In the beginning, it was his ignorance that attracted her.

Intelligence and sensitivity might also be called a form of contamination. At first he carried none of this contamination, nor did he later. Later, however, she discovered that there was more than one kind of contamination in a person. In fact, you might say that a person is a composite of different contaminations.

When they met, they were hiking and birdwatching with a guide in a forest in Southeast Asia. Hey, beautiful—that was what he called her—lend me your binoculars, will you? She handed them over. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt with enormous armholes exposing his armpits, and every so often he slapped loudly at a mosquito on his leg. While walking, if he sensed someone watching, he thrust out his chest and drew his shoulder blades together. She turned away. When she turned back, he was still moving the binoculars rapidly, pretending to aim at something. Sure enough, he asked for her WeChat.

She was not in a good state. You might also say that she had never been in a good state. She believed her problem was that she imagined too much and was always disappointed. So she had lowered her demands of life and fate to almost nothing. She found it difficult to tell whether she was in pain or not.

They discovered that they lived in the same city, even the same district. He had come here on holiday. He emphasized that he liked exercise, liked hiking, liked challenging himself. The last phrase was slightly funny, but she ignored this, whether deliberately or not. She slipped quietly back into the kind of fantasy that had once caused her pain: the belief that such a coincidence must mean something.

That evening, they rode an open-backed truck from the forest into town. On the way he shouted at her: Massage? Tom yum? Mango sticky rice? Every word looped past her ears against the wind. What? she asked. He moved closer without saying anything. After they got off, he pulled her behind a wall. She allowed him to hold her and kiss her, allowed him to put his fingers into her hair.

Very soon, no more than a few days later, he blurted out that he loved her. The following day he would be leaving, while she planned to travel for several days more. Between great gulps of beer, he said he loved her. Neither shy nor solemn, as if he casually said the word every day. He took several more gulps and watched her sidelong, waiting for a response. She was cautious with words. She rarely had the courage to say love. She did not answer, but she felt that he was fearless.

After they returned, she moved into his apartment. She put her belongings in dark storage boxes and placed them in the storeroom. She tried not to hang her clothes in the wardrobe. Once she found someone else's earring and bracelet on the floor. Another time she swept up several strands of blue hair. He proposed that they split the rent in a peculiar ratio: fifty-five percent from him, forty-five from her. This meant that she could state a position but could not decide. The apartment was high up in a new residential compound. Nearby was a deep pit. After the decline of infrastructure construction, the site had stood unfinished for several years. Recently, bulldozers had begun to enter again. The workers were all old now.

She found a new job at a gallery. He considered it optional, something she had taken merely to give herself a job to attend. When he asked what authority she held and what her KPIs were, she hemmed and hawed. Understandable, he said. It's a tiny workshop.

He took intense pride in the collective to which he belonged. Intentionally or otherwise, he often mentioned the organization he worked for, either to her or to friends around them. In a tense geopolitical climate, he said, his organization repeatedly achieved astonishing results. He emphasized its sense of honor. This honor had transcended commerce and politics and risen to the level of the nation. His coworkers were all very intelligent, he also said, and the youngsters beneath him would fight tooth and nail to stay. Sometimes he searched Doubao to ask where in society a person holding his position at his organization might rank.

What is art? Art is a false proposition, he said. The age of the Mona Lisa is over. Artists today are all swindlers. Where does the future of art lie? AI! If I raise a hundred lobsters, that's the equivalent of raising a hundred artists… He continued in a single breath, without stopping. He also offered extreme ethical scenarios: put an artist and an engineer, or a humanities student and a science student, on a deserted island—which one survives? He hoped she would not misunderstand and think he was alluding to her. After all, she was not an artist. She was the person who wrote mystifying introductions for artists.

The gallery where she worked was enthusiastic about exhibiting bad artists. Artists of this kind needed her mystifying introductions, or no one would be able to tell that their work was art. Their art lived parasitically inside those words and could not exist apart from the cosmos, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, or the field. The gallery owner repeatedly stressed that art should also be realistic, that it should echo its time. The time was made from such empty words, and buyers liked them. Meanwhile, her mind wandered. What would happen if she and an engineer were on a deserted island? Perhaps he was right. If she and he were on an island, which one would survive?

Sometimes she smoked outside the gallery. She remembered that he did not like women who smoked, though he could accept a woman drinking because he drank himself. Why was she always thinking about what he wanted? Dostoevsky did not like women smoking either, because he believed it meant that a woman had succumbed to nihilism. Perhaps he felt the same. Perhaps he did not want her to be a nihilist either. Was she?

One day, as she changed clothes before the bedroom mirror, he held her from behind. At first he only caressed her, but gradually his hand closed around her throat until she could barely breathe. She remembered again that Dostoevsky had done the same thing to his young wife when he saw her dancing with another man. She coughed. Perhaps he, too, was jealous of something? He released his hand. Feel good? he asked. She might have nodded. He fell backward onto the bed.

One afternoon, she faced a canvas and tried to make herself paint something. Nothing happened. She took out a notebook and tried to make herself write something. Nothing happened. She hated him.

When he came home, she was leaning against the bay window, looking down into the deep pit. They're going to build a mall here, he said. Was this a forest before? she asked. He said he could not remember.

He continued entering his name into Doubao's chat box. What did society think of him? What kind of person was he? he asked Doubao. I don't know him, Doubao said. Based on the public information currently available, the core team of this organization does not include anyone by that name. He sent Doubao his résumé. Doubao admitted it had made a mistake.

From the rocking chair, he could see her back in the kitchen. She wore a loose nightgown, and the curves with which he had once been infatuated were gone. He had once required her to change into different outfits at night. Like a clothes hanger, she displayed the temptations that different professions might exude. He never asked about her past—the real past, not what her parents did, or whether they had enough money to support her so that she would not burden him. He had heard that most people who remained in the arts were propped up by their families. After they had known one another for two years, he asked why there were several scars on her waist. Something from childhood, she said. Oh, I see, he said.

With her back to him, she busied herself for a long time. Today she had made a pot of tom yum soup and bought cold beer, one bottle each. At the table, she drained hers in one go and then said that she loved him. He was caught completely off guard. It was the first time he had heard her mention love. She tilted her head and watched him sidelong for his response.

She arranged an anniversary trip, taking them back to the Southeast Asian forest where they had met. The day before they entered the forest, he received a message informing him that he had been laid off by the organization with the sense of national honor. In the hotel, he cursed his leader and the country on the opposite side of the tense geopolitical map. That country had caused trouble. It was greedy and evil and refused to do business properly, and he had suffered as a result. At the same time, his leader was a bad person. All evening he rehearsed how he would report these facts to his leader's leader (a good person who did not yet know).

But when they entered the forest, his phone lost its signal. He shook it and restarted it over and over, to no avail. Then she handed him the binoculars and said, Look at the hornbill up there.

She leaned against him and adjusted the angle. He had no desire to see the bird, and she did not expect him to. She was only trying to obtain happiness through imitation: imitating his words, his movements, his thoughts. If these things could make him happy, why couldn't they make her happy? Once, she had been attracted to ignorance. Now she hoped ignorance would guide her life.

They left the forest in an open-backed truck. Beside the road were monkeys begging for food and tourists begging for monkeys. The truck moved faster. A hard wind blew. In front of him, she asked him many questions. He could see only the shape of her mouth. He could not hear her voice. What? he said. I can't hear you, he said. I can't hear you.