The flat opposite went first: a bagua mirror, plastic, fifteen centimetres, stuck above the frame with double-sided tape.
He put up a bigger one. Brass, twenty-two centimetres.
The following week a pair of scissors appeared on the opposite door, blades outward, hanging on red cord.
He hung a peachwood sword. Thirty-eight centimetres, twenty-six yuan.
Then they hung a new mirror. Not a bagua — a full-length dressing mirror, propped at an angle beside their door. Coming up the stairs he saw what was in it.
It was not his door. It was a corridor, narrower than this one, whitewashed, with a door at the far end.
He knocked opposite. He knocked for four or five minutes. There was dust along the top of the frame and the spyhole was cloudy.
The management office looked it up. That flat had been empty for three years. They held the keys.
He went back up. Above his own door: the brass mirror, the peachwood sword, five emperor coins, a string of gourds. He took them down one at a time.
He stopped at the outermost one.
A pair of scissors, blades outward, hanging on red cord.