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【完形填空】Cloze: The Last Night at the Oxygen Bar
At 11:40 p.m. on 3 March 2016, the door of the Oxygen Oasis in Shanghai swung open and a man in a damp coat asked, in careful English, (1) the bar was still dispensing air.
He was fifty-three, a logistics administrator from Rotterdam, and his name was Bram.
The receptionist, a twenty-six-year-old sociology graduate called Lin Yue, was (2) her final shift.
She had already begun to repack the accessories: plastic tubes, spare nozzles, a rectangular filter the size of a paperback.
"We close in twenty minutes," she said.
Bram paid 128 yuan (3) and sat down.
Such was the bargain at the end of an era.
Two hundred and forty bars like this had opened across China between 2010 and 2015, promising pure oxygen to anyone (4) by the circulation of city life.
By 2016, nearly half had shut.
The equipment was cheap; the demand was not (5).
Lin had watched the customers thin out week by week, and she had begun to derive a strange satisfaction from the quiet.
Bram came here often, mainly on Tuesday nights.
He manufactured nothing and sold nothing; he merely supervised the loading of cargo at Yangshan Port, a job that gave him an abject, almost military sense of (6).
He told Lin that oxygen helped him slumber.
Whether the gas did anything biological was, he admitted, a matter of theory.
He did not care.
What he absorbed, he said, was the setting itself — the loop of soft piano music, the faint calcium-blue light, the fact that nobody tried to communicate with him.
Lin, an introvert by habit, understood this.
She had taken the job because it required no sociable performance.
Between 2011 and 2014 she had sold insurance, and the memory of it still produced an irritation in her chest.
"I cannot pretend to be cheerful," she said once.
"Here, I do not have to."
Then came the transition.
In April 2015, Shanghai's health commission published a draft convention on indoor air claims, and the label 'curative oxygen' became legally (7).
The scandal broke in September: a chain in Beijing had been mixing industrial gas into its tanks.
Panic followed.
Customs officers began to occupy themselves with import documentation, and the price of a certified cylinder climbed from 900 to 2,100 yuan.
The owner of the Oxygen Oasis, a cautious man named Chen, attempted to relocate the business to the outskirts of Suzhou, where rent was lower and the air was, tangibly, worse.
Lin was offered the job of manager there.
She refused.
Her refusal had a repercussion she had not anticipated: Chen accused her of betrayal, of lacking morale, of being disloyal to an operation that had fed her for four years.
She stared at him and said nothing.
The next morning she began a postgraduate programme in public health.
The final weeks were quiet and memorable.
Old customers returned, not to inhale but to say goodbye.
A retired teacher brought a cake.
A young guitarist installed himself in the corner and played for two hours.
Lin found herself becoming, against her own temperament, the host of a small and inclusive gathering.
She began to encourage people to talk.
She wrote a brief narrative of the bar's five years and pinned it to the wall, and the melancholy of it was, she thought, worthwhile.
Bram sent a text from Dubai: still breathing, still skeptical.
On the last night, only seven people came.
Among them was a woman who claimed the oxygen had cured her migraine, and a man who said the whole thing was a dupe, a fine example of how readily the desperate can be convinced.
Both were right, Lin decided.
The truth was dimensional; it refused to sit still.
At 12:10 a.m., Lin turned off the compressor.
The silence that followed was not empty but full — of relief, of absence, of something she could not pronounceable-yet-name.
She walked through the room one last time.
There was litter under two chairs: a receipt, a used tissue, a single curly hair.
She did not (8) it in the bin.
She left it, as if the room might still need evidence that it had existed.
Bram was the last to leave.
He shook her hand, then attempted, clumsily, to reciprocate the small kindness she had shown him across three years of Tuesdays.
He gave her a pumice stone from Iceland.
"For the hands," he said.
"They work hard."
She laughed, and the beam of the corridor light caught the stone, and for a moment the whole strange enterprise seemed, (9) not divine, then at least not entirely foolish.
Outside, the street was being refurbished.
A drill carved into the pavement; the noise rose and (10).
Choices
(1) A. if B. that C. what D. which
(2) A. on B. at C. in D. by
(3) A. however B. anyway C. therefore D. otherwise
(4) A. to exhaust B. exhausting C. exhausted D. exhausts
(5) A. stable B. firm C. solid D. steady
(6) A. series B. chain C. sequence D. order
(7) A. awkward B. difficult C. complex D. hard
(8) A. dump B. throw C. drop D. toss
(9) A. though B. if C. whether D. unless
(10) A. flowed B. felt C. fell D. filled