Memory Leak

Things in the fishing village broke on a schedule.

Monday was Auntie Azhi’s electric fan. Wednesday was the temperature controller on the harbor cold-storage unit. Friday was somebody’s radio that could only pick up a single Taiwanese sermon program. Ahai crouched on the ground, took things apart, fixed them, put them back together — a walk-in clinic with no appointments, whose patients were all appliances.

The laptop was sent back by Auntie Azhi’s son, who said he’d graduated from college and didn’t need it anymore. Auntie Azhi carried it over to Ahai cradled in both arms, her face the expression of someone holding a live grenade.

“Ahai, can you fix this thing? It’s got a virus.”

He opened the screen. The desktop had forty-seven unidentified toolbars, three fake antivirus programs, and a phishing email reading “Congratulations! You’ve won an iPhone!” blinking away. His expression was probably that of a surgeon opening an abdominal cavity and discovering a full set of cutlery inside.

“Auntie, this isn’t a virus. This is organ failure.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.”

He spent the afternoon cleaning the laptop out. During the downtime while the OS was reinstalling, his fingers opened a terminal on their own and typed a few lines of commands. The screen spat out strings of things he could read — version numbers, environment variables, compiler paths. His brain was still blank, but his fingers knew which key to hit next, like a path walked so many times that even after the map was ripped up, the muscles in the soles of his feet still remembered every turn.

He could code.

This discovery was more concrete, more impossible to dodge, than “good with generators.” Fixing machines could be chalked up to handy fingers, but coding was a language — he didn’t remember learning to speak it, and yet when he opened a file he could read it, write it, spot someone else’s mistakes.

Later, someone hired him to build a small program. A young guy running a guesthouse in the next village over, who wanted a booking page. Ahai sat at the folding table in the side room with that cleaned-up secondhand laptop, waves outside the window clocking in for their permanent shift, and on screen, something he was building line by line.

He felt steady. Not happy — steady. A deep, foundation-grade steadiness. When his hands were busy, that dull hollow in his chest shrank a little. He didn’t know what the hollow was, but he knew that as long as he kept building things, kept fixing things, he wouldn’t have to look at it.

---

Over the next few months, the jobs kept coming. After the first guesthouse website went live, word spread, and several guesthouses around Changbin came calling — build a website, set up online booking, digitize the “guest records the owner’s wife kept in a handwritten notebook.” Ahai took them on, one by one, slowly.

He had some strange habits when he coded.

His variable names came out in doubles, involuntarily. btnBtn, imgImg, listList. He’d type them, look at the names, and feel something was off — this wasn’t good naming convention; any trained engineer would know better. But his hands kept drifting that way, as if they were talking to someone, in a cadence that gave everything a little singsong rhythm.

And then there were the comments. Above one function, he wrote:

// This function needs to be written so someone who knows nothing can use it

He stared at that line. It wasn’t written for himself. It was a promise to “someone,” but that someone didn’t even have a silhouette in his mind. Just a certainty — there was a person who needed him to make things simple.

The guesthouse owner called after reviewing the site, satisfied: “Not bad, not bad. But can you add some animated effects? You know, the blinky scrolling text kind.”

Ahai looked at the responsive design he’d spent three hours on — clean layout, precise breakpoints.

The client wanted a marquee.

He added it. Engineers have their pride, but pride doesn’t pay the bills. As the marquee blinked across the screen, he felt something lightly scrape against his soul.

---

Chenggong was much bigger than the village.

Ahai hitched a ride with a truck driver Haisheng-po knew, forty minutes down Provincial Highway 11, rocking all the way into town. Outside the window, the coastline shifted from the cove he knew to unfamiliar harbors, gas stations, convenience stores. His shoulders tightened without his noticing; his breathing went half a beat shallow. More people, more scooters, sounds crowding in from every direction. He could handle it, but it cost effort.

The market was in the center of town. The fruit stalls hit like an upended palette, and the crushed ice on the fish stands glinted painfully in the sun. He bought what Haisheng-po had asked for — ginger, rice wine, a bag of coarse salt — shoved it all into a canvas tote, and walked back along the street.

He slowed down when he passed a shop.

A children’s clothing store. Small place. Tiny T-shirts, shorts, hooded jackets hung on racks by the door. The command to keep walking had already been issued by his brain, but his legs didn’t execute.

He stood there, watching little clothes sway gently in the breeze.

In the corner hung a yellow raincoat. Very small. Sized for a five- or six-year-old. The hood had two round frog eyes on it. He reached over and lifted it off the rack; the plastic fabric rustled in his hands.

“Buying it for your kid?” The shop owner poked her head out from behind the counter.

His hand froze in midair. He didn’t have a kid. He didn’t know if he had a kid. He didn’t know who this raincoat was for. But his hand refused to put it back — a hardcoded loop, stuck, unable to break out of the conditional.

He didn’t answer her. He took the raincoat to the register and paid.

Back at the village, he hung the little yellow raincoat on the hook behind the side-room door. The frog’s eyes stared at him, round and unblinking. He stared back, and felt that something was in this room that shouldn’t exist — but at the same time, all the days without it were the ones that had been wrong.

He didn’t try to explain it. He knew any explanation would lead to a file he couldn’t open.

He left the raincoat there. Every morning before he went out, one glance. Every evening when he came back, one glance. It was nothing. It was everything.

---

New Year’s Eve.

Haisheng-po had put on a plaid shirt that was slightly less old than his usual ones — his formal wear. Next door, Ah-De’s family had come back from Taitung City, three generations strong — grandma, son and daughter-in-law, two little grandsons. The whole village came alive a notch: firecrackers had been popping sporadically since the afternoon, and the air smelled of braised pork and fried rice cakes.

Haisheng-po had cooked a pot of fish soup three times the usual size and told Ahai to come eat. He sat in Haisheng-po’s living room — plastic chairs, the old TV running a holiday variety show, the table carrying twice the usual spread. Ah-De’s two grandsons were tunneling under the table; they were scolded, went quiet for ten seconds, and resumed tunneling.

Haisheng-po picked up a piece of fish belly with his chopsticks and set it in Ahai’s bowl. Ahai took it, and as he lowered his head to eat, his chopsticks paused over the rice. He wanted to push that piece of fish to the person next to him. The impulse was brief, like a memory block reclaimed almost the instant it was allocated — not even fully unpacked before it was freed. But it had existed.

After the meal, Ah-De’s family gathered in the living room to watch TV. Grandma had one grandson on her lap; the other was leaning against his father, half-asleep. The daughter-in-law was clearing the dishes, scolding her husband for not helping as she went; the husband pretended not to hear, and only hauled himself up on the third scolding.

Ahai sat in the corner, a cup of tea in his hands.

He watched them. Complete people. A complete puzzle — every piece in the place it belonged, edges interlocking just right. And he was a piece that had been pulled out, not knowing which picture he belonged to, or whether that picture still existed.

The hollow in his chest ached beyond words. Not a sharp sting — something very deep and very dull, pressing outward from behind his sternum, pushing until he had to consciously maintain the rhythm of his breathing.

He set down the teacup and stood up. Haisheng-po glanced at him. Didn’t ask.

He walked out.

The village had no streetlights after dark. In the distance, firecrackers and the TV host’s countdown were carried in by the wind in broken fragments. He followed the path he’d walked a thousand times — past the clearing where the nets were hung to dry, all the way to the shore.

The sand was dark gray. The ocean was a slab of black, no boundary visible — sea and sky fused into one, like a function with no defined return value: called, but giving nothing back. A few fishing lights floated far out, faint sparks in the dark. The stars were bright. The wind was cold, inflating his jacket into a billowing shape.

He stood there for a long time.

Waves rolled in, pulled back. Rolled in, pulled back. The sound of the surf at night was deeper than in the daytime, like something enormous breathing. Under his feet, the sand was ice-cold. From somewhere far off came the tail end of a countdown, someone shouting “Happy New Year,” the voice so small it might as well have come from another world.

He’d been trying to understand. The extra cartons of milk. The doubled variable names. The comment line about “someone who knows nothing.” The little yellow raincoat behind the door that he didn’t know who it was for. The two small, faceless figures in his dreams. He’d been trying to arrange them, trace them back, find a logic — the way you debug, working backward from symptoms to root cause.

But there was none.

Every clue pointed in the same direction, and that direction was a wall. He couldn’t see past it. He couldn’t parse a result. The only thing he knew for certain was: he was missing someone. Not “missing a specific person” — he didn’t even know who. It was a packet with no destination address, sent over and over, returned every time.

His lips moved.

Not because he’d decided to speak. It was the things that had been pressed down at the bottom of his throat, and on this night when the whole world was gathering with their families, they’d finally found a crack.

He heard his own voice. Faint, most of it dragged away by the wind, but every word intact:

“I don’t know who you are.”

A wave swallowed one beat.

“But I miss you so much.”

That was it. That was all. No one heard. The ocean doesn’t answer, the wind doesn’t carry messages, the dark is just the dark. But he’d said it — for the first time, he wasn’t just enduring the fragments his body kept feeding him. He was using his own voice to acknowledge their direction. Missing. He was missing someone. Even if he didn’t know who.

He stood there, wind pressing his shadow onto the sand, crooked and thin. The waves kept hitting the rocks, same frequency as before. The fishing lights in the distance flickered — bright, dim, bright, dim.

He turned and walked back.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out — a message from the guesthouse owner: “Happy New Year, Ahai! 🎉 Looking forward to working with you again next year!”

He looked at it for three seconds. The screen lit his face. He put the phone back in his pocket. Didn’t reply.

Back in the side room, he closed the door. The little yellow raincoat behind it was invisible in the dark, but he knew it was there. The frog’s eyes were waiting for him.

He didn’t turn on the light. He lay down and closed his eyes. The waves were outside the window.

The hollow in his chest was still there. But its shape had gotten a little clearer.