an interlude of emptiness and sirens

Last wednesday there was an eerie feel to the office: everyone was talking very quietly, and the lights were still off even after universal post-lunch nap-time when everyone is slumped over at their desk, sometimes with a jacket over the head (roughly from 1:15 to 1:30 pm). My desk-mate told me to go out to the department store across the street. At 2 pm the air raid sirens would go off, it would be illegal to be out on the street, and the city government building would have to be evacuated, with all its electricity turned off and all the people crowded into a couple of rooms in the basement with minimal lighting and airflow. "It sucks," he said, "You should go shopping. Go now while the elevators are still working." This picture here is a picture of nothing: aside from parked cars, you'll notice that this street is empty. The air raid practice is a yearly exercise in getting attacked by the mainland; in the minutes leading up to it an older man from another section stopped by to share his views on how the PRC will attack, when it comes to that. "Surely you're thinking too much!" My desk-mate, fifteen to twenty years younger, reprimanded him, impatiently stapling some papers together -- for his generation it's clearly a joke, and one that gets in the way of getting the work done. Not so much, I suspect, because they don't think the PRC would ever attack, as that they have doubts about the utility of practicing sitting out the half-hour attack in a department store, or in an airless basement room.