At midnight, neon light had just spilled over the plane-tree canopy. Absinthe stood behind the bar, polishing a Czech crystal glass. The shadow of his lashes reflected on its sides like winter snow that had yet to melt. Three years ago, he had fled a conference room on Finance Street for this old alley, traded all his suits for indigo workwear, and used the thirty million yuan he had saved to buy the bar called Seventh Night.
Shen Bing always said he let life ferment in liquor. When she pushed open the glass door in her red Doc Martens, the pocket of her apron still held the architectural sketches she had just finished, and pencil dust from the design institute clung to the ends of her hair. As Absinthe’s only business partner, she planned the bar’s layout down to the millimeter, but after closing she always secretly added soda water to his whiskey.
Every regular at the bar had a story of their own. The old woman in a qipao came every Wednesday for a custom osmanthus brew, saying it tasted like moonlight over Shanghai in 1946. Xiao Zhang, a programmer, always ordered a “Code Crash” at two in the morning and watched Absinthe layer blue curaçao and bitters into the colors of a crashed screen. And there was the man who always wore sunglasses. He ordered his absinthe neat every time, but never let the ice sphere touch the sides of the glass, as though he were protecting some secret that was slowly melting.
When Absinthe ran his fingers over the liquor labels, he remembered what his father had said in the wine cellar: “Good wine, like good people, needs room to breathe.” Watching Shen Bing use a compass to sketch the bar’s starry ceiling on the back of the menu, he suddenly understood that everyday life was simply having someone beside you in the amber liquor of the late night, slowly seeing the edges each of you hid beneath the ice.
