The university’s student activity center was located toward the southern edge of campus.
Because of the campus lockdown, most of the club activities here had stopped. The promotional posters in the first-floor lobby were still from March, their corners already curling up.
Chen Zhuo followed the stairs up to the third floor.
On the door to the second-to-last room at the end of the hall, someone had taped a sheet of printer paper that read "String Society."
Chen Zhuo pushed the door open and walked in.
The rehearsal room wasn’t large. Two old sofas sat by the window, and a few music stands were piled in the corner.
There were only two people in the room. A boy with black-framed glasses sat on one of the sofas, flipping through a copy of *Reader’s Digest* from some unknown year.
On a folding chair next to him sat a girl with short hair, her head bowed as she applied rosin to her violin bow.
Hearing the door open, they both looked up.
"You’re here."
The guy with glasses offered a casual greeting, then lowered his head and went back to his magazine.
The short-haired girl just nodded, her hands never stopping their work.
They were long used to Chen Zhuo’s arrivals.
For the past month or two, Chen Zhuo had been coming over with his violin case every few days. He never made small talk or asked about club matters. Each time, he would quietly find a corner, play for a while, and leave as soon as he was done.
"Seniors."
Chen Zhuo returned the greeting politely.
He walked to the farthest corner of the room, placed his violin case on an empty chair, and unfastened the latches.
He took out the violin and rested it on his shoulder, his chin gently pressing against the chin rest. Chen Zhuo picked up the bow with his right hand and plucked each of the four strings.
The tuning was perfect. No adjustments needed.
He didn’t open any sheet music. Closing his eyes, he steadily pressed the bow against the A string.
He drew the bow.
No vibrato, no glissando, no extraneous movements.
The sound that emerged was crisp and steady, like a perfectly straight line.
Next came the scales—ascending, descending—followed by a polyphonic passage from a Bach partita.
Chen Zhuo’s style of playing was completely different from everyone else’s in the room.
He didn’t focus on emotional investment, nor did he try to feel the dramatic contours of the piece.
To him, notes were just frequencies.
The A string was 440 Hertz, the C string 130.8 Hertz. It had to be exactly that, without the slightest deviation.
He played with extreme precision, a precision that bordered on mechanical.
The guy with glasses on the sofa turned a page of his magazine. Listening to the violin, he felt none of the surprise he’d initially had.
When Chen Zhuo first started coming to play, he’d thought the kid’s fundamentals were excellent, his intonation frighteningly perfect. But after listening a few times, he realized the kid played like a human metronome. You couldn’t find a single flaw, but you couldn’t find a single shred of emotion, either.
’Oh well, this is fine too. It’s just background music, and at least it’s not distracting.’
Chen Zhuo was immersed in his own frequencies.
He could clearly feel the vibrations of the strings travel through his jaw and into his bones. This sense of absolute, un-approximated regularity slowly washed away the remnants of the tedious partial differential equations from his mind.
Time passed unnoticed as the dim, yellow light of dusk streamed into the String Society’s room.
Chen Zhuo stopped his bow.
He took a soft cloth from his case and wiped the rosin dust from the strings and body of the violin. His movements were meticulous, yet efficient.
He put the violin away and fastened the latches.
"I’m leaving, seniors," Chen Zhuo said, picking up his case.
"Alright, take care." The guy with glasses still didn’t look up.
Chen Zhuo pushed open the door and walked out into the summer evening breeze.
His days were like the scales Chen Zhuo played: steady, regular, without a single ripple.
He would wake up in the morning and head to the cafeteria for two steamed buns and a bowl of congee.
In the mornings, he would sit at his desk and read the *Theoretical Physics Tutorial*. At noon, he and Wang Dayong would get takeout from the cafeteria and eat back in the dorm. In the afternoons, he would continue deriving formulas or help Chu Ge review the messy foundational logic he’d written. In the evenings, he would go to the activity center to play his violin for a while.
This routine life cut time into perfectly even segments.
The temperature grew higher each day.
The old ceiling fan in the dorm was turned to its highest setting, spinning with a WHIR, but the air it blew down was also warm.
At some point, the sound of cicadas started up in the trees outside the window.
At first, it was just one or two sporadic chirps, but it soon grew into a continuous, noisy drone.
Just like that, summer had quietly and completely unfurled.
One day at noon in mid-June.
Chen Zhuo and Wang Dayong were carrying their meal containers and had just reached the bottom of their dorm building when a deafening cheer erupted from the second floor.
Immediately after, BANG! Someone threw a stainless-steel washbasin out of a window. It crashed onto the lawn below, making a huge racket.
"The hell? What’s going on? Have they lost their minds?"
Wang Dayong jumped in fright, quickly steadying the meal container in his hands.
A clamor of chaotic footsteps and shouts came from the hallway.
Chu Ge came flying down the stairs, nearly crashing into Wang Dayong.
"The lockdown’s lifted! The lockdown’s lifted!"
Chu Ge’s face was flushed with excitement. He grabbed Wang Dayong’s arm and shook it hard.
"The school just announced it over the broadcast! It’s finally under control! They’re lifting the lockdown. We can enter and leave campus freely!"
Wang Dayong’s eyes lit up, and he almost dropped his meal container.
"For real? Does that mean we can go to the back street for barbecue?"
"We’re eating!"
Chu Ge waved his hand grandly.
"This afternoon, it’s all on me. We’re going to have a proper feast."
The news of the lockdown lifting was like a gust of wind, instantly blowing away the gloom that had oppressed the campus for months.
Even though final exams were right around the corner, everyone’s spirits were noticeably different.
For Chen Zhuo, exam week was just a matter of writing in a different location.
During his advanced math exam, the proctor was an old professor wearing reading glasses. He was strolling slowly around the exam hall and stopped when he reached Chen Zhuo’s desk.
Chen Zhuo was solving the last major problem. Instead of using the tedious proof steps taught in the textbook, he simply drew a basic algebraic structure to the side, transformed the problem with two lines of equations, and wrote down the answer directly.
The old professor stood beside him and watched for a long time. His brow furrowed slightly but then quickly smoothed out. He said nothing and walked away slowly, his hands clasped behind his back.
After finishing the last problem, Chen Zhuo put down his pen, checked to make sure he hadn’t filled in the multiple-choice answers in the wrong spots, then flipped his test paper over on the desk. He leaned back in his chair and waited for the bell to signal the end of the exam.
The last exam was over on July second.
The moment they handed in their papers and walked out of the academic building, Wang Dayong tilted his head back, faced the somewhat glaring sun, and let out a long sigh.
"Finally free."
Wang Dayong gave a huge stretch.
"I feel like I left half my life in that exam hall. I don’t care anymore, I don’t care. Whatever score I get, I get."
Chu Ge ran up from behind and threw an arm around Wang Dayong’s shoulders.
"Let’s go, let’s go! Pack your stuff, buy your tickets! I can’t stand another day in this godforsaken place. I want to go home and eat my mom’s cooking."
Chu Ge’s words, "I want to go home and eat my mom’s cooking," seemed to still be echoing in Chen Zhuo’s ears.
The boisterous goodbyes, mixed with the dust kicked up by luggage being moved through the hallways, churned the sweltering early summer heat into a boiling cauldron.
Chen Zhuo stood up and walked into the bathroom.
He turned on the faucet.
GUSH—
Chen Zhuo lowered his head, cupped his hands to catch the cool water, and splashed it forcefully onto his face.
He grabbed the towel from the washstand and rubbed it haphazardly across his face a couple of times.
Then, he reached out and twisted the faucet shut.
In the instant the flow of water was cut off, it was as if an invisible knife had abruptly sliced away all sound from the world.
Chen Zhuo draped the towel over his neck and walked out of the washroom.
Without the sound of the water to cover it, the faint scraping of his chair as he pulled it out was magnified several times in the room.
He sat down.
A large empty space had opened up beside him.
All that remained on Wang Dayong’s bed was a yellowed, old bamboo mat. The desktop, usually piled with various advanced math review books, was now bare, reflecting some of the light from the window.
Chen Zhuo’s gaze returned to what was directly in front of him.
The bulky monitor, the quiet laser printer, and in the upper-left corner, the Russian edition of the *Theoretical Physics Tutorial*—all were in their proper places, just as always.
His gaze drifted past the crack of his own slightly ajar door. Across the hall, the door to Room 216—the one that always had light shining from under it and the sound of a keyboard clicking behind it—was now shut tight. A lock hung from its handle.
The old ceiling fan overhead made a monotonous CLICK-CLACK sound.
Outside, the midsummer drone of the cicadas, which had previously been suppressed by the hubbub of human voices, now poured in through the open window like a tidal wave after a brief lull.

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