Wolf Culture

"You were born into a life of being worked like livestock. You have the right to obey. You have no right to choose."

The voice hooked itself into the back of my neck like a rusted nail. I tightened my grip on the half-bottle and fled the tunnel.

Outside: blazing sun, the noise of traffic. But I felt strangely uncertain which world was the dream — the desert cave, the graveyard shack, or this office building crammed with pack animals. Standing there, I found myself wondering whether a two-day curse or an overdue mortgage was the more immediately lethal thing.

The elevator doors slid shut with a ding. In the mirrored wall I caught a glimpse of my own hollow face — and the half-bottle in my hand. The water rocked with the elevator's movement, rhythmic and relentless, like a heartbeat that refused to stop. I stared at it, and a thought surfaced unbidden: the evil spirit tells me to find a host; Manager Sun tells me to work unpaid overtime. Whose beast of burden am I?

I pushed open the office door and was immediately surrounded by colleagues.

"Tuniu, you all right?"

"You should rest when you're not well — your wife and kid are counting on you."

"Come to my office."

A cold, flat voice cut through from behind the group. Manager Sun stood there, face like a thundercloud. The colleagues who had gathered around me scattered to their desks in an instant — just like cockroaches bolting in every direction in the tunnel a little while ago.

I followed Manager Sun into her office and set the half-bottle on her desk.

I was about to explain my absence yesterday when I noticed her eyes had gone very still — not fixed on me, but locked onto the water bottle on her desk, as though two nails had been driven through her pupils into the plastic. Her throat made a sound too small to hear: a swallow.

Something lurched in my chest. The half-bottle began to rock, all on its own, slowly and steadily on the desktop. No one was touching it.

I coughed, lightly.

She snapped back, moved her gaze to me, dark-faced. "Why were you out yesterday?"

"Woke up with a bad headache—"

"A headache and you stay home?" Her voice shot up immediately. "End of year, targets like this, you're gone a whole day — who does your work?"

Not you, that's for sure. I kept my eyes on the bottle.

Manager Sun worked herself into a full rant, voice rising, face reddening, spittle flying. She launched into her personal heroism: the time she had a fever of thirty-nine degrees and still came in. Her tone was saturated with self-righteous suffering. I listened to her voice while my gaze stayed on the half-bottle — still rocking, steady and rhythmic, urging me.

The evil spirit: Go. Find me a new host.

Manager Sun: You were gone a whole day — who does your work?

Two voices overlapping in my head, fitting together with impossible precision.

She kept going. My thoughts drifted.

I had thought about why she was like this before, and worked it out. Manager Sun bullied her staff because she herself was bullied — bullied harder and more viciously. The person bullying her was the company's owner, a man named Yin, sixties, ex-military, with a talent for rage that had reached an art form. We called him Emperor Yin in private — his one redeeming quality being that he couldn't parse homophones. Every few days Emperor Yin would stomp through the finance department and scream at everyone within range, loud enough to be heard through the whole building. Several times he had reduced Manager Sun to tears on the spot.

But Emperor Yin was just another sorry creature himself. He had married into money — his father-in-law was a senior military official whose connections kept the company's contracts flowing. So at home Yin had almost no standing; his own daughter didn't even carry his name. A man who felt small at home could only bring the pressure to work to release it. Manager Sun absorbed it from Yin, I absorbed it from Manager Sun, Yin's father-in-law pressed down on Yin — look up and everyone is your master, look down and everyone is your subordinate. Every master has their moment of being a subordinate too. The negative energy cascades downward layer by layer, and whoever is at the bottom can only pass it on to their own insomnia and stomach ulcers.

What separated this food chain from the evil spirit's logic? The evil spirit finds a host; the host finds another host; the half-bottle of water passes down from generation to generation.

The moment I saw it clearly, I felt something more suffocating than fear: absurdity.

Manager Sun kept ranting. In the corner of my eye the half-bottle suddenly went still. In that pocket of quiet, her voice also cut off.

I turned back to look — her hand was hovering over the bottle, her entire body tilting slowly toward it, like a marionette being pulled by a single string, bending degree by degree. Her fingers touched the plastic. She seized it.

I was on my feet in an instant, snatching the bottle from her grip. "It's tap water. I brought it to water the plant. Wrong bottle."

Manager Sun blinked, bewildered. Her tongue swept slowly across her lips, and for just a fraction of a second something purple-black flickered in the depths of her eyes — then vanished.

"Fine." She paused for a few seconds, and her habitual thick-faced expression reassembled itself. "Then listen carefully. Last two days. Get every single expense report checked and filed. If you're not done, don't come home tonight."

Last two days.

Those four words landed in my ears like a needle finding the same puncture wound it had hit a hundred times before. Yesterday the skeleton-in-skin stood in my bedroom doorway and said with that ancient voice: You have three days left. One day had already passed.

I looked down at the bottle in my hand. Then I looked at Manager Sun's face.

The evil spirit's host and the finance department manager — speaking through the same mouth, at the same time.