“Remember those sleeper buses?” Sun Dongming asked. 

“Of course,” Lin Wang said. “Twenty years ago you came here on one.”

“They don’t exist anymore,” Sun Dongming said. 

“No.” Lin Wang shook his head.

“When did they disappear?”

“Let me ask.”

Lin Wang dug around in his pocket for his phone. Sun Dongming thought he was about to call someone, but instead he held the phone up to his mouth and said, “Tell me about the rise and fall of the sleeper bus.”

“What’s that?” Sun Dongming asked.

“Artificial intelligence,” Lin Wang replied.

“When did you get it?”

“This afternoon. About four hours after leaving prison.”

“Damn.”

Lin Wang read out the AI response for Sun Dongming. “ ‘Sleeper buses were widely used across China from the early nineteen-nineties to the early twenty-tens. As large numbers of inland workers migrated to coastal cities, sleeper-bus sales reached their peak between 1996 and 1998, with annual sales of seven thousand and two hundred vehicles. By 2005, the nationwide fleet of operational sleeper buses hit its peak at approximately twenty-three thousand units, carrying more than a hundred and fifty million passengers.’ ”

Lin Wang said to Sun Dongming: “You came here in 2005, so you were one of those hundred and fifty million.”

“One of a hundred and fifty million,” Sun Dongming said. “So fucking insignificant.” 

Lin Wang continued reading: “ ‘Due to the inherent safety risks associated with sleeper buses, they were fully phased out as of January 1, 2018.’ ”

“So,” he added, “they stepped off the stage of history.”

“We also stepped off the stage of history then,” Sun Dongming said.

“We were never on the stage of history.”

“I meant we went bankrupt in 2018.”

“We weren’t on it even before we went bankrupt. We were just part of the audience. Two of 1.4 billion.”

“So you’re saying we’re still part of the audience.”

“The part of the audience with no money.”

“The part of the audience who used to have money.”

It was growing late in the evening. Sun Dongming and Lin Wang were sitting at a cluster of open-air food stalls on the outskirts of the city. They’d finished eating their skewers and now burped as they downed their beers. Beside them sat a group of five men on a cursing spree: they cursed the weather, the traffic, government officials, the masses, rich people, poor people, their work, their coworkers, their wives, their children, the skewers they were eating, and pretty much everything else they could think of. Across the road was a brightly lit alley where live-streamers were hawking various products. There was lighting equipment set up everywhere, illuminating dozens of young people, each of them focused on delivering their own spiel into a phone perched on a tripod. A long string of large vehicles lined the road⁠—big rigs, container trucks, and refrigerator trucks, all waiting for midnight, when they would be permitted to enter the city. 

“Did you ever take a sleeper bus?” Sun Dongming asked. 

“Yes,” Lin Wang replied. 

“How many times?”

“Once. I swore I’d never do it again.”

“Why?”

“The guy lying next to me had breath that smelled like tartar. I had to turn away and try not to breathe.” 

“What does tartar smell like?”

“Rotten, fishy. Like a fucking sewage ditch.”

“I only ever rode a sleeper bus that one time, too. I had it a little better than you⁠—there was a pregnant woman next to me.”

“Good-looking?”

“She was pregnant.”

“There are good-looking pregnant women.”

“She spent the whole night calling her husband. It was soannoying⁠—she’d call him, and then she’d start crying.”

The trucks on the road started to move, their engines singing in unison. The five cursing men got up and left. They continued to curse the trucks as they drove away, and then they crossed the street. 

Sun Dongming waited until the sound of their curses had drifted to the other side of the road, and then asked Lin Wang: “Did your sleeper bus have a red-light district?” 

“Red-light district?”

“Yes, a red-light district.”

“Sleeper buses could have red-light districts?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t a bus a little cramped for that?”

“You know what they say⁠—‘a sparrow might be small, but it’s got all the necessary parts.’ ”

“So there was one on the sleeper bus you took here twenty years ago?”

“Right.”

“You never told me.”

“I meant to tell you, but I never got the chance. We went straight to the salon.” Sun Dongming had just gotten a haircut the day before, but Lin Wang had said to get another one, and this time to let a beautiful woman do it.

“What did you think of the salon?”

“It fucking opened my eyes,” Sun Dongming said. There had been twenty or thirty salons just on that street. They’d all had mirrors and chairs, special sinks for hair-washing, and little tables set up with electric trimmers, scissors, combs, hair clips, spray bottles, blow-dryers. “They had everything a hair salon should have, except that I never saw any actual hairdressers. Just ‘shampoo girls’ in miniskirts.”

“It was all a front to deal with police inspections.” 

“But the police were protecting you.”

“The inspections were just a front, too.”

Lin Wang had shoved Sun Dongming into a back room that was bigger than the entire salon area. Then he shoved a young woman in there with him, and went into the room next door. The woman had brought an old boom box⁠—the kind that uses cassette tapes⁠—and she placed it on the bedside table and pressed Play. Then she started stripping to the music. 

“When she’d gotten all her clothes off, she started to take mine off, too, and got me to dance with her.”

“She was my leading lady.”

“Big breasts, tiny waist.”

“And she gave you a striptease.” 

“What did your girl play?”

“Will Pan, ‘Can’t Help but Love.’ ”

“You still remember! I forget what song I had.”

“I remember⁠—I could hear you and your girl singing along.”

“What was it?”

“Michael Wong’s ‘Fairy Tale.’ ”

“Ah, ‘Fairy Tale’! Twenty years ago, that was my favorite.”

The two fell quiet for a while. The smiles on their faces showed that they were awash in memories. Softly, Lin Wang began singing the first bars of “Fairy Tale”: “ ‘I forget how long it’s been / since I’ve listened to you / tell me your favorite story …’ ”

“Those days really were a fairy tale,” Sun Dongming said.

“A wild and free fairy tale,” Lin Wang agreed.

“Gone and never to return.” Sun Dongming sighed.

Then Lin Wang started singing a few lines from the old Teresa Teng classic “When Will You Return?”: “ ‘Beautiful flowers seldom bloom / Beautiful scenes are often doomed.’ ”

“We always sang that song when we were in elementary school. Little did we know how true those words were.”