Her mind had been washed by the rain as much as her hair and shoulders had. She just knew what she would say to the friend whose mother just died. It turned out it was not hard at all if your feelings were clear enough to be shaped in words. Her deepest sentiment was gratitude for her living mother, who had suffered from two joyless marriages, who had asked her for money on multiple occasions, but who was very much alive today. Transferring that gratitude to his deceased mother was the most noble thing she could do. All these thoughts happened in these nearly-frozen seconds. A gentle smile surfaced on her face but unnoticed by anyone, as all the other three were gazing at the squeaking bus.

After more Earthly seconds, a blast was heard. One of the rear tires went flat. The remaining tires failed to grip the wet road, and the bus started to shake uncontrollably. The flat tire dragged the bus while the other three running tires remained stubborn. The tilted bus thrust forward towards the zebra crossing where the boy and the dog were. In another Earthly second, the bus’s front was no longer pointing at its moving direction. It slid like a giant slash. The scene is illustrated by Dennis in a report he has to submit to Heaven later:

                   _____  
__O_O_________|    \     \
          ____      \     \  
          ____   <-  \     \
          ____        \     \
          _o._         \_____\
          ____                
          ____
_______________
               |

“Something is different.” Pierre said while he frowned.

“Pardon?” Dennis lost his focus and looked at Pierre. Time sped up again and the bus slid faster.

“Concentrate!” Pierre shouted.

Dennis turned back his head quickly. Now the bus was only a few meters away from the boy and the dog, but it wouldn’t hit them on that trajectory. It was moving towards the walkway. Dennis still hadn’t figured out what Pierre meant, as it seemed that the bus would hit his girl and his guy in a few Earthly seconds. He was ready to catch him at any minute.

“This cannot be.” Pierre murmured. Dennis didn’t dare to react to it this time, so he stayed focused. In a couple of Heavenly milliseconds, he understood what Pierre meant. The bus was slowing down. It became so slow that it looked still to them.

“The plan has been changed.” Pierre said, as he relaxed his forehead.

“What?” Dennis answered with full surprise. “I thought there was no plan.”

After they let go of their gaze, the bus slid only a few more meters and stopped on the walkway, still seven meters away from the two.

A man jumped out of the bus and shouted: “Help! We need a doctor!”

He shouted back: “What happened?”

“The driver is having a heart attack! We stopped the bus safely, but she needs help!”

“I am coming. I am a doctor.” He ran through the rain and got on the bus.

The girl looked at them with full innocence. She had been lost in thoughts until seeing the bus on the walkway. That looked surreal to her. Meanwhile, an angel flew by her at full speed, arriving at the bus.

“That’s Gabriel. He is picking her up.” Pierre said.

“Whom?” Dennis asked.

“The bus driver. That’s the new plan, I suppose.”

“You lost me, Pierre. You just told me there was no plan, only accidents.”

“No, I said God didn’t make choices. It is all planned without a planner.” Pierre said firmly.

“Excuse me?” Dennis responded doubtfully.

“If God can spare them only by killing another, he won’t do it. However, he allows things to happen. There is a possibility that one accident hinders the aftereffect of the other accident.”

“And no one is behind all these?”

“Perhaps someone is.”

Pierre looked at his girl. He pondered what all that meant to her. She would have more time for her mother. Her words would soothe her friend’s grief. Her kindness would accompany the guy through his coming existential crisis. She would contribute to the world as a chemist. Everything she had become and everything she was meant to be just gave her another chance to live.

Pierre tried to hide his smile and said: “Heaven will ask us why we come back with no souls. You need to write a report, Dennis.” He flew away upon finishing the sentence.

“God damn reports.” Dennis stomped his foot and followed with his wings.

I am left no words when I see what is in the second level of the basement. It’s full of rats, but incredibly tidy. The rubble and twigs are piled on two lines, and stones are stacked on the other side of the room. Due to the darkness, I cannot see the floor clearly, but I believe it is spotless because even the air smells free from dust, very different from the upper level I just visited. It might be cleaner than my room and kitchen.

“Hey, buddies, I’m back. So, everything is fine above, but look what I found. The big feet were tap-dancing upstairs.” Danny’s voice emerges in the darkness.

“Eeeeeeek!!” Squeaking sounds from the crowd follow Danny’s joke.

“Folks, light up for our unnecessary guests.“

A few more squeaks. Then a couple of shark cracks. Sparks flicker here and there. Torches flare around us.

“Look at our work here, big feet. We use the rubble and stones to fix any cracks that we find in the basement. You will be surprised to know how many cracks we have found and how often we have to source the materials.”

“Where do you get the materials? I suppose you all live inside the basement.”

“We are rats. What options do we have? We dig. We unearth the corners of the basement as long as it’s safe for the foundation, of course. That’s why this floor is actually much bigger than what we started. We also benefit from the bigger space because it can accommodate more of us, but that also means more work. We are never done!”

“Are they your kids?”

“I cannot remember. Two more rats appear every time I blink my eyes. Does it matter? You have what you got and you carry on your work, your life, and your generation. There is no past. There is now. And now is time to work!”

Danny runs away and starts to move the stone beside the pile, or he is trying. The stone is bigger than he is and it’d take his life to move it across the room.

“How about I carry that stone for you and you tell me more about this house?”

“Huh! I could have done this by myself, but I would have been rude to a rare guest if I say no. You can go ahead.”

Danny moves aside. I move forward to lift the stone. He keeps on talking as we move across the floor. Discussant follows behind and turns his head left and right.

“Well, there are of course more than what you see. We also collect dirt and soil, but we have not figured out how to use them. We even found some pipes. I suppose it’s part of the watering piping for the house, but there were probably spare ones if you have not suffered from drainage. Oh, yea, we also have to move the twigs downstairs to heat up the house.”

“Wait, you guys are heating the house? I always wonder why the house does not get cold in winter.”

“Now you know how important we are, don’t you?” says Danny with an ego wildly disproportionate to his size. “Well, the heating warms us up, too. Nothing is fully altruistic, not any work in the world.”

“How much do you know about the world? I thought you have never left the basement.”

“This is just common sense, dumbhead!”

I don’t appreciate a sass-powered rodent, but I still need him to show me the way.

“Can you show me the heater? I am curious.”

“Of course. Let’s finish this one and carry some twigs and sassy downstairs.”

“Wait.” Discussant suddenly speaks up. “Don’t burn the good planks! I want them for my soapbox.”

“If you want some planks for us, we have to trade. We could use some hard labor.”

When he says this, I think he expects us to do the heavy lifting.

--

Discussant and I carry two big piles of twigs on the shoulder while walking carefully down by the ladder. The heating room turns out to be less interesting than what I initially thought. Apart from a giant water heater twice as tall as I am and a water container that can fit two elephants, there isn’t anything here and the space looks utterly vacant. The floor is lit by the burning fire but I still can’t see any walls. How can the basement be at this size?

“We built this.” Danny says.

“What? The heater?”

“Yes.”

“No, you can’t. You can’t even move a rock properly. The heater is made of bricks and clay. Besides, how can you possibly possess the knowledge required?”

“Eeeeeek!” Danny squeaks loudly. Though he can’t put a smile on his rodent face, I realize it was a joke from him.

“The lady that lived upstairs built this. It took her years. That was before we guys moved in, for we can’t have survived in the house without the warmth and water. She drilled a well so that we continuously have water. All we need to do is to keep the fireplace burning.”

My mom built this. I don’t remember her much, but I’ve been given her legacy without knowing.

“She was nice.” Danny says it with a quavering voice.

“But she left, without saying a word.” I react with a bit of anger from nowhere.

“She suffered. The last few weeks were painful to her. She also didn’t tell us when she left the house that day – you know, we work at night and sleep in the daytime. She’s just gone. Everyone was confused. Retrospectively, I think she knew she would die, but she didn’t know how to face it, with us, probably also with whoever else in the house.”

I cannot find a word to respond.

It is just too much for one day. First the unknown basement, then a talking rat. Now the untold story of my mom, whom I barely know.

“I need fresh air.” I say, though what I actually need is a break. “And we can bring back the planks we earn.”

I look at Discussant, expecting him to be happy about it, but he just stares at the fireplace with his mouth slightly open. So rare seeing him without his voice.

“You humans just aren’t built for the underworld. We keep this place spotless and you won’t even find dust. Yet you say you need fresh air! I’ll lead the way, but I have to come back to work. The winter is coming, so we are gonna burn more wood logs to warm the house and your lazy bones!”

It does not sound nice to my ear, but I appreciate that he respects my will. I guess whoever keeps the house warm is entitled to some swaggering.

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Discussant leads the way to my room with bouncy steps. He walks with open arms and short legs and obviously knows the orientation of the house. In my bedroom, we face the wall to which my bed and a closet are adjacent. There is no sign of a secret chamber behind the wall, which allegedly leads to the basement I know nothing of. While I inspect the wall, Discussant is just swinging his arms from left to right and right to left.

“I cannot figure this out. Are you going to help?” I ask with some impatience. After all, it was his idea to break my writing routine for this unnecessary venture.

“I can’t.” His arms stop. He answers with believable innocence. “I am a thinker, not an explorer.”

And I am a writer. Without the courage to say those words out, I say them in silence and put my hands on the white wall to look for any hidden doors. The gritty wall feels warmer than it looks. I cannot find anything intriguing about the wall. If there is a room behind it, how can I get into it? The puzzle becomes simple once I assume the architect is right, because the wardrobe is the only furniture next to the wall that can serve as a façade. I push it aside to see if there is a secret door. I was so sure I would find it, but there is nothing. I check the wall again and again. I start to doubt the architect’s words. Maybe he is just making a story.

Meanwhile Discussant starts to swing his arms again. He hums a song in a low volume, which I cannot recognize, but the mythic rhyme brings a name to my mind:

“C. S. Lewis.”

I utter the name involuntarily as I look at the wardrobe I just moved. This is a wild thought, but isn’t it wild enough to have three strangers that have nothing in common in the house without a single invitation? I’ll give it a try. In the worst case, I am just making a fool of myself and I couldn’t care less about the humming man’s judgement.

I open the doors of the wardrobe and walk into it.

It’s all dark in there. I didn’t expect the smell of my clothes to be this intense. They smell like my room, but the odor is a lot stronger. There is more. I think I can smell something else. I take a few steps forward to follow the smell, and I know my wardrobe isn’t that wide. This is magical. I am now in a space that is apparently larger than the closet as no clothes swing beside me anymore and the familiar smell is gone. Instead, it is the smell of humidity.

“What’s in there?” I hear Discussant in the room from a distance, and his shouting makes no echo in this hidden chamber. I sense it is larger than a small storage room I saw on the blueprint.

“Come in. There is a room in here. Bring a flashlight.”

I don’t realize the magic created more than a room until Discussant brings in light. He hands over the flashlight, and I look around with it. The light doesn’t even hit a wall. Only the same wood floor and the dusty air become visible. We walk a bit further and I try walking straight so that we cannot return to the closet without getting lost. After around fifty steps, something in front reflects the light. I take a few more steps to find out it’s a mirror on a vanity table. It’s fairly old-fashioned. Furniture lies around it. There is also a bed, a cradle, and some simple kitchen equipment. If I discard all the extra space around them, the setup looks like a bedroom.

I cannot quite figure out where I am or even if I am still in the house. I look around, but there is nothing much to see here. The smell also isn’t the best. As I am pondering if I should walk back to the wardrobe, some noises occur. They sound like hurried barefoot steps. I keep looking around until I realize that the sound is from below. Is that the basement? Just when I wonder, a shadow appears from the foot of the bed and bumps into my feet. I refrain from screaming but I still hear a scream.

“Ouwwa!”

It’s a big rat in front of me, but the scream is not from Discussant. Is it from it?

“What the...” I swear involuntarily.

“Hey! You blocked my way!” Clearly, the rat has a voice! It continues: “Just move your feet and we’ll be cool.”

“No, not so fast. You are a talking rat!”

“And you are a talking human. What’s new here?”

While still in shock, I try collecting myself. A talking rodent is not the worst thing I can think of in a magical closet.

“Pardon me, then. I’ve never talked to a rat before.”

“Me not so much with a human, but the nice lady and I used to have good conversations. She was hard-working as I am.”

“You mean a woman used to live in this room?”

“Yes, she took care of the furniture and food supplies. I didn’t need to do much back then. I just talked to her. She taught me how to maintain this basement. I think she knew there would be an end of her. I am not sure if she knew it’d be this quick.”

The rat has no rich facial muscles to express emotions, but I hear the sadness in its voice.

The woman who used to live in the house. It can only be my mom.

“I’m sorry to hear that, my friend.” Discussant cuts in. “But I need to get this straight before I can loosen up my tight arms and legs again. Where are we really?”

“This is the basement. The house is above us.”

“This cannot be. We didn’t take a step downwards.”

“Humans are slow.” The rat shrugs and shows his palms. “You just walked down a slope.”

I am in another shock. First the magical wardrobe, then a talking rat, now knowing my mom used to live in the basement. How many shocks can one take within a few minutes without a heart attack?

“But why would the woman live in the basement and not upstairs?”

“Well, I have no time to think about the past. I have a house to fix.” The rat withdraws his sorrow, putting his hands on the floor, ready to move on.

“Hold on.” I put my foot in front of his direction. “Are you fixing the house? What needs fixing and how do you do it?”

“You have no idea! The basement is the foundation of the house. It sinks if the supporting structure gets rusted or corroded . The water leaks in if a hole on the waterproof layers is left unattended.”

“Leaving a hole sounds like what a rat does.” I say.

“Nonsense! We fix the holes.” The rat objects, twisting its face while standing up with its back feet.

“We? There are more of you?”

“How rude! You think a rat is just another rat, don’t you? You don’t even know the house would have collapsed long time ago, soon after the lady died, if there had not been us.”

“Sorry, so you guys have been working on the house, but where are they?”
“Downstairs. In fact, I need to return to there. I feel insecure about it if I am gone for too long. Those dummies get distracted easily and they might start a wood fight.”

Discussant closes in on the rat and says: “Wood? You have it stocked?”

“Can I follow you?” I am curious now, too.

“Technically, you can’t, unless you can walk through the tubes, but—” The rat moves fast forward, and my light follows. It stops somewhere not far away. “you can open this piece of flooring and you’ll find stairs. It’s a hidden door the lady used to use.”

My mom used to use it. I talk to myself and open the hidden door.

“Oh, by the way. I am Danny. Now follow me.”

I run a marketing company named “Metamorph,” which became a unicorn two years ago and which is now one of the most valuable firms in the world. I also had a house in Beverly Hills and one on the beach in Florida, but they were destroyed by a wildfire and a tsunami. After the significant loss, which I can afford more financially than emotionally, I bought this apartment as my temporary nest. It was introduced by the entrepreneur next door, but I should not give you his name for he stays anonymous on paper. He is one of our clients, a small one for the size of revenue, but a loyal one. My company has been working for him for nine years straight. That’s a very rare relationship in this era.

The entrepreneur invited me to have dinner at his place today, as we often did. Finding a gift to bring with me is a hard task when you know billionaires can’t possibly want anything they can already afford, but I prepared it last week and had the gift wrapped in white. I put on a shirt with vertical stripes before I go next door. His husband answers the door and gives me a hug. He is a tall young man with a round face that reminds me of a sourdough loaf. The entrepreneur is still in the shower, so we wait in the living room. We sit on the sofa striped in dusty blue and burgundy red, which I compliment. The sourdough gives a proud smile. He says with excitement that he has been working on this design for the last two weeks. The amber green sofa he printed last month was too dull for his taste. The entrepreneur comes out of the bedroom, dressed in a thin blue flax shirt and a pair of black jeans. In his forties, he looks pure and holy like a child coming out of a bath, carefully cleansed by a loving mother and blessed by God.

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