Sharing a bed with a girl like Zhang Xiaomin is like drinking alone at night: if you're not careful you can become completely inebriated. But I also knew that if I really did slip with her, the next morning's hangover, the void one feels facing last night's empty bottle, would be even more unbearable.

　　That void she represented is restrained, evasive, and silent, but also clearly coercive, revealing, and naked; incessantly teasing and tantalizing you.

　　Young girl's bodies have a special kind of smell, a peculiar warmth, like a taste of sunshine that is impossible to refuse!

　　Furthermore, Zhang Xiaomin always slept naked, without a stitch of clothing. She said she had been sleeping naked since childhood and that habit had become second nature: if she didn't strip she couldn't sleep.

　　My basal body temperature is low, about 36.5 degrees centigrade. My senses tell me that Zhang Xiaomin's basic temperature was rather higher, maybe 37 degrees. Snuggling up to that sort of body through the late autumn night is ever so warm. Human life has little happiness that can compare to such an evening!

　　She was timid, reserved, but also mischievous and playful. She insisted on using the crook of my arm as a pillow. But she was inexperienced to the point that she had not the least idea of how to intentionally arouse a man. In reality, she wasn't used to sleeping in another person's embrace, and by and by she curled up in a corner of the bed to fall asleep.

　　Her sleeping form was completely sealed off; in slumber she entered her own realm and forgot everyone else's existence. This was "individual" sleep that brooked no intrusion from other people. Asleep, she was a little girl.

　　Though Zhang Xiaomin went to great lengths to project a seasoned recklessness, her sleeping form betrayed her true nature. I lay beside her, outside of her sealed, curled up body, careful to not even touch her. How could I make love till dawn in the arms of such an innocent young girl?

　　So, in the end I finally went to sleep, too; I can't say when. But when I woke up again she was already gone. Languid sunlight filtered through the shadow of the trees into the second floor window. A little bird was hopping back and forth on a branch outside. I could hear its wings beating and the branch swaying under its claws. On the branch of an unknown sort of tree, a who-knows-what kind of bird frolics in the autumn afternoon: what does that mean? Surprisingly, the bird did not chirp, in fact, the whole sky seemed silent. The bats, flies, mosquitoes, and cicadas of summer, not to mention the locust flowers dancing in the air, were no more to be seen. The birds had also fallen silent, leaving a clear, empty sky that held a vague feeling of dread underneath a drowsy, indolent loneliness.

　　It must have been going on one o'clock. Time to get up: the department had a meeting this afternoon. I opened my cell phone and found this note: "Off to class. Your bed is soft, but you are a bastard!"

　　After a night of little sleep, my brain was rather mottled; I didn't really understand Zhang Xiaomin's message, but sent a reply anyway: "On a good bed you can sleep well. When I am good you won't sleep at all."

　　I found a bottle of milk and a few slices of bread in the fridge. The milk still seemed fresh enough; I added a spoonful of instant coffee and stuck it in the microwave a minute. It didn't smell too bad. But the bread had already gone soft and sticky, though not yet outright moldy. Best to eat it up before it turned green. That gratified me. It was my first useful act towards humanity since I had gotten up.

　　Eliminate waste. Abolish mankind's squandering of materials. Eradicate humanity's wasting of energy. Those were my slogans.