In certain cities, on certain evenings, there comes a brief and exquisite interval — when the sky turns a blue that defies description, quiet and seemingly eternal, though in truth it is about to go dark.
One day in 2016, I saw that blue. I was walking — either grocery shopping or just strolling. Near a bus dispatch station somewhere on Xiying Road, I saw a string of Route 400 buses, nose to tail, departing one after another — like a string of happy bullets, fired into the heart of the city, though no one knew who pulled the trigger.
The wonder I felt at that sight was no less than hearing Faye Wong's To Love in 2003, and no less than seeing the endless city wall along the Ring Road suddenly light up all at once, as if by agreement. Route 400 buses are massive double-deckers, and the childlike innocence of them queuing up like that — I spent years unable to find the words, until Ma Xiaoyuan started kindergarten. One day I saw a video her teacher had posted: the toddler class was lining up to walk to the swimming pool, carrying towels, wearing flip-flops, and the naughty ones got gently corrected by the teacher. That's exactly what Route 400 was like — one bus veering slightly off course, then straightening back out — in that enormous kindergarten, even the enormous babies had to obey the childish rules.
Later, in 2021 or maybe 2022, one day Ma Xiaoyuan came clomping up to my desk in my World Peace Kyrie Irving basketball shoes, and told me to look at her feet. Then she said, very seriously: "Grandma says cars have feet too. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, a car's feet are its tires!" The exclamation mark is to preserve Xiaoyuan's original tone. It was then that I had my epiphany — of course cars have feet; a car's feet are its tires. Suddenly, Route 400 buses queuing up to depart made much more sense.
Around that time, Ma Xiaoyuan also loved singing a song — well, really just one line: The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round — and she could keep going forever. Sometimes it was the wheels on the car. Either way, they just kept turning.
That's about all I can say about Route 400. Except that in 2007 or 2008 — it doesn't seem like 2009 or 2010 — I rode Route 400 to the university district, then rode Route 400 back. On the way there, the heat swelled my heart so much it seemed to burst — the scene was just like in Wang Feng's "Youth": "I plan to set out at dusk / hop on a ride to somewhere far." And on the way back, blinding and dizzying brightness — I was drunk, draped over the window on the upper deck of the bus, vomiting wildly. How could I have known back then that Route 400 lined up like that precisely to carry things like this? Of course, it also carried people's happiness, their suffering, and their everyday lives.
One more thing: after I saw that blue, I went home and wrote a few lines. At the time I felt embarrassed; now I think they were sincere:
To observe a public bus from the perspective of a cat —
That should be very interesting indeed.
First, it has a big belly
Stuffed with the reasons people migrate.
Then it has strange, stubby legs
That spin like a tangled ball of yarn.
These Route 400 buses depart nose to tail
Like a herd of fresh donkeys fording a river.
They line up and crash into my chest —
Ah, this string of happy bullets!