Eriko insists the bridge was her idea.
“The Su Causeway was getting bored,” she said, the first week we moved in. “So it dreamed itself taller. I merely took notes.”
From the top floor apartment of the second building from the left, I mostly believe her.
Our round window is an eye that belongs to the lake. Every morning it wakes before we do, fogging over from its own private dream. The glass sweats little beads of West Lake mist, and when I wipe it with my sleeve I can see what sort of day Hangzhou has decided on.
Some days the surface of the water is a polished mirror, sliced into crescents by slow barges hauling tea leaves and silk bolts. Other days the lake is all steam and shouting, as if the boilers under the causeway have boiled the whole world too. Today is one of those days. Vents on the roofs exhale in ragged puffs, and the entire bridge-creature we live in is breathing, stretching, rattling itself awake.
Our apartment is shaped roughly like a teapot that grew extra rooms by accident. One long corridor, bulging in the middle, with two attic bedrooms wedged under the roof like thoughts you had but never wrote down. Pipes run along the ceiling, some for water, some for steam, and at least one for gossip. I know because if I put my ear to it in the evenings I can hear the noodle shop three doors down arguing with the clockmaker about the exact time when “night” begins.
Eriko calls our home “the observatory,” even though we have no telescope, just the round window and her stubborn faith that any place high enough can be an observatory if you are observant.
I call it “the round story,” because everything seen through that circle of glass wants to become a tale.
The top-floor hallway is narrow enough that we have to move in single file. Eriko goes first, because Eriko always goes first. She is carrying a stack of notebooks under one arm and the copper lunchbox I made for her under the other. The lunchbox has a little valve that lets out sighs of steam when she opens it; the vendor gave me a discount because he couldn’t get it to stop doing that.
“It’s considerate,” Eriko said. “It expresses how I feel before lunch.”
The stairs coil down around the old brick chimney like a dragon around a scholar’s tower. Somewhere beneath us the waterwheel grumbles. Its turning sends a slow shudder up through the spine of the building; to me it feels like a giant cat purring. To Eriko it feels like a metronome.
“Listen,” she says, pausing on the landing where the wall peels back to a slit of lake. “The wheel is half a beat faster today. The city is in a hurry.”
“Maybe the city overslept,” I say.
“That too,” she concedes.
We pass the door of our downstairs neighbor, Madam Zhen the clockmaker. Her sign swings over the door: CORRECTIONS OF TIME & OTHER REGRETS. If you bring her a broken watch, she’ll fix the gearwork and, for a little extra, the afternoon in which you broke it. People sometimes emerge from her shop blinking, shirts dry after yesterday’s rainstorm, suddenly uncertain whether they had the argument on the bridge or only imagined it.
We keep meaning to ask if she can fix the week Eriko spent trying to be “practical” and nearly took a job designing boiler valves instead of cosmic harmonizers. But the week gave us this apartment, so perhaps it knows what it’s doing.
We step out onto the sidewalk that is also a bridge that is also a causeway that is also a story that a Song emperor told about taming a lake with a line of earth. Nowadays, that line has erupted in houses and shops. Timber frames lean over the water like gossiping aunties. Roofs bump shoulders. Balconies shake out their laundry over passing boats. From our front door to the tea stand at the next arch there are precisely seventy-three steps; I know because the bridge counts them aloud in my head every morning.
One-two-three, it hums. You are awake.
Four-five-six, the waterwheel adds. So am I.
Hangzhou prides itself on being cosmopolitan, and our stretch of the Su Causeway is cosmopolitan squared.
A Persian spice-dealer’s stall clings to the outer railing, secured by ropes that remember better knots than their owner does. Next to him, a scholar from Dali sells miniature stone pagodas that, if you listen closely, recite the Heart Sutra backwards in the voice of a child. There is a bookstore specializing in banned commentary on banned commentaries, and a silk merchant who prints astrological charts directly onto sleeves so your destiny is always looking at you when you reach for something.
Over all this moves the usual Song dynasty traffic: officials in sedan chairs, students on donkey-back reciting poems at the exact wrong volume, Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, mercenaries with suspiciously clean swords, and tourists from every province trying to decide if the steampunk causeway is historically authentic.
It isn’t, of course. But history is just a draft that cities keep rewriting.
Above us, tram-cars shaped like carp whisper along overhead tracks, steam puffing from their gills. The carp-trams dive and rise between the rooftops, sometimes dipping low enough that Eriko could reach up and brush their brass bellies. She never does. “You don’t pet public transportation,” she says. “It might start expecting affection.”
We stop at Old Wu’s tea stand, which is really just a plank bolted to the side of the bridge, with stools perched in defiance of gravity. If you drop a cup by accident, the lake catches it and returns it later, filled with rainwater and lake gossip.
“Morning, girls,” Old Wu says, sliding two cups our way. The steam rising from them forms characters that spell out today’s headlines before dissolving.
“Anything exciting?” I ask.
“City council still arguing about whether to raise the bridge another story,” he says. “The lake spirits say they’d like a little more privacy. The landlords say they’d like a little more rent.”
Eriko sips her tea, watching the characters from the steam fade. “They should ask the wheel,” she says. “It knows how much weight the bridge can carry.”
“There it is again,” Old Wu chuckles. “Your girlfriend thinks the infrastructure has opinions.”
“It does,” I say, because I am loyal.
“See?” Eriko says to him. “Independent confirmation.”
Eriko walks to her post at the Institute of Metaphysical Engineering, which grew like a cluster of chimneys from the northern shore of the lake. I stay on the bridge; the bridge is my office.
My job, officially, is copyist at the printshop three arches down. Unofficially, I write stories in the margins. Hangzhou is full of margins. That’s where the magic leaks out.
Today I am supposed to copy a new tract titled On the Proper Regulation of Steam Spirits in Urban Environments. The author is concerned that the little fire-sprites who live in boilers are becoming unionized, demanding better ventilation and occasional incense offerings. He proposes regulations and licensure.
“What do you think?” I ask the printing press.
It considers, then clanks. The press is an old one, with a personality like a retired opera singer: moody, particular, secretly tender.
“The spirits were here before the regulations,” it wheezes. “They will be here after. Keep your wrists straight when you ink the blocks. I’m not straining myself for sloppy work.”
I behave. In between sheets I imagine the steam spirits marching on the city hall, wearing little metal helmets, chanting slogans. In my version, Eriko is called in as an expert consultant and accidentally becomes their negotiator. She would listen very seriously to their complaints about damp coal and overtime, then propose a plan that would make everyone slightly uncomfortable but strangely hopeful.
I tuck that aside for later. It’s probably a novella.
At noon, the sun hangs over the lake like a coin no one can reach. The round window of our apartment will be catching it, cutting it into fragments on our wooden floorboards upstairs. I eat lunch on the shop’s back balcony, legs dangling over the water. A carp-tram glides past at eye level. Inside, a boy is doing his homework with the determined misery of someone who knows the poem but not why he should care.
The lake murmurs against the pilings. Sometimes it speaks an older dialect of water that I don’t fully understand, but today it’s straightforward.
“Rain coming,” it says.
“How bad?” I ask.
“Enough to wash some regrets into me, not enough to drown them,” it answers. Lakes are used to a certain quantity of regret.
When the rain arrives it does so from below.
Those new to Hangzhou look up nervously at the thickening clouds. The locals glance down at the surface of West Lake instead. Where the first raindrops hit, rings of silver widen, and the reflections of boats and buildings ripple. Then the reflections begin to fall upward, lifting off the water and rising into the sky as shimmering copies of themselves.
The real raindrops follow, chasing their own images.
From the bridge, it looks as if two storms are passing through each other: one descending, one ascending. This is very good for business. People dart under awnings and into shops, buying tea, buying clocks, buying small stone pagodas that hum comfortingly in damp pockets.
“Sammi!” Eriko arrives at the printshop door, hair beaded with mirror-rain, notebooks clutched under her robe. “I need you to come home right now.”
“Are we getting evicted?” I ask, already reaching for my satchel.
“Possibly by metaphors,” she says. “Hurry.”
We dash along the bridge, bodies weaving around us like careful fish. Halfway home, the bridge shivers under our feet—a familiar movement, but today there’s a higher tremor threading through it, like a plucked string.
“The wheel’s overclocking,” Eriko mutters.
“Is that dangerous?”
“For the wheel? No. For the stories we tell about time? Potentially.”
This is the sort of answer that makes people in the Institute stare at her. I just match my stride to hers.
Our building seems to lean a little further over the water than usual, listening. The stairwell smells of damp brick and counseling. On the first landing, a rivulet of rain is flowing upwards, returning to the roof. On the second, Madam Zhen sticks her head out of her workshop.
“Your window,” she says. “It’s leaking eras.”
“That explains the call I got,” Eriko says.
The round window is sobbing quietly when we reach it.
Not with water. With moments.
Tiny droplets of time slide down the glass: a first kiss that hasn’t happened yet, the last chapter of a book I haven’t finished, a sunrise from five days ago that we watched together without knowing it would be important. Each little moment-bead bumps against the others, merges, splits, threads itself down towards the sill.
“Don’t touch them,” Eriko says. “Not yet.”
“What did you do?” I demand, because it’s always safer to assume she’s been meddling with metaphysics.
“Nothing reckless,” she protests. “I just asked the wheel to keep a backup of the afternoon schedules for the Institute in case the council decided to reset their clocks again. It must have synced with our window.”
“And now our apartment is time’s lost-and-found,” I say.
She smiles in a way that suggests she has no problem with that.
“Sammi,” she says softly, “think about it. We live in the top-floor apartment over the busiest causeway in Song Hangzhou. We’re already at the crossing point of so many stories. Now we’re a crossing point of times as well. Isn’t this what you wanted? Material?”
I look at the trembling window. In it, I see the bridge in endless variations: with cart traffic only, with trams shaped like dragons instead of carp, with no buildings at all, just a bare line of earth and young willows, with skyscrapers that seem to be made of glass calligraphy. All of them are real, somewhere along the wheel’s rotations.
“It is,” I admit. “But also I would prefer not to accidentally step into next Thursday while brushing my teeth.”
Eriko nods. “Reasonable. Here is my proposal. We tune it.”
“How do you tune a window?”
“Like any instrument,” she says, going to the closet and pulling out the small zither she bought from a street musician who claimed it was haunted by a very patient ghost. She sets it down on the windowsill. The ghost stirs in its strings, a faint pale shimmer.
“Good afternoon,” Eriko tells it. “We require your pitch.”
She plucks a note. Outside, the rain pauses mid-fall. Some droplets hang in the air like punctuation. Others reverse direction, uncertain which way is down.
Eriko adjusts the tuning pegs, finds another note, lower and rounder. The waterwheel far below responds with a bass rumble. Our whole building vibrates. I feel every shop, every stair, every conversation that has ever taken place on these planks shiver in my bones.
“Again,” she says. Pluck, hum, tremor.
And the window…relaxes.
The beads of time slow their descent, thickening into a single clear thread that hangs from the top of the frame to the bottom. It looks like spun glass, or a question drawn in water.
“There,” Eriko says. “Dedicated channel. If time wants to drip, it has to use this.”
“What do we do with it?” I ask.
“That’s your department.” She stands back, hands folded in her sleeves like a satisfied engineer. “Stories need a timeline. Now you can literally spool one out.”
I step closer to the window-thread. Inside it, scenes flicker: tomorrow’s market, next year’s fireworks, a day ten years ago when I will meet Eriko for the first time on a different bridge in a different city that this reality hasn’t heard of yet. It’s all there, braided together.
“Is it safe?” I ask.
“Not at all,” she says cheerfully. “But it’s ours.”
In the weeks that follow, our round window becomes the worst-kept secret on the Su Causeway.
People come under pretexts. The noodle seller brings us “extra broth,” which just happens to require simmering next to our window for an hour. Madam Zhen appears with a basket of malfunctioning alarm clocks that need to “absorb some ambient chronology.” Old Wu claims the stairs are better for his health than standing in his stall all day and spends half of every afternoon leaning against our doorframe, listening to the zither ghost hum along the time-thread.
We charge no fee. Instead, I ask each visitor for a story: something that happened to them, or could have, or should have. In exchange, they may look at the thread and see one moment: one glimpse of a regret, a hope, a possibility. The rule is that they cannot tell me what they saw, and they cannot change it.
“This is cruel,” Eriko says mildly.
“This is narrative discipline,” I answer.
I fill notebook after notebook. The stories aren’t about the moments themselves—that would be too easy—but about the people when they go back downstairs, back into the bustle of cosmopolitan Song Hangzhou, carrying under their ribs the knowledge that somewhere in the weave of time, something waited for them or missed them or almost happened.
Sometimes I see the same person three times in one week. They bring different pretexts, different offerings. Their eyes are never quite the same.
“You’re running a clinic,” Eriko observes one evening as we sit on the floor, backs against the wall, the window glowing softly with tomorrow’s suggested weather.
“I thought we were running an observatory,” I say.
“Observatories do clinics now,” she says. “Interdisciplinary.”
We share a bowl of rice laced with chili oil that claims to be imported from a region that does not technically exist yet. Outside, the carp-trams are lit from within, glowing lanterns gliding over the lake.
“If the council raises the bridge another story,” I say, “do you think our apartment will move up with it, or will we end up in the middle somewhere?”
“The bridge can’t do without its eye,” Eriko says. “We’ll stay on top. Cities need someone to tell them what they’re dreaming.”
“And what is Hangzhou dreaming?” I ask.
She tilts her head, listening. Far below, the wheel turns, the causeway creaks, the lake murmurs, the steam-spirits gossip in their pipes.
“It’s dreaming of never choosing between past and future,” she says finally. “Of being both: Song banners and smokestacks, silk and clockwork, sutras written on holographic paper. And of two ridiculous women who insisted on living in the highest, most impractical apartment on the bridge, because they thought the view might help.”
I lean my head on her shoulder. The window fogs slightly where our breaths meet on the glass.
“What if one day the wheel stops?” I ask.
“Then the stories will keep turning it,” she says. “That’s how time really works.”
Below us, the shops along the Su Causeway light their lamps, one by one. The Persian spice dealer tells a joke in five languages at once. The stone pagodas on the bookshop roof chant protective sutras against late fees. Somewhere, a steam spirit files its union paperwork and feels very optimistic.
And in our round-windowed teapot of an apartment, on the top floor of the second building from the left, in a cosmopolitan Song Hangzhou that has refused to decide where it belongs in history, I open a fresh notebook and begin:
Eriko says the bridge was her idea. This is what happened after the city believed her.
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