The Direction of Three O'Clock

Zhou had been working the night shift at this convenience store for seven years.

The store sat on an old street in the eastern part of town, wedged between rows of crumbling apartment blocks slated for demolition. Business was neither good nor bad. After ten at night, hardly anyone came in—the occasional office worker grabbing instant noodles after overtime, or a drunk middle-aged man wandering in for cigarettes. Zhou had long settled into a routine: tune the radio to the storytelling channel, lean against the counter, and doze off to the sound of pingshu.

He first noticed the young man in early spring.

To be precise, it was a little past three in the morning. Zhou remembered because the storytelling program always ended right around then, and in the silence that followed, he looked up and glanced out the window. Someone was standing under the streetlamp. Gray coat, tall and thin, hands in his pockets, facing east. Motionless.

Zhou figured it was someone waiting for a bus and thought nothing of it. But ten minutes later, when he looked again, the man was gone.

The next night, three in the morning, the man was back. Same spot. Same posture. Ten minutes, then gone.

The third night. The fourth. The fifth.

Zhou started paying attention. He leaned toward the glass door and traced the man's line of sight across the street. There was a six-story red-brick building, its facade peeling badly, rows of rusted air-conditioner units clinging to the windowsills. The third-floor window on the east side had its curtains drawn—pale yellow with a faded floral print. Hanging outside the window was a small red wind chime, swaying gently whenever the wind picked up, too far away to hear.

That window. That was what the young man was looking at.

It went on like that through all of March. The young man came rain or shine, even through three straight days of rain. He stood under the streetlamp with a black umbrella, never stepping inside the store to take shelter, just standing there like a tree. Once, Zhou almost went out to invite him in, but he stopped at the door—what ground did he have to stand on? He wasn't the man's father. It wasn't his place.

One early morning in April, the wind picked up in the middle of the night. Zhou was drifting in and out of sleep when he heard a faint, scattered clatter. He opened his eyes. Through the glass door, he saw the young man crouched on the ground, picking something up.

Zhou pushed the door open and stepped out. Scattered across the pavement were pieces of red plastic tubing and a few snapped nylon strings. The wind chime had fallen.

The young man was picking up the pieces one by one, moving slowly, as if defusing a bomb. Zhou stood watching for a moment, then turned around, went back into the store, poured a cup of hot soy milk, and brought it out.

"Here. Drink something."

The young man looked up. The streetlamp caught his face, and Zhou got his first good look at him—late twenties, dark circles under his eyes, unshaven, but not a bad-looking face.

"Thanks." He took the cup but didn't drink, just held it with both hands, still crouched on the ground.

Zhou took a cigarette and tucked it between his lips without lighting it. "Every night, three in the morning, ten minutes, then gone. What's the point?"

The young man paused, then smiled. Zhou couldn't quite name the expression—it wasn't really a smile. It was more like a kind of surrender, the kind that comes when you finally stop fighting.

"I used to live over there with my ex-girlfriend." The young man tilted his chin toward the red-brick building. "She loved wind chimes. Bought that one and hung it outside the window. We lived there for two years, then we broke up. She moved out."

"So why do you keep coming back? She's not here."

"I'm not looking for her." The young man gathered the pieces of the wind chime. "I just wanted to see if it was still there."

Zhou said nothing.

"I know she's gone. Moved to Shenzhen last year." The young man stood up, brushing the dust from his knees. "The day she left, she sent me a message. It said: 'The wind chime is yours now.' I never replied. Then one day I was passing by, looked up, and the chime was still there. So I just..."

He didn't finish. But Zhou understood.

"So you coming back tomorrow?" Zhou asked.

The young man looked down at the fragments in his hand. The plastic tubes were cleanly snapped, their red color badly faded, some split open to reveal pale white interiors. He stared at them for a long time, then stood up, walked over to the trash can outside the convenience store, and dropped them in.

"Forget it," he said.

He drained the soy milk in one go, tossed the paper cup into the trash, gave Zhou a nod, and turned to leave.

Zhou stood under the streetlamp and watched the tall, thin silhouette recede down the old street, turn the corner, and disappear.

The young man never came back after that night.

Zhou kept working his night shifts as always. On the radio, the storyteller wrapped up one saga and moved on to the next. At three in the morning, when the program ended and the silence settled in, Zhou would glance out the window, almost without meaning to.

The third-floor window of the red-brick building still had its pale yellow curtains drawn. The floral pattern had faded so much it was barely visible. Nothing hung outside the window anymore.

As the weather warmed, someone upstairs started opening their window during the day. The sounds of cooking drifted out, a child's crying, a soccer game on TV.

One night in mid-May, Zhou made himself a bowl of instant noodles. When he stepped out to toss the container, he noticed a new demolition notice posted on the convenience store door—the old street was coming down next month.

He turned and looked at the red-brick building across the street. A white character had been spray-painted on its wall: "拆."

The wind rose that night. Zhou organized the store shelves, mopped the floor, and stood outside for a long time.

He thought to himself that maybe, from the very beginning, all that red wind chime had ever needed was one good gust of wind.