Chapter 182: Bandages and the Enter Key

What the nurse handed over was a roll of elastic bandage and a bottle of Yunnan Baiyao spray. The receipt had the amount printed on it: 42.5 yuan. Lin Chen pulled that crumpled fifty-yuan bill from his pocket and passed it over. The coins from the change clinked sharply into the plastic tray. He crouched down and rolled up the left leg of his trousers. The swelling around his ankle had faded from a deep bruise-red, but the skin was still stretched glossy and tight, like a thin layer of wax ready to split at any moment. He sprayed the red bottle first. The cold mist made the muscle contract all at once, and his toes curled involuntarily. After waiting three minutes, he sprayed the white bottle. Then he began wrapping the bandage from the ball of his foot, one loop pressing over the next, evenly, without leaving any gaps. When he reached the ankle, he paused and adjusted the tightness. Too tight would cut off circulation; too loose would fail to hold it in place. He tied a knot and tucked the extra cloth inward. Then he stood and tested his weight on it. The pain was pinned down by the bandage and the medicine, reduced to a heavy, dull throb. He could walk. That was enough.

The time jumped to 13:48. He grabbed his backpack and stepped out of the campus clinic. Autumn sunlight slanted across the tree-lined path, and the edges of the plane-tree leaves had already gone yellow. He quickened his pace. His gait still had a limp, but the rhythm had steadied. The backup exam room was on the fourth floor of Building B in the laboratory complex. The stairwell smelled of old wood and chalk dust. Holding the railing, he climbed one step at a time. Every time his left foot landed, the bandage brushed against his skin with a faint rustling sound. At the end of the fourth-floor corridor, the classroom door was half-open. He pushed it open. The proctor was checking the roster.

“Lin Chen?” The teacher looked up at him, eyes lingering for a second on the bandaged left foot. “Two minutes late. Sit down. The test papers have already been handed out.”

He walked to the second-to-last row by the window and sat down. On the desk lay the exam paper and an old Founder desktop computer. The fan in the tower gave off a low, muffled hum. The screen was on, showing a Linux terminal. There were only three questions: first, write a shell script to batch-rename log files; second, configure an Apache virtual host and set its access permissions; third, diagnose a core dump from a C program with a memory leak. The exam lasted two hours.

Lin Chen did not start typing right away. He scanned through the questions once, quickly breaking the steps apart in his head. The first problem was basic regex matching, the second tested configuration-file syntax, and the third required reasoning through gdb and valgrind. He rested his hands on the keyboard. His fingertips were cool. Under the desk, his left foot pressed lightly against the floor, helping support the weight of his upper body. He typed the first command. Characters appeared one by one against the black background. No hesitation. No pause. His fingers were already used to this rhythm. It was as natural as breathing.

He finished the first question in twelve minutes. He pressed Enter, and the terminal returned a success message. For the second question, he opened httpd.conf and checked it line by line. The DocumentRoot path for the virtual host pointed to the wrong place, and the permissions block was missing AllowOverride. He changed three lines, saved, and restarted the service. He typed localhost into the browser, and the page loaded normally. The third question took the longest. The core dump was only a few dozen megabytes, but the error stack pointed to a linked-list node that had never been freed. Instead of writing the fix immediately, he first sketched the call chain for memory allocation and release on scratch paper. After finding the break point, he added free() and nulled out the pointer in the code. Compile. Run. The memory-usage curve remained stable.

When the bell rang for the end of the exam, he had just typed the final line of commentary. The proctor took away the paper without asking anything else. He packed his backpack and stood. The moment his left foot touched the floor, a wave of aching soreness spread from the sole up into his calf. He steadied himself by holding the edge of the desk and walked out of the classroom slowly. Wind swept down the corridor, carrying away the stale heat of the computer lab.

When he got back to the dorm, most of the hallway was already empty. Most of his roommates’ beds had been cleared out, leaving only bare bed boards and tape marks on the wall. He did not have much: a few shirts washed to a tired white, two dog-eared books—C++ Primer and Core Python Programming—a chipped enamel mug, and the cardboard box under the bed packed with old data cables. He crouched down and began to pack. He moved slowly, but methodically. The clothes were folded and stuffed into a woven sack. The books were wrapped in old newspaper. The cables in the box were sorted and bundled by connector type. Every time he finished packing one thing, he silently recited its use in his head. This was not moving out. It was asset liquidation.

His phone vibrated. The screen lit up with a bank text: “A transfer has been completed to your account ending in 7392 on October 15 at 16:20. Amount: 1200.00 yuan. Balance: 1235.30 yuan.”

Old Zhao’s final payment had arrived. Lin Chen stared at that string of numbers for a long time. Twelve hundred yuan. Added to the previous 35.3, it came to 1,235.3. He opened the drawer and took out a hard-covered notebook. Flipping to the latest page, he wrote down the date and the income-and-expense details. Income: 1200 final payment for Old Zhao’s data-cleaning job. Expense: campus clinic medication 42.5. Balance: 1192.8. His pen paused for a moment, and he added another line: Start work next Monday. Estimated first-month pay: 4800 (at 80%). Rent budget: 800. Medication reserve: 600. Food: 300. Transport: 200. Remaining buffer: 2900.

Numbers were cold, but they were also an anchor. With an anchor, a person would not be blown around in the wind. He closed the notebook and slipped it into the side pocket of his backpack. Then he went back to packing. The dust on the bed boards smeared into damp streaks under the rag. He stood in the middle of the emptied dorm room and looked around. Four beds. Four desks. Corners that had once been piled with instant-noodle cups and scratch paper now held only the marks of peeling paint. He had lived here for three years. In those three years, he had learned to run his first Python script on a secondhand computer, learned to copy code by the light of his phone when the power went out at night, and learned to stir meat broth into rice when buying the cheapest vegetable dish in the cafeteria. Now he was leaving.

There was no farewell ceremony, no sentimentality. He simply set the key on the hook behind the door and pulled the zipper on his backpack shut. The sound of the metal teeth meshing was unusually clear in the empty room. He turned and headed downstairs. The voice-activated lights in the stairwell clicked on one by one with his steps, then went dark again one by one behind him.

By the time he walked out of the dormitory building, evening had already fallen. The streetlights were not on yet, and the shadows of the plane trees along the road stretched long. At the little shop by the campus gate, he bought a pack of the cheapest dried noodles, two packets of pickled mustard greens, and a bottle of mineral water. 8.5 yuan in total. He packed them into a plastic bag and headed toward the urban village. The room he rented was in an old residential block three bus stops from school, on the sixth floor with no elevator. The landlord was a retired factory worker with a difficult temper, but the rent was cheap: four hundred a month, one month’s deposit and three months’ rent up front. He had only paid the deposit before; now he had to make up the first month’s rent.

Climbing the stairs was a trial. Every time he took a step, the muscles under the bandage pulled once. Holding the stair rail, he paused after each step. His breathing grew heavier, and fine beads of sweat formed on his forehead. But he did not stop. He knew that if he stopped, the leg would stiffen and his breath would scatter. When he reached the sixth floor, he took out the key and opened the door. The room was tiny, about ten square meters. One iron-frame bed. One folding table. One north-facing window. The wall paint had peeled in places, but it was clean. He set the woven sack and the cardboard box in the corner, put the noodles and mustard greens on the table, unscrewed the mineral-water bottle, and took a drink. The water was cold. It slid down his throat and pressed back the emptiness in his stomach.

He sat on the edge of the bed and took off the sneaker on his left foot. The bandage had already loosened a little, so he wrapped it tight again. Then he opened his laptop. The screen lit up to that familiar black desktop background. He connected through his phone hotspot. The signal showed only two bars. He opened his email and found the onboarding instructions Director Li had sent as an attachment. The download was slow. The progress bar crawled forward bit by bit. While waiting, he opened a terminal and created a new folder: internship_prep. Inside it he created three subdirectories: docs, scripts, and logs.

Once the attachment finished downloading, he opened the PDF. It listed the tasks for the first week: get familiar with the internal codebase conventions, configure the development environment, read the API documents for the existing modules, and submit an environment-setup report before Friday. No filler, just a checklist. Lin Chen read through each item, mentally stepping through the dependencies: JDK version, Maven repository address, Git-permission request process, internal proxy configuration. He took out a sheet of A4 paper and started drawing a flowchart. Arrows. Boxes. Decision nodes. The lines were straight, with no need for correction.

Outside the window came the distant pounding of a construction site, heavy and regular, like a heartbeat. He wrote the final configuration command, saved the file, and closed the laptop. The room fell quiet. Leaning against the wall, he closed his eyes. The pain in the sole of his foot was still there, but it had become background noise. He knew that tomorrow he had to go collect the dorm deposit, open a salary card at the bank, and buy a shirt decent enough to wear to the company. There were many things to do, but none of them were hard. The hard part was keeping his rhythm and not letting anxiety throw off his pace.

His phone screen lit up again. A text from an unfamiliar number: “Lin Chen, this is the counselor from the Computer Science Department at Provincial Institute of Technology. Come to the school office at ten tomorrow morning. We need your signature and the official stamp for your graduation project and internship certificate. Bring your student ID.”

He opened his eyes and looked at the message. Graduation project and internship certificate. It meant the formal stripping away of his student identity and the complete binding of his professional one. He replied: “Received. I’ll be there on time.”

He set down the phone and walked to the window. When he pushed it open, night wind rushed in, carrying the city’s familiar scent of dust and exhaust. In the distance, neon lights blurred together into a halo with no distinct outline, but they were there. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Tomorrow would not be any easier. But he was already used to that.

He turned back to the desk, opened his notebook, and wrote on a new page: Night of 2010.10.15. Medicine applied. Final payment received. Environment setup checklist prepared. Tomorrow: collect deposit, open bank card, buy shirt, sign documents. Do not pursue perfection. Pursue usability.

After the final stroke, he closed the notebook. Under the dim yellow light, his shadow stretched long across the wall. He lay down and pulled the thin blanket over himself. Closing his eyes, he let his breathing gradually steady. Under the bandage, his left foot gave off a faint heat, like an iron brand slowly cooling. He knew that at seven the next morning, the alarm would ring. He would get up, wash his face, wrap the bandage, and go out. Then he would keep walking.

The wind outside the window had gone still. The city slept in the night. And somewhere in a corner, a screen was quietly waiting for the next press of Enter.