I’ve made a full circuit of the house and am standing at the doorway to my room. I’ve arrived
just in time. The cassette player finishes rewinding and restarts with a rigid click.
The weather for the Gobi region will be sunny, with daytime maximum temperature at 18
degrees Celsius and nighttime minimum at 3 degrees Celsius…
Mum! It’s summer break! Can I go out and play?
Alright, sweetheart. But come back in time for—
The tape ticks end and time has stopped.
All the tapes have stopped.
The lights are out. I flick the switches on and off, but they stay unresponsively dark. The
usual hum of the central heating has broken off, and for once the house is entirely silent.
The electricity is down. The storm must have damaged the cables.
I’m drowning.
Outside, the sky is dark with whirling frost.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment I found myself living in this enclosed world. For days
after the snowstorm I stayed curled in bed, unable to stop crying. Tears would form even when I
wasn’t upset. Gathering in atoms millionfold, they leaked salty rivulets down my parched cheeks
before falling, scattering, freezing to dust. When I at last had recovered sufficiently to look
outside, I found that the world had rolled on without me. The snow was colder, the clouds drier,
and the sky a heavier load to bear.
It was all too much. In the weeks and months that followed I gradually withdrew from human
society. I delegated more of my research tasks to the technicians, spending my work time out of
the laboratory, wandering desolate streets. I began taking days off to stay at home, first a week,
and then another; before long, I had stayed off work an entire month, and no longer had any
intention of returning. No matter how many times I tried, I had never made it beyond the main
street before cowering back to the safety of home.
And as the weeks passed, the front door only grew heavier.
It had taken two months before the laboratory sent me a warning notice and one more before
they fired me.
I was free then, to exult in my new life as a shut-in.
For a while I sit and watch the play of shadow and snow outside the window. But soon the
deathly chill, no longer held at bay by the heating, creeps in, and the three duvets I am using
offer comfort no more.
Shaking violently with cold, I stagger to the kitchen to make cup noodles. It’s only after I get
there and try turning on the stove to no avail that I remember it runs on electricity. In all my
days here it had served efficiently and well, but now when I truly need it it’s nothing more than a
metal box. I regret throwing away the gas range.
With no electricity there is only one thing which will see me through the storm. I need a fire.
I begin by clearing the living room and piling anything I can burn at its centre. Newspapers
as starter, then magazines, then books for fuel. I’ve nursed the spark into a dancing flame when I
* * *
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