The 3 AM Regular

I first noticed him because his sense of timing was too precise to be human.

Between 3:13 and 3:17 in the morning, the glass door would swing outward, the sensor above the frame would chime, and he would walk in. Grab a bottle of water from the cooler, approach the register, point at the cigarette shelf behind me. Marlboro Whites. I'd pull a pack down and scan it. He'd say "Mm." I'd tell him the total. He'd pay. The whole thing took under forty seconds.

Five days a week, Monday through Friday. Weekends he didn't come.

I'd been working the night shift at this 24-hour convenience store in Beijing for almost a year. Ten at night to six in the morning. My customers fell into a few rough categories: the drunk ones buying cigarettes and hangover cures, the club crowd trickling in for snacks and makeup touch-ups, the white-collar workers grabbing oden to fill their stomachs after a late shift, the insomniac seniors out for a stroll and a bottle of water. They all had their rhythms. But nobody kept time like this man.

His suit was always the same shade of dark gray, his shirt a blinding white, his tie knotted with military precision. But if you looked past the first impression, you'd notice the fraying at the cuffs, the outer edges of his leather soles worn down at an angle—not the even wear of a desk job, but the kind you get from walking miles. He had a callus on his middle finger, between the second and third knuckles, the kind that comes from gripping a tool, not a pen. Maybe he did surveying work. Maybe drafting. I didn't know. The night shift is long. You find things to think about.

He never looked at his phone. This bothered me more than his punctuality. Everyone who walks into a convenience store at 3 AM is glued to a screen—scrolling as they enter, scrolling in line, pulling the phone back out before they've even cleared the door. Not him. He walked in, grabbed the water, bought the cigarettes, paid, and left. If his phone was in his pocket, it never buzzed. It might not have been there at all.

A few times I deliberately slowed down reaching for the cigarettes, curious if he'd get impatient. He didn't. He just stood there, eyes resting on the over-boiled tea eggs simmering next to the register, looking at them without really looking. I'd feel guilty and hand him the pack.

In three months, our routine broke only once. The register froze. I scanned the barcode three times, nothing, started sweating. He had been standing at the counter for almost a minute, twice as long as usual. Just as I was about to apologize, he spoke.

"Try rebooting."

His voice was lower than I expected, with a rasp to it, the kind that comes from not talking to anyone for a while.

I rebooted the terminal. It worked. He paid and left. "Try rebooting" was the only complete sentence he ever said to me.

In March, he stopped coming.

The first night I didn't think much of it. Everyone takes a day off. The second night I started glancing at the door around 3:10 and didn't stop until 3:20. By the third night I was constructing his life in my head. Was he sick? Living alone, fever spiking with no one to notice? Was that dark gray suit the only decent thing he owned, the rest of his life crammed into a subdivided room in some urban village, forty minutes on foot to work every day—was that why his soles were so worn?

By the fourth night I was annoyed at myself. I didn't even know his name. What was I worried about?

The fifth night I had the night off. I came back Sunday, half expecting him to break pattern and show up on a weekend. He didn't.

Sixth night. Seventh.

On the eighth night, at 3:15, the door chimed.

I almost didn't recognize him. Not because he'd changed his clothes or cut his hair, but because his gait was different. His stride used to be even, neither long nor short. Tonight his left foot dragged slightly, as if he didn't quite trust it to take his weight. He pulled the water from the cooler, walked up, pointed at the cigarettes.

Marlboro Whites.

As I handed them over, I noticed a scab on the back of his left hand, three or four centimeters long, already peeling at the edges to reveal pale pink skin underneath.

I scanned the water and the cigarettes. Same total as always.

When he pulled out his phone to pay, I saw the outline of it bulging in his pocket. He'd had it with him all along.

I almost asked. Where were you. What happened. How did you hurt your hand.

But I didn't. Not because of professionalism, and not because I was afraid of overstepping. It was because I realized: if he answered me—if he told me his mother had been in the hospital and he'd spent seven nights on a hard waiting-room bench, or that he'd been fired and shoved to the ground while trying to collect his last paycheck, or that it was nothing, just a business trip out of town—whatever the answer was, he would stop being the 3 AM regular. He would become a specific person, with a name and problems and his own mess. And I didn't want a specific person walking into my convenience store at three in the morning.

What I needed was a shadow that arrived and departed on schedule, marking the edges of my eight-hour shift.

He held up his payment QR code. I scanned it.

"Thank you," I said.

"Mm."

He pushed through the door. The sensor chimed.

I checked the time: 3:17.

Then I turned the tea egg warmer down from three to two and waited for dawn.