Have you heard of the Floor Cat of Line 4? The Floor Cat of Line 4, rather than being a cat, is more like a kind of tiger—though of course cats are already a kind of tiger. People usually call tigers "big cats." In my mind it's the other way around: cats represent a terrifying, magnificent wildness. The Floor Cat of Line 4 has overly powerful limbs, correspondingly oversized paw pads, and a chunky, blockheaded face more chunky and blockheaded than the chunkiest, most blockheaded face you've ever seen.

The Floor Cat of Line 4. I was moonlighting as an animal at the zoo on weekends and spotted the Floor Cat of Line 4 on my way home. At the time I was still working as a programmer, and I took weekend gigs at the zoo.

Once, I went with Miss Rocket Bear to the underground market at the zoo to go shopping. We walked into a shoe store, and I sat there while she tried on shoes. The salesperson was odd—when she tried on cowhide shoes, the salesperson said, "You look just like a cow in those"; when she tried on deerskin shoes, the salesperson said she looked like a deer. I said, "What the hell is this—Bear, let's go." But you know how women are—in a shoe store, it's like a bear at a basketball shooting arcade: she just couldn't stop.

I was exhausted, so I walked further inside to look for a seat. But the narrow corridor in the back of the shoe store went on and on, seemingly without end. I must have walked for about ten minutes when the corridor suddenly brightened. I stepped through, my eyes not yet adjusted, and heard someone speaking. "Can you swim?" A lazy, middle-aged Beijing bureaucrat-woman's voice. "No." "You can't swim and you're here to be an otter?! Go line up with the reptiles next door!" I had no idea what was going on, but I went over and lined up as told, and that's how I ended up working as a zoo animal.

At first I tried to improve my craft. I asked the supervisor: "This is my first time being an animal—is there anything I should know? Visitors will be here soon. How should I perform?" The supervisor looked annoyed: "Just be yourself!" Then he started howling, because visitors had arrived and begun tossing food.

I didn't know how to be an animal, so I just lay there motionless, secretly texting Rocket Bear that I was being an animal. The grandmas outside my enclosure were stomping their feet in frustration, shouting, "Get up! Do a jump!" It was as if they all knew the zoo animals were just us in costume.

After a while, Rocket Bear came out of the underground market, found my cage, and took a selfie with me. Then she posted it on WeChat Moments: "Believe it or not, Mr. Alarm Clock is inside this astonishing shell. Meow."

Before long, I got the hang of being an animal. It really was like the supervisor said—just be yourself. I played the lazy, couldn't-care-less type of animal. Sometimes visitors offered me cigarettes, and I'd saunter over, take one in my mouth, and puff away. The zookeeper chased the visitors off with a big stick but left me alone. The sun warmed my back. This isn't such a bad life, I thought. And I sank into sleep with a gentle hum.

Being an animal, checking my phone and puffing away. In my dreams I saw my mother again. Her expression was calm. I walked and walked everywhere, not knowing what I was supposed to do. Light flowed over me like water, covering me, passing through me. When I looked up at the reflection of time on the water's surface, I felt myself sinking down, powerless. So very tired.

So very tired. On the subway I was like a blob of soft clay—until Renmin University West Gate station, where I saw the Floor Cat of Line 4 spring powerfully from the floor. Without time to think, animated by some vitality I didn't know I had, I took off after it. It leapt from the tail end of the train into the tunnel, and I followed right behind like Spider-Man. Deep inside the tunnel, I followed the Floor Cat into a hole—first dark, then gray, then finally pure light. I walked toward the light, feeling as though I were about to escape from myself.

I walked for I don't know how long before life began to gradually materialize. First as a single point, then a few points, then a swarm, like deep-sea fish, surging toward me, pressing their shapes against the windshield. "Why is the snow all coming from one direction?" I asked Miss Rocket Bear.

She didn't answer.

When I woke up over the steering wheel, the car was buried in snow. I could never remember how I had made it back from that expanse of snow into real life. The swirling, tumbling snow was like shards of light, crashing onto my head, piling up, getting thicker and heavier, as if trying to bury me in that zone of unreality. Deep inside I was crying for help, speaking to Rocket Bear. But Rocket Bear wasn't in there. She didn't know that Mr. Alarm Clock was inside this astonishing shell.

Yet in the heavy snow, in Beijing's 2018, I still managed to find some kind of exit and returned to reality.

I tapped on Rocket Bear's avatar and sent her a message. Our last exchange had been a month ago. She'd said, "The next blue sky, we'll meet."

Like a squirrel digging acorns from the earth, my fingers scraped and burrowed across the screen, depositing characters into the chat box with Rocket Bear: "Have you heard of the Floor Cat of Line 4..."