The Archivist

Municipal Archives, Repository Seven, three floors underground, where sunlight never reaches. Lin Xiao is the least-known archivist here, spending his days sorting through a roomful of unwanted old files. He has a secret he can't tell anyone: whenever he takes off his cotton gloves and touches an old object steeped in powerful emotions, he can "read" its owner's final memory: the window they saw before they died, the hand they clutched, the half-finished words they never got to say. Others spend three days solving a case; one touch is all he needs. But every time he reads a memory, the fear, anger, and despair that aren't his stay inside him for another day. Over time, he starts to lose track of which emotions are his own. Three years ago, his father, Lin Zhengsheng, worked as an archivist in the same repository. One night, he fell from the top floor. His death was ruled an accident after he failed to grab a pen. Then one day, Lin Xiao touched an unnumbered, sealed file. The fragments that exploded in his mind showed the few seconds before his father's fall: someone had pushed him from behind. Following the trail of that hand, he discovered that the archives weren't a place to store records at all. Behind the walls stood an entire hidden wall of authentic files. In the cabinets was a hand that never aged. The Dead Letter Office of 1986 was still sending mail. For decades, this place had been governed by a set of rules that ran on their own: erase a name, transfer a name, nurture a name, send out a name. And in the second column of one register, a chair had always been left empty. The empty chair wasn't waiting. Someone was waiting for him to put pen to paper. Lin Xiao didn't sit down. He put on his cotton gloves and, one stroke at a time, reopened the ledger his father had left unfinished. Others thought he was turning over old papers. He was unearthing a life buried for decades.