White Page

The plane touched down at Shuangliu just before midnight, and Dylan Wang woke to the sound of his own name being whispered three rows behind him.

He kept his eyes shut, cap pulled low, and counted seconds until the seatbelt sign chimed off. Three months. Ninety-one days of night shoots, rain machines, wire rigs, a director who wanted his grief to look like weather. He had cried on cue so many times that his body had forgotten how to do it for real.

"Mr. Wang?" A flight attendant's voice, soft and practiced. "We've arranged for you to disembark through the rear."

"Thank you." He smiled, because he always smiled. It was a reflex now, like breathing.

——

He had the driver drop him at a narrow street off Chunxi Road, waved off the offer of an escort, and let the rain find him.

Chengdu rain was not Hengdian rain. It was warmer. It smelled like peppercorn and wet stone and something frying just out of sight. He walked without an umbrella, because the umbrella was in the suitcase he'd left with his assistant, and he found he didn't mind. The water cooled his scalp beneath the cap. For eleven blocks, nobody knew him. Best eleven blocks in a year.

Then he saw the light.

It spilled from a storefront the color of old tea — a narrow place wedged between a noodle stall and a shuttered pharmacy. The sign was hand-painted and slightly crooked: 白页. White Page. Books rose in the window so high they leaned against the glass like tired people.

He pushed the door open. A bell rang.

"Sorry — closing in ten minutes," said a voice from the back, not looking up.

He stood in the doorway, dripping.

The voice's owner sat at a workbench behind the counter, bent over a book spread open like a patient on an operating table. She held a scalpel in one hand and a strip of rice paper in the other, and there was a smudge of wheat paste on her cheekbone that she clearly didn't know about.

"Ten minutes," she repeated.

"Okay," he said.

She looked up. He watched it happen — the flicker, the widening eyes, the small parting of the mouth. Recognition, the thing he had learned to brace for the way other people braced for cold water.

Then she closed her mouth and went back to the book.

"You're soaked," she said. "There's a towel under the counter. Don't drip on the 1978 edition. It's the only one left."

——

Her name was Su Nian. She was twenty-six, she had inherited the shop from her father, and she mended books for a living because, she said, everything in Chengdu was being torn down and somebody had to be paid to put things back together.

He came back the next night. And the night after that.

At first he told himself it was the tea — real jasmine, brewed in a chipped porcelain pot, nothing like the paper cups on set. Then he told himself it was the silence. Nobody in that shop looked at him and saw a poster. She looked at him and saw a man who didn't know how to sit still.

"You tap your foot," she said on the fourth night, not glancing up from a water-stained poetry collection. "Constantly. Like you're waiting for someone to call action."

He stopped. "Sorry."

"Don't apologize. Just notice."

He noticed a lot of things after that. The way she held her brush. The way she hummed when she thought no one was listening. The way she said his name — plain, unadorned, as if it belonged to any man on the street.

"You really don't care who I am," he said one night.

"I care who you are," she said. "I just don't care who you're famous for."

——

On the ninth night, the rain came back hard and the power flickered, and she lit two paper lanterns and set them on the counter. He helped her carry a shelf of damaged volumes down from the loft. She stood on a stool, reaching, and he stood behind her because the floorboards were uneven and he didn't want her to fall.

When she stepped down, her shoulder brushed his chest.

Neither of them moved for a moment. The lanterns made the whole shop look underwater, gold and slow.

"You should go home," she said quietly. "You look like you haven't slept in a year."

"I haven't."

"Then sleep."

"I sleep better here."

She looked at him then, really looked, and he felt — absurdly, terrifyingly — like a page being held up to the light.

——

The photograph surfaced on a Tuesday.

He was walking out of White Page at eleven at night, cap on, head down, and someone across the street had a long lens and a lot of patience. By noon the next day it was everywhere: the nation's most bankable young actor, hand on the door of a tiny bookstore, soft around the eyes. The captions did what captions do. The questions did what questions do.

By evening there were three vans parked on her street and a knot of strangers with cameras outside her window.

He called her. She didn't pick up.

He went anyway. She met him at the back door with the lights off.

"They trampled the herb pots," she said. Her voice was steady, which was somehow worse than if it had broken. "An old man next door got shoved. He's seventy-eight."

"I'm sorry."

"I know." She looked past him at the alley wall. "You should go. For a while. Until it's quiet."

"Su Nian—"

"I'm not asking you to leave my life." Her eyes came back to him, and there it was — the flicker, but a different kind, the kind that meant she was afraid of something real. "I'm asking you to leave the street."

He nodded. He understood. It was the most honest thing anyone had asked of him in years.

——

He stayed away for eight days.

He did the press obligations. He answered the questions with the smile and the practiced tilt of the head. He slept badly and woke at four every morning, and each time he woke he thought about a chipped porcelain pot and hands that put broken things back together.

On the ninth night, he came back after closing, the way he always had.

The lanterns were lit. She was at the workbench, but she wasn't working. She was just sitting, looking at the door, as though she'd been sitting there for a while.

"You came back," she said.

"I told you." He stepped inside. The bell rang behind him like something being marked. "I sleep better here."

She stood. She crossed the little room slowly, and stopped close enough that he could smell jasmine and wheat paste and rain.

"There's a reporter outside," she said.

"I know."

"Tomorrow it will be worse."

"Probably."

"And you're still here."

"I'm still here."

She reached up and took off his cap, the way you'd take a book off a shelf you'd been meaning to open for a long time. Then she kissed him — carefully at first, the way she handled anything old and fragile, and then not carefully at all.

Outside, the rain kept falling on Chunxi Road, and somewhere down the street a noodle vendor called last orders into the dark. The lanterns burned low and gold. And in a narrow shop wedged between a pharmacy and a stall, surrounded by everything broken that she had spent her life mending, Dylan Wang finally let himself be a person instead of a face.

He would have to leave again in the morning. They both knew that.

But the shop had a back door, and he had memorized the way in, and for the first time in ninety-one days, he slept until noon.