Nonfiction / Ziyao Lin
:: Delivery Has Failed ::
50%
After keeping at it for more than a month, I stopped writing for a week because of job applications and moving house. It takes very little to bring a person to a standstill.
It began at one in the morning on the 14th. For no particular reason, I could not sleep, and I gave in to the urge to look at his social media again. He had posted a part-time vacancy at the institution where he worked. I opened the job description and found that my skills met most of the requirements.
At two, I went into the room next door and asked my flatmate, who was still awake, whether it was worth applying. If I got the job, I might have the chance to become his colleague. Perhaps I already knew the answer, more or less, before I knocked on the door. I was only waiting for someone—anyone—to confirm it.
‘Wouldn’t you want to start revising your CV straight away?’ my flatmate asked.
‘Maybe once I decide whether I’m applying, I’ll be able to sleep.’
At three, I moved from the bed to my desk and began revising my CV. I felt that unless I could produce a version of myself that matched the position one hundred per cent, I would have no chance of getting an interview. I was as wired as if I had taken too much caffeine, and in that state of agitation I reached six in the morning. The summer sky had begun to lighten. Somewhere in the distance, birds were calling.
When I lay down again, my heart was still beating too fast for sleep. I began to think that only after I had completed the entire application would I be calm again. In fact, from that day onwards, I never returned to the ordinary, peaceful life I had had before seeing that post.
I slept for a little over three hours. Over the next few days, I woke countless times during the night. I had been using adapalene for more than a month, but the day after staying up all night, several red spots still appeared on my face. The more I tried to squeeze the pus out of them, the more swollen and conspicuous they became. A routine I had maintained for months was undone by a single furtive look.
I dreamed that my teeth were snapping and falling out one by one, until my mouth was full of blood. Sometimes, in the instant after waking, I would not know whether I was in my hometown or in Britain. And if I was in Britain, I would not know which city. Once each of these questions had answered itself, I would remember that there was still a long time to wait before I heard the outcome of the application.
During the day, I kept imagining what I would do if I became his colleague. Should I be deliberately cold towards him, or pretend to be warm? Should I smile at him? Could I make sure I never cried in front of him? If he found out that I had applied, would he think I had done it to keep watch on him, or to get close to him?
Several times, I wanted to withdraw the application. Partly because I thought I had answered the key questions badly, and partly because I missed the days before this had disrupted the rhythm of my life. But there was no undo button. Perhaps I had been the first person to submit an application. Perhaps I would be the first to receive a rejection.
Life had suddenly acquired another vector. I began imagining when I would move if I went to his city, and how I would balance the job with my research. None of these were questions someone who had not even been offered an interview had any business considering. But one thread in a life gives rise to countless others, until eventually they tangle themselves into a knot.
I began spending a little time each day preparing slides for the interview. Sometimes I thought that, when he saw my name, he could simply tell his boss that I was emotionally unstable, or that there was something abnormal about my behaviour, and that they should not hire me. Of course, the more decent way to do it would be to say nothing at all, and let me receive a rejection email.
On the first day after submitting the application, I began to suspect that I would never give him the thick journal I had spent two months making. I had once been certain that, in a year or two, I would place it in his hands. Now, suddenly, it seemed pointless. This had nothing to do with whether I got the job. It had only to do with a sense of estrangement. If there was no corner of his mind in which I existed, an object would not become more precious simply because I kept it for longer. As the connection between two people faded, it would only become more and more out of place.
There was a sentence I had written by hand in the journal:
‘There are 31,536,000 seconds in 365 days. Could you spare one of them for me?’
Thinking about it now, it only seems inexplicable.
Again and again in the journal, I wrote that the only ending available to us was to become strangers. After the vacancy appeared, I thought it through once more and arrived at the same answer.
Even if one day we really did become colleagues, we would not come to know each other again.
*
50%
Since moving into this new house, my days have been broken, almost at random, into fragments.
Last night, halfway through writing my diary, my flatmate came into my room and asked where I was planning to live in October, once our tenancy ended. But when I opened the document again, twenty-four hours had passed, and I was no longer in my room but at the university, at eight in the evening. In the house, even the kind of writing that requires very little thought is difficult to finish in one sitting.
‘If I move somewhere else, where are you going to live?’ my flatmate asked.
‘I could go back to the old halls.’
‘The old halls were different because the three of us knew each other. If you go back now, you have to think about the fact that you might be assigned to live with five strange men from five different ethnic backgrounds.’
‘I know. In the first year of my PhD, the university had already placed me in accommodation with several male flatmates. One drank, cheered and threw parties in the middle of the night, but wouldn’t let anyone else have parties. Another never wore shoes, drank water from a laboratory beaker, and had his mother stay and sleep in his room.’
‘You’re in the final year of your PhD. Why make life this difficult for yourself? I know a building with studios. We can go and have a look tomorrow.’
For the past two weeks, one way or another, our conversations have kept returning to housing. The job application in London has only made the uncertainty worse. The advertisement said nothing about when interviews would be offered, or when applicants would hear the outcome. Last Friday, I emailed HR to ask and received no reply. Sometimes I think perhaps they already have someone in mind for the vacancy, in which case the date of the interviews hardly matters to them. It only matters to those of us who do not know whether we have any chance at all.
This morning, I spent another few hours looking at places nearby. The property manager told me, ‘It’s August now. If you want the room, I can hold it for you. But I can’t promise it will still be available in two weeks, or a month.’
I said I understood.
The tenancy on our shared house ends on 30 September, but I might hear about the job in mid-August, or at the end of August, or in early September, or in the middle of September. A single job application had raised the probability of my moving to London from one per cent to fifty. In the meantime, no matter how many places I viewed in the small town where I live now, I could not truly commit to any of them. I did not even dare pay a deposit.
Most of the time, I felt like the mayfly I made in one of my artworks, unable to choose where it was going, carried wherever the ocean current took it. In that work, I called this poetic. A year later, I find it difficult to call having nowhere settled to live poetic at all.
A few months ago, I could still write in my room. Now, if I want a stretch of time that genuinely belongs to me, I have to walk twenty minutes to the office. In the new house, whenever one person eats, tidies up, dries their hair, makes a phone call or goes to the toilet, the other person is inevitably affected. The university, of course, is no silent refuge either. Outside the meeting-room door is the shared office area: people walking past, washing cups and cutlery, talking, singing. Water repeatedly strikes the metal sink, sounding like an electric drill beside my ear.
During breaks, I looked on my laptop and phone at several places near the London job. It was only then that I realised, for the first time, that even if I did get the position, I might not be able to afford the rent. In London, monthly rent was roughly twice what it was in the small town where I lived.
In my country, rent is usually quoted by the month. In Britain, it is usually quoted by the week. I once lived in a small room near a university in China for 700 renminbi a month, almost the equivalent of a single day’s rent in London. My flatmate taught me the formula for converting weekly rent into a monthly figure in Britain: multiply the weekly price by the number of weeks in the tenancy—forty-eight, say, or fifty-one—and then divide by twelve.
I calculated it on my phone.
If I took the job in order to become his colleague, and converted the salary after tax into monthly income, I would have to hand over everything I earned from the job to my landlord and still come up more than ten pounds short every month. That was before counting commuting, food or anything resembling entertainment. The difference between him and me was that even if I got the job, I did not own property in London. As a temporary, part-time worker, I would be paying several times what he paid for housing while earning less than half his salary.
A month ago, I had thought: if I get this job, I can go to London.
Now, for the first time, I began to think that if fate did not let me take it, perhaps that too would be a form of mercy.
Leaving him felt like leaving my happiness behind. Moving closer to him meant moving closer to a kind of pain.
*
0%
I am not quite sure how to begin writing this. I do not dare call my family either. I am afraid I will start crying in the middle of the conversation. I have decided to stay in my room today and speak to as few people as possible.
Last night, within the space of a few hours, I swung between joy and sorrow. In the early evening, I received news that my work had been accepted for a conference. Unusually, both anonymous reviewers had given me full marks. I began calculating the costs and looking at flights, excited by the thought that, in a few months, I would be able to exhibit my work.
The happiness lasted less than seven hours.
At 1.06 in the morning, I was lying in bed, about to go to sleep, when I received the rejection from the job. A bloodless template email:
“We regret to have to inform you that, after careful consideration of all candidates against the person specification, your application has not been successful on this occasion.”
I did not understand why anyone would send a rejection at one in the morning, UK time. Perhaps there was someone sitting behind the screen, working late, still reading my CV at one o’clock, then impatiently clicking the reject button. On my phone, I replied:
“Thank you for letting me know.”
Almost immediately, I received an automated response in bold:
“Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups: Your message couldn’t be delivered to the recipient because you don’t have permission to send to it.”
From the moment I submitted the application twenty-nine days earlier, I seem to have believed that I would at least get an interview. I thought it would be difficult to come across another job whose requirements matched me so closely. Over those weeks, I had already made slides for the interview presentation and rehearsed it aloud several times. I had gone back over things I thought I ought to know, filling in gaps and revising them, and made a separate document for all of that.
One morning after I got up, I put on a dress and asked my flatmate whether green or black would look better if I went to the interview.
‘Have you got an interview?’ my flatmate asked. ‘You’re already thinking about what to wear?’
I had not. I simply thought that, even if I might not get the job, it should not be so difficult to get an interview for a part-time temporary contract. In the end, I decided in advance that, to look professional, I would wear a black top and black trousers.
Once, I took an academic journal out of one of the cardboard boxes I had already packed away. I had promised him two years earlier that I would give it to him, and I thought that perhaps, this time, I might finally have the chance. Another time, I bought a small teddy bear in a charity shop, dressed in blue. I do not know why, but something in its expression reminded me of him as I remembered him. I thought that if I got the job, I would put the bear on my desk.
Many times, I thought there was a good chance I would see him this time. Even if we did not end up becoming colleagues, most of the department would probably be there for the interview, and he would probably be there too. I would tell him that my new article was about to come out, that my project had been selected for an exhibition. I wanted him to see that I was no longer quite the person I had been before.
It had simply never occurred to me that I would not even be given a ticket through the door.
I asked GPT: the application has failed. Should I tell R, or not?
GPT replied: ‘Don’t tell him. Now that the result is out, I’m even more certain of that than I was while you were applying.’
The tears followed gravity across the bridge of my nose, down my cheeks, and onto my Prussian-blue duvet cover, where each one became a dark spot. I had to sit up in bed to cry. For a moment, I felt like a child regressing into an earlier self, unable to bear hearing the words: ‘Nobody wants you.’
Gradually, I could no longer see the screen. The white letters on the keyboard blurred into countless vertical streaks and shafts of light, like the four-dimensional space in Interstellar. A place where you can call out to the past:
“Tell him, Murph. Make him stay.”
Perhaps he had no obligation to know any of this. Perhaps he should be allowed to remain as happy as the life he shared on social media made him seem. Perhaps he should simply be allowed to be happy forever. I repeated this to myself several times.
He had once shared the link to the vacancy enthusiastically across all his social-media accounts. There were dozens of likes and reposts underneath. It probably never occurred to him, from beginning to end, that someone might cry this hard over not even getting an interview. Whoever succeeded and whoever failed, he would still end up with a new colleague.
Again and again, I wiped my runny nose with tissues until the skin above my upper lip was rubbed red and swollen. I had cried myself slick and wet as a loach. At first, I took a thin plastic bag from the bedside table and used it for the tissues. Later, it began to hold my tears as well. They dropped into the bag with soft pattering sounds, like rain falling beneath the awning at my grandmother’s house when I was a child.
Eventually I had to get up to go to the toilet, and when I stood, I felt briefly dizzy. At three in the morning, I lay back down and turned off the light. My phone was still playing, at random, videos pushed to me by social media.
One of them said, in an almost accusatory tone:
‘If you miss someone, why don’t you send them a message?’
If messages were always answered with care, no one in this world would have to chew through the darkness alone.
From the writer
:: Account ::
I began writing “Delivery Has Failed” while waiting for the outcome of a job application. During those weeks, I became interested in the strange way uncertainty can generate an entire imaginary life: a new city, a new home, a different professional identity, and the possibility of becoming close again to someone from whom I had already become estranged.
The essay is divided by the figures 50%, 50%, and 0%. At first, these numbers referred loosely to the probability I assigned to a future that had not happened. Gradually, I began to see them as a way of measuring how much emotional reality an imagined future can acquire before it disappears. The rejection email reduced the practical possibility to zero, but it could not immediately erase the life I had already rehearsed in my mind.
The title came from the automated message I received after replying to the rejection: “Delivery has failed.” I kept it because the phrase seemed to describe more than an undeliverable email.